Because if they do declare all sales final, it kills sales. Customers do not like final sale, and regularly go for sellers they trust to take care of them. Generally final sales are only acceptable to consumers on things that obviously have logistical, regulatory, or cleanliness concerns.
If return windows were shortened via legislation, it would massively advantage shadier resellers, as nobody would be able to offer better return polices to offset a higher end price.
That's not how the legal theory works, fyi. The theory is that “sincere belief” is not a choice, and since it’s impossible to determine that externally the only choices were to not protect sincere belief or to protect all religion sincere or not.
The reason why the “bake a cake” thing was ever an actual point of controversy is because it centered around an immutable aspect of people; their sexual orientation. There is leagues of difference between denying service due to who they are vs. their behavior.
There was a relevant discussion earlier today in which I commented [0]. Read the parent comment too. The point we were making is that nondiscrimination against homosexuality (or anything) should be automatic, and not have anything to do with whether it's genetic or not. The argument that somehow it's more important because its immutable" is ridiculous- if some later study decided it was learned, would that change something? Anyway, that has no bearing the the "cake" business because that was about the cake, not the attributes of the client. And the analogy is very relevant regardless, because it's about hypocrisy in telling private businesses what to do.
As can Christians, aethists, or whomever else. Are you arguing that we should remove religion from the list of protected classes? A bit harder than most of the others since it happens to be in the constitution, but whatever, I'm open to that idea...
> Are you arguing that we should remove religion from the list of protected classes?
Of course not, the idea is completely bonkers. The point is that protections are not extended solely on the basis of "immutable" or inborn characteristics.
I will repeat a part of my comment I posted in another thread:
It’s a weird legal meme that immutable characteristics should somehow be treated differently for the purposes of moral blameworthiness. I am not really sure where it comes from and why people seem so eager to parrot it, but it looks completely baseless.
> The reason why the “bake a cake” thing was ever an actual point of controversy is because it centered around an immutable aspect of people; their sexual orientation. There is leagues of difference between denying service due to who they are vs. their behavior.
Most universities required immunizations before covid, although I suspect that enforcement varied wildly. I distinctly remember having to get a whole bunch of vaccinations because we’d lost my records and couldn’t prove that I was in compliance without another round. It was a mild inconvenience at worst.
I think its too early to declare it a fad. It hasn’t been around long enough en masse to know whether that’ll be the norm, or disappear yet. We’ll know in a year or two.
Yes thats the one, what word would you like to use for that sensory molecule detection
There is still some difference in who they choose to follow or act upon so I’m grasping for where that difference is. Could be something alongside the CO2
Humans exhale all kinds of stuff aside from just CO2, including moisture and other metabolic byproducts depending on what you’re eating. Probably some bacterial metabolic products from our mouths too.
I guess I’m less into the semantic difference between “smell” and “detect” and more whether it’s the CO2 they’re following or something else we exhale regularly.
Oh, that’s an interesting observation I’ve never realized until you pointed it out. I’ve always been the target of mosquitos more than anyone else I know, but it seems to get worse the fitter I am. Now that I’m a bit pudgy and out of shape, I haven’t had anywhere near as many bites.
But, to be fair for me being fit and being in the regions where mosquitos exist en masse is a related phenomenon. Out of shape me spends less time on trails than fit me.
> Very hard to attract workers to come to a city where they have to walk through needles and poop to get to the office. Or after they’ve been attacked by a mentally ill pan handler.
Are we ignoring the past 20 years of startups and major tech companies attracting high level of talent to SF? Because pre pandemic it was very, very easy to attract workers, very expensive workers, to move to SF despite all of its issues. Every few years we’d have these discussions, and yet major startups and FAANGs would keep hiring there.
I think remote is an issue for SF, but it is also worth pointing out that remote work is extremely popular outside SF too. $CORP is really struggling to get on site workers across a variety of cities where satellite offices exist, and not just CA cities either. My feel is that this is a general cultural change across the industry, and maybe SF is a bit more affected because it’s so much more expensive than other metro areas.
