I'm not commenting on US fact checkers but the concept made its way to my country of origin some time ago. As I suspected, it turned out to be completely biased, often ignoring or softening the controversial topics that affect their side. It's the same old journalism trick where they claim to be neutral and dedicated to the truth but in reality they all have their own agendas, which seems unavoidable (nowadays or since forever?). The main issue is people believing that their favorite fact checker is the most neutral and thus using their content as absolute truths.
Glad to see that the concept is now completely unpopular in my country and we're back to the usual terrible journalism where there's no controversy in stating that.
Similar observations here in Germany. Those fact checkers pick the facts that supports their agenda and leave out others. Framing is in place just the same. And it does not matter if you look at left or right journalists or left or right fact checkers, it is all the same.
As usual, what looks great on paper often falls short in reality because humans are involved. Who could argue that the concept of fact checkers is inherently bad? After all, they're supposed to chase down all the "disinformation" you mention, and they're there to ensure "factual discourse" to prevent "malicious intent." But if someone opposes fact checkers, they must be a pesky leftie/rightie/whatever label fits, and surely they're against the truth... because how could a fact checker have an agenda? It's not possible, they're just checking facts!
In reality, though, why are there so many fact-checking organizations? Shouldn't there be just one, holding all the truth? Oh, right... some are fact checkers, and others are just fakers. Because only organization X does real fact-checking, why cannot everybody agree with me?
You see, the whole system starts to fall apart the more you reason about it. To me, it was just journalism in disguise, pretending to be more neutral, but it's really business as usual.
> because how could a fact checker have an agenda? It's not possible, they're just checking facts!
Of course a fact checker has an agenda. How else do they decide which fact checking to prioritize? It's not like a single person or organization has the ability to fact check everything about every topic.
A fact checking group with an emphasis on correcting mistakes about Catholic teachings is very unlikely to provide fact checking about water rights under the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo nor fact checking statements about British tank production during the Second World War.
> Shouldn't there be just one, holding all the truth?
I can't make sense of that argument. Which organization could that even be?
> To me, it was just journalism in disguise
It can also be journalism. Newspapers, magazines, and even podcasts can have staff fact checkers. The origin story for The New Yorker's famous fact checkers was to avoid libel after printing a false story about Edna St. Vincent Millay.
That is, the clear agenda of the New Yorker's fact checkers is to minimize lawsuits and enhance the reputation of the magazine among its current and future subscribers.
I therefore see no problem in fact checkers having an agenda as I can't make sense of how it would be otherwise.
And the hole fact checking concept falls apart when you prematurely conclude a dialog. This is the most valid critique to any political participant and way more on point: botched online discourse.
I am not concluding that fact checker are bad by nature, they are at worst, incomplete, imbalanced ... biased like any other political participant. Shutting them down with visas or labeling them as malicious will not foster the dialog.
The fact is that people were censored based on so-called fact-checkers. It's not as innocent as some jackasses online calling themselves "fact-checkers"... It is so far beyond that, I feel sorry for you for seemingly not knowing. Go start with the Twitter Files as reported by Matt Taibbi.
I'm not going to argue the point that the man is perfectly impartial on everything. But of the people who reported the story of the Twitter Files, I trust him the most. He doesn't need to be perfectly impartial to convey what you need to know.
Nobody is actually free of bias. That absurd pretense of impartiality is only in the conversation because "fact-checkers" claim to have it, and that claim is used to promote censorship. Though it matters when journalists are biased by personal views and their funding sources, that is inescapable and consistent with their rights to free speech. Censorship is not.
> Shouldn't there be just one, holding all the truth?
How do you hold the truth? Even if there was only a single fact-checking organization, and they had no institutional or personal biases, they still wouldn’t own the truth.
Nobody is going to give a singular example because their entire position rests on them being unbiased, but fact checkers are biased. But if you point out what you believe the fact checker's bias might be, that in it of itself is a bias, and now you're no longer trustworthy by the metrics you yourself set forward.
>(...) because their entire position rests on them being unbiased, but fact checkers are biased
Sorry but this completely misses the point. I can't speak for everyone who dislikes the whole fact-checking thing but I can speak for myself since I'm the OP. What I'm saying is that nobody is truly unbiased, not that fact-checkers are biased.
In fact, I go further and openly state that not only are they biased, but many of them even have an agenda. Yes, media outlets have an agenda, and that agenda may go against your interests - why is this a shocking point on this forum? @wakawaka28 has expressed this much more clearly than I have below, anyway:
Nobody is actually free of bias. That absurd pretense of impartiality is only in the conversation because "fact-checkers" claim to have it, and that claim is used to promote censorship. Though it matters when journalists are biased by personal views and their funding sources, that is inescapable and consistent with their rights to free speech. Censorship is not.
