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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   35347 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 3, 2023

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The same groups which want public transit want strong environmental review and lots of veto points ("community input") in permitting.

It seems that environmental groups and regulations are losing their hallowed status in the left intelligentsia as others have mentioned. Exciting times to be alive.

I think this was true for a while but nowadays the yimbyist-transit crowd have developed a growing consensus around opposing things like zoning and environmental road blocks to construction. The mouthpiece for this crowd are people like Noah Smith, Matt Yglesias and Ezra Klein who talk about "supply-side progressivism" and fighting veto-points.

Yimby's are like libertarians. There are dozens of them!

I'm familiar with the unmitigated disaster that is the California high speed rail project. As best I know this "growing consensus" has not produced actionable cost-effective American rail projects. Billions are poured into contractors to perform various reviews, hardly any low speed track is laid.

Yes, trains are more expensive than they need to be, because of the reasons I listed in the comment you’re replying to and in my OP. The “growing consensus” isn’t among policymakers and politicians but among urbanist advocates. Like him or not, if Noah Smith were transit god king these projects would likely happen much more cheaply.

Zoning is not "environmental review" or "community inputs". They want some carveouts from roadblocks they favor for things they like, but they haven't actually turned against the roadblocks in general.

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