See also: the invention of “jaywalking” to criminalize pedestrians and elevate car traffic over foot traffic[1], and the successful effort to dismantle the US’s streetcar systems[2].

[1]: https://www.vox.com/2015/1/15/7551873/jaywalking-history

[2]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_streetcar_con...

Jaywalking is an example of this power being used for good. Traffic flow is more important than being able to cross anywhere you want when we have crosswalks.

In what context?

In New York and many other pedestrian-oriented cities around the world, more people get around via walking than driving for intra-city trips — the cars are the ones blocking traffic flow there.

Nevertheless, I’m of the persuasion that people who live in a neighborhood/city/region should be prioritized more for quality of life purposes than those merely passing through on a commute. Thus I would argue a pedestrian-hostile six lane road has no purpose going through a residential area, and in the same way I think there’s as many places where pedestrians should be prioritized highly above cars, such as neighborhoods, school zones, and dense commercial corridors.

It’s all contextual.

There's a crosswalk at every intersection in New York. It would be unecessary and inefficient for the streets to be constantly crowded by pedestrians. The pedestrian's trip would be marginally faster while traffic would be backed up considerably.

"Traffic" has no inherent right to not be backed up.

If you are able to walk and you aren't carrying cargo, you should be walking. (EDIT: cyclists who can cycle at pedestrian-safe speeds are welcome, too!) The overwhelming majority of a city's residents fit into this category and the ridiculous amount of square footage allocated to car-asphalt is in defiance of this. And every able-bodied person who drives into the city for an office job should be dissuaded by geometrically increasing parking costs for increasing that unnecessary traffic load.

I live in on the edge of the suburbs and my car's gotten sixteen thousand miles on it in the last five years. Almost all of which is going to Home Depot and back or visiting people significantly outside of the city.

This is the sort of language we’re talking about: pedestrians aren’t (and rightfully wouldn’t be) “crowding” anyone. Pedestrians have been crowded onto sidewalks, to the advantage of a relatively small (and substantially less dense) class of drivers.

Driving in NYC should be a matter of necessity, not pure expedience. If and when our policies match that fact, those drivers that need to drive will find that they’re stuck in less traffic as a result.

Nah. Cars can slow down and cars can wait. And, preferably, be removed from populous areas during human-active hours (modulo assistive vehicles).

Massachusetts has a thunderous $1 fine for your first, second, and third jaywalking offense ($2 for those subsequent), and the world has not ended.

In Tokyo it's uncommon to jaywalk and it's still considered the #4 most pedestrian friendly city. It's more efficient and safe for everyone this way.

Jaywalking has been exported to the rest of the world, but Tokyo is not a great example: they’ve successfully applied just about every urban design technique that allows cars and other traffic to coexist, to the uniform detriment of cars.[1]

In other words: the restrictions that Tokyo places on urban car traffic would make the average American driver scream bloody murder.

[1]: https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2019/10/1/lessons-from-t...

> Cars can slow down and cars can wait.

How about emergency response vehicles of any kind?

Fire and rescue? Turn on a siren and people will move. This works in other places. It can work here.

You're right that police in many areas can't be trusted with that responsibility, though, and maybe we'll have to think about how to deal with that.

FWIW, check out "A Trip Down Market Street", filmed in 1906 in SF just before the earthquake. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oubsaFBUcTc

Upscaled and colorized: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VO_1AdYRGW8

You can see pedestrians, horse-drawn carriages, and early automobiles all "flowing" together.

One could just as easily say that "[foot] traffic flow is more important than being able to [drive] anywhere you want", and in some locales that attitude may serve to benefit more people than the inverse. It's not a given that cars must be the default mode of transportation, but the idea that this _is_ a given is ingrained in the public conversation about infrastructure due to precisely the sort of propaganda the original commenter in this thread was talking about.

Nobody thinks that traffic flow isn’t important. What’s striking is the prioritization of one form of traffic over another, largely at the expensive of neighborhoods and the people who live in them.

I have seen it in action, though. PG&E bought enough propaganda to convince Yolo County not to switch to a public utility. They convinced everyone to take a worse deal that would cost more money, by repeating the lie so many times that the other side cost more. Most human brains are not equipped to make rational decisions, but simply make social decisions based on perception of group opinion.

You call a system a democracy where corporations can spend tens of billions on propaganda. And conclude that our brains are the problem.

