When you visit the US as an outsider, it's always one of the things that gets noticed and commented on. People in Europe tell each other hilarious trip tales about how they tried to walk somewhere and the consternation and chaos that ensued. But because most US folks don't have passports and aren't able to afford travel, they have no idea about how bonkers it all is. Cars-shock and guns-shock are the things that I hear over and over in travellers' tales.
Not just housing! We need places of work, public services and commercial areas, right in the middle of the city. Instead American cities bulldozed their tax base so people can live in one exurb and commute to another.
I agree wholeheartedly but I don’t agree America has only three cities. That’s complete nonsense. Even many car-centric cities are fun and cool and beautiful if you know how to visit a city. Many cities in America are unexpectedly rich, and even, in their own way, walkable. I grew up in a car-centric city and have lived in many without a car. I was a bus maven. These shitty places are also full of parks, museums, libraries, universities.
They could be VASTLY better with more transit. A high speed train system in the USA BETWEEN cities would be in-freaking-credible. This is my dream. There are high speed trains going everywhere constantly in Spain. It’s so freaking easy. I can’t understand how Spain, which is not even close to as rich as the USA can have this. Why can’t we have this. Why can’t we have light rail?
But you’d be surprised. You can get around a lot of these cities on the bus and there are so many cool things in many of these cities. People WANT light rail even in the most car-centric cities. It’s hard to do for some reason. But they WANT it. The minute you put in light rail the best stuff comes—lots of cafes, and clubs and fun stuff. You won’t love this but the price of housing will go up near the light rail.
I can’t figure out why light rail is so hard to do? It looks easy? Many of these things are mysterious. But most of all WE NEED HIGH SPEED TRAINS. Why can’t we have this? Something is just WRONG.
It’s apparently much more expensive to build here, and I have tried to look for the reasons but I can’t find a good account of them. Maybe it is land use regulations or something else?
There’s a tremendous amount of propaganda out there against high speed rail (really—it is propaganda, and not accurate on all points).
Sometimes it appears to be a matter of priorities. The US priorities the profits in certain economic sectors and not other things like livability, environment, safety, etc. It requires a change in outlook which is hard to achieve in this country.
I found this article but do not have time to listen to the video now.
They're trying to build a high speed rail in California (SF/LA) but it's administered so badly and probably cost way more than it should. The project is too ambitious to start with. More localized trains (SF to Sacramento for example) might have been a better experiment but then you have to contend with unwalkable cities or cities lacking in public transportation. Electrification of Caltrain (necessary for hsr) was hard to complete because the rich folk didn't want to cut the branches of their heritage trees. It took forever to cut something like 9 branches.
Yes--but when I see the anti-train vultures descend on the California project I get so frustrated. Because that's one project. We don't know if it was ill-conceived, ill-planned, etc., etc.
But there's a lot of graft, incompetence, arrogance, stupidity, and so on that can happen in various types of public works project. Strategic corruption and many other problems are a burden on us.
This may be the reason SCOTUS has horrifically burdened the public with this travesty of a decision.
If this is true HOW are we going to get ANY public works project off the ground in a rational manner. FFS they can fly you out to Tuscany and wine and dine you if you're a public official? I mean--who knows if they do all kinds of shit but some people play by the rules anyway--and now there are NO RULES?
And about the branches--oh good grief. I assumed something like that was happening somewhere down the line. Some rich people got in the way, like they usually do! If they see a white spot on the horizon of their million dollar seacoast mansion, you can bet the windmill projects will cost $50 million in legal fees if they even get off the ground.
Like a lot of things--all these problems are systemic and political. It's shameful to me. It's become normal to want money more than ANYTHING ELSE. Our culture has normalized this. That's only part of the problem, and maybe not the largest part but I think we need to make 'filthy rich' a thing again and tar some of these cultural norms with the disrespect they deserve. Let's start to appreciate people's efforts and their work more than their bank account.
