I'm not a reporter, but I am snooty when being chased down the road by a massive Ram with a pristine cargo bed. In the each according to their needs world of common sense such vehicles would be used only by people whose livelihood involves hauling building supplies. I've given up bicycling on public roads and will stick to restricted trails because of those who don't need trucks who are clogging the roads, though it would be nice if I could ride a bike to the grocery in 15 minutes or less. Which we will need to start doing to get a handle on carbon output, mass obesity, and much more. Or I could put my bike in the bed of my FRamHevvy to haul to the trails to take my rides, and let the rest of the world burn
Look, the cities are full of ni . . . um, people who are not like you, William T. Whitebread. And the liberals will do anything ANYTHING!!!! to force your daughter to marry one of those. And that includes forcing you to move to Manhattan when your house in Manhasset gets burned down--probably by MS-13, know what I mean? And then what are you gonna do? You'll be forced FORCED!!! to walk to one of those bodegas! Why, there will probably even be laws mandating you eat delicious foods that Cracker Barrel and Applebees don't serve!
Beyond the abject stupidity of these arguments, they are silly as well. “If cars and trucks are banished from the pedestrian village, how are medics in ambulances to get to victims of heart attacks?” You know what happens when a person has a heart attack and they’re in a pedestrian zone? The fucking ambulance drives in the pedestrian zone. And because there’s no traffic jams to contend with, and people will willingly and quickly scatter out of the way if an ambulance is coming to address a medical emergency, it’s better than forcing the ambulance to deal with a street full of cars that can’t get out of the way because everybody is forced to drive a car to get anywhere.
Jun 21, 2023·edited Jun 21, 2023Liked by Roy Edroso
I drive nearly 2 hours a day to my job in the green industries. My wife drives a full size pick-up.She needs it to tow the horse trailer. About that RV- Don't ask .
I'm the last person that should be talking to people about reducing a carbon footprint.
I bet you could sell the Olds on a 15 minute lifestyle. You'd have to allow golf carts.(Old people fucking love golf carts.)
Plus give them exclusive communities. Over 55. Nobody else really wants to live around them anyway.
Until the last few years, I've only known the U.S. Growing up the suburbs, that was my initial paradigm of "normal," until I hit adolescence and began to feel increasingly alienated from it. And urban life meant NYC, so I've been happy living out in the country surrounded by greenery and silence.
Then last month I spent a week each in Paris and Amsterdam. With a metro card, you can go anywhere, quickly and cheaply. Instead of gray canyons of high-rises trapping dirt, noise, and caged people, buildings were human-scaled and aesthetically interesting, parks were frequent, and my rooms were actually quiet. (And no enormous pick-up trucks!)
Frankly, I don't see how we can reverse engineer the U.S. to achieve European-style liveability. The obstacles, physical and social, are just too great.
Of course the real history of suburb v. city is exclusionary zoning which took over from red-lining when that racist scheme was weakened (but not eliminated). Yes, some people want a big yard and no sidewalks and the need to drive to everything and also lower taxes. Then the suburb grows up, has to add services, traffic into town gets ugly and taxes go up. Suddenly there’s interest in “partnering” with the city to provide fire, public transportation, police, water and sewage. But no way they’ll let themselves be annexed and be subjected to multi family housing, integrated schools, etc. It all starts with zoning.
I love these histrionics about 'the tyranny of the pedestrian' over car owners, and unquantifiable hyperbole (as you ably point out) like 'most people in Western democracies' suits the Reactionary Sprawler Set down to the core. 'Most people' as in, scared white people like ME. Maybe I sound unsophisticated but they can s*ck my b*lls with that garbage.
It's only liberals who come up with ideas, so if we're going to have a debate about ideas, they're going to have to be liberal ones and the debate will have to be about how they're awful. Sorry, conservatives just don't do the "ideas" thing any more.
Yeah I'm sure all those people currently working from home in the Bay Area suburbs so they can walk their kids to school and hang out in the backyard while they do their zoom calls are just waiting for an opportunity to waste 2 hours a day on the freeway.
If you don't get back into the car and curse the traffic, then to paraphrase an old conservative truism, the flu has won.
Re Kurtz (likewise his cohort of course): X, what an asshole.
Much too big a rabbit hole to even look at the rabbit hole, but exactly how do builders get encouraged to build urban housing? And if there’s sufficient state pressures to get builders to quit the burbs, clearly there’s no interest there in becoming urban landlords in addition, of course, to building the housing in the first place.
It’s one of these fantasies the comrades, too, lock onto: vision and no discussion of how to make it manifest.
Similarly, that 15 minute city is a great vision with no possibility of happening in the US anytime soon.
Didn't I used to like Michael Lind in the NY Review of Books? As Art Buchwald entitled his book about Watergate, I Think I Don't Remember. That bit about ambulances not being able to get through is also a good argument against speed limits, BTW.