My guess is that like a ton of other tech companies, they were either losing staff to remote jobs, or having a hard time justifying having an office when a large percentage of their work force didn’t come in, and this is how they decided to spin the PR.
It got worse during the pandemic. All policing stopped and downtown became a free for all. When I moved to San Francisco in 2016, I constantly had to reassure others it’s not as bad as the media makes it out to be. Now it is worse than media reports. I had someone threaten to stab me with a pencil when commuting to downtown at 9 AM. I had someone detached from reality and naked yell they wanted to kill me at 1 PM across the street from Salesforce Park. My home was broken into with my bike stolen and the cops told me there was nothing they can do. Then politicians tell you that there is no crime problem and you are just bigoted.
My eyes were opened when I went to Manhattan last summer and found it way safer and nicer than San Francisco. Finally getting out.
I rejected a fairly good FAANG offer because they required me moving to SF. That was 2019, but I still rejected it after watching some bikers driving through and filming the city on YouTube.
I stopped a Google interview halfway through in 2012 because they would only consider junior engineers in NYC and Mountain View, and I didn’t want to leave Chicago. But I don’t think our one off experiences make a trend. Facebook and Google alone hired and kept a ton of talent in SF pre pandemic, never mind the countless non FAANG companies there. Not everyone obviously, but a gob smacking number of engineers lived in the Bay Area.
>Are we ignoring the past 20 years of startups and major tech companies attracting high level of talent to SF? Because pre pandemic it was very, very easy to attract workers, very expensive workers, to move to SF despite all of its issues. Every few years we’d have these discussions, and yet major startups and FAANGs would keep hiring there.
I don't think this is the straw that broke the camel's back, but costs have only gone up for residents and employers, while benefits to being SF based have generally decreased.
>my guess is that like a ton of other tech companies, they were either losing staff to remote jobs, or having a hard time justifying having an office when a large percentage of their work force didn’t come in, and this is how they decided to spin the PR.
I imagine this specific case is a conflux of all the issues. If the office was a pretty 5 minute walk from cheap housing, I doubt they would be having trouble getting in-office workers.
Pre-COVID, the benefits of suffering downtown outweighed the detriments:
1. It wasn't as bad before. Some areas were, but the zone of insanity has grown and worse behavior is being tolerated now.
2. There was a lot more people around which made the problems less visually severe
3. There was a lively "scene". Events, experiences, dinners, whatever. Stuff was happening all the time for techies.
Now it's a lot less vibrant. SF's insistence on masks, tests, and vaccines to the very end guaranteed that normal social behavior wouldn't come back. And, surprise, it didn't! All of the people who live for that stuff and organize it... moved away!
On top of that, SF was drunk on power and money in 2019 and implemented all manner of taxes to punish tech companies. Well, the tech companies now have their options and they aren't choosing the jurisdiction that hates them.
I don't expect that SF will return to its peak 2019 level of hegemony at any point prior to a political and social revolution in the town.
It’s amazing how many downvotes pointing this out gets. People have quite the kneejerk reaction when the downsides of car transit are pointed out to them.
It’s a lazy slogan that gets us nowhere. I live in NYC and we’ve built three brand new subway stations in the last fifty years.
It’s not just a matter of people’s preferences for cars, it’s not possible to build a non car city anymore due to pathologies that have nothing to do with “car culture”.
The number one issue is that we’ve allowed too many people and interest groups to effectively bring any major project to a halt. This is not some inherent feature of democracy either, you can have a democracy where the majority gets to do things. We just don’t have one of those in the US, or Canada it sounds like.
“Cars are land inefficient” isn’t a slogan, it’s literal fact.
> I live in NYC and we’ve built three brand new subway stations in the last fifty years
Ah, the stereotype of New Yorkers not paying attention to other cities strikes again! Yes, New York has its own problems, but for the vast majority of other cities GP’s comment is true. New York is one of the very few exception cases in the US.
> The number one issue is that we’ve allowed too many people and interest groups to effectively bring any major project to a halt. This is not some inherent feature of democracy either, you can have a democracy where the majority gets to do things. We just don’t have one of those in the US, or Canada it sounds like.