The fact-checking organization "Correctiv" (which was one of the first that got the privilege of marking shared links on Facebook as "disinformation") falsely claimed the right-wing AfD party planned to deport millions of non-Germans in a secret "Masterplan" ("Remigration") which of course did not happen which was confirmed by a court and later by Correctiv themselves.[1] This false report was repeated on every TV station, print and online magazine but the correction was not as widely shared (most people don't even know that the report was fabricated). Keep in mind that the Correctiv report lead to mass protests against the AfD and reactions from a lot of companies and government officials, so it had a HUGE impact.
The government also funds projects from Correctiv (a common pattern for these "N"GO's).
Outside specific examples, I can never tell what anyone thinks when they're concerned about journalism and bias. As far as I can tell random citizens are no better at spotting it and their own pov drives what is or isn't bias.
Plenty of times I've seen valid fact checking folks complain about bias, not because of the fact, but because they think the fact should inevitably involve a far different persuasive type discussion. Rather the fact checker isn't there to push or not push someone's policy, they're there to tell you the story that leads up to someone's argument did or didn't happen or something in-between ...
And frequently they are simply contradicted by broadly available evidence.
Do the following exercise.
In whatever your main field of work is, the thing you are qualified in, go look up and track "fact checked" things. Keep a little tally in your notes of whether the fact checker is entirely correct, somewhat correct, or wrong.
Even on cybersecurity stories, and it's not as if there is a major journalist group pushing for the hackers and scammers, the fact checked stories are simply frequently incorrect. You can confirm this through legal filings or post-analysis in older stories.
It is, as far as I can tell, just a job done badly. The fact checkers aren't evil or malicious, just not good and confused about basic things.
Generally, the fact checkers hired for newspapers and the like aren't attempting to assert any sort of correctness, just that the sources actually exist, said what was claimed, etc.
A number of journalists have gotten caught inventing stories, plagiarizing stories, and other rather basic issues.
No, the fact checkers exist to pick their sponsors' preferred sides when there are multiple sources. They have little or no actual expertise of their own but the mere terminology leads the uninitiated observer to directly believe that the "fact-checked" view is objectively true. Everyone else is forced to do the constant rhetorical work of re-explaining why fact-checkers are not what they purport to be.
>A number of journalists have gotten caught inventing stories, plagiarizing stories, and other rather basic issues.
Ultimately, fact-checkers are just journalists who attempt to claim a monopoly on truth. Censorship does not work, and can only be tolerated in a free society in VERY limited circumstances, usually after due process. The censorship we've seen during covid and since "fact-checkers" entered public dialog in general is absolutely not acceptable in any way. I don't have a problem with the existence of so-called fact-checkers per se. The real problem is that it's false advertising and a blatant attempt to rally for censorship of wrongthink. If you want censorship, move to North Korea or China, and leave the rest of us alone.
I can't tell if you are serious or if this is just a god-tier straw man but it's all wrong. If I didn't find it so damn annoying, I'd call this response a fact check. First of all, newspapers don't turn fact-checkers on their own employees. Maybe if some of the employees are supposed to play the part of controlled opposition, it might happen. But fact-checkers exist to discredit information from other sources. Secondly, fact-checkers were used as a pretext for silencing people all over social media. This happened extensively in the West, including in the US, and many politicians still crave the power to deanonymize and silence their opposition under the pretense of misinformation or hate speech. Finally, people can decide for themselves who is credible, and nobody is trustworthy enough to decide for everyone what is true. That even goes for most so-called objectively knowable information. The importance of having a free market of ideas is perhaps proportional to the tendency for people to lie or misrepresent the facts. People are not as stupid as the proponents of fact-checking would have you believe.
That is a little interesting but those are not the fact-checkers I'm talking about, nor the ones that the post is talking about (since they mention tech companies). Don't hold me to that. Maybe there is some overlap because working for a media outlet might count as a credential in the eyes of the people who appointed them to work in social media. In any event, so-called fact-checkers were used as a pretense to censor social media and silence contrarians. I obviously have no problem with legitimate researchers, especially if their job is internal to particular news agencies so that they can avoid lawsuits for libel or whatever.
This is not new. I can call myself Bearer of the Unassailable Truth Who Is Beyond All Doubt or Criticism but that doesn't make me any more accurate than the next guy.
The "Fact Checker" title is is meant to describe the task the person seeks to undertake. The evidence and argument they provide gives their opinion weight.
The real problem here is that people read a title, or look at how confident someone is, or how well dressed, neat, polite, white, young, old, nerdy, worldly, good looking, well spoken or enthusiastic and think that is means anything at all as to the validity of what they say.
I had some contact with an evangelical congregation many years ago, and I remember a woman saying something like, "Everyone has their different spiritual gifts, mine is just that I know if a message is from God." That creeped me out, obviously. She was basically claiming exclusive veto on anything anyone might say.
But people who claim similar authority in political matters, the experts on expertise, or those who have the "spiritual gift" (intellectual gift, maybe?) of telling with certainty if a message is foreign propaganda, somehow don't set of as many alarm bells.
The New Testament instructs the elders of a church to evaluate the messages brought by people who share a message or claim to prophesy. We're also instructed to "test the spirits" to see if they are from God. And to search the Scriptures in order to see if what people say is consistent with the teaching that has been given from God.
