• beigegull@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    It’s worth actually doing the comparisons to see whether car-centric living is a net positive or negative in practice in particular situations. Urban density should be a pure benefit, with economies of scale making everything cheaper. Unfortunately, cities in practice have some downsides that reduce that benefit. One major one is that centralizing services means that it’s more useful to try to get a cut of the cash flowing through the institution, and so some of the gains get siphoned off. As a trivial example, exactly zero percent of car commute expenses go to a bus driver’s union.

    • Lexi Sneptaur@pawb.social
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      1 year ago

      I understand you’re trying to be nuanced here. I think that realistically things are so very skewed toward suburban and exurban development, car centricity, that any movement toward urbanity is better at this point in time.

      • beigegull@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        It’s really bad to support specific policies just because they sound like a kind of policy that you broadly support. I personally broadly support pro-density policies. But many specific policies that are proposed either have fatal flaws or are useless as long as a century worth of accumulated NIMBY policies exist that super-redundantly ban the sort of density increase that would actually be useful.

        And to be clear, only allowing density increases without cars would be exactly the sort of nonsense restriction that would be a fatal flaw, at least in the US.

        • Lexi Sneptaur@pawb.social
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          1 year ago

          When I vote, I read up on the candidate’s positions. I make sure to do my research for decisions I make in the real world. When I’m on Lemmy? I’m going to stage a broad vague opinion because the level of nuance at play here is generally not attainable when not speaking about a specific local policy

          • beigegull@lemmy.world
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            1 year ago

            That discussion tactic results in groupthink to a level that even coherent positions on the broad issues get obscured by conformance to factional stereotypes.

            • Lexi Sneptaur@pawb.social
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              1 year ago

              I think if someone is that unable to think critically, my comments on Lemmy are not going to have much impact. You don’t need to throw a thesaurus at me either, friend. I assume everyone I talk to on here is at least as smart as me or smarter, no need to prove anything. :-)