Probably would be better off with relatively minor adjustments to overarching standards over time, much akin to parking requirements, but probably that would look more like parking-protected bike lanes downtown, mixed-use zoning, making missing middle housing more available by getting rid of lots of zoning requirements on housing, or, like japan, making them much more comprehensive. None of that costs you anything economically. Parking protected bike lanes just require paint, and you can do that when you need to repave and repaint the main high traffic roads downtown. Eventually you may be able to justify an upgrade to a totally separated bike lane, or you might be able to justify shutting down main street to through traffic and routing things around.

Then you don’t really have to shell out for anything in terms of city transit, you’re just changing some regulations around, and people can walk or bike 2 to 3 minutes to the grocery store on their street corner, from their apartment, which is above a pizza place or whatever the fuck. Bike 3 minutes from the edge of downtown in their rowhome into main downtown where they can pick up groceries. Those people can also have jobs and be economically productive with the higher job density that such a development provides, and this all provides a much healthier and more stable tax base for the city since the utilities cost per person and per business is going to be much less. Course, you’re not gonna get heavy industry like that, but I haven’t really cooked up a solid approach to that sort of commute to a factory or industrial district that doesn’t involve a bus or passenger rail line that just heads straight there, like the USSR did.

The more significant problem with this isn’t so much that it’s some sort of like, totally impossible thing, it’s that any city doing that shit will probably be overrun by a shit ton of annoying gentrifiers, which is a harder problem to solve.

I feel like it’s pretty obvious that the main problem here is with the local NIMBY voters which might not like such a thing, and a significant lack of federal funding. There isn’t really a solid argument against any of the fundamental and somewhat universal planning principles which increase density, walkability, public accessibility, economic efficiency and productivity.

You could still probably blow with your mouth if you didn’t have your lungs connected, I imagine it would involve a kind of burping type of action. I think the bigger problem would be that if your nostrils closed up, you wouldn’t be able to breathe, and probably also talking would be a lot harder if your vocal chords and mouth were separate from your main air sacs.

I think the solution is probably just an easily opened and closed internal valve that separates the stomach and the lungs, rather than this bullshit we currently have with two separate valves that lead into both and open for one and then close for the other whenever it’s required. It’s still good to be able to close both when you want to, but you can already close your mouth on command, and another valve with the nose is a notable upgrade in that it keeps everyone from smelling bad smells they don’t wanna smell, and it also doesn’t take any more valves than we already have.

There’s probably some way you could fix this all with enough surgical intervention, I bet…

Yeah, i would empower monsters to do heinous things to my citizens, like forcing them to live in a rural village where someone will care for them when they’re old, and their utilities layouts will make sense, and their cost of living and lifestyle footprint will massively decrease. Oh no! The horror!

Also, I dunno. ahh, they’ll go to war, how horrifying! whatever shall we do! How many of these people will actually go to war, though? That’s some shit that floats around a lot, but I realistically think that if you just kick someone into some situation that’s realistically better than what they were previously hucking, then they’d probably just take it. IF you really wanted to swing it, though, then you could just swing it all through the markets and then fuck them over that way, just like they’re already being fucked. Not many people actually have that killdozer gene in them, though, and they wouldn’t really have a good target. There’s no amount of “blowing stuff up” or “going to war” that can realistically bring back a, by it’s nature, highly vulnerable, detached development style like that, and blowing stuff up doesn’t really help you contest with whatever your current standards of living are.

Lemme ask you this, though. How do you think we should solve the problem of the suburbs? Do you think a market solution is going to operate fast enough? Do you think those solutions are going to solve the broader problems with the housing crisis popping up in every major city? Do you think they will be enacted fast enough to mitigate climate problems?

and I’m loving every minute of it jerry

I mean, yeah, but the major difference is that they were wrong and dumb and I am correct

Money’s just an object. Just do maybe 3 or 4 five year plans, and you’d probably be able to get there. If they don’t like it, eminent domain their asses. I dunno. It’s not a real obstacle, to me, that they’re deciding to intentionally be obstinate and intentionally deciding to make all their neighbor’s QoL worse. Just an slightly smaller version of the problem where some iowan baron decides it’s their right to dump their 84 million people’s worth of pig shit into a massive pig shit lagoon, tainting 70 something percent of the water supply. Except in this case, people aren’t getting malaria and we’re not having water quality issues. Instead, they’re getting heart disease and increased risks of lung cancer from needing to drive everywhere, they’re having to work fruitlessly on road and utilities maintenance jobs for longer, and grandma dies maybe 10 years earlier than she would’ve cause she was 5 miles away and nobody was able to notice that she wasn’t coming out of the house.