If you don't believe in God, divine revelation, and God speaking to people in their lives, then I'm not sure why you'd find her assertion creepy, it might make more sense to just find her and the entire Christian belief system false and mostly irrelevant.
At any rate, I doubt she was claiming spiritual authority over everyone else as you put it, more like saying God gave her a spiritual spidey sense or BS meter to help her personally and to help caution her local congregation or the people in her life.
It's a le legitimate claim within Christian teaching but I can't speak to her use of the gift. People's use of spiritual gifts isn't autonomous, but prophecy, preaching, administration, hospitality, discernment, and so on should be regulated within the Church body by the oversight of other Christians.
Surely in these situations, the fact-checked information is more knowable than God. The fact checker can provide other sources that may support their position. The woman with a hotline to God cannot possibly provide any proof of her claims.
Comparing a belief in spiritualism to a fact checker thinking they've found misinformation is apples and oranges in terms of falsifiability.
> The fact checker can provide other sources that may support their position.
Sure, and that woman could surely have come up with some bible verses or something. But would they even bother, if we accept them as an authority?
There weren't exactly many sources to support the claim that a certain laptop "had all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation"
The point isn't that the truth is unknowable, but that we should be deeply skeptical of people who claim to be truth experts. Of course real experts exist, but the more generic a person claims their expertise to be, and the more political the topic (in the sense that people have genuine conflicts of interest over it, that what benefits you may not benefit me), the less we should trust them.
At least Divine Authority Lady probably didn't have much opportunity to benefit at my expense, the same can't be said for all media experts.
> Sure, and that woman could surely have come up with some bible verses or something. But would they even bother, if we accept them as an authority?
In a modern, secular society, we do not take "the bible" as a logical reason for something. However, we do accept statements of things that are verifiable like that an event occurred, was observed by many people besides the one making the claim, and possibly even recorded by multiple sources.
> There weren't exactly many sources to support the claim that a certain laptop "had all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation"
There also weren't many sources to support the chain of custody for said laptop. Given the people involved, the implications and the timing, it is right to be skeptical of such a fantastical story.
> The point isn't that the truth is unknowable, but that we should be deeply skeptical of people who claim to be truth experts
Assumedly the fact checker is not researching every fact check per post, but is referencing some internal document stating what the organization considers "fact". This could have surely been created through discussions and research with experts.
Is your solution that we should never attempt to fact check anything?
> At least Divine Authority Lady probably didn't have much opportunity to benefit at my expense
I guarantee there is a lucrative spot for someone claiming to have secret knowledge from God. And even less fear of being executed as an apostate than in the past. However, being a "Fact Checker" now means you are scrutinized by the US federal government and may be denied entry or citizenship. The fact checker took a bigger risk and had a worse outcome than Divine Authority Lady.
In the context this woman was, they DO take bible verses as justifications. Not "logical reason", for heaven's sake. Expressing it that way suggests you're stubbornly refusing to think about contexts other than your preferred one, how others see the world. That seems to happen a lot with techies online.
I'm not asking you to accept how someone else sees the world as truth, I'm asking you to understand that it's how they see the world. Seems pretty important to understand the impact of a policy like trying to elevate professional institutional fact checkers in the media.
> Given the people involved, the implications and the timing, it is right to be skeptical of such a fantastical story.
That is not the question. The question is, was "citing" 60 anonymous authorities who claim to have evidence you're not allowed to see, going to convince anyone who wasn't already? If that was the attempt, I'd say it's a symptom of the usual "online techie autism" - people with bad theories of mind, bad ability to understand other's people thinking, who think they've got everything that matters worked out (those other people are just stupid anyway, don't you know).
You should ask, are the sort of institutional fact checkers we have now a useful institution? Or maybe more, the ones we used to have a few years ago. Even most of them have given up after the fiasco of Trump's second election.
> I guarantee there is a lucrative spot for someone claiming to have secret knowledge from God.
I was talking about specific people. You don't know them better than me.
> However, being a "Fact Checker" now means you are scrutinized by the US federal government and may be denied entry or citizenship. The fact checker took a bigger risk and had a worse outcome than Divine Authority Lady.
Ridiculous. That's like saying right-wing grifters like, what's her name, Candace Owens, or the one who recently jumped ship, Marjorie Taylor Greene, are brave and principled for breaking with their side's orthodoxy. They're not. They're just trying to be one step ahead of events, one hour ahead of their time (no more!) and are terribly bad at it.
Your poor harassed institutional fact checkers may deserve pity for the outcome, but they are not brave, they just bet on the wrong horse, and they may well swing back in power and authority soon anyway (though not for long, because they're part of the problem they imagine themselves the solution to).
Since "truth" is more of a philosophical concept than anything else, IMHO the problem with "fact-checking" is largely rooted in the framing of it.
Instead of acting like there's some objective truth that some people know for sure, it should have been framed simply as argumentation and exposition so people can follow the logic.
