#automobiles delenda est

[st-just]

Objectively it's not even in the top ten worst things about Canada but def. one of the most personally embarrassing to me is that half the population lives in one narrow 1,000 km strip bookended by major cities and yet we still haven't managed to figure out high speed passenger rail up and down the corridor. Absolute joke of a country.

#I don't even live anywhere near the corridor #it just offends me on principle #automobiles delenda est #canada

[shabbytigers]

I bet that anon would not have survived the low-budget car-free lifestyle I used to have in Bucharest (the metro built under communism is nice, the wages are unimaginably shitty). There is no rule that streets must either be covered with cars or paved with gold.

that anon has brainworms that are systematically and chronically depriving them of sense of personal agency and/or meaningful hope for change, and in that respect i find their predicament sympathetic actually and wish them a very cure, but the coping mechanism “stamping on anyone who dares to suggest better things might be possible because i’ve decided despair is my comfort zone now and anyone not in it is outgroup” is. Not sympathetic

also, cars cost a fucking fortune to obtain, maintain, insure and fuel. the american status quo where you need a personal car to function at all in most of the country is not in fact friendly to poor people. (nor to disabled people who cannot drive, nor to young people still living with abusive parents; for many this situation is a literal horror movie hellscape)

furthermore, no serious urbanist wants to literally ban cars from rural areas with zero transit and do nothing else whatsoever so that people are just suddenly stranded thirty miles from work or food? realistic action steps are things like “improve transit and eliminate free parking in manhattan below 60th st to discourage private driving into the densest and most transit-having city in america” as opposed to things like “outlaw car ownership nationwide instantly”*? but also some of us actually care about people in underserved areas and smaller cities and towns and would like to fix policy and add infrastructure so that most people, not just center-mega-city dwellers, have practical options other than daily routine car usage, and it becomes possible to dial down on internal combustion and lower the financial investment in personal transport barrier to functional autonomous adulthood

which means we gotta get past the mindless visceral fear response to any kind of anti-car rhetoric, because otherwise nothing WILL ever change. like, stay trapped if you like, but listen: fuck that shit.

*there may be like 3 extreme green lunatics who want to do this, but fuck those people also

#automobiles delenda est #urbanism #hideous anon

[st-just]

I hear advice from the older generation that “buying a house is an investment”. On one level, I get that. Buying a house is a better way to spend money than renting, because at the end, you have something. You have a whole frigging house. On another level, I think that the idea that home prices should outpace inflation is insane and maybe has broken modern society.

-Andre Cooper, Maybe Treating Housing as an Investment was a Colossal, Society-Shattering Mistake

#quote #funny #politics #economics #polemic #Andre Cooper #automobiles delenda est

[st-just]

I grew up in one of those upper middle class suburbs north of Boston where homeowners band together to stop new affordable housing from being built. You wouldn’t get the impression that this is how things work by walking around my hometown or any of the neighboring suburbs that invariably nuke housing proposals. There are plenty of those “Hate Has No Home” signs on the lawns, and every block or two, you may even spot a BLM banner. But when it comes to any development proposals that might make it easier for “other people” to put down roots locally, a majority of cranks always materialize to vote down the possibility of adding multi-unit, mixed-income housing to the upmarket zip code. A version of this conflict is playing out in many U.S. cities as well. Since the 2008 recession, our national rate of housing construction has lagged behind demand. Between 2006 and 2016, the number of American renters ballooned by 25%. And just like in the suburbs, there’s an inevitable bloc of city homeowners who overpack community input meetings whenever new housing comes up and literally shout down whatever proposal is on the slab. (A lot of these people are the same folks who demand a bolder solution to homelessness in their cities, which—evidently—would not involve giving homeless people actual homes.)

-Miles Howard, What do rich homeowners actually want?

#quote #polemic #politics #american politics #automobiles delenda est #Miles Howard

[st-just]

An incomplete list of incredibly grandiloquent category tags I use whenever I remember to

#hubris is a coward's word

#I am waiting impatiently for all that is solid to start dissolving into air

#the measles of humankind

#my problematic fave is high modernism

#nostalgia for the future

#automobiles delenda est

and there's probably more I forget at the moment tbh

#reference I guess

[st-just]

Ngl the right-wing fever dream dystopia sounds pretty great, who do I vote for to get this done sooner.

#canada #politics #I need to block twitter again #canadian politics #automobiles delenda est

[st-just]

TIL a whole new way I was a weird outlier growing up, I guess. (Is it actually not normal to walk to school? Weird)

(I have apparently fallen into watching a bunch of urban planning youtube and the algorithm is doing an amazing job radicalizing my already negative feelings on suburbs)

#Canada #probably tmi #random internet stuff #automobiles delenda est

[st-just]

I really have no idea when weird anti-car online urban planning nerds became a group my local government feels the need to pander to, but honestly it’s a great feeling.

(Also explains why they’ve been expanding the sidewalks so much while they rebuild the street tbh)

#my beloved provincial backwater #canada #random internet stuff #automobiles delenda est

[st-just]

In this way, our expectations for housing are bizarre. In other realms, we expect new versions of consumer goods to 1) do more than their old counterparts, 2) be cheaper relative to inflation, or 3) both. Cars can now instantly show where they are and find directions to anywhere. A fraction of a standard modern television screen has higher resolution than the best TVs 30 years ago. Despite those improvements, cars and televisions (and furniture, and apparel, and just durable goods in general) have all gotten much cheaper on an inflation-adjusted basis over the last 30 years. Meanwhile, for housing, we expect that a 40-year old house with a bunch of renovations is somehow worth more than it was when it was built. We’d be surprised if it weren’t. It’s worth more because, like oil paintings and Faberge eggs, it’s rare.

-Andre Cooper, Maybe Treating Housing as an Investment was a Colossal, Society-Shattering Mistake

#quote #polemic #economics #automobiles delenda est #Andre Cooper