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Deltamatic
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Post by Deltamatic »

The problem is, public transportation takes you to the area of your destination, not your destination itself. And you can't change your destination on the go, so buses lack the flexibility of cars (or taxis, come to think of it).
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Rorie
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Post by Rorie »

RoboBlue wrote:It'd be nice if public transportation was cheaper than gas.
public transport expensive in the us? i am not surprised. i can go anywhere in the geelong area on it's bus network and only pay around $1 for a concession fare. i also get my bank account for free and have a visa debit card at no extra charge or monthly fee. australia is the only country that i am aware of that provides free bank accouns for those on the disabilty pension
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Post by tulip »

I'm pretty sure it's not only in the US that public transport is expensive, so you could lay aside that "US is evil Babylon" attitude for a while. If I go into town at Heidelberg by bus/tram it'll cost me 2.20 € one way, and it's about 5 km (also one way). If I buy gas for 4.40 € I can go about 70-80 km with that. Now considering I take someone with me in my car it gets just so much cheaper than public it hurts.
Plus there aren't that many places you can go publicly. If I want to vistit my dad at home I'd have to make sure it's not the weekend because there are no busses then, and make sure the train arrives either before 8 am or near 4 pm, otherwise I'd be waiting hours for the bus (also for a distance about 5 km)
And I think this is basically the case in all the so-called first world.
The only place I know where public transport is cheap and you can go practically anywhere was China, which has so many disadvantages otherwise I wouldn't want to live there.

So bottom line the public transport situation today is a joke.
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Post by RoboBlue »

I'm not sure about the rest of the country, but in New York as far as trains go, 2.20 euros would be extremely cheap. To go the 30 mile round trip from here to Manhattan by train is approaching 40 dollars (30.80 euros). The bus system may be turned over to the state soon, which will mean massive service cuts and fare hikes as well.
Considering this, I feel my right to complain about the horrible nature of our public transit system is assured. :P
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Post by Scarlet »

True. But the company's moving away wouldn't have happened if the US had what whatever they moved overseas for.
We have it actually. Prison labor. Remember prison blues? US made prison labor. 4 cents an hour. Not even burma can beat that. lol

But still, I think that workers should be very worried at the thought of competing with jobs that pay so little.



I agree that safety regulations shouldn't be lax, but as I understand it cries for deregulation weren't the cause for the current recession.
The price of oil is what makes the econ in the US go up and down. All natural resources actually, but mainly oil. Supposedly the housing bust started the recession. Where did the housing bust start... in the exurbs, which were built thanks to no regulation to prohibit that freaky sprawl. Those places that poped up in the middle of nowhere are what caused it - those places hurt the most when the price of petrol went up, and hence that is where foreclosures first hit. It was a domino effect afterwards.

Van Nuys by Nikki Sixx sums it up... " I don't want to die in this suburb"... but no regulation helped create these monotnous stupid entities that were created only for the purpose of promoting a developers profits.


They don't seem monotonous and disgusting to me. Cars aren't that bad, either.
Not sure where you are. But, things like this are, http://blueroof.files.wordpress.com/2007/05/suburb.png

I am not an anti-car freak. However cars had all the support while mass transit had none in the US, for a long time. This disparity must change, and is, but it's going slowly, way too slowly.


It'd be nice if public transportation was cheaper than gas.
It depends on where you are. In some places mass transit simply is the way to go, you don't need a car. In many others the mass transit infrastructure simply does not exist (or is inadequate) so there is no choice.


The problem is, public transportation takes you to the area of your destination, not your destination itself. And you can't change your destination on the go, so buses lack the flexibility of cars (or taxis, come to think of it).
That's why big urban areas of top ranked cities for livability have extensive metro systems. One gets on the rail and it zooms, often many times faster than a car stuck in rush hour traffic.
I look at buses as things that should feed into these metro stations.


The only place I know where public transport is cheap and you can go practically anywhere was China, which has so many disadvantages otherwise I wouldn't want to live there.
Well, transit companies in the west are often in a hard situation. They gotta try to get some of their opperating costs covered by the fees. As cities tend to not have money, they keep cutting back on transit and other things... so the rise in prices follows. Or cuts in service.
Many third world cities have very cheap transit. Mexico City's metro is only like 20 cents per ride, quite affordable. But then again peoples incomes down there are quite small.