I.e. let's say someone claims that mRNA vaccines are causing widespread heart attacks, the people who push these claims are almost always misrepresenting data through statistical tricks. Instead of just doing "fact checking" in form of "our data says it doesn't" its much more effective to address the original claim and expose the tricks used to give the impression that people are dying of heart attack after vaccination. It not only builds trust and reason but also makes people smart for understanding what's going on instead of feeling dumber than the "experts" who tell them the "truth".
During the pandemic, I recall some conspiracy theorists using official data in such a way that I swear it obviously shoved that vaccinated are about to die off. I spent hours multiple times to dig out and understand what the data actually says. Every single time, it was due to some technicality like the times the data is collected or processed(data entered in batches giving the impression of people dying from something that happens periodically) or something that from a laymans meant one thing but it was actually exactly the opposite when you know it(i.e. some response from the immune systems that looks bad but actually it means that the vaccine is working as expected). Oh and my favorite, change in methodology presented as change in outcomes.
> Instead of just doing "fact checking" in form of "our data says it doesn't" its much more effective to address the original claim and expose the tricks used to give the impression that people are dying of heart attack after vaccination. It not only builds trust and reason but also makes people smart for understanding what's going on instead of feeling dumber than the "experts" who tell them the "truth".
This is in fact (no pun) what every fact checker I've ever consulted actually does. I assume a lot of people just read the conclusive "Lie"/"Truth", and don't bother with the paragraphs of reasoning and sources they're basing the conclusion on. If there are faults with sourcing evidence, logic, or anything in between, that's where the issue is, but the concept is fine.
Maybe instead of "fact-checking", they are instead called "rebuttal" or 'counter-point'. This framing may be more accurate most of the time. But for the instances where the initial point is objectively provably false, like 'the earth is flat'.
Mike Benz does a nice job of covering the US State department using this for political purposes in other countries.
Instead of directly addressing dissenting opinion, you accuse people of “disinformation” and “misinformation” (my favorite - true but interpreted in a bad light). This includes passing laws in countries either punishing it (through online censorship) all the way to making such speech illegal.
And before anyone claims it’s false, Mike Benz does a nice job of sourcing evidence from US State department documents on this technique.
It's always the same discussions here whenever a company decides to use Electron or a similar solution. It's beyond tiring to see the same arguments being repeated.
A company's goal is to make money by optimizing its resources. What benefits would Meta gain by maintaining native apps for WhatsApp across the three major operating systems? I can tell you: absolutely none, only negatives. Nobody except a negligible fraction of users would care about native performance or idle memory consumption. No one is going to switch to Signal or whatever the flavor-of-the-year messaging app is because of this.
It would be a different story if WhatsApp were to lose a significant portion of its user base due to the app becoming unusable or extremely slow. But for the vast majority, this change will go unnoticed or frankly won't matter at all. So, expect most companies to continue adopting Electron-like apps (for the few that still have native apps anyway) for exactly the same reasons.
Sorry to be blunt, but it's really tiresome to see these discussions going around in circles here. It’s pointless to keep debating this, it's not going to change. If one day a framework emerges that's comparable to Electron (or something similar) but requires fewer resources to develop against, I could see Meta and other companies considering it... provided the migration costs aren’t too high. But again, no end-user truly cares about this.
>Endeavour like these make people vote for extremists
Maybe it's time to start considering the current individuals in power as extremists? Just because their speech is more 'peaceful' doesn't mean their actions aren't extremist in nature.
There's something called implicit context (this submission and the entire ongoing discussion), which clearly refers to the first group of people you mentioned. Why would I be talking about people who aren't involved in pushing this?
their actions are clearly not extremist, absolutely not perfect and not always equally democratic, but not extremist or violent like the actual extremists...
I do think the ambition to spy on all private communication to be quite extremist.
Especially Germany should know better. If you build two autocratic dictatorships on average per century, maybe start to take care that state powers are restricted.
The US is fully correct in its criticism of Germany regarding freedom of speech and house searches. Sure, on surveillance their arguments would be very weak...
Absolutely nothing positive will be gained by this surveillance, so there isn't even the smallest security benefit. On the contrary.
Again, I disagree, I wouldn't call it extremist. It's vile and wrong, but people all over the political spectrum are in favour of this. there's a difference between something being bad or self-serving, and something being extremist. Labelling everything as extremist does not help anyone, especially today when everyone is already highly divided.
No way I'm getting into the restrict state powers discussion as that is highly complex and not something that can properly be discussed on an internet forum.
I disagree, for me it is an extreme position that affects the lives of everyone because of diffuse security whims. At best, since the motivation could be entirely different.
We had that in Germany by extremist autocratic parties and these policies are quite a clear mirror.
"Scanning the communications of everyone" - Might want to let that go through your head again.
Hmm, sure, I can agree that the position is extremist, I still don't agree that 1 (or some) extremist positions makes the current people in power extremist. Or at least, maybe they are, but I think most of the alternatives are more extremist.
