Imagine we talked about anything else like that: 'bread is getting more expensive by the minute in Germany" - thats not a sign of doing well.
We all pay for this real estate not just in rent, every time we get a coffee a good chunk of that price is paying someone else's rent. In wages.
Just because you are a homeowner does not mean its in your interest for realestate to go up, any more than if you own a fridge it would be in your interest for fridge prices to go up. Anyone who ever plans to trade up to a bigger home, has kids that will need to buy a house, or needs local economy to function does not benefit net from house prices going up. The only time you profit is if you are a massive landowner or real estate business.
Its literally blood-sucking leech
The economy is doing well when neccessities of life such as housing, food, etc. Are as cheap as possible and then you do not spend 90% of your effort and income just to keep wolf from the door.
This disconnect between how we thing about housing and other goods is like a collective madness of oursociety
Beautifully put. This is a point I don't see often enough. Why should a system allow one person to own two homes and then rent one of them out and use it to pay off mortgages for both.
Housing is a human right. Vienna is a beautiful example of this: https://www.theguardian.com/society/2017/dec/12/vienna-housi...
A system involving rent controls may be easy to sell because it's a solution designed to satisfy existing tenants on the expense of prospective tenants. That doesn't make it a more fair system than one that operates on free market. Then if that's not enough, we have to be aware that when the market laws aren't the one that rule, other things are. For example, in the communist setting housing were provided "fairly" to anyone, so that the desirable locations had in them apparently all kinds of people. Only that many times the selection were far from random and you could bet value (in various forms) had to be exchanged under table. So Vienna? I wouldn't be surprised if on a closer look I'd find something gaming the system at some level. Let's say, (hypothetically) that some club rents out properties to its members, and whereas rents are regulated, club membership fees aren't.
I'm curious to understand why you aren't talking about the issue of people being unable to own their own home. Would you yourself really want to pay rent to another human your whole life? Probably not, right?
The fact that you focus on the market (and seeking a perfect calibration within the current capitalist system), and not on the original parasitic nature of absentee ownership and the bourgeois hoarding of capital (in this case housing stocks), already quickly shows me that you might not be very in touch with your fellow human beings and that you don't understand the real (and diverse) systemic oppression many people face (e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qWSVG9nsRa4 [use yt1s.com to download if not in US], and also in the global south: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mleQVO1Vd1I).
> For example, in the communist setting housing were provided "fairly" to anyone, so that the desirable locations had in them apparently all kinds of people. Only that many times the selection were far from random and you could bet value (in various forms) had to be exchanged under table. So Vienna? I wouldn't be surprised if on a closer look I'd find something gaming the system at some level. Let's say, (hypothetically) that some club rents out properties to its members, and whereas rents are regulated, club membership fees aren't.
Your critique contains many unfounded assumptions, as well as generalizations, which distort what is really happening on the ground. The exact same argument you've made here could also be made about the current capitalist organization of housing: e.g. "I wouldn't be surprised if on a closer look at the capitalist organization of housing I'd find something gaming the system at some level." Capitalists game the system with the help of the bourgeois state, and collude to violently force people to work within capitalist production using capitalist-owned means of production (in the case of a software engineer/knowledge worker, proprietary software/hardware systems). When capitalists withhold this means of production it leads to the division of labor and alienation (this reaction to exploitation, this alienation, being something that unfortunately capitalists gaslightingly weaponize and label as 'individual failures', and calling it 'depression' [1]). Capitalists, together with the capitalist state that enforces bourgeois laws (which benefit only a very tiny minority), coerce laborers to forever pay them to rent their homes. They are to be kicked out and made homeless unless they participate in the bourgeois property system and the bourgeois production system. You're suggesting that the status quo, and the rules of the game, are somehow fair, yet we live in era where there is an incredible gap between the rich and the poor, the dynamic between capital-owning capitalist exploiters and exploited wage laborers. [2]
Why do you not talk about people being able to own their own home? Would you yourself want to pay rent to another human your whole life? Probably not, right?
Alastair Parvin from Wikihouse has a great take on the origins of this weird thing called 'rent':
"The origins of our land system
Like all journeys forwards, we have to begin by going backwards.
So where did our land system come from?
Weirdly enough, the land system that we have today has its origins in a problem specific to medieval kings, which is ‘how do I fund military campaigns and defence, without paying to keep a standing army?’