I mean, my answer doesn’t make any of those people happy, but it’s basically just, fuck those people, if there’s a correct way to do something, we should do things in said correct way, rather than capitulating to everyone’s half-baked propagandized idiot desires

However, in most case, each of those steps resulted in a useful service or product.

I dunno if I’d say that, really. “useful service or product” is inferring a lot about the context in which these transactions are done, it doesn’t really open up the box, there. Is gambling a useful service to have access to, for instance? What about, say, setting everyone about buying a big suburban house, a car, running out a ton of asphalt to these places, putting out utilities to them that are both financially insolvent in the abstract and also take up too many resources for what they are? Like, I dunno, if we’re considering the alternatives, there, which incur much less consumption, and thus, much less trade, the alternatives that cost a whole lot less, I would say that the idea that this is a useful measurement really at all begins to totally fall apart. I dunno. I maybe wonder if, say, free healthcare might be thought to decrease the GDP of a country simply because less money is being thrown around.

I have no close friends and I couldn’t be happier.

But also

I wish I wasn’t me. I really do.

hrmmmm

You eliminate the rural area with 5 minute drives between homes. Japan has a much higher population density more generally, granted, and they do occasionally get older, offset, single homes that are miles from anything else. But they also have extremely rural villages with maybe 2000 people that are still about as rural as you can get and still go in for farming. Many other places (I would say, basically all of them?) do this as well, and not all of them have high population density. I think, almost definitionally, the land use I’m proposing has a higher pop density, but the style of development generally, you’d be hard pressed not to classify it as rural.

The solution here is to orient the land use radially. Also probably to use less land generally, but that’s a separate issue. Most land use in america looks like having 20 different farms, that are each like 3 or 4 miles across, sometimes with multiple plots, with each house being positioned as far away from the other houses as possible, usually somewhere along the edge of a plot, and then running roads out to each of them, sometimes dirt roads, sometimes paved, usually some combination of the two for higher use vs lower use vs private.

Instead of that, you do what people have been doing for centuries. You clump the 20 different houses together in one contiguous strip that’s placed along some sort of rail line or higher traffic road, and then you disconnect all the plots of land from the particular houses. Ownership doesn’t necessarily have to correlate with one plot of land vs another. Then you gain all of the benefits that entails, and if everything is laid out sensibly, then you’re only about 3 miles from your specific plot. Utilities become cheaper to maintain, emergencies like fires, medical problems, natural disasters, become much easier to deal with, you can start building some actual infrastructure, like, say, a rail line.

That becomes much easier to justify if you only gotta send that shit to like one concentration of 20 or 30 or houses instead of sending it to those 20 or 30 houses individually, most especially if that line is just passing through before heading somewhere else, which should generally be the case. Maintenance of that rail line also becomes less problematic compared to that of a road if we’re considering that this rural area is probably mostly going to be farmland that demands larger industrial equipment shipments, and is going to be shipping back and forth things like grain, bulk goods which would do much better to be shipped by train compared to most other forms of transit. Slap that together with a multi-daily passenger rail line that passes through it as a stop and you’re pretty much set.

I mean I do think banning them is a good idea, and in general I think nazis should be taken on helicopter rides, most especially the enablers of nazis, their financial leash handlers which basically bootstrap them into these positions in order to push the dialogue further rightward in service of corporate interests, and probably also in this case in service of “geopolitical security” since we’re going to be seeing oncoming climate refugees in the coming years, and combatting that in any way but increasing the security apparatus is off the table.

More than that, though, I worry that realistically just banning them, though a great temporary measure, won’t do much, say, five years or a decade down the road, because it’s not gonna solve the core hypocrisies and discrepancies that neoliberalism is not so keen to solve. If you want to actually solve this problem long term then you need to combat those core problems. Instead, though, I think that probably the party being banned will just see them either form a new party, or else tone down their rhetoric to an acceptable degree, or just join the next furthest right party and then decide to push them further right, and so on and so on, until we’ve all collectively just shifted rightward to an incredible degree.

Ad nauseam, et cetera, regardless of the political apparatuses at work, until collectively the western world plummets towards fascism.

nah.

I mean I dunno, even if you switch to some sort of li-on AAs (something which I think would also be good for other reasons, like making recycling potentially easier, being able to swap batteries between devices, making batteries slightly cheaper), I dunno how many people are gonna want to slice open their own batteries and run tests on what comprises them. Since the half-life on any given set of batteries is probably in the range of multiple years, or at least several months, you’d probably be able to set up an attack before any government agency or private battery replacement or analysis would start getting off the ground to sus out what you’re doing.

