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Cake day: June 13th, 2023

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  • Like in a housing shortage you’re hoarding property and profiting off it.

    Housing shortages are caused by bad government policy: namely, low-density zoning. Direct your anger towards the entity that deserves it, and make them fix their fuck-up.

    (Note: I’m not making some kind of Libertarian “all government is bad” argument here. I’m saying that in this specific case, the laws need to be changed.)







  • speeding is bad…

    True.

    …and that lowering car speeds is good…

    Also true.

    …so all these changes can be implemented.

    No, see, that doesn’t follow because not “all” changes are good. Only modifying the geometry of the street is good. Changing the number on the speed limit sign should only ever be done in conjunction with that geometry change, and even then it’s just an afterthought.

    It’s really, really, really important not to give the people in control of the budget any excuse to think that they can cost-cut “fix the geometry” down to “install lower speed limit signs” and still have it count as accomplishing something!


  • Look, you’re not wrong from a moral perspective; it’s just that your sentiment isn’t useful either.

    • When roads are designed appropriately, the vast majority of people don’t speed and the ones that do are incorrigible. In this, case, trying to shame the latter group to stop speeding is ineffective.

    • Conversely, when roads are designed inappropriately, the vast majority of people do speed. In this case, successfully shaming a few of them into driving the speed limit only makes the situation worse because having a wide disparity of speeds is even more dangerous than everybody uniformly exceeding the speed limit.

    The bottom line is that, from a traffic engineering perspective, trying to shame people into not speeding simply doesn’t ever improve the situation. Moreover, bringing it up in a discussion of how to fix speeding is actively unhelpful because it’s a distraction that serves to dissuade policymakers from forking out the money for the solutions that do work!


  • Nobody cares about your condescending non-solution that ignores human nature and is therefore worthless.

    Traffic engineers have to design for the reality of how people actually act, not some theoretical Platonic ideal of how they “should” act.

    Edit: that first sentence is harsher in tone than @[email protected] deserved, in retrospect. I’m not going to rewrite it because I still mean what I wrote, but please treat it as being addressed towards people who make that sort of argument in bad faith instead of at Pablo. (Sorry, I guess I’ve still got some leftover cynicism from Reddit.)












  • grue@lemmy.mltoTechnology@lemmy.worldIt’s time for Americans to embrace small cars
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    11 months ago

    we need to push representatives into office that are far more left-leaning and not fucking autocrats who will MANDATE massive increases in taxes on billionaires and legislate much more significant subsidization of public transit

    You’re framing it wrong. We don’t need to elect scary commies to massively increase taxes in order to subsidize icky collective things; we simply need to elect Fiscal Conservatives™ who will cease massively subsidizing car dependency. In particular, it’s time to repeal Big Government® intrusive regulations that try to tell Red Blooded Americans© they can’t build a multifamily building on their own damn property or that dictate minimum parking requirements.

    This is America, damn it! It’s high time we put the invisible hand of the Free Market back in control!

    [insert screaming eagle noises]