There's plenty of substance. It's just hypocritical for the Sierra Club to pretend that the motive is environmental.
There isn't any cause for shock. Given the incentives at play this is expected. How much financial suffering would you accept to put a dent in global warming? For most people it's not much.
The good news is, it's easy to predict that the Sierra Club is going to eventually lose on this issue. Property values are so high that many people are totally shut out of the property market and a political storm is gathering. Hopefully, by the time the dam breaks and real urbanization finally arrives on the West Coast, it's not too late to matter.
This isn't about the Sierra Club. It's about the blue cities in general. I've been to transit alternatives infrastructure meetings in Austin, NYC, and SF.
They are all driven by parking spaces and reducing peak traffic. It's absurd to see the very same people who lose their mind at the idea of America dropping out of the Paris Climate Accord, are exactly the same people who think we should impose minimum parking requirements on new buildings, block a bike share and safe bike infrastructure because the bike are ugly and take parking space away, and argue that BRT is terrible and will never work, because they won't use it.
There isn't any cause for shock. Given the incentives at play this is expected. How much financial suffering would you accept to put a dent in global warming? For most people it's not much.
The good news is, it's easy to predict that the Sierra Club is going to eventually lose on this issue. Property values are so high that many people are totally shut out of the property market and a political storm is gathering. Hopefully, by the time the dam breaks and real urbanization finally arrives on the West Coast, it's not too late to matter.