Well, having good public transit and lots of things in close proximity to each other certainly helps. One of my old roommates specifically moved from our Atlanta suburb to Charlotte because he’s legally blind and needed to be able to get around without driving. 

Something tells me someone interested in moving into a building with no parking plans to walk, bike, or use public transit instead of driving everywhere. 

Holy shit, that’s a bad take. Please don’t make me list the reasons why; just renounce it and hope you can be forgiven someday.

Nah, needs to never have owned, nor ever again, own a gun.

The United States is creeping ever closer to the wild West. And not the real wild West... the movie versions of the wild West. The open-carry, gun-slinger version of the wild West is a myth.

Seriously, fuck Florida and fuck “Stand Your Ground”. It’s legalized murder, over and over again. 

Couple of douche bags.  Obligatory: Fuck Florida.

The world is truly sick. Meanwhile, people go to jail for attempting to have their kids attend a better school than they can afford.

Your first point is spot-on. I review bills for a public agency and I can’t believe what private engineers and attorneys bill our organization. We could do it so much cheaper if we had our own engineers and attorneys, but big government = EVIL and private sector = GOOD (not to mention campaign donations from engineers…

Planes don’t services the cities between LA and SF nearly as well.

you know whats also ridiculous about bart is that it doesnt run a standard gauge rail.... It would have been nice to have one continuous system that ran all the way around the bay, as opposed to the piece meal bart/lightrail/caltrain/amtrak shit we have going on now....

If you want a good topic for an article, how about, why is infrastructure so expensive in this country? It’s not just California High-Speed Rail, and it’s not just California.

Multiple factors. First, we have a habit of outsourcing non-routine public works to consultants and contractors rather than bringing that talent in-house in the US. It’s why municipal utilities run pretty well, municipal transit projects suck because the agency doesn’t know what they want, how feasible ideas are, and…

This the project where after several years SNCF terminated their contract with California and went to Morocco where they built a 200 mile line in 7 years. Note that this was the time from SNCF quitting California in 2011, to California starting actual construction in 2018.

This is the kind of thing where climate change considerations need to take precedence and it should be, um, railroaded through. Impose those carbon taxes on those ICE cars and aircraft.

I was impressed in Korea when they in just a few years extended a rail line by 30 some odd miles—through valleys and mountains (i.e.…

In 20/20 hindsight, for sure BART should have had a hub-and-spoke topology, ringing the Bay continuously with feeder lines poking out. One might imagine their going to or even across the Carquinez Straits, into Marin, and out to Livermore to begin with.  Maybe another Bay crossing or two as well.

I was born and raised in the Bay Area and in those 27 years I think they managed to only extend BART to the airport. There’s always some excuse for why they can’t do it while raking in a ton of money. It always seemed ridiculous there wasn’t a subway that ran the full loop of the SF Bay with multiple underwater…

It has always been underplanned and overbudget. They planned the route to go along 99 instead of I-5 for political reasons, adopted a Design-Build approach to make it look like they’re actually doing something, and just generally have done a shit job of the basic systems engineering / project management stuff that is…

This is the perfect encapsulation of ‘libertarian thought’: Our whole motto is ‘free choice’ but the second it impedes my ability to dictate what you do, it’s gotta be stopped!

Yes, it all has systemic impact on a ton of levels. I’m not about to say that *nobody* should be allowed to have a huge truck or SUV, but they should absolutely have to shoulder more of a societal burden for it.