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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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Consensus building. You might care about these things, but the market disagrees. Most people care about having open space for their kids that is free of drug addicts.

Much of my post was about demonstrating that transportation isn't a free market, it's massively distorted by government intervention and regulation. I too care about open space, which is why I advocate for more space efficient transit, and also about drug fee zones, which is why I endorsed O'Toole's idea of building secure turnstiles that cannot be easily hopped.

Experian's data only shows cars that have payments on them, which are usually the first or second owners and are 10 years old or newer, in the first half of their service life

I updated the piece about Experian after Walterodim pointed out we don't know what percent of cars are new or old, and instead took my numbers for the total private costs of car ownership from O'Toole, who estimated $1.15 trillion in 2017, and got his numbers from the Bureau of Economic Analysis.

He's highlighting the failure mode of transit systems. All systems in the US, except perhaps New York, are out of date, overpriced, and dangerous. Every transit system in America becomes a target for massive graft and corruption, and the American inability to police cities ensures that they will not only be corrupt, but violent.

This is much what I said - O'Toole is making criticisms of mismanagement rather than of engineering. Problems of mismanagement can be solved by better management, as they are in most of the developed world, not just Japan.

This is much what I said - O'Toole is making criticisms of mismanagement rather than of engineering. Problems of mismanagement can be solved by better management, as they are in most of the developed world, not just Japan.

If the problem was "management", we would have outliers. We do not, and public transit in the United States is universally filthy, violent, dangerous, and corrupt. Every single system, from majority white Portland to majority black Baltimore, from frozen Chicago to boiling Houston, from wealthy San Fransisco to impoverished St. Louis, is a graft-ridden cash grab that shovels billions to the politically connected while providing nothing but rolling asylums for the insane to shit in climate control.

You cannot have public transit without public-minded people.

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