Without getting into whether cherry-picking the negatives without also explaining the benefits of automobility in cities is the right way to explain their net effects, can we at least agree that the term “better cities” is normative?

Not arguing with your specifics, but again, this sentence is nonsense: “Taking away space for personal cars to replace them with public-use space is exactly the kind of thing that benefits a city.”

Don’t fear the reaper.

Does anybody else have huge reliability problems with RCS? I have to disable it all the time, or else my texts will just fail silently (and won’t fail back to SMS/MMS).

I support this unironically. The world would be a happier place if more people could boat to work.

Right, but just because you can measure something doesn’t mean that there is an objective right or wrong answer. There is also the problem of cherry-picking only certain metrics. Not to mention the lack of context (just one example) that before the automobile was introduced into cities, the streets were actually much d…

Right, now you’re talking about specific, objectively-measured outcomes rather than if something is “good” or “bad” for a city.

Maybe true, but I don’t want to live in a world of constant video surveillance and I don’t want to contribute to it. Bigger issue than maybe getting screwed over in a 1 in a million chance where something nuts happens.

The issue isn’t who hit whom, it’s who was , in the words of the FIA, “causing a collision.” The leading car in a rear-ending can very much be the one who caused the collision.

This is a ridiculous straw man argument. We have never designed cities for cars “above all else.” If that were the case, we wouldn’t have traffic! The allocation of public space in a city is always a compromise.

Objectively? Oh man, this is a classic example of begging the question. You’re just saying that you don’t like cars in cities. Don’t pretend that you’re stating an objective fact.

This is just a mechanical Turk. Either way, it’s cars on the road. And the deadhead mileage rate for taxis and Ubers is always going to be greater than the deadhead mileage rate for a personal car (which is zero).

Sounds right; is wrong.

Yeah, screw those chumps who street park! Only rich people should be allowed to have automobility. </s>

Remember that mass transit ridership was in free-fall from 1945 through the ‘80s. People talk about the dismantling of rail transit like a huge conspiracy, and while there was shady shit going on, it was also a reaction to what the people at that time were deciding to use.

Uber and Lyft are worse for the environment than using a personal car.

Uber and Lyft have no path to profitability except by making all alternatives worse. That’s why they’re helping to destroy mass transit - this is explicit in Uber’s IPO filings.

What I wonder is, for reliability, would it be cheaper to just place a bunch of redundant new chips into a system rather than dealing with the highly-reliable but out-of-date ones?

But bad drivers are the least likely to pay attention to these idiotic devices!

Seriously. This site might as well be run by the Spandex Mafia these days, for all the love for traffic "calming."