Hiiii... how much do you actually know about the project? I'd suggest looking it up. It was a ballot measure voted on in 2016, passed democratically. I personally didn't vote for it because I knew it wouldn't be the right project to attempt something like this. Even my friend who is some honcho in building the LA metro system, thinks its an ess show. Nice idea, bad administration. I can't remember who put it on the ballot, but it would help with your questions, namely if it was "ill-planned, ill-conceived" (probably is my answer). Besides when flights are $120 round trip SFO/LAX I don't know very many folk who will change that for a train at the same price, unless they don't want to fly into LAX. I guess my point is, I don't like to speculate about corruption, but just point out that we should be practical and understand the current limitations so that we can address them and move forward. There's a lot more than I care to comment on here but its worth looking into if you're so passionate about it
I merely was listing common challenges that exist with large public projects. I mentioned some of the reasons these are very difficult to do.
US infrastructure is a mess. We have no choice but to undertake many infrastructure projects in the near future. So it would be silly to think the challenges of these are a reason not to do them.
My point is that—while we can get important information while looking at one flawed case— this isn’t knock down evidence that projects such as these should not be attempted. And sometimes people do present it as such evidence.
There are many things HSR does that planes cannot do. E.g., they have stops along the way, and substantial economic benefit has been shown for these stops—where there will rarely be airports. HSR is usually cheaper, faster and convenient for travelers.
"Sometimes it appears to be a matter of priorities. The US priorities the profits in certain economic sectors and not other things like livability, environment, safety, etc. It requires a change in outlook which is hard to achieve in this country."
I think this is the crux of the issue. I think we may get there but it's gonna be just a bit...
Light rail needs to be built safer than in Portland, OR. Currently it isn’t safe since payment is on the honor system and it’s full of hardcore drug addicts riding for free. It’s too bad since ten years ago I would ride the Max as often as possible.
A large number of Americans don't own cars. Yet we plow hundreds of billions into car infrastructure. Another hidden cost of cars, besides the highways and roads, is the land requirement it puts on businesses to build and maintain huge parking lots for their car-owning customers. This also requires massive stormwater management infrastructure.
I have a theory that the total area of highways, roads, parking lots, etc is probably enough arable land to feed the entire population of the United States (if put under agriculture).
You simply could not conceive of a more material and energy intensive way to build your cities. The only thing that made it possible was a brief window where fossil fuels were easily accessible and cheap.
I had a car, like an idiot (idiot because I live in Brooklyn) and sold it a couple of weeks ago. What a relief. Felt like I just took my first shit in six months. Fuck cars.
100%. I've been wanting to write a post about car-harm for a while, but every single day I see new studies and new examples of how bad cars are. There's so much overwhelming evidence against cars that it would be at least a 10-15 part series to pull everything together.
Houston, Texas will be studied by historians for centuries as the epitome of hellish design and even worse quality of life. Los Angeles will become a collection of dense neighborhoods loosely connected by a bus system and a city government that has completely abdicated any responsibility other than doing favors for Hollywood. Atlanta will be swallowed by the sinkhole that should have consumed Manhattan 50 years ago.
Cleveland and Cincinnati will become mirror images of each other. No one will notice.
LA has actually been successfully building out a metro system to connect its dense neighborhoods. New lines have been built and even more are planned. I think LA is one city that could actually pull itself out of this mess(it will take time tho)
I've watched a lot of videos by CityNerd on YouTube, who mixes great data and explanations with a wonderfully laconic, almost deadpan, delivery. Anyway, your comment reminded of his video on the Brightline development. I realise Brightline is an intercity link rather than metro, but I was interested to see this kind of rail infrastructure emerging in car-centric cities in the American West. https://youtu.be/11Noo855zyA
Since Atlanta's leadership seems hell bent on clear-cutting its largest expanse of green space for a fucking cop training facility, it will become quite clear that the sinkhole was right.