And it was William the Conqueror who perfected the answer. It was a piece of paper. And on that piece of paper was basically an agreement between the Crown and a noble, saying ‘if you provide men for military campaigns when I ask, in exchange I will grant you a monopoly over your own private fiefdom, where you can levy as high taxes as people can bear to pay’.
So effectively — rent is the original tax, paid via lords to the King.
In fact the word ‘feudal’ derives from the latin word feudalis — for ‘fee’. In other words, rent. So the whole system of government by which the Normans ruled over the Anglo Saxons was based on rent.
If you’re a King, there’s only really three groups of people you’re scared of: other kings, your family, and your nobles. So over time landowners managed to engineer a set of concessions, whereby increasingly taxes were levied directly on people and business, leaving them (the lords) as the owners of a monopoly right to extract privatised land tax.
So what you’re left with is a set of power relations in society: an enforced system of servitude and control. As the economist Henry George pointed out, it is essentially a diluted version of slavery.
“Ownership of land always gives ownership of people… Place one hundred people on an island from which there is no escape. Make one of them the absolute owner of the others — or the absolute owner of the soil. It will make no difference — either to owner or to the others — which one you choose. Either way, one individual will be the absolute master of the other ninety-nine.”" [3]
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/jul/16/mental...
[2] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/mar/30/wealth...
[3] https://alastairparvin.medium.com/a-new-land-contract-684c3b...
Some incentive to avoid typical real estate inflation where investors jump in first needs to be put in for a successful experiment with goals that are beyond monetary concerns.
Are you aware that continuing to build tall buildings murders the planet, and thus humanity? [1] [2]
Does your proposal include any sort of mitigation for the environmental impacts of building tall buildings and using cement (as revealed by researchers in the articles below), or is this Silicon Valley "technological solutionism" [3] together with a belief in "The Californian Ideology" (both of which posit that any problem can be solved with a technological innovation, instead of by actually addressing the underlying socio-economic of the previous solutionist strategy), by someone who has unfortunately fallen victim to the fallacy of transferable expertise?
[1] https://theguardian.com/cities/2019/feb/25/concrete-the-most...
[2] https://theguardian.com/artanddesign/2020/jul/11/skyscrapers...
[3] https://technofilosofie.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/Cours...
I completely buy that skyscraper have higher fixed costs then lower buildings. It can be true that the optimal height from energy expenditure per capita would be 5, 8 or 12 stories. Or it can be false and sckyscrapers are the best energy investment per square feet of living space created. Your links don't provide any evidence either way.
> If you can undercut existing cities by a factor of 3 or more i am sure new people will come.
> Some incentive to avoid typical real estate inflation where investors jump in first needs to be put in for a successful experiment with goals that are beyond monetary concerns.
and then you wrote:
> Your links don't provide any evidence either way.
Your comment and the original post do not provide evidence to prove any of your points either (either way).
I am saying: why hasn't a strategy like this been tried before if it seems so obvious to you both?
I see it as a sign that an expert in one domain believes they can solve a complex issue in another domain without much effort. In other words, as mentioned above, I see them/you as having fallen victim to the fallacy of transferable expertise: believing they/you can solve domain specific problems in a domain in which they/you are not an in expert in - as made obvious by the fact that this proposal is stated without any links to current research/plans (which undoubtedly do exist).
I think the above is important to point out, mostly as someone who fell victim to both, and who wants to warn others who might still be unconscious perpetuators of the Californian Ideology. It's dangerous. This excerpt does a good job at explaining it (although for a proper tl;dr version/critique, the best part is probably the 'As the Dam Bursts...' intro):
"Across the world, the Californian Ideology has been embraced as an optimistic and emancipatory form of technological determinism. Yet, this utopian fantasy of the West Coast depends upon its blindness towards - and dependence on - the social and racial polarisation of the society from which it was born. Despite its radical rhetoric, the Californian Ideology is ultimately pessimistic about fundamental social change. Unlike the hippies, its advocates are not struggling to build 'ecotopia' or even to help revive the New Deal. [...] Interpreted generously, this retro-futurism could be a vision of a cybernetic frontier where digital artisans discover their individual self-fulfillment in either the electronic agora or the electronic marketplace. However, as the zeitgeist of the 'virtual class', the Californian Ideology is at the same time an exclusive faith. If only some people have access to the new information technologies, 'Jeffersonian democracy' can become a hi-tech version of the plantation economy of the Old South. Reflecting its deep ambiguity, the Californian Ideology's technological determinism is not simply optimistic and emancipatory. It is simultaneously a deeply pessimistic and repressive vision of the future." [1]
[1] http://www.comune.torino.it/gioart/big/bigguest/riflessioni/...
edit: I also enjoyed this https://www.metamute.org/editorial/articles/californian-ideo...
