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On January 11 2019 10:20 JimmiC wrote:Show nested quote +On January 11 2019 10:13 Plansix wrote:On January 11 2019 09:37 JimmiC wrote:On January 11 2019 09:25 Plansix wrote:
I grew up in an area where the closest bus stop was a half an hour drive away. And it took 40 minutes to get to a store to buy milk. And what % of the population is this? This is just more american exceptionalism, of course you could have way better public transportation and it would work for the majority. It is way more expensive to manage the amount of roads, overpasses and so than mass transport. People just don't want to do it and it isn't culturally expected. We also have a car culture here, and we are way more sparse than you and I have been to enough city planning sessions to know that what you are saying is simply not true. Over half the state is rural and lacks any form of public transportation. My home town still doesn’t have high speed internet or traditional cable TV. Am I am not even talking about a state like Maine where there are literally signs that warn travelers to buy gas because the next station is near the border of Canada half a day away. Think of the most rural town you know and that is vast swaths of America. You do know that Canada is way more spread out than America right? We are WAY WAY bigger in land mass and WAY WAY smaller in population. In spite of this when you look at numbers a huge % live in cities and with proper transit there a ton of problems would get solved. Yes it wouldn't work for 100% of americans or Canadians. But it would work for at least 80%.
First, Canada and the US have approximately the same land mass, however, the difference is that much more of the US is habitable so the population is much more spread out, compared to Canada. Few people want/choose to live in Nunavut/Yukon/NW Territories for instance. (Compare Nunavut climate to say....rural states like Wyoming/Montana/ND/even Alaska and it's a big difference)
Also, if you did any amount of research, you'd realize that just recently more Americans live in cities than not. Nothing that even remotely compares to the 80% # you spewed out. Public transit can be semi-decent for large metropolitan areas, but even then if you ever want to leave a car is a necessity. Go visit family 2 hours away? Good luck without a car. Go make that trip from Ocala to Disney with your family? Good luck without a car. This idea that people are like statues and remain stationary in one confined place is anathema to US culture. Maybe you can get away with that stultifying attitude in the EU or Canada, but not here.
Also, your 100 million number will hardly get anything done. I live in Hawaii and the rail project is something like 500% over-budget (somewhere between 11-15 billion) and looks like it'll never get completed. Won't really alleviate traffic, because its route doesn't even address the most pressing need and is a huge corrupt cluster-fuck like 98% of any government transportation project. Even if there were an efficient public-transit system it's going to be less efficient in terms of time (and time is money - the most scarce of resource) for the commuter. Would I rather pay 1200$ more a year and cut my commute time down by 75-80% of save 1200$ and take a 50 min bus ride instead of a 10 min drive? Hmmm...I suppose if it was up to Jimmi, if he'd even "allow" that option to exist, he'd make sure that the cost would be artificially raised on drivers to "gently persuade" them that no, you will want to take the Government-option.
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That was overly aggressive Wegandi. JimmiC is just saying, in the simplest of terms, that public transportation could be better. And he is right. You need a car in America, no one is disputing that. But if you're only going 1 hour away, then take the rail. I ride the train for 5 hours to go across state, when it's 4 hours to drive. There are ways to minimize car traffic and VMT. We just don't want it.
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On January 11 2019 12:05 JimmiC wrote:Show nested quote +On January 11 2019 11:40 Wegandi wrote:On January 11 2019 10:20 JimmiC wrote:On January 11 2019 10:13 Plansix wrote:On January 11 2019 09:37 JimmiC wrote:On January 11 2019 09:25 Plansix wrote:
I grew up in an area where the closest bus stop was a half an hour drive away. And it took 40 minutes to get to a store to buy milk. And what % of the population is this? This is just more american exceptionalism, of course you could have way better public transportation and it would work for the majority. It is way more expensive to manage the amount of roads, overpasses and so than mass transport. People just don't want to do it and it isn't culturally expected. We also have a car culture here, and we are way more sparse than you and I have been to enough city planning sessions to know that what you are saying is simply not true. Over half the state is rural and lacks any form of public transportation. My home town still doesn’t have high speed internet or traditional cable TV. Am I am not even talking about a state like Maine where there are literally signs that warn travelers to buy gas because the next station is near the border of Canada half a day away. Think of the most rural town you know and that is vast swaths of America. You do know that Canada is way more spread out than America right? We are WAY WAY bigger in land mass and WAY WAY smaller in population. In spite of this when you look at numbers a huge % live in cities and with proper transit there a ton of problems would get solved. Yes it wouldn't work for 100% of americans or Canadians. But it would work for at least 80%. First, Canada and the US have approximately the same land mass, however, the difference is that much more of the US is habitable so the population is much more spread out, compared to Canada. Few people want/choose to live in Nunavut/Yukon/NW Territories for instance. (Compare