It's kind of a not-great review because I was so stoked for this to be a GREAT book that it felt disappointing for not living up to the potential. But I'd definitely still recommend the book to anyone trying to understand what cars do to us.
And while you're there, if you really find yourself stoked about seeing way we develop differently, check out StrongTowns.org -- it's not totally focused on cars and auto-dominance, but it is focused on trying to make places more financially stable, and that necessarily requires a complete top to bottom recast of our relationship with cars and urbanity.
Also, Not Just Bikes is a truly great Utube channel for more on all this.
Not to reply to myself, but I noticed the like by the author and wanted to add something - Chuck Marohn, former PE civil engineer turned planner turned iconoclast (author of "Confessions of a Recovering Engineer" a five-star book) has a LOT of good demolition of the whole cost-benefit scam used to justify MOAR roads everywhere. Anyone who wonders why all this growth has made us worse rather than better off should become a member of Strong Towns (StrongTowns.org), the nonprofit Chuck founded to pursue a restoration of sanity.
Could not agree more. Howard Kunstler has done great work on this topic, I highly recommend Geography of Nowhere, it's a legitimate classic. Unfortunately, a lot of his other work is....in a different vein, we might say.
Making a list of the best cities in the United States is easy: NYC, SF, Chicago, DC, Boston. You can live life without a car and all the associated costs and stress that comes with it. Unfortunately these are some of the most expensive cities to live in as well. Also unfortunately, the convenience provided by cars and the entitlement that comes with them has fried the brains of our elders who own all the homes and control the policy setting in these cities, which makes building apartments and new bike lanes an absolute knock down drag out war.
I live a half decade in New Orleans without a car. Between streetcar, bicycle, and walking, I had no trouble. Granted, I was young and had no family. Might have been tougher with kids.
Your elders didn’t make this system capitalism did. Your elders are trapped by it more than you can imagine. When we can’t drive any more we are completely stuck. And the so-called 55 and over communities are located in the middle of nowhere.
You’re missing Philly. It’s actually the most walkable city of all of them and mixes office, food/entertainment, and housing pretty well for a huge chunk of the city.
Have you ever tried traversing DC on foot? It's a living hell. Nothing like NYC or Boston. It's basically an office park sharing space with some of the most deprived slums in the country.
My wife is a travel nurse. Last year, she was in Boston for 6 months. She managed to snag a really nice apartment that wasn't too expensive (at least comparatively) in Jamaica Plain. I loved visiting that neighborhood - tons of nice bars, restaurants, cafes, shops, a metro stop and at least a couple of grocery stores, all within a 10 minute walk. It was the kind of place I wanna live and should absolutely be the model of a city.
Denton, Texas? That’s COLD. It’s also incredibly accurate: all of the sprawl around the Dallas/Fort Worth/Denton can be attributed to North Texas’s exacting skill of attracting psychopaths who want to live “away from it all” (i.e., “The only brown and black people I want to see are the help”), but who then want every amenity within a 5-minute drive. The perfect summation of how badly North Texas is broken is based on the absolute logjams around any school before and after class: because every Lexus-driving soccer mom in the area HAS to be first at picking up their Schnookums from school, the traffic jams start about an hour before the end of the school day, and teachers have to be traffic directors to keep them from slamming into each other when they try to cut into line. And how DARE you suggest that their precious darlings take the bus: that’s for POOR people!
Yes. I had the misfortune to grow up in North Dallas in the 1950s and early 1960s. All that you say about the car culture is true. And, as you are probably well aware, the pathologies go much further and deeper than that, as, for example, nicely chronicled in "Nut Country: Right-wing Dallas and the Birth of the Southern Strategy" by Edward H. Miller.