They should have said that the value of houses in smog-ridden areas will go up, which is independent of their price.
IANAE
However if the baker is paid in pennies, has cost-of-living in pennies, but owes the banker £1000000 for his bakery shop, this causes problems. Same with back taxes etc.
On the other side, inflation is hazardous to creditors: the lender gets back less than they originally gave out (creditors also include those holding bank deposits)
Debt aside, I would maintain that if people can barely afford bread, they are likely not buying cars, washing machines, or other more expensive items. That seems like a recipe for a vicious cycle where society ends up regressing towards individualism and barter, with less economic strength.
I'm not sure professional economists are either...
Why it is not in my interest if I can resell my fridge with upside after several years of using it?
This is a good thing because it ensures that food is used by the most productive and profitable citizens, right?
We have more empty houses than homeless people. Efficient market my ass.
Currently the most profitable use of land in London is building luxury apartments that are bough by Saudi and Russian billionaires who never live there or even let them out. They wait for their price to go up even more.
During covid 700,000 people left London, but real estate prices grew.
Price controls don't work, except for short term periods.... when you have a temporary disruption of few weeks (for an earthquake, weather, etc).
In long term famine, food that is price controlled disappears from shelves and almost never makes, and is resold in black markets at 3x the price (or whatever the market is).
Increasing food prices cause more food to be grown and food to be shipped over longer distances, lessening the impact of a famine. It also causes people to spend less on luxury foods that cost more per calorie.
> We have more empty houses than homeless people. Efficient market my ass.
Have you bought an unused home and given it to someone homeless lately? There are many that are quite inexpensive out there.
On the whole, I agree that our current housing and property market is not as efficient as it could be. One reason for this are our building codes; they raise the cost of housing making truly inexpensive homes illegal. There is definitely a lot of benefits to living in a properly–built house, but that is always going to be more expensive than a shack you built yourself on land you claimed from the wilderness at the edge of a growing population. When governments eliminate that possibility, they cause people to go homeless. I suspect that you will want to “fix” this by having the government step in and buy a house for everyone who wants one.
The bureaucracy expands to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy.
Yes, this doesn't work with land.
I don't know why anyone would believe that. It doesn't even work in places with no zoning restrictions at all. Building up gets you more housing, sure, but it also costs way more cash per square foot, it inherently drives the price of all nearby housing higher.
> higher housing prices cause people to reduce the square-footage they occupy as well.
This is just "famine" being spun as a benefit. "Bread prices at $10,000 per loaf and rising is good, actually. It will help those silly obese Americans lose weight!"
Your point is apriorism and not supported by evidence.
Interest rates go down, housing prices go up.
What people are buying is not a house, but a loan. The cheaper the loan, the more they buy.
I think most people would be shocked to learn that when a bank lends out money, they are actually “cloning” their money many times over: each dollar from their reserves actually gets loaned out multiple times over, to multiple people (such that e.g. 100 people all have claim to the same 1 “real” dollar that exists, although it’s not actually tracked that way). But because almost nobody uses physical cash any more in large quantities, no actual cash needs to be printed to cover this. Then, if/when the loan is later repaid (which again is not a physical transaction, but occurs as numbers being updated in balance sheets), the repaid “clones” get “erased” from circulation, and only the real original reserves remain [1]. The banks keep the (greatly multiplied) interest paid though as profit.
You (as a mere peasant) are not allowed to clone your money and lend/invest it out, but banks are (in fact, this is essentially what makes a bank a bank), and it’s called “fractional reserve banking”. Some argue that this is very unfair, and argue that this is actually the root cause of a lot of financial problems and wealth inequality in the world.
For example, this system inflates prices (usually starting with investment assets like land, stocks, etc. but can later trickle down and in very delayed way start to inflate food prices etc. too), due to this expansion of the money supply (commonly called “money printing” even though no actual printing needs to occur) being funneled through financial institutions and into various investment assets and derivatives.