Politics are an inherently violent affair. The government is simply a monopoly on legitimate violence. Politicians decide the laws, which result in people breaking them getting beaten up & dragged to a cell. Not to say this is always a bad thing: some people cannot be stopped from misbehaving just by talking, but it definitely is violent.
I see this a lot and am not convinced. It appears reductionist in a way that feels like it's pushing an agenda.
Democratic governments clearly are about addressing community needs and coordinating efforts that require pooled resources (at least). I'm not denying there may be a monopoly on violence. However, in a democratic system, such a monopoly would be voted on, giving the monopoly some legitimacy (not saying it's necessarily moral).
Yet in reality, the US, for example, has the Second Amendment, which grants citizens the right to bear arms and form militias. That doesn't sound like the government has a monopoly on violence.
I guess the weasel word is "legitimate"? But is that legal or moral legitimacy (or something else)? By whose definition and arrived at how?
It feels like such a pithy comment, "a monopoly on legitimate violence", like it's expressing something deep. Yet I get the sense that supporting it requires some contortion of logic and language. Maybe I'm missing something but it doesn't seem self-evident to me at all.
Define "extremist". Many people would argue mass immigration is an extremist position but was the normal accepted position for the people in power within the European Union but was never a popular position with the populations of Europe.
So these so called <<right wing extremists>> represent the normal position.
Pontevedra has around 80K inhabitants, so it's practical to design it this way. But when cities are much bigger, problems start to arise. Not everyone can afford to live in the center (nor is there space for them, and building taller than a certain number of meters or floors is often forbidden for various reasons), so people begin moving farther out.
Sure, there's public transport... but only until it takes six times longer than driving a car - and that's not even counting all the issues public transport has in many places, which some people deny even exist, although doesn't matter to me because I just experienced them first hand way too many times (I have never owned a car until recently).
At that point, you might as well move farther out to a nicer house, less expenses and just drive a bit longer.
I would argue that a public transportation network is a requirement, maybe even a prerequisite, for high density. Manhattan simply could not work without the various public transportation methods -- if everyone commuting in from CT, LI, NJ, upstate NY, etc., had to drive in, would there even be enough space for all those cars on the island?
> But when cities are much bigger, problems start to arise.
Actually, the bigger the city, the more efficient public transportation is. Just look at LA with it's 16 lanes of car traffic, and compare it to London - the fundamental difference being that LA has no real public transport and London has an extensive tube and train network. Oh, and London has about twice as many people as LA... which one would you rather be a commuter in?
Just an example: a colleague of mine was commuting from Reading to Canary Wharf (before the Elizabeth line even), this is now an hour long train ride, if you tried to take it by car it would be double that - and then you'd have to find parking for your car in Canary Wharf, which is not easy and very expensive.
It's not about being bigger, but having high population density.
Obviously in larger cities it will take longer to travel from one extreme to the other, but that is a similar problem as trying to travel to another city. Trips that are 20km long need to be treated as such, no matter if they're in the same city or not.
Some suburbs in Barcelona and Madrid have more than 20K hab/km2. And they are expected to have as low car transit as other European cities with around 3K to 6K hab/km2.
It is obvious that even though lots of people might be able to switch to alternative ways of transportation car is still extremely useful for many use cases.
The solution is the right city design: more populated areas in the district centers, and less densely populated areas towards the outskirts. Spain is terrible at this, as they design high density areas everywhere. Americans do the opposite, it's mostly all low density.
A balanced solution is how dutch cities are designed. You can live in your own garden house, while having access to commerce, offices in higher density areas, just by 5-20minutes by bike (up to 5-6km).
Cities can scale far further than that and cars make the situation worse, not better. The Amsterdam metropolitan area houses in the ballpark of two and a half million people, most of them not living in the city center.
To the lurkers: If you live in a big enough city, look for local nexuses of people doing good social work and volunteer. Social media is too divorced from reality and the satisfaction of helping improve your community should naturally lead you into the finding cool people in your area. Tool libraries, food kitchens, park cleanup crews, cycling groups, cultural preservation groups, maker spaces, church groups if applicable/compatible, stuff like this. And try to have a calm, humble, accepting attitude.
Volunteer work is so very good for my mental health. The pandemic directly and indirectly caused me to stop it for a few years, but now that I’m volunteering again, I’m much happier.
Exactly, do we need social media in the first place?
I guess most people's family/friend circle do not exceed some dozens of persons. Having different messaging groups seems ideal, more targeted and more genuine interactions than shouting in the void in the hope of getting "likes"...
It's interesting how people's positions can be so different. As a European who has lived in two (european) countries with good and affordable transport, I've always been a happy public transport user... until a couple of years ago, that is. Much of the transport is now filled with unpleasant people, dirt, delays, etc which paired with the insane prices of housing in the "walkable" parts of cities, has made me 100% invested in the myth of motorized freedom.