When I was a child in Tallahassee, Florida, the neighborhood was surrounded by beautiful, mysterious woods, full of snakes, myriad birds, little creeks where you could find tortoises, mosses, bull frogs, wildly colored spiders. then came the big fuckin' Caterpillars and giant machines to gouge a fistula through the land amputating the north of that valley from the south for I-10. That was the beginning of the end
Hamilton hambone. I cant even read the article right now because of my awful job that makes me drive a car to an office but yes, 100 percent yes. Get the automative lobby out of government
You should see the bike lane fight in LA over Hollywood Blvd. Granted, it's almost totally confined to Nextdoor, but I've now read every bike lane myth and some wild catastrophizing. I'm trying to be sensitive to people's concerns and reactions, there's a lot of people who support it from a variety of perspectives as well. Change is hard. Culver City lost it's bike lanes so I think there's a segment that think they can get this bike lane removed. They have a petition with nearly 500 signers.
Car centricity? I think in Culver City people found it slowed driving times too much or it was threatening from the jump. I lived here for two years without a car in a walkable area of LA. I'm glass half full about transit here. People attend open streets with a passion. And we have a 7 new subway stops connecting UCLA to downtown by 2028 https://www.metro.net/projects/westside/. Work in progress.
That's really good to hear. I have a hard time with LA because I hate traffic, but the last time I was there I took the train from Hollywood to Downtown every day and it was pretty alright. I would love to see that become the norm there.
When you visit the US as an outsider, it's always one of the things that gets noticed and commented on. People in Europe tell each other hilarious trip tales about how they tried to walk somewhere and the consternation and chaos that ensued. But because most US folks don't have passports and aren't able to afford travel, they have no idea about how bonkers it all is. Cars-shock and guns-shock are the things that I hear over and over in travellers' tales.
Don’t forget all the land that becomes road is land that is not becoming housing, exacerbating that problem
Not just housing! We need places of work, public services and commercial areas, right in the middle of the city. Instead American cities bulldozed their tax base so people can live in one exurb and commute to another.
I agree wholeheartedly but I don’t agree America has only three cities. That’s complete nonsense. Even many car-centric cities are fun and cool and beautiful if you know how to visit a city. Many cities in America are unexpectedly rich, and even, in their own way, walkable. I grew up in a car-centric city and have lived in many without a car. I was a bus maven. These shitty places are also full of parks, museums, libraries, universities.
They could be VASTLY better with more transit. A high speed train system in the USA BETWEEN cities would be in-freaking-credible. This is my dream. There are high speed trains going everywhere constantly in Spain. It’s so freaking easy. I can’t understand how Spain, which is not even close to as rich as the USA can have this. Why can’t we have this. Why can’t we have light rail?
But you’d be surprised. You can get around a lot of these cities on the bus and there are so many cool things in many of these cities. People WANT light rail even in the most car-centric cities. It’s hard to do for some reason. But they WANT it. The minute you put in light rail the best stuff comes—lots of cafes, and clubs and fun stuff. You won’t love this but the price of housing will go up near the light rail.
I can’t figure out why light rail is so hard to do? It looks easy? Many of these things are mysterious. But most of all WE NEED HIGH SPEED TRAINS. Why can’t we have this? Something is just WRONG.
We can; we choose not to.
It’s apparently much more expensive to build here, and I have tried to look for the reasons but I can’t find a good account of them. Maybe it is land use regulations or something else?
There’s a tremendous amount of propaganda out there against high speed rail (really—it is propaganda, and not accurate on all points).
Sometimes it appears to be a matter of priorities. The US priorities the profits in certain economic sectors and not other things like livability, environment, safety, etc. It requires a change in outlook which is hard to achieve in this country.
I found this article but do not have time to listen to the video now.
https://time.com/6340931/america-high-speed-rail-history/
They're trying to build a high speed rail in California (SF/LA) but it's administered so badly and probably cost way more than it should. The project is too ambitious to start with. More localized trains (SF to Sacramento for example) might have been a better experiment but then you have to contend with unwalkable cities or cities lacking in public transportation. Electrification of Caltrain (necessary for hsr) was hard to complete because the rich folk didn't want to cut the branches of their heritage trees. It took forever to cut something like 9 branches.
