Another reason to nationalize the railroads. Double-stacks under overhead electrification are common in China and India, and were it not for our absurdly inflated infrastructure construction costs, it’d pay off very quickly through cheaper fueling costs, greatly reduced maintenance, and better performance.

Yeah, Chicago could be perfectly served by transit, but Metra is a joke and doesn’t appear to have any interest in doing better. So much of America’s distaste for transit is because we’re absolutely terrible at running it. Even NYC’s transit isn’t great compared to its global competitors (e.g., Paris, Tokyo, Seoul,…

I hear that. I used to be able to walk 45m, bus/light rail for 30m, or drive 15m to work, and I often chose to walk because it was just so pleasant (quiet side streets for the most part) or take transit because it was low-stress (although it didn’t run very often). Now it’s a 45m-1h drive to my new job depending on…

There’s obviously a lot of other factors at play, but this is what happens when most jobs are such that you need a car to get to them. I guarantee you that other countries that don’t build their cities around the idea that EVERYONE has a car to get them to work would look at this kind of situation and be even more…

As Birdnose says, we don’t need to go from single-family/multi-family dwellings straight to dozens of 30-story skyscrapers. There’s a whole range of building types in the middle of that that American cities are largely missing. London and Paris are not Hong Kong and Seoul; the former two don’t feature the densely…

That’s because like everywhere else in the country, Portland ME doesn’t build enough housing to meet demand in downtown. I left Manchester, NH because housing’s too expensive, for metro Portland OR (technically a suburb of it, Beaverton), which has the same problems. Lots of people want to live in these places, but…

Believe it or not, there’s more than one way to live a materially-comfortable existence, and we have absolutely zero reason to jump to “there should be fewer people” as the only solution.

Maybe we North Americans should start living like it’s 2023, instead of 1983. There are examples of this all over Europe, East Asia,…

So glad I didn’t have to be the one to say it this time!

“...because other people’s choices are not my own”. Okay, but other people’s choices do affect you. The flip side of this is that you have no responsibility to other people, and those two thoughts are completely destructive of any sense of social cohesion and belonging, and I hate to be dramatic and generalize, but…

Well, I work in healthcare, and my current job is a 13 week contract I started after Thanksgiving, so...7 weeks? I’m also on a month-to-month lease, so everything’s up in the air, more or less.

I don’t see where I said that. Unlike Seoul and Taipei, Bangkok didn’t invest during the boom years of the 90's, and so has famously congested traffic. What I DID say is that Bangkok, more or less unlike Jakarta and Manila, is massively investing in their rail transit and that Thailand has fewer cars per capita than…

This country is just...so dumb. I don’t see how anyone could be happy with the way things are. It’s expensive, it’s polluting, it’s time-wasting, and I’m sorry, but there’s nothing free about NEEDING to drive basically everywhere. Going from a job I could walk, bus, take light rail, or drive, to one where I had to…

Hong Kong, Singapore, and most large mainland Chinese, Korean, and Taiwanese cities have excellent public transit, and no big country in the world has as many cars per person as the U.S. Bangkok and Kuala Lumpur are both continually investing in their transportation, even if they’re far behind, and have fewer cars per…

Just one more lane, bro. Dude, I swear, just one more lane. Last time, I promise man, just One. More. Lane.

Catch me jumping out of my car at 50mph to stop at the Safeway for some eggs.

The thing that bugs me about this line of thinking—and everything else related to the level-of-service road grading system—is that it’s entirely based on getting people through areas. What if you need to stop at a local store? The highway’s probably not the most efficient way to get there, as they’re limited access…

Vision Zero programs in the U.S. have mostly been a bust because the most important rule of the program--slow down cars--runs exactly counter to most municipal, state, and federal transportation planners’ most important rule--speed cars up. The irony of slowing cars down also permitting a greater volume of traffic to…

“Sometimes roads are built and they lessen congestion”, only in the case of economic or demographic decline. Is that really the ultimate desired fix?

Seriously. How much of the south’s economic growth is simply due to greater willingness of their state governments to abuse their populace for the sake of money? All you have to see is issues like the water crisis in Mississippi to think the answer is probably “a lot”.

Seriously. Consumer preferences aren’t static and immune to external influence. If people, by default, always wanted trucks and SUVs, we wouldn’t have had to wait til the 90's to see them start selling so strongly. Profit margins are higher, so marketing was designed to sell them hard, ergo consumers started buying…