Even in large cities like London there are huge areas where public transport is a joke. Yes it's fine in the very tourist center, but get out further from the center where normal people with families actually live and what is a 5-8 minute drive to a large grocery store becomes a mammoth 50-60 minute journey each way. I personally don't want to spend 15% of my waking day going to and from the shops and paying huge prices for public transport (and also struggle back carrying heavy bags) when I can pay pennies in electricity to drive there and back in a small fraction of the time. I can leave, do my shop, drive back (with heavy bags being carried by the car not my fingers!) and unpack and be sat down again and half way through a TV episode before I'd even have got there by public transport. And this is London where we have "good" public transport.
mode share even in tokyo is only 51% - they have a lot of work they can do. That 51% is likely just going to work, cities rarely collect data for other trips but those matter and are places to work on.
i mean none of the supermarkets close to my home have parkings... (they have a bunch of bike racks though).
there is 1 combini with a small ~6 spots parking that sits mostly empty. my building has more units than parking spots, there are a lot of bikes though.
in tokyo, having a car is not the default, you need a good reason.
now if you get out of tokyo (like gunma), it's another story, in japan they talk about "car society" (kuruma shakai). you'll see lots of cars, and big parkings.
Even somewhere which is lauded as having "good" public transport such as London and its actually not good in real life situations. Yes its great and all to visit London or Amsterdam or Berlin or whatever on vacation when you don't have Real Life (TM) responsibilities to worry about and you're only ever shuffling around the most central tourist areas and attractions with no real time pressures etc.
But realistically unless you put train lines literally everywhere there are roads now, and have non-stop trains shuttling around all day every day that turn up every 3 minutes, public transport is going to be terrible for day to day living for most people simply because it doesn't go where you need it to go, when you need it.
I think the 15 minute city proponents are deluding themselves. Yes it is a nice dream that everything is a 15 minute walk away (...presumably on a warm sunny day when you have no time pressures), but really when it comes down to actual day to day living its kinda ridiculous - so you're going to have offices, nurseries, primary schools, secondary schools, universities, doctors, dentists, hospitals, grocery stores, vets, hardware stores, gyms, libraries, churches, synagogues, mosques, cinemas, restaurants, bars, art galleries etc etc - all the things we need for day to day living and life in general - repeated every mile or two so that people can walk to them within 15 mins?
That is absurd.
You just cant have that density of things like major hospitals or universities for example. Ah but then we add public transport links they say! But then you're back to where we are currently with a "good" public transport system actually being expensive and a pain in the ass to use because it can't be a direct link to every single possible place in the urban graph so it ends up meaning in reality you walk 5-10 minutes to reach a stop, wait 5-10 minutes for something to turn up, pay £3.50 to ride for 10-15 minutes, potentially change buses or train/metro/tram lines (including the 5-10 minute wait for that to arrive), get out, walk another 5-10 minutes etc, when if you had just driven it would have taken 5 minutes and you don't need to carry back 18kg of groceries on the return journey that also costs you £3.50 as well and also takes just as long except now everyone else on the bus/train/tram hates you because you're taking up the space of 4 passengers with your shopping bags and you're banging into them. And let's not even start with the weather.
for first, most people do not own cars and do everything via public transport/bicycle.
plus. it is often faster to use public transport than using a car, and cheaper...
supermarkets, grocery stores, hospitals, offices, appartments have generally no or little parking spots.
you will have to find dedicated parking spots which are pretty expensive, and will in fine have you walk around as if you were going to the station...
oh and yes, as i mentioned before lots of apartments don't have parking spots, so you will have to walk some to get to your car, and you will have to pay a hefty sum to rent the parking spot.
there are dentists/hairdressers/grocery stores/restaurants pretty much everywhere in tokyo. use google maps and try by yourself you will see.
people haul their stuff by hand or with their bikes.
people who don't have a very specific reason to own cars simply don't... there is no point. the building where i live has way less car parking spots than units (and it is illegal to own a car without a dedicated parking spot in japan).
people who have cars are generally one of:
- do not actually live in tokyo
- go in and out of tokyo often
- need for work (cargo)
- hobby / family need (haul a lot of stuff regularly or enjoy driving)
i'm specifically talking of tokyo, outside of tokyo you will find lots of parking spots and cars.
European countries only have good and affordable transport in the first and second tier cities. I usually spend a few weeks per year in Europe, often in smaller cities or rural areas, and the only public transport you'll find is some occasional bus service at inconvenient times. In those places everyone drives everywhere. Or they just sit around and home and don't go anywhere.
And then there are third-tier historical medieval towns that are 100% walkable and you again don't need a car.
My ideal city of the future is a small walkable town with everything within a 15-20 minute walk, possibly a part of a conglomerate of towns that run trains or buses between them.
I currently live in one such historical town in Southern Europe that's protected by Unesco. The streets are so narrow that not only there's no public transport, all non-resident and non-delivery traffic is prohibited and there's no Uber even. And yet you have everything you need for life and work within a 15-20 minute walk max. More for remote work, obviously.