Nunavut climate to say....rural states like Wyoming/Montana/ND/even Alaska and it's a big difference) Also, if you did any amount of research, you'd realize that just recently more Americans live in cities than not. Nothing that even remotely compares to the 80% # you spewed out. Public transit can be semi-decent for large metropolitan areas, but even then if you ever want to leave a car is a necessity. Go visit family 2 hours away? Good luck without a car. Go make that trip from Ocala to Disney with your family? Good luck without a car. This idea that people are like statues and remain stationary in one confined place is anathema to US culture. Maybe you can get away with that stultifying attitude in the EU or Canada, but not here. Also, your 100 million number will hardly get anything done. I live in Hawaii and the rail project is something like 500% over-budget (somewhere between 11-15 billion) and looks like it'll never get completed. Won't really alleviate traffic, because its route doesn't even address the most pressing need and is a huge corrupt cluster-fuck like 98% of any government transportation project. Even if there were an efficient public-transit system it's going to be less efficient in terms of time (and time is money - the most scarce of resource) for the commuter. Would I rather pay 1200$ more a year and cut my commute time down by 75-80% of save 1200$ and take a 50 min bus ride instead of a 10 min drive? Hmmm...I suppose if it was up to Jimmi, if he'd even "allow" that option to exist, he'd make sure that the cost would be artificially raised on drivers to "gently persuade" them that no, you will want to take the Government-option. Just to point out how little you know. Urbanization in the us was 80.7 in 2010 and guess what irs rising. But great anecdotal story that actually has questionable numbers.
You do know the definition of urbanization the US uses right? How that is also different than a city?
https://www.citylab.com/equity/2012/03/us-urban-population-what-does-urban-really-mean/1589/
https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2015/cb15-33.html
If you're going to use technical terms at least know what they represent.
But 2,500 people is hardly what we'd think of as a city, or even 5,000 for that matter. Let's say we decided to call places with 20,000 residents or less small towns. Of the 3,573 urban areas in the U.S. (both urbanized areas and urban clusters), 2,706 of them are small towns, by this definition. That's 75.7 percent. If roughly 80 percent of our population is urban, roughly 80 percent of our urban areas are actually small towns.
What's that about how little I know?
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The area I live in rual America actualy has some form of mass transit but its mostly private companies offering shuttle services.
I keep hearing talk of a light rail line going from Duluth to MSP and from MSP to Chicago. I think that would be cool.
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As an architect and urban designer, I won't get into the vastly different ways America, Canada, EU, and Asia are different in terms of city planning. While we used the Jeffersonian grid to most cities, EU, Canada, and Asia grew more organically. This allowed for the need of public transit early on, to be a necessity. We had automobiles, horses, carriages up until early 1900s. And then boom, steam engine and Ford accelerated the expansion of America. In order to connect the East and West coasts, the FHA was necessary and all of the millions miles of road. When you include the blatant racism that kept others away from certain people, there you go as to why the 2-car and the proliferation of the hatred of public transit was a thing.
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On January 11 2019 12:48 ZerOCoolSC2 wrote:
As an architect and urban designer, I won't get into the vastly different ways America, Canada, EU, and Asia are different in terms of city planning. While we used the Jeffersonian grid to most cities, EU, Canada, and Asia grew more organically. This allowed for the need of public transit early on, to be a necessity. We had automobiles, horses, carriages up until early 1900s. And then boom, steam engine and Ford accelerated the expansion of America. In order to connect the East and West coasts, the FHA was necessary and all of the millions miles of road. When you include the blatant racism that kept others away from certain people, there you go as to why the 2-car and the proliferation of the hatred of public transit was a thing.
I also read somewhere that the oil and car companies also gave a helping hand to this development, for example by presenting a model of a future US connected by highways. Cars and oil give jobs and money, so I understand it, but there is no easy way out of it now.
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On January 11 2019 12:48 ZerOCoolSC2 wrote:
As an architect and urban designer, I won't get into the vastly different ways America, Canada, EU, and Asia are different in terms of city planning. While we used the Jeffersonian grid to most cities, EU, Canada, and Asia grew more organically. This allowed for the need of public transit early on, to be a necessity. We had automobiles, horses, carriages up until early 1900s. And then boom, steam engine and Ford accelerated the expansion of America. In order to connect the East and West coasts, the FHA was necessary and all of the millions miles of road. When you include the blatant racism that kept others away from certain people, there you go as to why the 2-car and the proliferation of the hatred of public transit was a thing.
Didn't the US have a, for its time, awesome railway system but later just decided to neglect it?
I also have a hard time seeing how buildiung up a public transport system relying on Busses for "short" Travels and highspeed trains for longer distances is seen as impossible?
Shouldn't the Jeffersonian grid be an advantage for Busses anyway?
