this post was submitted on 19 Jul 2023
591 points (96.7% liked)
Memes
45307 readers
1788 users here now
Rules:
- Be civil and nice.
- Try not to excessively repost, as a rule of thumb, wait at least 2 months to do it if you have to.
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Housing might be cheap but…
It's worth actually doing the comparisons to see whether car-centric living is a net positive or negative in practice in particular situations. Urban density should be a pure benefit, with economies of scale making everything cheaper. Unfortunately, cities in practice have some downsides that reduce that benefit. One major one is that centralizing services means that it's more useful to try to get a cut of the cash flowing through the institution, and so some of the gains get siphoned off. As a trivial example, exactly zero percent of car commute expenses go to a bus driver's union.
I understand you're trying to be nuanced here. I think that realistically things are so very skewed toward suburban and exurban development, car centricity, that any movement toward urbanity is better at this point in time.
It's really bad to support specific policies just because they sound like a kind of policy that you broadly support. I personally broadly support pro-density policies. But many specific policies that are proposed either have fatal flaws or are useless as long as a century worth of accumulated NIMBY policies exist that super-redundantly ban the sort of density increase that would actually be useful.
And to be clear, only allowing density increases without cars would be exactly the sort of nonsense restriction that would be a fatal flaw, at least in the US.
When I vote, I read up on the candidate’s positions. I make sure to do my research for decisions I make in the real world. When I’m on Lemmy? I’m going to stage a broad vague opinion because the level of nuance at play here is generally not attainable when not speaking about a specific local policy
That discussion tactic results in groupthink to a level that even coherent positions on the broad issues get obscured by conformance to factional stereotypes.
I think if someone is that unable to think critically, my comments on Lemmy are not going to have much impact. You don't need to throw a thesaurus at me either, friend. I assume everyone I talk to on here is at least as smart as me or smarter, no need to prove anything. :-)