An ideal city of the future doesn't need to be medieval but maybe we should go back to a city planning concept that is made for humans and not cars. And you know, narrow pedestrian streets are totally fine, they are cute!
> And then there are third-tier historical medieval towns that are 100% walkable and you again don't need a car.
Ah yeah sure I'll just find work in a place and then buy a house there. It's not like 3+ decades of mismanagement on migration and internal policies left even places 30+ minutes by car from work unafforable by mere mortals.
> third-tier historical medieval towns that are 100% walkable
Very many people, including me, want to live in a glorious walkable bijou old-town stone apartment, except they can't afford to because they stopped building them like that in about 1756 and the only jobs within walking distance of the old town are in hospitality and those do not pay the salaries to buy one of the treasured old town apartments from under an AirBnB host.
And if it's a really small, non-tourist town in the middle of nowhere, it may not even have the hospitality sector. So, yes, that bijou property may indeed only cost 50,000 euros, and yes, you can walk to the boulangerie or the confitería or whatever but you're probably going to need a car to get out of your tiny town and go to work or basically anywhere else.
Or you could work remotely or hybrid, or take a 30-60 minute wifi-enabled commuter train to the big city for your big city job, clocking in and handling your emails during your commute and doing the last bits of work on your way home.
It's interesting to me seeing the different ways that different people respond to our modern urban hellholes. I don't want to live in a city at all, I want to live in at most a village where people all have their own land, and the village 'center' is just the most convenient nexus of property lines, where people could set up the local market.
I always sort of assume people who are into de-urbanization are also de-dev, because I don't see how or why the large-scale industrial base would be needed or could be sustained with only smaller, distributed cities, but it's interesting to hear another perspective.
You only have everything you need for work in such a city if your "work" is limited to small offices, restaurants, and retail shops. So you're excluding everything related to manufacturing, agriculture, resource extraction, logistics, military, etc. You know, all of that stuff that keeps modern industrial civilization operating and allows quaint medieval towns to continue existing at all. If you like where you live that's great, but it's hardly ideal and certainly not scalable.
> all of that stuff that keeps modern industrial civilization operating and allows quaint medieval towns to continue existing at all
That doesn't make sense to me. Medieval towns existed for centuries before industrial civilization and without it we might see a drastic increase in medieval style living...
In any case the poster is talking about their own ideal future scenario, maybe leaving out the details like the robots working in underground manufacturing facilities or fusion-powered hydroponic vertical farms etc.
Yeah, I agree. I've just happened to live in two capitals, so I've had access to top-tier public transport. But even in the capitals, a simple 10-minute drive can turn into a 50-minute journey on public transport (this is a literal common example of mine, not an exaggeration!). So even then, you have to consider how much your time is worth.
I lived in a lower-tier American city (Charleston, SC) for 15 years, and this was my experience with public transportation. I had commute options of a 7 mile drive @ 30 minutes due to congestion, a 7 mile bike ride @ 35 minutes no congestion thanks to bike lanes, or approximately 2 hours bus ride on an unreliable system with no good drop off points and no guarantees in a timely arrival or space for a bicycle to complete the 2 mile walk to my office. These numbers are also one way, not round trip.
In other words, I could not use the service in any honest sense.
Perhaps a nice future is a hybrid model of public transportation plus personal transport via bicycles and scooters, especially with battery powered options becoming so robust.
Even in the first tier cities there is usually significant personal car ownership, often with more than half of households owning one.
Is that because many people find even first tier city public transit inadequate for much of their normal in-city transport, or are there a lot of people living in the first tier cities who need to visit the smaller cities or rural areas often enough that it is worth keeping a car just for those occasions?
Categorically this isn't true, I easily found good and affordable public transport in smaller towns. It's definitely less common, but to bluntly say that only first and second tier cities have gold and affordable public transport is inaccurate and dismissive.
My motorized freedom dreams got stuck in increasingly worse traffic. Nowadays I dream of a "bikeable" commute and grocery shopping and whatever works best between public transport and driving on the weekends.
My area is fairly "bikeable" but I seldom ride my bike for errands because I can't be sure that it will still be there when I get out of the store. The local authorities do almost nothing to prevent bike theft.
Sure, cars can also be stolen. But modern cars are now fairly theft resistant and police at least take it seriously as a crime.
I ebike and the combination of an old rusty bike plus a large lock seems to stop thieves, even though I leave it on the street 247. I take the battery in though. And have a funky diy paint job. Also even if it was stolen it cost less than any of a years tax on the car, one service on the car, one replacement shock on the car etc.
My way of shopping with my bike is either taking my obviously pricey bike, which I can just walk into the supermarket without anyone thinking it could be left outside, or just take my old 25kg bike that's kind of not worth stealing and lock it somewhat close to the entrance just in case.
It has gotten significantly worse to the point where I stopped taking it. Prices on public transport are now also so high I'm better off taking the car on most trips.
Also it it me or are "just have walkable/bikeable cities people" more obnoxious than vegan speed cyclists
I'd say the decline is happening (in my experience) in most public services, not just transport.