I hope you are incorrect about this line of nonsense finding a place in the political debates. It reminds me of the peasants in the Russian Revolution who opposed "collectivism" because they were told they would lose their little vegetable plots.
Home ownership is one of the oddest scams of the US economy. The concept is so engrained in our concept of ourselves, of our identity, that most people do not even question its efficacy or practicality.
It is a weird divide, those who believe owning a shack on a plot makes one a better class of person versus those who see owing money and taxes on something is hardly freedom. And you have to maintain the thing! I guess if you think that's the best use of time and attention...replacing a roof, pruning plants, commuting, etc.
In the nonwalkable world, suburban Maryland has become a hellscape of developments all built in the past 30 years, strung together by highways all built in the last 20 years. No town centers have been built. Instead there are shopping complexes with huge parking lots. Even so, by luck, my mother actually lives within walking distance of two of these. Twenty minutes of sidewalk, even going slooow, 0.8 miles, gets you to a supermarket, suburban chinese food, Dunkin Donuts, a poke bowl, pizza -- now ask me, in almost 30 years living there, has she ever walked to any of these places? Friends, not even once. When I visit she always says it is "great" that I walk to them, by which she means "surprising." It is always surprising.
Back in the 50s and 60s when I was just a wee lass, the "15-minute city" was where we all lived. Many people still didn't have cars. There was a main street with shopping, doctors' and dentists' offices, bars & restaurants, Woolworth's and Grant's, etc., all accessible to pedestrians. Then they built the highways out to the suburbs. Destroyed large swaths of neighborhoods, especially minority ones, and cut the city up in ways that made no sense to the existing neighborhoods. Easy access to the burbs fueled white flight, encouraged by fear of encroaching minorities and block busting by greedy realtors. If I moved back to the old home town, I would have to have a car and live virtually a suburban lifestlye since there is no grocery or other shopping within walking distance.
In my current urban hellhole, I have indeed a 15-minute walk to groceries and other shopping, the public transportation is adequate to get downtown or to a suburban mall if I want. Sad to say, the creeping gentrification is eating the amenities that make urban living pleasant. The suburbs' refusal to build any housing denser than single-family on large lots is forcing the city to make up the difference by building large, monotonous glass boxes of apartments on any buildable surface. Who is forcing tiny, expensive apartments on whom, Mr Kurtz?
I'm not a reporter, but I am snooty when being chased down the road by a massive Ram with a pristine cargo bed. In the each according to their needs world of common sense such vehicles would be used only by people whose livelihood involves hauling building supplies. I've given up bicycling on public roads and will stick to restricted trails because of those who don't need trucks who are clogging the roads, though it would be nice if I could ride a bike to the grocery in 15 minutes or less. Which we will need to start doing to get a handle on carbon output, mass obesity, and much more. Or I could put my bike in the bed of my FRamHevvy to haul to the trails to take my rides, and let the rest of the world burn
Look, the cities are full of ni . . . um, people who are not like you, William T. Whitebread. And the liberals will do anything ANYTHING!!!! to force your daughter to marry one of those. And that includes forcing you to move to Manhattan when your house in Manhasset gets burned down--probably by MS-13, know what I mean? And then what are you gonna do? You'll be forced FORCED!!! to walk to one of those bodegas! Why, there will probably even be laws mandating you eat delicious foods that Cracker Barrel and Applebees don't serve!
Beyond the abject stupidity of these arguments, they are silly as well. “If cars and trucks are banished from the pedestrian village, how are medics in ambulances to get to victims of heart attacks?” You know what happens when a person has a heart attack and they’re in a pedestrian zone? The fucking ambulance drives in the pedestrian zone. And because there’s no traffic jams to contend with, and people will willingly and quickly scatter out of the way if an ambulance is coming to address a medical emergency, it’s better than forcing the ambulance to deal with a street full of cars that can’t get out of the way because everybody is forced to drive a car to get anywhere.
I drive nearly 2 hours a day to my job in the green industries. My wife drives a full size pick-up.She needs it to tow the horse trailer. About that RV- Don't ask .
I'm the last person that should be talking to people about reducing a carbon footprint.
I bet you could sell the Olds on a 15 minute lifestyle. You'd have to allow golf carts.(Old people fucking love golf carts.)
Plus give them exclusive communities. Over 55. Nobody else really wants to live around them anyway.
Until the last few years, I've only known the U.S. Growing up the suburbs, that was my initial paradigm of "normal," until I hit adolescence and began to feel increasingly alienated from it. And urban life meant NYC, so I've been happy living out in the country surrounded by greenery and silence.