What if I told you that for a lot of transit activists, undemocratic processes that prioritize the needs of drivers over the rest of society is car culture?
Environmental impact reviews are car culture? Public notice and comment processes are car culture? Kafkaesque public bidding processes are car culture? Decade long litigation needed to exercise eminent domain is car culture? Union work rules are car culture?
For the most part, yes. These items are so inherent in public works projects that it is inconceivable that they wouldn’t exist. But try to build or expand a road or parking lot and none of these exist. The culture is literally biased toward the relatively effortless expansion of car use and relatively challenging expansion of anything else. This duality is car culture.
The big dig is actually a pretty phenomenal example of what we're talking about. It was a dumb project that was extremely expensive, incapable of fixing the problems it was supposed to fix, highly disruptive to locals, and it still got built.
Meanwhile complaints from a tiny number of affected people completely scuppered the high speed rail planned between Los Angeles and San Francisco before any track got laid.
Governments pull out the stops to complete car-centric infrastructure even over the loud complaints of the populace, but flinch the moment there is any push back against any public transit. Heck, trading on street parking for a bike lane is often a herculean effort.
Oh, and there's this little gem about the Big Dig "As of 2021, promised projects to extend the Green Line beyond Lechmere, to connect the Red and Blue subway lines, and to restore the Green Line streetcar service to the Arborway in Jamaica Plain have not been completed. Construction of the extension beyond Lechmere has begun.[20] The Red and Blue subway line connection underwent initial design,[21] but no funding has been designated for the project. The Arborway Line restoration has been abandoned, following a final court decision in 2011.[22]".
So once again, governments promised the moon about public transit and then did a rug pull once the highways were done. They in fact used this as an opportunity to destroy existing streetcar service. Exactly what we've been talking about.
> Or the new Kosciuszko Bridge?
Completed in 3 years. Again, we are really capable of building stuff, so long as that stuff supports cars.
You wrote: <<built three brand new subway stations in the last fifty years>>
That sounds pithy, but it overlooks all the maintenance work done on the system. Have you ever looked at pictures from the NYC subway in the 1970s? It was hell. (You can Google it.) My father lived in NYC in the 1970s and said the subway was like the "Fourth World" (vis-a-via first/second/third world!).
Also, how about PATH, Metro North, NJT, LIRR, AirTrain JFK, or AirTrain Newark? These are not the NYC subway, but they have also seen major upgrades in the last 50 years.
Finally, I tried to Google for list of stations opened from 1972. It could not find a concise list. I'm pretty sure it is more than three, just for NYC subway.
Also, you don’t need to add a ton of subway stations when you already have an extensive network. 3 stations in 50 years would be a much worse outcome in say, Cincinnati.
That just made me appreciate how much greater value still might be unlocked by simply building as few as 3 stations in metro areas that don't currently have any at all, and then expanding from there. That would be an interesting study if it hasn't been done: what is the MVP of underground subway networks? How many stations do you need for a given area is probably a budgetary concern as much as a passenger capacity concern.
Have any metro areas built entirely new subways where there were none before in recent times? I know a lot of places are looking at light rail too, so have there been any greenfield light rail deployments in USA either?
It seems like a uniquely American problem, which leads me to believe that there just isn't political will to overcome the massive car lobby in most places, which is all the more reason to advocate for it, in my view.
"Have any metro areas built entirely new subways where there were none before in recent times?" China is the easiest one to study. The number of kilometers of heavy rail metro lines built since the year 2000 is simply mindboggling. (Specifically, I am not talking about high-speed train lines.) In the same two decade time range, look at Korea, Taiwan, Hongkong, and Singapore. I guess multiple systems have doubled or tripled in size (length or stations). Remember that Korea has two major systems: Seoul and Busan; and Taiwan has Taipei and Kaosiung.
I am not an urban planner but the north-south & east-west initial two-line style seems very popular. In my experience, the trick to quickly increasing ridership on new lines is closely coordinate with private developers. Be transparent about line planning, then team-up with private developers who can build (large) residential or office buildings with subway entrances in their basement. I've never seen a city do it better than Tokyo. My assumption is that the Elizabeth Line in London will spur similarly spectacular levels of redevelopment.
