Hey, German here. What the f*** are Americans doing at the other side of the Atlantic? Some of you already know this monstrosity. I did’nt. This is a Ford F650 Truck and when I stepped out of my Youtube Bubble I realized, it was marketed as the “biggest, baddest Truck on the road” for the everyday American. Are you guys serious?! Is the end goal really to drive a Monster Truck to McDs to get a McFlurry? Americas bloodiest wars have been fought in the middle east to secure oil, bombing nations to rubble. And all, for this bullshit? The excess, waste and decadence is mind boggling to me and people on Reddit seriously justifying this by “you know dude I’m 6,4ft. I don’t fit in any other vehicle” makes me go up the wall.
Welp, this is awkward. I support most of those (disregarding the uncharitable way you spun the descriptions, anyway). I’m interested to hear why you think they’re “crap.”
“Let’s make driving harder not mass transit easier” – The problem with doing it the other way around is that the act of accommodating cars makes transit non-viable, both by (a) sucking up funding in an (ultimately futile) effort to build our way out of congestion by widening roads, and (b) physically forcing trip origins and destinations further apart by shoehorning parking lots in between them, lowering density and therefore the maximum potential transit ridership along a given route. People are going to use the transportation mode they think is best for them (quickest, cheapest, etc.), and to continue bending over backwards accommodating cars is to put a thumb (if not your entire body weight) on that scale.
“Traffic circles!” – meh, I’m not going to argue this one 'cause I agree they’re overrated. They often perform better than traffic lights in terms of their level of service (LOS) moving cars, but they take up lots more space and aren’t necessarily great for cyclists and pedestrians. Besides LOS often isn’t the right thing to measure to begin with.
“Tax on poor people who have to be work at a certain time” – By this you mean anything that increases the costs of driving, I assume? The problem with that kind of thinking is that it uses a current symptom of the problem as an excuse not to solve the problem. In other words, increasing the costs of driving wouldn’t be a problem for poor commuters if, in so doing, we also solved their need to drive to commute.
“More zoning laws can fix the problems zoning laws created” – I, for one, argue for straight-up repealing things like minimum parking requirements and restrictions on density. That sort of idea often gets [mis]represented as “abolishing single-family zoning,” but in reality it’s not about prohibiting property owners from building single-family houses; it’s about ending the mandate to build single-family houses and giving them the freedom to build higher-density things instead if they want. Frankly, this common criticism is usually just flat-out backwards.
“Force upper middle class people to move to areas with poverty” – I have almost no idea what you’re talking about here. However, I suspect that, like the previous bullet point, it’s another backwards argument confusing an option for a mandate.
In that case every proposed solution needs to solve the need to drive for a commute on Day 1 of implementation. If you don’t want to disproportionately hurt poor people and the working class, that is.
That’s the issue. It is like saying we could get rid of fire departments if we installed fire suppression systems in every home, then we get rid of fire departments.
We need to make mass transit better, once that happens people will stop driving as much by choice.
Exactly. Fixing the underlying issues to a problem takes time to propagate. It’s only about 2 years after a president takes office that their policies have affected the national economy and such.
Great analogy by the way. We need the fire department until those systems are installed. In this case, it probably means avoiding congestion taxes and the like until there’s viable public transit for commuting. Otherwise we’re just squeezing the working class.
This is why technologies to reduce emissions on cars and electrify them are so important. We need to minimize their impact since they’re going to stick around.
What happens in practice is it is easier to make roads shit then it is to make buses good. So the town makes it shit and everyone stops going there. It is better to put up with the existing bad solution and make a better replacement instead of breaking what you have even more so and hope some Messiah figure will fix it. Go check out what happened when Buffalo NY built its rail. That is a perfect example and the entire downtown died.
Glad you agree. They aren’t safe and rarely a good option. Forcing cars to make sharp turns and pedestrians to walk longer distances in the road to cross.
Congestion taxes. They don’t impact somewhat wealth-off people like me since we can adjust our schedule. They punish poor people who can’t. It isn’t even regressive, it is reverse-progressive.
My city has a rule that satellite dishes can’t be street visible. When I see urban cough…planners…cough willing to admit that rules like that should not be a thing I will be inclined to take you guys seriously about density.
Gentrification and white flight. I suspect you knew damn well what I was referring to but enjoy backwards arguments