[1] Note that in practice, the total amount of outstanding debt tends to increase over time, because old debt just ends up getting replaced/refinanced with newer debt of even larger size (e.g. due to decreasing interest rates). This creates a system where the global economy is essentially “addicted” to perpetually increasing amounts of debt. The official stance though is that central banks should be able to unwind this debt when we are in good economic health, but this is debated; for example, I don’t know of any case in modern history where overall money supply has actually been decreased without markets immediately panicking and starting to crash (after which the central banks always quickly give in and reverse course, usually re-inflating the money supply far more than even before).
Starbucks in London is staffed with poor sods who travel for 2 hours from outside the city to take their shift for hardly above minimum wage.
You could accelerate this by making employers pay for time spent commuting to and from work, but that will not be a panacea; it will eliminate some jobs that people rely on. The person in your example might end up completely unemployed, and given the choice they might prefer to commute for four hours per day than to be completely unemployed.
Historically some people sold themselves into slavery, should we bring back the good old days?
Also, how does any of this prove that having people travel 4 hours a day is economically productive?
> Also, how does any of this prove that having people travel 4 hours a day is economically productive?
It’s manifestly more productive than being unemployed. It might be a bad enough job that you can barely tolerate it, but that’s better than starvation. An employer whose employees are this close to the edge is taking a very large risk. If any alternative opens up, or if the job conditions get any worse, then they will suffer fatal turnover. They’ll either have to pay higher wages or improve conditions (or both) to survive, or their competitors will do it for them.
For jobs that pay above minimum wage, that's what already happens.
I certainly agree that it would be nicer if everyone could live in as nice a house as they wanted, located in as nice a place as possible, and if they could always eat all the food they wanted without regard for prices. We should aim as much as possible to build our world along those lines. But we must also recognize that it will only happen once we’ve built a Dyson swarm so that we have enough energy that it can be given away, and we’ve developed actual Star–Trek–style replicators (using nanotechnology, most likely, rather than teleportation) that produce as much food as people want without consuming any time or effort on the logistics of growing, preparing, shipping, and preserving food. But most everyone would still want to live in the big city, so land prices would still be a factor.
On the other hand, with a growing Dyson swarm we can start making as many O’Neil cylinders as people want. Even so, there will always be some places that are popular and crowded, and others that are almost empty and peaceful.
Even in novels like the Culture series, where free energy and free living space abound, there is still scarcity and economics. You might have heard of a really great place to live on the other side of the galaxy, but do you really want to pay the price of moving there? Sure, you wouldn’t have to buy any property there, or pay someone to move your stuff (in these books anyone can just hop on the next passing space ship and make their way to wherever they want to go, because those ships can house millions or billions of people.) But you would still have to pay the cost of the travel time, potentially years of it. You would eventually lose contact with the friends you have, and the place you grew up. All of these things are scarce, and it will cost you some or all of them to move across the galaxy. It would be nice to live in a civilization where those were the only costs, but it’s important to recognize that we haven’t built it yet. We can’t just legislate that people are not allowed to be poor until after we’ve eliminated the scarcity of physical goods.
Infrastructure that doesn’t encourage driving everywhere, and a switch to EV’s in cases where you ‘just have to’, can’t come soon enough.
Perhaps that indicates you live in the wrong place - it shows you what is possible! Obviously the world is not ideal and you may be tied to where you are but it sounds like you need to reconsider where you live.
I was a smoker for about 30 years and gave up just over three years ago. I did some damage to my lungs but there you go - mea culpa. In your case it isn't your fault but I have an idea what it is like to have some difficulty breathing. It's different for me and you but I understand: my mum was asthmatic (had some episodes that ended up in hospital) and suffered from awful hayfever - a bit crap for a farmer's daughter but then she still managed to become a Captain in the WRAC (Women's Royal Armoured Corpse! Ok Army, oh alright Corps)
Anyway, why not consider moving to somewhere more rural? I remember after about a fortnight after deciding to give up the fags, I stood outside my office without a cigarette in my gob. The air tasted and smelled fresh and pure. At this point I was trying to enforce positive experiences as an enticement to help giving up. It is quite hard to give up smoking. Then a diesel car drove past nearby and the smell was horrendous, really horrendous. I suspect you know that as well or better than me.
Take care mate.
i think we should remove the cars from the cities, not remove the people from the cities. People were there first after all
Perhaps that indicates that we as a society are doing it wrong.