But anyway, I'm purposely staying away from discussing politics here since it's pointless, so I'll just share my experience as a public transport end-user, and the rest can fill in the gaps with their perspectives.
No one is "interested" in making public transit worse, the issue is that people in power are not users of it and so are not invested in it, and civic and national pride is generally dead in the West, being replaced with vapid nationalism, so there's no drive (no pun intended) to invest in public works projects.
The way I understand your comment, it implies that a) users of public transportation should be invested in it, whilst it’s more likely that they use it because they have no alternative, and that b) civic and national pride results in higher demand for public transportation. I don’t think those are universal truths.
You don't think that people who use services care more about the service than non-users? Whether they're forced into using it or not, the fact they do absolutely makes them more invested in it being good.
Civic and national pride makes citizens (which includes politicians and the wealthy) more likely to care about the actual state of their country. That's what national pride means, as opposed to nationalism, where they are proud without reason. Is public transit guaranteed to be one of those reasons they feel pride or shame? Not at all, but support for it is certainly more likely to come from that than a bunch of nationalists who don't actually feel any shame at failings of the country, of which public transit is currently.
When users of transit are few there is not enough people to care. often the only users are those least likely to be usefuly involved. so you can't get a useful advocate. Even when transit gets support it is from people wanting to feel good about helping the poor - but would never use it themselves and so they want something with no care for quality. They often make alliences with those whose intersts are not for good transit and don't care that the compromise is bad for transit.
The London Mayor some years ago, Ken Livingstone, was a huge proponent of public trasport and used it extensively.
The current Mayor, whilst still a proponent, likely does not use it. A quick glance at the social media that he recieves will tell you why - it would not be safe. He needs to travel with close protection officers.
The reason? He is Muslim, and Britain has become a very racist country indeed. Well, maybe always was, but the likes of Farage and Musk have so emboldened them that there is no longer a stigma.
Make it like Japan, not public, private. Then, like Japan, provide positive feedback loops so it’s in each of the 100+ train companies in Japan’s best interest to provide good service. They do this by letting the private train companies have complementary interests like shopping centers, office rental, apartments, etc such that the more people ride their trains the more business they get to their other interests.
Conversely, “public” transportation always needs flawless perfect politicians to continue to fund it
I don't get it. If you've been enjoying public transportation for so long, then why is your reaction to it getting worse not: OK, we need to fix it so it's as good as it was.
Instead you are just saying: OK, I have the resources to fix the problem for myself, so I don't give a F.
I do give a F. I'm paying a fair amount in taxes every month despite not using it.
On top of that, what's your proposal? Whether I use it (and be miserable) or not doesn't move the needle either way, so I choose not to be miserable.
If there were actually a way to make it better, I'd maybe get involved. But since I see zero options, I just stay away from it. Virtue signaling doesn't work for me.
Ha, the "I pay taxes" type I see. Paying taxes doesn't necessarily mean you care. For example part of the taxes I pay will go into the Military Industrial Complex, but yet I wish they don't exist.
One way to reduce the chance of meeting "unpleasant" people (are they really unpleasant or has your perception just changed as you age?), is to just have more of public transportation! Besides pure statistics, it also makes people's lives better and will reduce poverty.
transportation is expensive and must be paid somehow. For most people good public transportation would realistically cost them $100 per month - that is less than they spend on a car per month but still a lot of money. (Car costs are mostly hidden - you spend less than that in gas, not noticing the payments, insurance which are paid differently, or maitenance which is large bills not often).
when looking at the above, most people live in a couple situation so think of it as selling one car and keeping the other - it still saves money and you get the best of both worlds. This only works though if transit is getting that money from everyone already though since you need that much before it is useful to those who would pay.
Usually when people get older and start complaining about new "unpleasant people" the issue isn't that new unpleasant people exist. Rather, its that the older person has not adapted and is stuck. They become "get off my lawn" types
As someone who is 32 and takes public transport, if a homeless person gets on my train car and smells bad enough to stink up half (or all!) of the car, they have earned the "unpleasant people" label fair and square. Yes I understand it may be their only option, and I sympathize with them but it still makes my trip unpleasant.
It is, but it's also just something I see time and time and time again.
Every generation complains about how the world is going to shit and the yougins ain't got no respect and whatever particular segment of brown people at that time don't belong in their country.
I would have some sympathy if this wasn't, like, the millionth time this has happened.
Look one layer deeper and likely the issues are classist. Of course you didn't mention where you were, but, in the places I've lived, it goes down like this: the people who are wealthy enough to not need to use use public transit have more sway in terms of voting/persuading politicians, and push for policies that directly benefit them, even if it's to the detriment of the city overall.
Thus: more resources go towards those places with insane house prices, leaving everyone and everything else behind. The problem isn't public transit, it's the wealthy.
Glad to see that the concept is now completely unpopular in my country and we're back to the usual terrible journalism where there's no controversy in stating that.
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