Light rail: Silicon Valley opened their system in Dec 1987.
About "unlocking value": Two massive upgrades come to mind. East Side Access in Manhattan will allow LIRR trains to enter Grand Central Station. The construction photos online are like something from science fiction. And look at last 30 years of Tokyo metro tightly integrating with private suburban rail lines where trains enter same station, but opposite sides of same platform. Everything is timed to the minute, so transfers are seamless.
> Have any metro areas built entirely new subways where there were none before in recent times?
None that I can think of in the US, but Madrid is generally pointed to as the stellar example of rapid and cheap subway expansion. They added an unbelievable amount of track and stations at really low cost.
> Between 1995 and 2007, the Spanish capital swiftly and cost-effectively upgraded its subway system, building more than 150 new stations over 120 miles at costs far below New York City rates. First, in just four years, Madrid designed, constructed, and opened 39 new metro stations and laid 35 miles of rail, 23.5 miles of which required new tunneling. The expansion was unprecedented for its low costs (about $65 million per mile of rail) and speed. Then, between 2000 and 2003, Madrid built Metro Sur, a 28-station, 25-mile circular subway line that connects the densely populated municipalities south of the city. Simultaneously, Madrid completed a direct metro line from the city’s central business district to its airport, now a 12-minute train ride away. Finally, between 2004 and 2007, commuters in the Madrid region gained an additional 80 new metro and light-rail stations, at a cost of $6 billion.
Just like high speed rail, this was less of a revolution in public works, and more a series of unglamorous minor improvements that added up to something greater than the sum of its parts. The government aimed for speed above all else, with the understanding that delays and financial uncertainty are the doom of any large project. So they would hire multiple teams to bore tunnels at once, and pit them in friendly competitions to bore faster. They negotiated with local land and business owners over more interruptions over a shorter period of time to reduce lawsuits (a big issue in NYC subway expansion), and they designed all the stations to be modular so that they wouldn't waste a ton of time designing and constructing bespoke stations. The sum is that they got it done really fast and really cheap.
Ironically, it looks a bit like the way that we construct our highways.
I agree it is car culture... but I feel that too often people treat it similar to self-driving-car predictions.
Sure, we have a good option for a significant majority of the time. But those many edge cases are non-trivial to resolve so a large majority of people will keep their cars for simple practicality sake.
> Why are all the major cities in the western world seemingly hitting this limit at the same time, even though they all have different populations?
I can’t speak for Canada, but in America the answer is always cars. Car based transit is wildly land inefficient, and the main reason why all car based cities hit their limit at the same time.
In particular there are two huge shortcomings with cars in urban design:
1. Parking eats up a huge amount of space. Either you let that drive density way down (which means commutes get longer) or you build underground parking at exorbitant prices driving up rents. Even in the latter case the roads around housing ends up becoming an issue, limiting density far below what you’d expect in say, Paris on Chicago.
2. Car transit to a shared destination is almost comically inefficient, which is really noticeable when people try and commute via car to job centers. This wouldn’t be as bad if we restricted cars to what they’re good at, such as driving away from the city, but most American cities have the unique psychosis of demanding that transit into the city center be via car. This does not scale, and is why places with wildly different zoning laws can have equally hellish commutes.
The issue is not that we can’t build, we’re really good at adding more highway lanes, it’s more that we are monomaniacally focused on building the wrong things.
Isn't this more a limit of dense (taller) housing?
If we had much more housing in tall buildings near where people worked then they either would not need a car or would at least not need to drive their car to work. You still of course need to provide parking but tall parking garages can solve that as well (or underground).
Seems like tons of cars are the symptom of the problem here not the cause
It’s symbiotic. We can’t build denser housing because we need space for car storage and roads. We can’t encourage people to reduce/eliminate their car usage because our infrastructure makes that miserable.