Sure, so how do you stop that?

As long as it’s possible for individuals to decide things via voting, there will be an incentive to convince those individuals to vote in particular ways.

I don’t get why this is hard to understand^W communicate.

Corporations have tens of billions to spend on marketing. To put things in perspective: what do regular people have in terms of a propaganda budget in order to target corporations?

The very fact that corporations have these kinds of budgets to just point at regular people—and regular people have no recourse other than “don’t be stupid”—betrays the fact that ours are democracies in name only.

If a nation had a population of millions and a handful of billionaires who just bought off the politicians then the real fundamental problem would be the massive wealth disparity, not the fact that the billionaires could de jure buy off politicians (they could have done that de facto if there was no such explicit law).

Bloomberg spent $1B of his own money to become US President and never even had a good showing in the primary.

I think you over estimate the power of money on people’s thoughts and opinions.

Am I supposed to respond to the collective opinion drift caused by a new person responding to me in this thread at every sub-level?

The original claim was that our brains are broken because we respond to propaganda. I don’t have the inclination to address the opposite claim as well.

One spectacular failure doesn't disprove the argument. If advertising weren't effective businesses and campaigns wouldn't spend money on it. You might as well argue that commerce isn't real because some products bomb and lose money.

There are numerous examples. Trump outraised Biden in the last election. AOC defeated a career Democrat in NYC with a far smaller war chest.

Sure it works...to a degree. But if people don't like you or your ideas, all the money in the world won't change that.

Sure there are exceptions...to a degree. I never said money was the only factor. But those are poor examples because the other factors are unusual.

Trump was absolutely loathed, such that getting him out by any means far outweighed Biden's personal popularity for most people. Biden's slumping poll numbers indicate that he has little support in his own right.

AOC is unusually charismatic and youthful, in contrast to a somewhat dull middle-aged opponent that she defeated. But there were 3 other factors at play in that race: Crowley, the incumbent, had won his seat 20 years before in an open race following a retirement, the political equivalent of easy mode; the demographics of the district had changed during his tenure; and the DSA are decent organizers who took advantage of the general low turnout in NY Congressional primaries.

There are certainly lots of ways to overcome the influence of money on politics, but understating its influence is as naive as throwing in the towel when outfunded. Again, if things like advertising didn't work candidates wouldn't spend so much on it; and if money didn't matter political operators wouldn't put effort into pushing the legal envelope to allow more into a race.

Consider a recent case, in which Ted Cruz successfully sued the FEC to get rid of limits on the use of post-election fundraising to retire personal campaign debt (ie where a candidate loans money to their own campaign, which is not subject to campaign contribution limits). Cruz 'overpaid' by exactly $100, incurred a fine, and litigated the case. Previously, the limit of $250k in post-election fundraising put a ceiling on the amount of money a candidate would typically be willing lend to their own campaign; now you can raise any amount from your supporters after the election.

https://www.fec.gov/updates/supreme-court-finds-limit-on-can...

Going back to your first post, you could argue that bloomberg threw vast amounts of money into the race because he wasn't worried about being paid back. But that's kind of the point; Bloomberg spent $1 billion and people laughed, because there was wide public awareness that he's worth $82 billion so losing one of his 82 giga-bucks was not a big deal. He had big name recognition because of his news business, but not big personality recognition outside of NY, and his extreme willingness to self-fund ended up looking even more crass than Trump. This was the political equivalent of an army provisioned with a million swords but only 5000 swordsmen.

Through governance and civilization? There will always be an incentive to bribe public officials, too. Or for that matter, to rob, rape, and kill.

Of course people's brains are the problem. Who do you think is deciding things?

Going by the amount of money spent: the corporations, obviously.

Corporations don't just run themselves.

Corporations are run as command economies by a small handful of people. Corporations indirectly run society. Hence a small number of people run society. Which means that democracies are not run by the people. Hence democracy in name only.

Given the incentive structures of society, they pretty much do.

Employee tries to go against the flow? Management replaces them Management tries to go against the flow? Ceo replaces them. Ceo tries to go against the flow? Board replaces them. Board member tries to go against the flow? They are outvoted or stock price crumbles.

Corporations? That hardly the case. People make up their own minds about green energy and make decisions about about voting themselves. People are seeing the affects right now of what happens when they vote for politicians that are doing their best to shut down oil - $6 a gallon gas.