Something that bugs me to no end is how they say that roads are a massive drain of money (they aren't in fact are only a net positive in what they do) and then are hyper defensive if its proven without a shadow of a doubt that without generous subsidies that many public transit options are highly unprofitable. On it's own having public transit at an operating loss isn't the end of the world assuming its actually being used efficiently but usually its so empty that it's honestly tough to justify running it at its current capacity.
regardless I hate how that most of them are some form of online socialist saying costs don't matter for public transit when being beyond hyper-capitalist with roads no matter how beneficial they are towards the community in question.
The "hyper-capitalist" approach is only done when it benefits them, like "ackshually it creates more tax dollars if you put bughive apartments in every square inch of property". (No need to mention that you can't just plant apartments everywhere and expect them all to make money--I posted an article earlier about that).
There's a economic value to increased mobility, and social value in providing transport for short trips i.e. a Pregnant Mother, or a person who can walk limited distances(illness, disability, temp incapacitation) benefit from those short trips.
The issues is these hypocritical fuckwits count those as benefits against the costs for PT but don't for Car transport, yeah a 2 stop tram ride may not be worth driving+parking for the same distance, however a 10min drive and park would absolutely be worth it for someone of limited mobility, or having to go where tram/bus/train reach is poor because of time/cost/etc
That being said Congestion Tax is a smooth brain tax, it hurts the commuter service class(i.e. the people who actually do shit we need), needlessly increases costs for necessary trips, and is only ever proposed because economists are retards that only can factor in like 3 variables max, it can only work by pricing out people who would otherwise make those trips, as opposed to PT improvement which if done right should increase the total number of trips even if traffic remains the same(those that change mode replaced by those who couldn't justify the time/money cost previously).
I don't even understand why it's needed, I dunno about NYC but here City Traffic is massively down during the week and up something like 110% on weekends compared to pre-covid because of all the Work From Home people do now, which if NYC has had a similar change then it's further proof it was a smooth brain cash grab rather than actual problem, and they are just hurting the people who have to commute, which is classic bougie urbanist behaviour right there.
Trying to argue mass transit on the grounds of disabled people (and actually disabled people, not "muh spoons" disabled) isn't relevant because at the price of a mass transit you can just run dial-a-bus services or give out Uber vouchers.
The congestion pricing
was supposed to go to the MTA, but they made zero commitments or promises to actually improving the service (and if they did they certainly weren't legally binding). It would all go toward pensions or administration or "donation" or whatever. Therefore it's even more absurd to get mad over it, because even if you were some urbanist scum you would NEVER benefit from it and ONLY get hurt from it because now your beloved bodega has to jack up its prices because deliveries are now taxed even more.
Manhattanites love to brag about their variety of businesses, but most of them cater to commuters and can't be supported solely by the local residents. Remember, Manhattan is only a city of 1.6 million people but has a daytime population of four million; in other words, without the commuters it could only support around 40% of its current businesses. For comparison, the Jacksonville, Florida metro area has slightly more people than Manhattan. That's what the borough would look like without commuters.
I'm not sure how true it is but New York comes off as one of the most elitist U.S. cities of all time and incredibly spiteful to its commuter class (to the point where
they have pejorative slurs). They probably think that Macy's
runs a massively oversized store that they actually support it, and not the tourists who go to it
because it's not the comparatively dinky store at the local mall.
In other news at /r/fuckcars, there's some
crying over Cairo (
archive) replacing some
defunct tram lines with a wider highway.
This leads into some absurd theory (this isn't the first time I've heard this but probably hasn't been mentioned on this thread yet) that the current leader of Egypt, Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, is doing making Cairo more "car-centric" to shut down potential protesters. This is stupid for two reasons:
1. For almost all of human history, capital cities have made their streets wide and grandiose as reasonably possible. That's what all the European capitals did when they were running empires, and that's what Washington DC did because it was heavily influenced by Europe.
2. If you were designing a city to shut down protests, you'd want something that heavily on mass transit—just suspend service! You'd also want narrower streets and no gathering areas.
proof!