I have had days when driving into town has hit me badly because of the pollen loads, and other days when the breeze has changed to coming from inland which have also been yucky for me even at home.
https://eurocities.eu/latest/parisians-will-live-within-a-15...
On the whole, I think city planners should design everything around public transport and it should be seen for the societal value add, rather than as a public expense.
Sadly, in Canberra it is buses, often once an hour. And most people feel as though if you catch a bus, it is a social signal that you are not doing very well.
Doing public transport well is hard.
But Canberra laid a good foundation for great bicycle riding!
What it isn't is in anyway useful to anybody. It shouldn't even be called public transit, be honest and call it last ditch option.
Real public transit needs to run more often. Half hour service is marginal public transit.
Designed and planned from the beginning, founded in 1913.
Has several "town centres" with the similar idea of "close to everywhere you need to be".
But imbalances of distribution through all the various factors of life mean one town centre has better [X], another has better [Y], your [Z] hobby group may be mostly in another area and your friends and family end up all over the place.
And so you travel everywhere anyway.
If you think ‘need to’ doesn’t needs quotation marks, try sitting through a few local community board meetings focused on re-allocating free parking for anything more useful :)
I can't imagine doing weekly shopping for a family without a car (we buy from both a grocery store, and a wholesale warehouse store)
I live in the suburbs (20 miles west of DC). My office is 1 mile away and I walk. The schools are 1 mile away; if I had school-age kids, we'd walk. I can walk or cycle to the grocery, the brewpub, coffee shop, post office, and burger joint (all 0.5-2 miles away). I rarely use my car during the week; the vast majority of my mileage is weekend trips to the mountains.
Even having it all sorted for day to day living. You still have a car to go somewhere else.
I feel the same here in Australia. Much of our day to day living doesn't need a car. Some of our friends though are in small country towns that would be a big hassle to visit without a car.
But few American communities are planned with minimizing car use as a key tenet. I’m lucky to live in one that is.
A personal data point: My wife and I used to live about 20 blocks from the gym we used. She would drive because of the vagrants and street people who would follow and harass women. Cycling wasn't an option because anyone who left their bike unattended would have it stolen.
Well planned communities can be close to car-free, at least for day-to-day activities. The problem is we haven't prioritized being nearly car free, choosing instead of externalize the costs of car culture (pollution that generations will have to deal with, health impacts on some community members today, depletion of fossil fuels and the impact of digging them up, vast swaths of land dedicated to flat tarmac for car storage).
They want to see sights 90 minutes drive away. 3 hours drive away. And be home again that night.
I support "local living without cars as much as possible", but I think cars are here to stay for most of us.
"The cities we live in are hundreds, if not thousands of years old. The idea of that a 15 minute city has any bearing on real life is sadly laughable."
The two sentences don't make sense together. Those old cities were "15 minute" cities by necessity - easy long distance travel wasn't a thing until the industrial revolution. We've since redesigned many of them for car use, and in some cases realized the mistake and redesigned them again (Amsterdam, for example).
There will be various solutions to our energy and pollution problems, and some of the variations will depend on the region the solution is being implemented in. I don't think solar power will be as big in Canada as in, say, the Sahara Desert.
Apparently, the dark greasy stuff that you can see covering everything close to vehicle roads is not coming from the fumes but from the asphalt, tires and brakes.
It makes no sense environmentally to keep private cars around.
If we channeled half that money into public transport, we would have amazing systems and could save the other half. Without cars, many roads in city centers could be reclaimed into public squares, or planted.
Until Public Transport can match the quite amazing "go anywhere" utility of a car, it isn't going anywhere.
With money, engineering and creativity it could be done. And I hope it is. But even if it starts today, I won't live to see it in full action.
I still fantasize about sitting in a standardised car-cabin-like box IE seats(maybe facing each other), aircon, windows, media.
And having it shuttled around like a packet on the network. Automated trains, trams, trucks, cars, drones even - all working in harmony to get you where you want to go.
That way I'd own my space. But all the moving parts can be communal and benefit from best engineering practice for efficiency at economies of scale.
This presumes the existence of cars, which is exactly what is ostensibly to be eliminated in the public transit strategy.
You could absolutely go visit your friend on his farm if we had a decent public transit system.