To go the 30 mile round trip from here to Manhattan by train is approaching 40 dollars (30.80 euros).
Don't you guys have some sort of monthly pass sort of deal, or even daily pass?


The bus system may be turned over to the state soon, which will mean massive service cuts and fare hikes as well.
Well in some place like Seoul, Korea, they have like 80 different private bus providers. These guys are freaking out as the metro expanded big time, cutting their profits. On top of that many of them go on the same routes, thus needlessly wasting money competing against one another...

Bus companies alone often can't make ends meet. Puting mass transit under public ownership is simply how things go. The only reason that mass transit started out as private endeavors was because nobody drove cars... it was simply extremely profitable.
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Post by Deltamatic »

Scarlet wrote:Supposedly the housing bust started the recession.
In a way. Clinton ordered Fannie May and Freddie Mack, partially government-owned banks, to give loans for houses to people with little cash and dismal credit records so that The Poor Can Have Houses. Then when those loans expired, of course they didn't pay up because they didn't have the money to. This left Fannie May and Freddie Mack with evaporated assets. Several major banks had loaned things to FM-FM and suddenly those assets evaporated or taken loans from FM-FM and suddenly they had to pay up. Then when those banks took a dive, minor banks who had loans with the major banks went down as well. The domino effect continued into companies and people, hence the recession.
Scarlet wrote:no regulation helped create these monotnous stupid entities that were created only for the purpose of promoting a developers profits.
Just like lots of other helpful things that happened without regulation, like light bulbs, rock music, and the internet.
Scarlet wrote:But, things like this are, http://blueroof.files.wordpress.com/2007/05/suburb.png
They're all the same type of house, but it's not revolting or anything.
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Post by Scarlet »

I don't think that you can compare lightbulbs and music with millions of jobs being shipped off...




That is not a matter of houses just being the same. There is a whole lot more to that. It's a sort of landscape where land use is segregated. You have to have a car in that kind of landscape. Congestion is insane in that landscape. It's an economic failure.
Here's just one example... on the left is the new suburb, and on the right is a more reasonable thing.
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And you tell me what is more economic... to have these winding roads with pods and cul-de-sacs... built thanks to no regulation... or this more reasonable thing.

Big corporations have only one thing in mind, and that is to squeeze out profits like they squeeze a melon. That's it really. Taken to the extreme (given a free hand) means that they will be destructive out of their own greed. They require regulation for the benefit of society. How much regulation - that can be debated, but giving them to do what they want unimpeded is outright ridiculous.
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Post by Genius314 »

If developers want to "squeeze out a profit," they'd go with the design on the right. You can fit a lot more houses into a rectangular shape than you can into a cul-de-sac.
The kind of street design on the left happened because that's what people wanted. There's plenty of people who don't want to live cramped right next to their neighbor, in a monotonous grid of city blocks.
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Post by Deltamatic »

I'd think traffic would be more of a problem with the option on the right. There are only ~two cars/house with people coming and going to and from their homes intermittently in the residential area as the only traffic in the left option, so it wouldn't get congested. But on the right option, there are constant stop signs or streetlights and because the residential area diffuses into the commercial area there's bound to be more commercial traffic. People often go on foot instead of using cars while in inner-city areas because the tight grid and lack of parking make it awful to drive a car in there.
Of course there has to be some regulation to prevent people from committing unethical acts. When I speak of deregulation, I don't mean that law and order should be suspended, but rather that harmful economic hindrances shouldn't be there.
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Post by Scarlet »

If developers want to "squeeze out a profit," they'd go with the design on the right. You can fit a lot more houses into a rectangular shape than you can into a cul-de-sac.
Tell that to the guys that made this, and the countless others who kept on repeating that. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levittown,_New_York

With rules such as minimum lot size and other things in place, high density is a dream. Plus few developers even bother to go into that. Until recently that is.


