@xmarksdaslop @criticalurban Ask the households without cars how awesome being broke is
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Fool Pitier
82 posts
@PitierOfFools @criticalurban yeah, ask the households about their +1000 dollar car payments and how awesome they are
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For people who don't like subsidies, this is a reminder that automobiles are the least subsidized form of transportation in America. Drivers have to pay for their own vehicles, fuel, insurance, and maintenance.
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@PitierOfFools @criticalurban you almost got it -- who do you think benefits most from NINETY PERCENT of households owning a car?
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@xmarksdaslop @criticalurban Over 90% of US households own a car, and the ones who don't are more likely to be poor. Poor people pay less taxes. And even then, they use busses, buy things, and otherwise benefit from the existence of roads.
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@PitierOfFools @criticalurban no one pays taxes but motorists?
who pays for the free parking?
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@xmarksdaslop @criticalurban Taxpayers, which is to say motorists.
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@TrashPanda08x What advantage do advantage do either of these trains have over a bus, other than being more expensive, and, in the case of the Mardi Gras, slower?
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Amtrak Borealis projected annual ridership: 125k
Actual ridership: 215k
Amtrak Mardi Gras projected annual ridership: 52k
Ridership 8 months into service: 100k
Don't let people tell you we "Don't need trains, no one would ride them"
daviss 📸@daviss
Not enough trains too many riders: "Rail ridership locally is surging. In fiscal year 2025, just under 200,000 travelers got on or off Amtrak trains at St. Paul’s Union Depot. That marked a 58% increase over the previous fiscal year and was the highest ridership in the Twin Cities by far in the past 15 years." startribune.com/as-ridership-s…
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@Truthful_ast If highways don't solve problems why are they congested?
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Never take anyone serious who complains about spending on spaceflight when the US has done this with the interstate system just for it to solve absolutely no traffic problems, cause more congestion, and pocket money to contractors
Fin Moorhouse@finmoorhouse
The hyperscalers have already outspent the most famous US megaprojects
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@ApoStructura Private capital is enthusiastic about data centers because they anticipate making money with them, not because they just want to have something to build.
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Now imagine if it were legally as easy to build a private railroad as it is to build a private datacenter.
There would be rail lines paid for by private capital being built between every major city.
Fin Moorhouse@finmoorhouse
The hyperscalers have already outspent the most famous US megaprojects
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@the_transit_guy Nobody talks about the efficiency of road spending because everyone knows it's much higher than the only alternative.
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This country spends hundreds of billions on roads and highways annually, yet almost no one asks if that money is spent efficiently; and yet, everyone becomes a forensic accountant when it comes to transit
MaplehoodUnited@MaplehoodUnited
Reminder that MNDoT is giving Rochester $65M of the $93M for an interchange at this section of Hwy 14 that sees 2k vehicles crossing at 60th per day while the metro governments squabble for $93M for transit, roads, and bridges and face a $40M cut to transit funding.
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@EricEatsPickles How come Amtrak and public transit have such abysmal ridership when the Law of Induced Demand says they should be jam-packed with mystery people who spawn in to fill the excess capacity?
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A Department of Transport doing the meme, like they always do...
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@TheCityMentor It may be ugly but I don't see how you could call that "out of scale."
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Residents of Florence are not amused with the newest International Style building in the historic city
Jack T. Bernhard@jacktbernhard
Jail sentences required 👩⚖️ „Florence flats so ugly they’ve triggered a police investigation Prosecutors question 12 people after brutal black cube is built alongside elegant Renaissance architecture“ @michael_diamant telegraph.co.uk/world-news/202…
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@simonsarris The same people who say you'll go bankrupt if you don't maximize tax revenue per foot of sewer pipe will tell you that it's not only OK, but actively good to run a public transit system at a massive loss.
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I used to believe this but then you run the numbers and you find out that in practice its not true at all. The most dense cities in the US have *higher*, not lower, municipal spend per person. There's basically an inverse to cost savings in practice.