Also how is your specific case a refutation of the GPs argument anyway? Everybody always loves to argue against public transit with some weird special case that's somehow "possible". It's quite tiresome.
How about some imagination instead. Is it such a stretch to image a rural bus route that goes by your friends farm? How about a few mile bicycle ride from the nearest town's train station? How about renting a car ala Zipcar? I am sure there are many other ways to solve this non-problem.
Lets break this down:
1. I took a bus to a train to a bus to a tiny village in the countryside in England. Nothing in view for miles except the pub at the bus stop and a farm.
1A. Cool. I can't do that. I did write a convenience comparison [train, all day regional bus, unknown last mile effort] vs [car] but it was lengthy with predictable results, especially when travelling with wife and toddler.
But I am absolutely not against trying to make it better.
2. You could absolutely go visit your friend on his farm if we had a decent public transit system.
2A. Ok.
3. Also how is your specific case a refutation of the GPs argument anyway? Everybody always loves to argue against public transit with some weird special case that's somehow "possible". It's quite tiresome.
3A. I didn't think I was refuting? I like the idea of decent public transport for all. I mean, there wasn't even any specifics mentioned. Just a general "goodness" of it. I like goodness!
But many people take for granted the miracle of convenience a car provides. It certainly isn't some weird special case.
It is a huge task to match that with Public Transport, just via engineering and technically. Let alone doing it in such a manner that it is socially accepted by the public at large.
4. How about some imagination instead. Is it such a stretch to image a rural bus route that goes by your friends farm? How about a few mile bicycle ride from the nearest town's train station? How about renting a car ala Zipcar? I am sure there are many other ways to solve this non-problem.
4A. I did say "With money, engineering and creativity it could be done." And it really isn't an all or nothing endeavor either.
But it is a HUGE endeavor to match the convenience of a car. And my example was merely trying to demonstrate that.
And there are possible solutions to tire dust. Changes to tire formulation, better road maintenance and mitigations, possibly relying more on tunnels (which we should do anyway in cities, even if it’s more expensive... and EVs make it much easier). Once fossil fuels are solved, it makes tire dust the next problem we can tackle.
So don’t use tire dust as an excuse to not transition to electric vehicles. Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the much better. (And public transport can also generate particulates... tire dust, dust from rails, brake dust, and especially diesel particulates from buses.... we need to electrify everything.)
EDIT: And I don’t want to use this an excuse to NOT do public transport, only to argue it actually has much the same problem, but in case you don’t believe me on the rail dust thing: https://www.osha.gov/laws-regs/standardinterpretations/1996-... https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S004896971...
If it's a densely populated place, I don't think that "less polluting cars" is the answer.
This underground train thing doesn't have to be called train as I understand trains are considered communism in the USA. It is actually a sharing economy of connected electric vehicles, atmospheric pressure hyper-loop if you wish. Many of those are autonomous too, like level 5 autonomy without LIDAR. They are often used with a loyalty card(called "Osyter card" in London, for example) and even work with your mobile phone if you prefer not to carry a plastic card!
You can always say that in 2 years it would be pressurised and run at supersonic speeds!
We need to work with the current conditions, and that means BOTH public transit and better EV/road infrastructure.
All the things attributed to the American car-centric lifestyle were a thing to some degree everywhere. Then people got tired of it and changed it. Probably Europe not having much petrol also helped, which also explains the tendency of the European cars having significantly smaller and efficient engines.
There are plenty of cool videos of European cities that used to be traffic hells that turned into bicycle friendly walkable places. Though admittedly the hell part still exist for those who choose the to drive the cars.
That said, like you mentioned: that didn't stop them from making traffic hellholes. Designing a city to need cars is a choice.
Cars are a huge problem in Europe as well.
Take Mainz, Germany; where my father is from; the core of the city is a walkable old city (which my Opa knew every corner of having worked for the city for decades, and he toured me around all over it when I visited...). But then around it are a whole bunch of villages which grew into suburbs, and are connected by freeway. But it seems to me that because each of those villages, towns, and the central city already had a tradition of walkability, the connectivity between the towns, villages, suburbs took that into account when the post-WWII reconstruction happened.
In Mainz I was able to take a streetcar out from the centre of town to a small village in under 45 minutes and go walk in a forest. Here in southern Ontario -- where we have similar density and population to the Frankfurt/Rhine corridor -- such a thing requires a car.
The snark is unwarranted, it is unwelcome, and it is against the guidelines for this site.