Yes--but when I see the anti-train vultures descend on the California project I get so frustrated. Because that's one project. We don't know if it was ill-conceived, ill-planned, etc., etc.
But there's a lot of graft, incompetence, arrogance, stupidity, and so on that can happen in various types of public works project. Strategic corruption and many other problems are a burden on us.
This may be the reason SCOTUS has horrifically burdened the public with this travesty of a decision.
https://prospect.org/justice/2024-06-26-supreme-court-blesses-form-bribery-snyder-v-us/
If this is true HOW are we going to get ANY public works project off the ground in a rational manner. FFS they can fly you out to Tuscany and wine and dine you if you're a public official? I mean--who knows if they do all kinds of shit but some people play by the rules anyway--and now there are NO RULES?
And about the branches--oh good grief. I assumed something like that was happening somewhere down the line. Some rich people got in the way, like they usually do! If they see a white spot on the horizon of their million dollar seacoast mansion, you can bet the windmill projects will cost $50 million in legal fees if they even get off the ground.
Like a lot of things--all these problems are systemic and political. It's shameful to me. It's become normal to want money more than ANYTHING ELSE. Our culture has normalized this. That's only part of the problem, and maybe not the largest part but I think we need to make 'filthy rich' a thing again and tar some of these cultural norms with the disrespect they deserve. Let's start to appreciate people's efforts and their work more than their bank account.
Hiiii... how much do you actually know about the project? I'd suggest looking it up. It was a ballot measure voted on in 2016, passed democratically. I personally didn't vote for it because I knew it wouldn't be the right project to attempt something like this. Even my friend who is some honcho in building the LA metro system, thinks its an ess show. Nice idea, bad administration. I can't remember who put it on the ballot, but it would help with your questions, namely if it was "ill-planned, ill-conceived" (probably is my answer). Besides when flights are $120 round trip SFO/LAX I don't know very many folk who will change that for a train at the same price, unless they don't want to fly into LAX. I guess my point is, I don't like to speculate about corruption, but just point out that we should be practical and understand the current limitations so that we can address them and move forward. There's a lot more than I care to comment on here but its worth looking into if you're so passionate about it
I don’t claim corruption on this project?
I merely was listing common challenges that exist with large public projects. I mentioned some of the reasons these are very difficult to do.
US infrastructure is a mess. We have no choice but to undertake many infrastructure projects in the near future. So it would be silly to think the challenges of these are a reason not to do them.
My point is that—while we can get important information while looking at one flawed case— this isn’t knock down evidence that projects such as these should not be attempted. And sometimes people do present it as such evidence.
There are many things HSR does that planes cannot do. E.g., they have stops along the way, and substantial economic benefit has been shown for these stops—where there will rarely be airports. HSR is usually cheaper, faster and convenient for travelers.
"Sometimes it appears to be a matter of priorities. The US priorities the profits in certain economic sectors and not other things like livability, environment, safety, etc. It requires a change in outlook which is hard to achieve in this country."
I think this is the crux of the issue. I think we may get there but it's gonna be just a bit...
Light rail needs to be built safer than in Portland, OR. Currently it isn’t safe since payment is on the honor system and it’s full of hardcore drug addicts riding for free. It’s too bad since ten years ago I would ride the Max as often as possible.
A large number of Americans don't own cars. Yet we plow hundreds of billions into car infrastructure. Another hidden cost of cars, besides the highways and roads, is the land requirement it puts on businesses to build and maintain huge parking lots for their car-owning customers. This also requires massive stormwater management infrastructure.
I have a theory that the total area of highways, roads, parking lots, etc is probably enough arable land to feed the entire population of the United States (if put under agriculture).
