Sorry to break the chain here but I thought this article was intriguing and also sort of irritating/challenging to somebody who tries to keep driving to a minimum (me)
King also feels strongly about increasing car availability for low-income people. Cars are harmful to the environment, expensive, and loaded with negative externalities. But the individual benefits to low-income people are too great to ignore. “Just because too much driving is bad,” he says, “doesn’t mean we should punish people who’d be better off by driving more.”
Mainly the story is that poor people are better off with cars as long as car dependency is a thing, which isn’t a shocker, but then what’s the right thing to do about that?
Doing my weekly scrolling of FB to see if I can discern what my friends are up to. One of my friends is getting tagged in a lot of posts by his wife. This one friend and I went to Burning Man together back in the day. He was an old school unix nerd, came to the bay area for the same reason a bunch of other nerds did. Totally decent guy with interesting taste in partners. Eventually, he ended up at a startup, Snowflake, early on, and held on long enough until they went public. I’ve no idea how much he made off the deal, but I presume he no longer has to work again.
His wife also went to Burning Man. We’ve hung out, she’s… special. Definitely on her own wavelength. I think she was an aesthetician and fashion consultant for a while, eventually having kids and primarily focused on that.
Anyway, scrolling the FB, I see this person’s happy July 4th diatribe about how fucked up things are in the US with lots of detail. Okay… Goes on to mention how fortunate they are to be in Iceland… Okay… and how nice it is that husband privately booked an entire hot springs for 90 minutes so they could enjoy the luxury by themselves, get lots of selfies, and also how cool it was to have that experience because there was a long line of people waiting to get in as they left.
The mind boggles.
I got menaced by a driver with Roland in the box for the first time this morning.
I was making a left turn at a four-way intersection and I took the lane for a moment in order to safely enter into the turn following the rhythm or the intersection.
A guy in a white sedan pulled up on my left meaning he was fully in the wrong lane, fucking up oncoming traffic.
He rolled down his window and yelled something like, “Come on man, move over a little!” in an exasperated tone.
I said, “I’m turning left, get a life.” and executed my turn. I’m lucky he didn’t accelerate into us as the arc of our turn forced us in front of him in the wrong lane.
I’m also proud of myself for restraining myself and not screaming obscenities at the guy with Roli on the bike.
I’m proud of you as well. Reading along, I had a growing anxiety that I would react in a way in appropriate for a kid to hear.
Did I ever tell the story about how Pookie was driving around one day, saw me riding, and thinking it’d be funny decided to roll up next to me and yell at me to get on the sidewalk?
give them extremely practical $10,000 Rene Herse bikes to liven up their daily bike commute
more seriously, though, I don’t think it’s going to change. I do not see our society becoming less car dependent in our lifetimes, barring some sort of catastrophe. the number of people who are willing to orient their life around less car dependency is vanishingly tiny.
I do not think there is a peaceful to extricate the personal automobile from the fundamental bedrock of American identity.
4 days in a row of record breaking global temps isn’t going to be enough, and I doubt anything short of actual hellfire and damnation is going to change anything
Well, the catastrophe is happening right now, so not even that stops them from driving.
Maybe the looming extinction event will do it after it slops over to h. sapiens
I mean, this kinda happened already! Covid got people out of their cars for a few months, only MORE people died because the remaining drivers were the most drunk and reckless.
I do think we’re seeing some glimmers of what the future looks like. New Urbanism Lite developments x remote work allow people with money and autonomy to decide how much they want to drive. On the other end, poor people will keep driving as much as they are able because the jobs will never be close to where they live. The most depressing bit for me is watching all the people we know with kids move out to the burbs because they want more space than they can afford in town.
I feel fortunate all the time to have the house and yard and garage near the middle of town but that would not be attainable to me now if I was forced to do it over.
our club’s public greeting when encountering other members is “get a car hippie”
Everything you said is right on. But this is the thing that’s been happening since the invention of suburbs. Growing up in Atlanta I watched the flow of people push the suburbs farther and farther out. Then in the 2000s young people decided cities weren’t scary any more so they flooded back in and prices skyrocketed. The fact that people are running back to the burbs again just feels like the natural progression of things. That doesn’t make it less of a bummer.
there are some other factors at play— for one, the young folks who returned to the cities largely were single or adult couples without kids, and because of a finite supply of kid-friendly dwellings and the post-2008 economy, those folks couldn’t afford to have kids and also an urban dwelling for the family
Frankly, the school systems (something you never think about when you’re young and cool) have a lot to do with migration to suburbs (with good schools).
This is a little misunderstood. Many suburban schools are absolute shit and have many fewer resources than urban schools. Because when people want to spend money on improving schools, it looks a lot better to send money to an underfunded urban school than it does to send it to some no-name suburban district (especially in terms of buildings and resources like libraries and instruments).
Basically all schools in non-wealthy communities are differing levels of crappy. Schools in upper-middle class suburbs are usually pretty good but this is only a fraction of suburban schools. The discrepancy is magnified in states that rely more heavily on local money to fund schools.
I have so many questions….
Which people? When does this ever happen? Do you think the people in charge of allocating funds know what makes good schools? Or follow through on implementation?
I don’t really want to argue: obviously not all urban and suburban schools are the same, but I wanted to point out how this becomes a huge consideration on where to live when kids come in the mix.
I’m thinking of my time teaching in Atlanta. The money spent per student was significantly more than in the suburbs and teacher pay was about 20% higher. My school building was gutted and renovated when it was only about 30 years old and was featured in architectural publications. We had an exceedingly good madching band and an excellent library. This all came from the district.
From outside the district, we had a grant for several years that have us a lot of money for increasing AP course enrollment. The kids didn’t need to pass tests, just be in the classes.
Also, my school sucked. But it was just as bad as many suburban schools in the area in crappier buildings with horrible old instruments and libraries and barely any AP offerings.
The good schools were in suburbs that were as expensive or more expensive than living in the city.