America is absolutely enormous, sprawling, and suffers from a relatively recent inability to build things, which is very frustrating indeed.
If we were to cram our entire population into, say, Michigan†, I doubt we would have given over our extensive rail network to freight. But, we did, and Los Angeles tram system was bought out in a shady backroom deal, and there were other various and sundry sins. But mostly, we invented jet travel, and trains just don't cover the 4500 kilometers between New York and Los Angeles in an appropriate amount of time.
Admit it: if you were going from London to Istanbul, you could take a train, but you would fly. Well, London to Istanbul and back, that's the distance from New York to Los Angeles. Which you can do by train! But, people don't.
California, that notorious bastion of communism, voted in a high speed train between San Francisco and Los Angeles, and is still waiting for what they paid for. LA has added quite a lot of Metro in the last 30 years, but with a mere 150km of rail, 93 stations, and only a hundred million yearly riders, there's a long way to go. Meanwhile SF can't get the BART to circle around the South Bay for love or money.
† The size of the entire UK, and there are ten states larger.
As the "densely populated area" remark should give it away, I do not claim that USA should build metro lines between cities. What I say that cars in cities are not the solution.
Funny enough, I am in Istanbul since a while. I flew from London to Istanbul, it took me about 8,5 hours I guess. 30 minutes to Heathrow, 2 hours at Heathrow, 5 hours in the plane(did not take off immediately) ,1 hour at Istanbul Airport, 1 hour on a bus to my destination. Definitely better than the train but only because there's no direct line. The trains in Europe are great but expensive. If there was an overnight train to Istanbul from King's Cross at reasonable price I would have taken it.
The mass transit in Istanbul is horrendous but wherever available, the metro is much much better than the Istanbul traffic. Admittedly, the car could be better if you are in an S class Mercedes and being chauffeured.
Believe it or not, a substantial proportion of the population takes pride in their car ownership and the maintenance thereof.
Brakes get less use tho, due to regenerative braking.
"The report assumes that diesel and gasoline-powered cars are going to be replaced with electric vehicles, eliminating tailpipe emissions, but that problematic PM emissions will remain or even increase."
[1] https://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/environment/non-exhaust-partic...
[2] https://www.treehugger.com/electric-cars-wont-save-us-from-p...
If you selectively choose the smallest Model 3 vs the heaviest 3 Series BMW, maybe it's 100lb. If you choose models with comparative ranges, it's as much as 800lbs. That is a massive difference.
The model 3 and BMW aren't really that close either depending on which model you pick.
Do you own real estate there or something? Are you aware that many people are homeless? Why is an increase in property values a good thing when it has never been more difficult and more expensive to buy a house than ever before? This increase is in large part due to the disgusting financialization of the housing market.
A documentary called ‘Push’ (2019) does a great job at laying out all the facts, while at the same time showing the impacts of these changes on working class people the world over: https://youtube.com/watch?v=qWSVG9nsRa4
For people in Europe or elsewhere you can use http://yt1s.com to download it if it’s region blocked. You can support the filmmakers and rent it too: https://vimeo.com/ondemand/pushthefilm
Greed, period. Owning an investment property is seen as easy money. When I was a kid it was essentially unheard of to own a second property for rent. Now a substantial number of people I work around own one (or more) rental properties. I know "just a guy" that owns 5 AirBNB condos he rents for $250-300 per night in the summer season, that sit vacant the rest of the year.
I have no idea why we allowed this to happen.
Sorry but that’s flat-out wrong. Owning a second property for rent has always been a thing. How would you have known, you were a kid!
Case in point: my family was middle class. My parents were a college professor (new grad from graduate school, not a big deal) and a stay-at-home mom, living in suburban America. They owned a second property for rent. I didn’t even know until 20 years later that they had owned it!
Lest you think I’m some kid who grew up in the 00’s: no, I grew up in the 60s and 70s.
Sure beats working for it.
1. Diesel/Petrol/Thermal Coal - air pollution
2. Plastics and Phthalates - hormone disruption, land and sea pollution
3. Sugar - obesity
If anyone has any surplus energy, money, or political power, we would strongly benefit from these ingredients being removed as much as possible from human environments.