You simply could not conceive of a more material and energy intensive way to build your cities. The only thing that made it possible was a brief window where fossil fuels were easily accessible and cheap.
I had a car, like an idiot (idiot because I live in Brooklyn) and sold it a couple of weeks ago. What a relief. Felt like I just took my first shit in six months. Fuck cars.
I find NYC overwhelming but I am SO JEALOUS of the well-developed transit system there.
100%. I've been wanting to write a post about car-harm for a while, but every single day I see new studies and new examples of how bad cars are. There's so much overwhelming evidence against cars that it would be at least a 10-15 part series to pull everything together.
It could, verily, even be an ongoing podcast series: www.thewaroncars.org
Houston, Texas will be studied by historians for centuries as the epitome of hellish design and even worse quality of life. Los Angeles will become a collection of dense neighborhoods loosely connected by a bus system and a city government that has completely abdicated any responsibility other than doing favors for Hollywood. Atlanta will be swallowed by the sinkhole that should have consumed Manhattan 50 years ago.
Cleveland and Cincinnati will become mirror images of each other. No one will notice.
LA has actually been successfully building out a metro system to connect its dense neighborhoods. New lines have been built and even more are planned. I think LA is one city that could actually pull itself out of this mess(it will take time tho)
I've watched a lot of videos by CityNerd on YouTube, who mixes great data and explanations with a wonderfully laconic, almost deadpan, delivery. Anyway, your comment reminded of his video on the Brightline development. I realise Brightline is an intercity link rather than metro, but I was interested to see this kind of rail infrastructure emerging in car-centric cities in the American West. https://youtu.be/11Noo855zyA
Since Atlanta's leadership seems hell bent on clear-cutting its largest expanse of green space for a fucking cop training facility, it will become quite clear that the sinkhole was right.
Also worth noting is the gruesome lethality of cars, not just to drivers but to everyone else.
HTW readers might enjoy "Killed by a Traffic Engineer" by Wes Marshall.
My review of it here: https://hardcover.app/books/killed-by-a-traffic-engineer
It's kind of a not-great review because I was so stoked for this to be a GREAT book that it felt disappointing for not living up to the potential. But I'd definitely still recommend the book to anyone trying to understand what cars do to us.
We act like car deaths are just natural and there's nothing you can do about it. Like 50,000 car deaths a year is just an act of god. It's grotesque
The cover carries a strong message, even if you don't read the book (which can be a little tedious as it gets into the weeds).
Welcome to the War on Cars! No, really, a truly great podcast -- enlist today!
https://thewaroncars.org/
And while you're there, if you really find yourself stoked about seeing way we develop differently, check out StrongTowns.org -- it's not totally focused on cars and auto-dominance, but it is focused on trying to make places more financially stable, and that necessarily requires a complete top to bottom recast of our relationship with cars and urbanity.
Also, Not Just Bikes is a truly great Utube channel for more on all this.
Not to reply to myself, but I noticed the like by the author and wanted to add something - Chuck Marohn, former PE civil engineer turned planner turned iconoclast (author of "Confessions of a Recovering Engineer" a five-star book) has a LOT of good demolition of the whole cost-benefit scam used to justify MOAR roads everywhere. Anyone who wonders why all this growth has made us worse rather than better off should become a member of Strong Towns (StrongTowns.org), the nonprofit Chuck founded to pursue a restoration of sanity.
Could not agree more. Howard Kunstler has done great work on this topic, I highly recommend Geography of Nowhere, it's a legitimate classic. Unfortunately, a lot of his other work is....in a different vein, we might say.
Making a list of the best cities in the United States is easy: NYC, SF, Chicago, DC, Boston. You can live life without a car and all the associated costs and stress that comes with it. Unfortunately these are some of the most expensive cities to live in as well. Also unfortunately, the convenience provided by cars and the entitlement that comes with them has fried the brains of our elders who own all the homes and control the policy setting in these cities, which makes building apartments and new bike lanes an absolute knock down drag out war.