Andrew Swirsky - Water Data & Technology@Andrew_Swirsky
I seem to have found similar goals with others on X with @bobbyfijan and @YIMBYLAND Not really for the same reasons but on the water infrastructure side. You may think that the image on the left is the cheapest to build and maintain...it's not. Well, at least not per household. In low density each household has to proportionally pay for the pavement, utilities, hydrants, valves, etc to service their home. That can be anywhere from 100-200 linear feet per home for a typical subdivision. In medium density you have to upsize waterlines from 8" to 12"...maybe even 16". But the linear feet per household is much lower. Maybe even down to 10-20 linear feet per household. So you have double the cost of infrastructure but 10x the people to pay for it. Then in high density, all the infrastructure sizes double underground (24" and 36" waterlines) but the density increases to as low as 3-5 linear feet per household...maybe even lower. Another 2x cost in infrastructure but 3-4x in people to pay for it. If we want to make America affordable again we have to stop the suburban sprawl and find a way to get our cities denser, safer, cleaner. Then our kids can afford better lifestyles than us which is the goal of every great parent.
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@bonchieredstate I wouldn't mind if the current president took them down.
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Does it make me a lib if I want the next president to take these ugly gold appointments and hotel signage down?
Jon Michael Raasch@JMRaasch
The Rose Garden has some new signage
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@RokoMijic How is that supposed to be a whitepill anyway, it just makes them better per capita.
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@simongerman600 In 1960 we only had sparkling wine, as it was impossible to grow grapes in the Champagne region of France.
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Many of the European regions that are suitable for wine-growing in 2025 weren't so in 1960. Rising temperatures will continue to shift these growing regions.
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@atlanticesque The only reason trains don't bring development is that no one uses them.
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Railroads uniquely enable cross-country transportation without disrupting the countryside.
Highways, even at their best, are wider, louder, and carry with them obligate development (gas stations, truck stops…)
Rail is how to connect towns without ruining everything in between.
.@___haikus___
@atlanticesque Moscow is insane in the way that it’s the largest city in Europe but then it’s just surrounded by huge forests - I think about the time I took a train from there to St Peter. And between these huge cities it was just tiny nothing towns and forest.
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@CompletedStreet Perhaps the most irrelevant comparison I've ever seen. Why don't you compare it to a patch of farmland, or a piece of the Moon? That could also be the same size!
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Same size, but one has 30,000 tax paying citizens living in a walkable small city, and the other carries speeding cars that often crash and kill people.
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@MorlockP In the past there were of course buildings which were ugly as a consequence of being built cheaply. This does not justify modern architects in designing buildings which are ugly despite being expensive.
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5/
The photos of prestige buildings in the fancy part of cities in 1900 look great.
You're doing selection bias again though.
You're not looking at the raw data.
Here, enjoy some pictures of NY c. 1880-1920
x.com/PitierOfFools/…
Fool Pitier@PitierOfFools
@MorlockP This is cope. We have photos of e.g. 1900 cities, and we can see that the buildings which have been knocked down looked largely the same as the buildings which survived.
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this is a point I make all the time
19 year old extremely online trad LARPers: "all of the old buildings are beautiful but today we build crap"
wait, you're telling me that the buildings that survived 200-500 years of winnowing are better than average !?!?
Tamara Winter@tamarawinter
Separately, we only see the best of what was curated from previous decades (there was plenty of bad art, architecture, etc in the 70s!), whereas we see everything made today…and most of it is bad.
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@MorlockP This is cope. We have photos of e.g. 1900 cities, and we can see that the buildings which have been knocked down looked largely the same as the buildings which survived.
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@YIMBYLAND It looks like most of the buildings which were knocked down weren't in the path of the highway at all. I guess those property owners just hated money or something.
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US cities weren’t built for the car.
They were destroyed for it.
Dion@2024dion
It’s depressing to drive through the Kansas City freeway loop and think about all the irreplaceable urban fabric that was destroyed to build it
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@woke8yearold That's because when it's in the middle of nowhere you forget that you should be comparing it to a building in a different style and not to an empty lot.
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