There's plenty of people who don't want to live cramped right next to their neighbor, in a monotonous grid of city blocks.
Corbusian towers have been rejected as a good thing, I thought?


d think traffic would be more of a problem with the option on the right.
First of, we can see that the routes are a lot shorter - hence saved resources. Less gas wasted. Less driving. Less traffic.
But there are other things too. Those winding streets - it makes it so that all people from that little pod converge onto the same exit at times of days... hence that is what creates more traffic.

The option on the right is the better one. That's not me saying it. It's academics.


But on the right option, there are constant stop signs or streetlights and because the residential area diffuses into the commercial area there's bound to be more commercial traffic.
There is no more or less commercial activity in either.


People often go on foot instead of using cars while in inner-city areas because the tight grid and lack of parking make it awful to drive a car in there.
In the inner city - at least in good inner cities - people take the subway/metro. But despite that, the car is still king of the road even in cities themselves.


Of course there has to be some regulation to prevent people from committing unethical acts. When I speak of deregulation, I don't mean that law and order should be suspended, but rather that harmful economic hindrances shouldn't be there.
That all depends on what one considers as an economic hindrance.

Unions are an economic hindrance. Organized labor man, that is a big nono.
Minimum wage - how dare the peasants dare want that?
Taxes? - we pay too much. Reagan removed major taxes, but it's never enough until it's all gone.
Theses are just some that come to mind. Anti-monopoly laws and other such stuff are also there.

So what's harm for one might not be harm for another, even in the case of child labor, or prison labor.
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Post by RoboBlue »

To be frank, I think the first diagram looks a bit silly, considering the only exit to the entire lower right quadrant is onto an interstate highway. No one would build a town THAT badly... property values would plummet.
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Post by KeenEmpire »

I will say something about capitalism in general: it compromises the open, or libre software movement.

A company that hires a programmer to do something has no incentive to release it to the world; in fact they have a disincentive if they think it might benefit its competitors in any tiny way.

Kudos to Microsoft's plan to disenfranchise their standards so that non-IE etc would be unable to read them.

The end result is setbacks. The functionality of a program is locked with a particular company, no one else can improve upon it, and the company probably doesn't have enough resources to fix it as much as it otherwise would be. Even if they did have (some) resources, they might not have incentive to do so (aka IE) for the longest time. After the initial capitalistic incentive to deliver the original product, the barriers to improvement start to become incredible and consumers are left trying to make their lives work with a crappy version that doesn't quite do what they want. Sound familiar?

I guess you could possibly say that the software vendors become mini-Socialist states, in that they start to have the sole say in how to invest into their software. And we all know how inefficient socialism is.
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Post by thehackercat »

On the cul-de-sac issue: We don't really have a problem with that here. There's some pretty weird turns and curves, but not any congestion. All the cul-de-sacs are serviced by one road which connects to the main city.

Public transportation is pretty much non-existent though. People tend to go on foot or on bikes in the inner-city.
Last edited by thehackercat on Tue Jan 28, 2020 0:33, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by Deltamatic »

@Scarlet: good points on the traffic. Although grids may be more efficient, I don't think suburbs should be discouraged. Yes it uses oil, but more oil can be drilled for a few decades before cars switch over to electric.
I think minimum wages are actually a bad thing, since when they're implemented companies with low-paid workers typically fire those workers leaving them out of work and without as many entry-level positions because other companies are doing the same thing. Their former jobs are then added to the duties of higher-paid workers. So it's bad for both the company and the worker to have an artificial minimum wage imposed on them.
Of course some form of taxation is necessary for maintaining government, and in that sense it isn't an economic hindrance because if government wasn't there the economy would degenerate due to lawlessness.
Anti-monopoly laws have tended not to find actual monopolies and deal with them, but rather to find successful businesses which are by definition not monopolies and then harm them thus harming the economy at large.
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Post by KeenEmpire »

Deltamatic wrote:successful businesses which are by definition not monopolies
Huh, how are successful businesses "by definition" not monopolies?

A successful business can become a monopoly by driving its competitors out of business. Subsequently, it can remain successful because it has no competitors.

Don't be so black and white. A business can become a monopoly by exploiting seemingly innocent capitalistic rules (cough cough that which will not be named) and then subsequently spurge development, ruining our quality of life.
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