I live a half decade in New Orleans without a car. Between streetcar, bicycle, and walking, I had no trouble. Granted, I was young and had no family. Might have been tougher with kids.
I'm glad to hear car free living was a real possibility there. We can add it to the best cities list then.
Your elders didn’t make this system capitalism did. Your elders are trapped by it more than you can imagine. When we can’t drive any more we are completely stuck. And the so-called 55 and over communities are located in the middle of nowhere.
You’re missing Philly. It’s actually the most walkable city of all of them and mixes office, food/entertainment, and housing pretty well for a huge chunk of the city.
DC and Boston? Nobody likes those cities. Philly and Chicago are the answers. Seattle is better too
Have you ever tried traversing DC on foot? It's a living hell. Nothing like NYC or Boston. It's basically an office park sharing space with some of the most deprived slums in the country.
My wife is a travel nurse. Last year, she was in Boston for 6 months. She managed to snag a really nice apartment that wasn't too expensive (at least comparatively) in Jamaica Plain. I loved visiting that neighborhood - tons of nice bars, restaurants, cafes, shops, a metro stop and at least a couple of grocery stores, all within a 10 minute walk. It was the kind of place I wanna live and should absolutely be the model of a city.
I lived in Jamaica Plain and concur!
Carmageddon is an excellent recent book that dives deep into this subject.
Denton, Texas? That’s COLD. It’s also incredibly accurate: all of the sprawl around the Dallas/Fort Worth/Denton can be attributed to North Texas’s exacting skill of attracting psychopaths who want to live “away from it all” (i.e., “The only brown and black people I want to see are the help”), but who then want every amenity within a 5-minute drive. The perfect summation of how badly North Texas is broken is based on the absolute logjams around any school before and after class: because every Lexus-driving soccer mom in the area HAS to be first at picking up their Schnookums from school, the traffic jams start about an hour before the end of the school day, and teachers have to be traffic directors to keep them from slamming into each other when they try to cut into line. And how DARE you suggest that their precious darlings take the bus: that’s for POOR people!
Yes. I had the misfortune to grow up in North Dallas in the 1950s and early 1960s. All that you say about the car culture is true. And, as you are probably well aware, the pathologies go much further and deeper than that, as, for example, nicely chronicled in "Nut Country: Right-wing Dallas and the Birth of the Southern Strategy" by Edward H. Miller.
When I was a child in Tallahassee, Florida, the neighborhood was surrounded by beautiful, mysterious woods, full of snakes, myriad birds, little creeks where you could find tortoises, mosses, bull frogs, wildly colored spiders. then came the big fuckin' Caterpillars and giant machines to gouge a fistula through the land amputating the north of that valley from the south for I-10. That was the beginning of the end
Hamilton hambone. I cant even read the article right now because of my awful job that makes me drive a car to an office but yes, 100 percent yes. Get the automative lobby out of government
You should see the bike lane fight in LA over Hollywood Blvd. Granted, it's almost totally confined to Nextdoor, but I've now read every bike lane myth and some wild catastrophizing. I'm trying to be sensitive to people's concerns and reactions, there's a lot of people who support it from a variety of perspectives as well. Change is hard. Culver City lost it's bike lanes so I think there's a segment that think they can get this bike lane removed. They have a petition with nearly 500 signers.
Why on earth would they want the bike lanes removed???
Car centricity? I think in Culver City people found it slowed driving times too much or it was threatening from the jump. I lived here for two years without a car in a walkable area of LA. I'm glass half full about transit here. People attend open streets with a passion. And we have a 7 new subway stops connecting UCLA to downtown by 2028 https://www.metro.net/projects/westside/. Work in progress.
That's really good to hear. I have a hard time with LA because I hate traffic, but the last time I was there I took the train from Hollywood to Downtown every day and it was pretty alright. I would love to see that become the norm there.