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This is hardly an American exceptionalism, and is rather something you see around the entire world. Public transportation is expensive, and you need a political will to spend a lot of money on it to see any useful outcome. I live in Norway's third biggest city, and I feel absolutely bound to own a car, or else I wouldn't get around. Even back when I was a student I owned a quad bike, simple so I didn't have to get up 20-30 minutes earlier in the morning to catch a bus which 95% of the time was late, and the remaining 5% didn't show up at all.
Another anecdotal story is about my friend who is a father of 2, and who is barely scraping by month to month. He lives a bit outside of the city, and also owns 2 cars. One which he drives for work (he delivers news papers), and the other which his wife can use to bring the oldest kid to and from kindergarten, and probably to work later down the line. They live an hour outside of the city, and there are something like 2 busses passing by every day. They can't just cut one of the cars out, and they also don't have anything else they could cut to try to save up money. They don't live in poverty, but they do live paycheck to paycheck. If something like the US shutdown happened here, he would be fuuuuuuucked.
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An hour outside of the city is what i would call rural (unless its an endless spreading Suburbia or plenty of villages/smaller towns). Public transport will most likely not be great there and thats okay.
But in and directly around (even small) towns this shouldn't be an issue.
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Are there any legal repercussions if you stop working when you don't get paid but are in a 'critical' federal job position? Like if the air traffic controllers just go play board games until they get paid, are they liable for all flights grinding to a halt? They can hardly fire them all given their critical job positions.
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On January 11 2019 22:33 FueledUpAndReadyToGo wrote:
Are there any legal repercussions if you stop working when you don't get paid but are in a 'critical' federal job position? Like if the air traffic controllers just go play board games until they get paid, are they liable for all flights grinding to a halt? They can hardly fire them all given their critical job positions. I don't see how it is different from not working at any other time. It would simply be a breach of your contract.
'they can hardly fire everyone' is an argument that always exists for many jobs.
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Nope, there’s a law on the books called the Anti-Deficiency Act that requires that employees who are deemed essential must work, even without pay. I’m not sure what the penalties are for violating it, but it’s a different game than a mere employment contract violation.
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I don't see how it would be possible for air trafic controllers (for instance) to coordinate what would essentially a mass strike without some sort of internal communication like a union.
And even so, in occupations when people will literally live or die if you work or not, such as in health service, the culture tends to be to work even in poor conditions, though being legally forced to work for free kind of strains that somewhat, I would imagine.
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On January 11 2019 23:03 Dangermousecatdog wrote:
I don't see how it would be possible for air trafic controllers (for instance) to coordinate what would essentially a mass strike without some sort of internal communication like a union.
And even so, in occupations when people will literally live or die if you work or not, such as in health service, the culture tends to be to work even in poor conditions, though being legally forced to work for free kind of strains that somewhat, I would imagine.
I guess it would be similar to conditions where "essential services" now organize strikes. And yes, it'd be hard to organize an air traffic controller strike without some level of organization amongst air traffic controllers. I don't know the exact situation in the US, but air traffic controllers here are generally unionized.
In general, it seems, employee rights are less well protected. It'd be impossible here to (legally) force someone to work for no payment. I'm quite amazed that it is allowed in the US. Shouldn't this whole idea conflict with the 13th amendment?
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On January 11 2019 23:34 Acrofales wrote:Show nested quote +On January 11 2019 23:03 Dangermousecatdog wrote:
I don't see how it would be possible for air trafic controllers (for instance) to coordinate what would essentially a mass strike without some sort of internal communication like a union.
And even so, in occupations when people will literally live or die if you work or not, such as in health service, the culture tends to be to work even in poor conditions, though being legally forced to work for free kind of strains that somewhat, I would imagine. I guess it would be similar to conditions where "essential services" now organize strikes. And yes, it'd be hard to organize an air traffic controller strike without some level of organization amongst air traffic controllers. I don't know the exact situation in the US, but air traffic controllers here are generally unionized. In general, it seems, employee rights are less well protected. It'd be impossible here to (legally) force someone to work for no payment. I'm quite amazed that it is allowed in the US. Shouldn't this whole idea conflict with the 13th amendment?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Air_Traffic_Controllers_Association
Not really a union, but organization that could start a strike.
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There would need to be a lot of lead up and planning to air traffic controllers striking. If they did it, it would ground both domestic and international flights into and out of the US. They would need to make sure to give the entire world enough warning that flights into the US were canceled and for flights in transit to land. I’m sure there is some sort of plan for if they needed to strike, but it is something they would have to do as a last resort. After all, some people are flying to the country for emergency reasons.
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A full on national strike might be problematic. In the EU I would expect the courts to deny it.
A better approach would be forced delays, still massive economic damage as a pressure tool without the complete disruption of no flights at all.
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EPT