I don't think number 2 is necessarily true. Lifestyle and diet are much bigger influences. My grandparents lived in a town with coal as a heat source and for the trains moving through town. That's a lot more pollution than cars today. This is also the generation that walked places (for miles) and worked hard because they had nothing. They were a healthy weight and ate fairly healthy diets. They lived into their nineties and never went into a care facility.
I don't see how number 2 and 3 could be true together. One of the major theories on the increasing cancer rates is that people are living longer and this increases the chances of having cancer at some point. My grandfather had cancer, but didnt get it until he was 91 - then he beat it. The other theories tend to focus on environmental toxins not from car exhaust. Usually it's based on household chemicals and indoor air quality from items in the home.
While this is a good thing, it is an economic drain, not a boon.
Some things are a trade-off.
I wonder how society will help them transition to other things well
The other day a friend of mine bought his first car - a 2008 Honda Jazz.
Stuff that needed to be replaced from the get go:
-front stabilizer link rods.
-front discs
-brake pads
-AC pump
-12V battery
-front lights
Regarding combustion-related parts there's the muffler and oxygen sensor, but that's it.
His case is fairly typical.
Also there's a more immediate danger looming - newer diesels are so sophisticated that quite often repairing them is uneconomical. The same will happen sooner or later to gasoline, because usually it's the costly stuff like injectors and the flywheel that fails.
There could be many other potential second-order effects (and third-order, etc).
I suspect the added electricity demand from everyone switching to EV's won't be easily supplied by renewables thus creating this problem elsewhere.
Hopefully it's possible but the cynic in me disagrees.
"Where will the electricity come from" is unadulterated FUD.
Australia mines >50% of the world's lithium and 1% of worlds oil, and for them oil pollutes more
And lithium is recycled, oil is not.
Oil is a biohazard, we had massive oil spills wich posioned areas as large as fukushima exclusion zone. Pour barrel of oil in a forest, and everything dies
How many lithium spills were there? Zero. If you sprincle lithium in a forest, nothing happens.
Where I'm from(Poland) the biggest power plant is the Bełchatów power plant, which burns lignite for power - the CO2 emissions per kWh generated from that power plant are about 1kg/kWh produced[1]. At such an insane CO2 emissions rate even the most efficient EV - let's take a Model 3 - is worse than a modern petrol car.
According to this site[0] Model 3 is incredibly efficient, using only 11.9kWh for every 100km travelled. So that's about 120Wh per km. If you're getting electricity from the Bełchatów power plant, that also means that Tesla is "emitting" 120g of CO2/km travelled.
There are many modern cars that have their CO2/km emissions at less than 120g of CO2/km. But even if they are slightly above that, it doesn't change the fact that the emissions from driving an EV are not zero like some people say they are. Even if we go back to the UK and use that 300g of CO2/kWh figure, the Tesla is still emitting 40g of CO2/km travelled. That's not zero.
[0] https://thedriven.io/2020/10/20/model-3-achieves-record-low-...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Be%C5%82chat%C3%B3w_Power_Stat...
Highway driving in the winter is the only scenario where an EV can reach 250Wh/km.
Of course it matters. Unless the goal is just out of sight out of mind.
I never said it wasn't slightly better.
Stack up enough small wins and you can get to sizeable gains.
Nah - I think your gut reaction is mostly just decades of propaganda painting fossil fuels as a necessary evil.
On the topic of pure renewables - hydro definitely can't scale, we can get a lot more out of it then we currently are but it's comparatively not clean and most locations don't have unlimited options for power harnessing - wind and solar scale up pretty ridiculously and in most parts of the world one or the other is going to be quite accessible and, we've also got geothermal and some other options that we can look at.
Beyond that we can look into demand reduction, the dead simplist of these is insulation/passive cooling requirements on housing and taxing private transportation to encourage ride-sharing especially in the commercial realm.
We've got some great options to look at if only the coal barons would STFU and go away.
With the ICE car, any equipment you add to try to capture emissions adds to the weight of the car, in turn making it burn more fuel, and you are also limited in the total weight that the car can have and still drive safely (or at all). You've also got space limitations.
With the stationary power plant, by picking a place with sufficient space there are no weight limits on how much emission capturing equipment you can add to the plant.
1. Real estate prices in high traffic metros like Los Angeles and Houston will increase further because the return to clear skies from smoggy days and fresh air will be a bonus.
2. People will suddenly start living much longer lives with more quality years at the tail end "for some strange reason."
3. Cancer rates will stabilize "for some strange reason."