So I hate driving and actually moved to DC for work and also partly for the transit. Here's what I found:
1) Taking the metro many places (for example, from my apartment in an urban "luxury" apartment building a couple blocks from the initial station to my boat near the waterfront in downtown DC) doubled the time it took to get there. It was actually faster to drive there even during rush hour where you'll sit motionless on the 395 bridge. Yes I can redeem a lot of that time with my above average personal mobile computing set up but a: most people have a pretty mediocre personal mobile computing setup and b: now I can't use that time for anything other than programming projects.
2) I couldn't get rid of the car entirely because I still needed it to move bulky things that I really can't take on transit. It's bad enough not having a truck but losing the car entirely would create some serious logistical problems on a regular basis. So while I saved some money I couldn't save as much as I wanted.
3) Most wealthy people (many of my friends) start families^ and people who can afford it buy detached housing for that. You're not going to be taking transit to these places. It might not ever be economical. Like it or not transit will probably always lower property values in the US too. For whatever reason the more violent people here tend to take it and anywhere it goes becomes more violent so building it into suburbs like these is always going to be unpopular.
4) Bringing me to the fact that I've been accosted multiple times on transit by people who were high, drunk, or just belligerent. I have an extremely high tolerance for this sort of thing (I've wandered around some of the more violent cities early in the morning just to see what the fuss is about) but I can absolutely see why most people here would give up after that happening once at a maximum.
I'm a huge fan of transit but pretending it isn't a large sacrifice to give up a car is just going to get people to ignore you, because it is and for most people it isn't worth it.
(^ and for those that don't start families, many have lots of intense DIY projects that don't fit in apartment buildings and actually need either detached housing or industrial space with similar density.)
Almost everything you're saying is a symptom of poor investment in public transport. I have no doubt that the car works better for your commute, as is the case for millions of other people. Unfortunately, stick millions of cars on the road and you have a huge bottleneck for growing the commuter belt, which means only houses in a relatively small area are useful, and they get extremely expensive.
Historically, and in some countries still, we solved this problem by identifying when it was happening and creating new public transport lines for faster commutes and people living further out. In the UK, we even developed whole "New Towns", upgraded their transport, amenities and infrastructure specifically to support shuttling a greater number of people into London. They weren't particularly inspiring towns, and we still make fun of them nearly a century later - but it worked. Even today, it's far quicker to take the train into London from those towns than it is to drive, as is the case for pretty much all suburb to central commuting here.
There are still lots of situations where a car will be better (I have one too, in London), but if we can get people out of their cars for their commutes, that frees cities up to expand and useful houses will become more affordable. Driving to the tip or mall is much less of a problem.
Regarding the violence and antisocial behaviour, that's really a problem of policing and allocation of funding. It needn't be that way and it doesn't happen to nearly the same extent in the UK and I put that down at least partially to the excellent British Transport Police. Apparently it used to be violent and dangerous in the 80s but we turned it around. Now the train stations are mostly far safer than the surrounding environs. If I was ever being harassed or attacked, I would run towards the station as there would most likely be someone to help me there. Living within a few minutes of a train station also significantly increases your property value here, provided you're not so close that it rattles your bed...
Antisocial behavior on public transit isn’t just a matter of policing and funding.
It’s also a matter of civil liberties.
In California, people have a constitutional right to defecate on the streets.
In was once in a San Francisco bus and watched a young woman of West Asian descent break down in tears because a homeless man was calling her a “sand n***”.
She screamed back at him the Trump was going to put him in a concentration camp. He made some comments about the Muslim faith, and she told she was going to pray he’d die a horrible death.
Some more words were exchanged about Trumps policies towards Muslims and the homeless.
She got off early and walked the rest of the way.
This is all 100% constitutionally protected, or at least, under the policies of subsequent DAs (including Kamala Harris) officially tolerated.
I think that's just a think that happens where people are, and the more people you run into in your travels, the higher the likelihood that you'll run into them.
Public transit is one of the few public spaces we have left, ironically. Perhaps especially so post-Covid. I think that it's worth the investments necessary to make it usable. You can't blame public transit for the lack of effectiveness of homeless programs, and some folks are homeless by choice. It's a fraught situation, and that's why folks choose cars a lot of the time. It's more convenient for them and I guess I don't fault folks for that, but the built environment shows a lot of deference for cars in many metro areas, and that doesn't help with the traffic issues, or with zoning issues, or with housing affordability.