Then last month I spent a week each in Paris and Amsterdam. With a metro card, you can go anywhere, quickly and cheaply. Instead of gray canyons of high-rises trapping dirt, noise, and caged people, buildings were human-scaled and aesthetically interesting, parks were frequent, and my rooms were actually quiet. (And no enormous pick-up trucks!)
Frankly, I don't see how we can reverse engineer the U.S. to achieve European-style liveability. The obstacles, physical and social, are just too great.
Of course the real history of suburb v. city is exclusionary zoning which took over from red-lining when that racist scheme was weakened (but not eliminated). Yes, some people want a big yard and no sidewalks and the need to drive to everything and also lower taxes. Then the suburb grows up, has to add services, traffic into town gets ugly and taxes go up. Suddenly there’s interest in “partnering” with the city to provide fire, public transportation, police, water and sewage. But no way they’ll let themselves be annexed and be subjected to multi family housing, integrated schools, etc. It all starts with zoning.
I love these histrionics about 'the tyranny of the pedestrian' over car owners, and unquantifiable hyperbole (as you ably point out) like 'most people in Western democracies' suits the Reactionary Sprawler Set down to the core. 'Most people' as in, scared white people like ME. Maybe I sound unsophisticated but they can s*ck my b*lls with that garbage.
Indulge away! It's what we signed up for!
It's only liberals who come up with ideas, so if we're going to have a debate about ideas, they're going to have to be liberal ones and the debate will have to be about how they're awful. Sorry, conservatives just don't do the "ideas" thing any more.
This is good content
Yeah I'm sure all those people currently working from home in the Bay Area suburbs so they can walk their kids to school and hang out in the backyard while they do their zoom calls are just waiting for an opportunity to waste 2 hours a day on the freeway.
If you don't get back into the car and curse the traffic, then to paraphrase an old conservative truism, the flu has won.
Re Kurtz (likewise his cohort of course): X, what an asshole.
Much too big a rabbit hole to even look at the rabbit hole, but exactly how do builders get encouraged to build urban housing? And if there’s sufficient state pressures to get builders to quit the burbs, clearly there’s no interest there in becoming urban landlords in addition, of course, to building the housing in the first place.
It’s one of these fantasies the comrades, too, lock onto: vision and no discussion of how to make it manifest.
Similarly, that 15 minute city is a great vision with no possibility of happening in the US anytime soon.
Didn't I used to like Michael Lind in the NY Review of Books? As Art Buchwald entitled his book about Watergate, I Think I Don't Remember. That bit about ambulances not being able to get through is also a good argument against speed limits, BTW.
I hope you are incorrect about this line of nonsense finding a place in the political debates. It reminds me of the peasants in the Russian Revolution who opposed "collectivism" because they were told they would lose their little vegetable plots.
Home ownership is one of the oddest scams of the US economy. The concept is so engrained in our concept of ourselves, of our identity, that most people do not even question its efficacy or practicality.
It is a weird divide, those who believe owning a shack on a plot makes one a better class of person versus those who see owing money and taxes on something is hardly freedom. And you have to maintain the thing! I guess if you think that's the best use of time and attention...replacing a roof, pruning plants, commuting, etc.
In the nonwalkable world, suburban Maryland has become a hellscape of developments all built in the past 30 years, strung together by highways all built in the last 20 years. No town centers have been built. Instead there are shopping complexes with huge parking lots. Even so, by luck, my mother actually lives within walking distance of two of these. Twenty minutes of sidewalk, even going slooow, 0.8 miles, gets you to a supermarket, suburban chinese food, Dunkin Donuts, a poke bowl, pizza -- now ask me, in almost 30 years living there, has she ever walked to any of these places? Friends, not even once. When I visit she always says it is "great" that I walk to them, by which she means "surprising." It is always surprising.
Back in the 50s and 60s when I was just a wee lass, the "15-minute city" was where we all lived. Many people still didn't have cars. There was a main street with shopping, doctors' and dentists' offices, bars & restaurants, Woolworth's and Grant's, etc., all accessible to pedestrians. Then they built the highways out to the suburbs. Destroyed large swaths of neighborhoods, especially minority ones, and cut the city up in ways that made no sense to the existing neighborhoods. Easy access to the burbs fueled white flight, encouraged by fear of encroaching minorities and block busting by greedy realtors. If I moved back to the old home town, I would have to have a car and live virtually a suburban lifestlye since there is no grocery or other shopping within walking distance.
In my current urban hellhole, I have indeed a 15-minute walk to groceries and other shopping, the public transportation is adequate to get downtown or to a suburban mall if I want. Sad to say, the creeping gentrification is eating the amenities that make urban living pleasant. The suburbs' refusal to build any housing denser than single-family on large lots is forcing the city to make up the difference by building large, monotonous glass boxes of apartments on any buildable surface. Who is forcing tiny, expensive apartments on whom, Mr Kurtz?