I think the only reason this might be harder with replaceable batteries, would be that the potential for batteries to get swapped out of devices means that you’re less certain to see any kind of explosion from a given device that you’ve modified, and you’re less certain to hit the particular targets that you want, but it doesn’t seem like either of those would really be a big problem for whoever would want to do this sort of terrorism in the first place, so I’m not sure that’s a major deterrent.

Doesn’t Lyft work sorta like that?

I’ve only ever heard of lyft being a normal taxi service where people just use their own cars they already own. Also, I dunno where you’re getting your numbers for the calculation you’re doing, that would probably be something good to include. You could say the same for everything I write, I guess, but none of my criticisms much have to do with the numbers, except for this: I dunno what “smaller european cars” you’re using. Most cars nowadays are like, 2 tons or so at the least, probably more, and you could maybe get one ton of human body weight, at the most, if you had several 250 pound chucks riding around in one car, which I don’t really imagine to be the case normally at all.

There’s also an efficiency created by the “inefficient” route planning of the bus. By having something that travels in a loop, rather than having every individual travel to every individual point, we’re trading some amount of efficiency in terms of total time spent by everyone (theoretically, but this time is probably eaten up by increased amounts of car traffic in reality), and we’re trading that for a slight increase in the amount of foot traffic that people are collectively engaging in, which is probably a good thing. So that’s a total decrease in curb weight as a factor of total travel time, which is a decrease in road maintenance.

You’re also probably looking at a massive decrease in mechanical maintenance for buses compared to cars, using one big engine, set of brakes, A/C systems, etc, rather than like 15-20 smaller non-standardized sets, and maintenance costs for the specific roads you’re traveling on via bus means you can engineer in less maintenance over time compared to a more spread out system.

Density is also a pretty big consideration, because real estate downtown, i.e. the location most people are going to want to go, is at a high premium, both for people and for the city/state’s tax base. High density has the capacity to provide a sustainable tax base for the cost of providing utilities and maintenance by the city… Unless you park the series of autonomous cars all in some huge superstructure outside of town, and then basically just merge them straight into the highway, where you’d still have to overbuild and deal with a massive amount of car infrastructure (more than just the space you’d save on all this parking, since you could just have a couple pickup and dropoff spaces, if that, compared to all this other parking taken up downtown). I can’t really see it working out, and even at the normal densities we’d be looking at, I’d struggle to come up with a way by which it’s more efficient overall.

There’s also other types of buses, if we’re just talking about emissions efficiency, or energy efficiency. Obviously an overhead electrified bus is probably the most desirable, just behind a tram or a streetcar or whatever. Then you have the weird stupid hybrid battery overhead-electrified buses that I hate, and then probably all your natural gas buses and diesel buses and whatnot, and then your pure battery buses.

If we’re talking about autonomous vehicles, then we’re kind of also sidestepping all these questions about like, the scalability of the AI for this, and the computing power we’d have to use on that, constantly. We’d have to deal with the traveling mailman problem on a near constant basis, something which public transport can mostly sidestep by assuming passengers will come to it, and that public transit will be of a high enough density to create desirable locations simply by stopping there. We have all the pedestrian and cyclist traffic conflicts which we’d encounter, or else have to segregate from these cars entirely (something normal traffic already struggles to do adequately). And if we’re segregating the traffic entirely with a large amount of infrastructure, which definitely makes this much more achievable and easier, if still not easy, I think it makes more sense from a top down maintenance perspective to just go for trams or streetcars, or subways, or something like that.

I think the only real way in which I can cook up a reason this might be done, is because it’s outsourcing costs onto the public, and onto the state. Road maintenance can be done by the city, or state. Probably, this would mean that the autonomous vehicles would not be segregated, which means it’s less of a good idea, which I believe, is the primary reason it hasn’t been done. Then, the taxi service could basically make a bunch of money on their highly necessary transportation, which they have created a large need for, simply by existing and demanding a large amount of infrastructure by existing.

Use bicycles, e-bikes, and walking for individual pedestrian point to point travel. Fuck all the bullshit excuses people give about how, oh no it’s too hot out, too rainy, too hilly, what do I do with this cargo that’s not large or consistently arriving or departing enough to be loaded by a freight train, or by a professional truck, but isn’t so small that I can carry it, what do I do with all my kids, etc… Use cars sparingly enough to fill the very minor amount of gaps that can’t be bridged by bikes, cycling, and public transit, as a method of last resort. Mostly for people that would maybe need to live out in the boonies, like park rangers, maybe. Actual farms, not the stupid rich people playtime “ranches”, and industrial locations, they usually have a large enough cargo haul to justify a small freight train, or a large truck taking a small route to a freight yard.