Yet, if you improve those other issues, then property values will probably just go up even higher than they already are, but at least that money will benefit more than just the buyer and the seller; it will benefit the entire community.
Without that kind of protection usually some group gains power and becomes the only protected group. Neo-Nazis are an indication that even the most socially unacceptable groups still have a voice. They should be considered a canary and a good thing to see occasionally. I wouldn't want to live in a country where they were censored and if you feel so strongly about it I would suggest moving somewhere else (Germany censors Nazis pretty aggressively for example.)
For example: You're upset that Nazis marched through a Jewish neighborhood. Are you upset about the violent BLM protestors marching through White neighborhoods? I would guess not but there's little difference between the two.
I've moved to places to see if I thought the changes improved things, you learn a lot about yourself and the world by doing that.
> Regarding the violence and antisocial behaviour, that's really a problem of policing and allocation of funding.
Japan has one of the lowest crime rates in the world with heavy investment in public transportation & policing, and yet they still have issues with sexual harassment and sexual assault on their trains. It’s a hard problem to fix related to population density.
Are you aware that many Tokyo train lines have women-only cars during rush hour? I think they started in the 1990s and have greatly improved the situation for women in Tokyo.
That makes things even worse. If a women can't fit in that car and goes into a normal car, there are POS who can now justify sexually assaulting them. Cracking down on the crime and publicly humiliating the perpetrators would be far better for society.
>Like it or not transit will probably always lower property values in the US too. For whatever reason the more violent people here tend to take it and anywhere it goes becomes more violent so building it into suburbs like these is always going to be unpopular.
This smells of the coded racism that is so rampant in the USA. It's sad because there might be some element of truth at its root, but it gets exaggerated and the attitude creates more and more segregation, exacerbates the divisions and creates a hostile society.
The problem is you’re comparing the commute by public transport in the current status quo and missing the point that fixing the car culture means improving public transport so that it does become more convenient than taking the car.
Plenty of European cities have achieved this. I work in London and I wouldn’t even dream of driving into the city. It’s far more convenient to get the train.
I think you should read my comment a little more carefully. 1 and 2 are due to serious physical and economic constraints that are very unlikely to change and apply to all but the absolute most dense areas. Remember, this is in DC. It's unusually dense and is supposed to be the best we have. 3 and 4 are additionally due to cultural, historical, and demographic problems that are becoming worse rather than better and the current political situation is working to accelerate it.
I'm not against transit but it's not the solution people think it is.
DC isn't unusually dense. It's only the 6th most dense city in America and not even in the top 100 for the world. It doesn't even have an districts that are in the top 100 (Paris, on the other hand, features several districts and still has good public transport networks).
And this is just looking at density in terms of population. There's also building density, London would rank very high up there and has excellent public transport.
The problem in DC isn't technical; the problem is cultural. You see the car as a solution so you keep investing in roads and under funding public transport. Whereas Europe took a different approach. Some UK cities have "park and ride" schemes where you parks on the outskirts and get a cheap bus into the city. Buses will have their own dedicated lanes too so aren't subject to congestion. Some of these cities even go as far as pedestrianizing chunks of the city center so the only way to access it is via subway, bus, tram or bicycle.
The benefits of improving public transport isn't just reducing congestion either. You improve the transport for the vulnerable (elderly, poor, etc), you improve the air quality in the city, you improve road safety. It's better for the environment, it's better for peoples health, it's better for moving people around. But it requires a cultural shift to happen.
> Then both in terms of any arbitrary area in the US or any arbitrary city in the US, it's unusually dense (much more dense than the mean density.)
I haven’t visited DC so I’ll have to take your word for it. But it should be noted that I can’t find anything online that supports yours assessment of DC being unusually dense.
And even if it is, that just makes a stronger case for the need of better public transport services.
> Many places in the US have these and both DC and the suburbs around it are full of them.
I’m sure they are but having a park and ride scheme is only of benefit if you invest in public transport, which, by your own admission, DC doesn’t.
It is. But the problem is that the US is about 80-100 years behind Europe in this.
Personal economies are literally built on the idea of driving, it will be painful to solve that, but unfortunately it’s necessary to solve it otherwise you end up losing enormous amounts of your life to traffic and the infrastructure cost grows exponentially.
America is simply too big for public transit to replace cars to any great extent.
There's an old cliche that goes something like, "In America, people think 100 years is a long time. In Europe, people think 100 kilometers is a long distance." It's pretty much spot on.
The comments pushing for urban densification and public transport are largely theoretical and abstract, while your comment is personal and subjective.
To all those thinking about is as 'policy' - you have to solve ways for making the subjective experience actually better if people are going to go for it.
> Taking the metro many places (for example, from my apartment in an urban "luxury" apartment building to my boat near the waterfront in downtown DC) doubled the time it took to get there. It was actually faster to drive there even during rush hour where you'll sit motionless on the 395 bridge.
Depends a lot on where you live and work. My experience was the exact opposite in Chicago. Heck, for some of my jobs I could outrun car commuters on my bike pretty trivially.
One of the clear downsides to transit oriented cities is that you do need to pay attention to transit access when renting. A unit being “luxury” is no guarantee that it’s in a convenient place for transit, nor that the trip will be short.
> Yes I can redeem a lot of that time with my above average personal mobile computing set up
I find the need to make commute time productive quite an odd but common impulse. How about just making your commute suck less? Reading a book is better than driving in traffic.
> I couldn't get rid of the car entirely because I still needed it to move bulky things that I really can't take on transit.
Again, experience varies. For a lot of people it would be cheaper to abandon the car and pay for deliveries when necessary.
Regardless, do not let the perfect be the enemy of the good. If you relegate your car trips to just when you need bulk goods, that is far more efficient than the current habit of using a car fo every single trip.
> Most wealthy people (many of my friends) start families and people who can afford it buy detached housing for that. You're not going to be taking transit to these places.
We could, but we’ve built our infrastructure with the opposite assumption in mind. Most other rich countries use a mix of regional rail, bus, and cars to solve this problem. The issue of “mass transit doesn’t go to the burbs, therefore I must use a car everywhere for everything” is an entirely self inflicted wound.
> Bringing me to the fact that I've been accosted multiple times on transit by people who were high, drunk, or just belligerent
Maybe we could solve that problem instead? Because that seems like a rather silly rationale for designing a transit system around.
Also, it’s not like all car drivers are sober. In fact, a drunk driver is almost certainly a far bigger risk to your safety than a belligerent drunk on the train.
> I'm a huge fan of transit but pretending it isn't a large sacrifice to give up a car is just going to get people to ignore you, because it is and for most people it isn't worth it.
It’s almost like I’m arguing that we should make public transit more convenient than using a car for urban transit or something.
> Depends a lot on where you live and work. My experience was the exact opposite in Chicago. Heck, for some of my jobs I could outrun car commuters on my bike pretty trivially.
I got a taxi from Gare du Nord to a hotel on Champs Eleyse this evening -- took about 40 minutes to go 2 miles. That's ridiculous, but it's apparently a thing.
Duh? I wasn't literally suggesting that GP walk from a hotel; baggage was obviously implied by the context. I'm just commenting on how taking a taxi on that route is less time and speed efficient than walking.
Obviously a bus would be a better choice, or a train depending on geography. They handle baggage just fine.
A lot of people don’t like public transit for several major reasons:
1. It takes a lot longer to get to your destination even accounting for traffic.
2. The potential for harassment based on your gender or race.
3. The potential for sexual assault.
4. The potential for violence.
Unfortunately, Western society at large is not collective and conformist like the one in Japan, which would heavily mitigate 2 out of the 4 problems stated above. Even then, Japan has a huge problem with harassment and sexual assault when it comes to female passengers.
If return windows were shortened via legislation, it would massively advantage shadier resellers, as nobody would be able to offer better return polices to offset a higher end price.