From: Charles Hixson (charleshixsn@earthlink.net)
Date: Tue Feb 11 2003 - 16:55:49 MST
Rafal Smigrodzki wrote:
>Damien Broderick wrote:
>
>
>>Mike Lorrey said:
>>
>>
>>
>>>Successfully used public mass transit is a
>>>paramount sign of a mature and ingrained socialist society.
>>>
>>>
>>I dunno about that, but it sure makes life in Melbourne considerably
>>more comfortable and pleasant than it would be otherwise. New York,
>>too, for that matter.
>>
>>
>>
>### It would be interesting to find out if any New York-type cities were
>ever built *after* cars became widely available, in areas with sufficiently
>cheap land.
>
>As I said before, New York, and other high-density cities were formed by the
>logic of industrial and economical development in the age of the horse buggy
>and snail mail. They are the infrastructure from a bygone era, adapted to
>technologies of one hundred years ago, and can be best explored using
>antiquated methods of transport. However, suburbs are effects of the
>interaction between today's technological possibilities and innate human
>preferences.
>
>Tooby and Cosmides include an essay in the "Adapted Mind" about human
>esthetic preferences. Apparently, most humans prefer environments with the
>appropriate balance between being enclosed and having unobstructed view,
>environments which promise hiding places from predators, good lookouts, an
>element of mystery, appropriate seclusion and the right amount of closeness.
>While there are great interindividual differences, the teeming metropolis of
>the Industrial Age seems to violate our most cherished desires - for space,
>safety, greenery, and absence of noise. The flight into the suburbs is an
>expression of these desires, and was enabled first by the car, now even more
>so by the Internet.
>
>It is true that the metro makes New York less unbearable, but apparently,
>for many if not most people, a quiet, village-like settlement, with abundant
>greenery, large, quiet, comfortable houses, and easy access using narrow,
>meandering roads connected to high-speed highway networks and G-bit data
>lines, is what good Mother Nature made us for.
>
>Rafal
>
Well, San Francisco may not have been build after the car, but it
certainly grew to it's present size after the car. Currently there are
appearanly more cars than parking spaces in the city. Ouch! And this
considering that the city is served by BART, Busses, and Trains. It's
true that there was a period during the 1950's when cars were the vogue,
and the transit rails were ripped up. (Courtesy of lobbying via GM, by
the way.) Within a decade people were really regretting this.
OTOH, San Francisco sits on a peninsula, and occupies the entire tip.
It can't expand any direction but up. Perhaps anywhere that land
becomes valuable enough to justify skyscrapers can also justify mass
transit. This doesn't mean that it's always a good answer, but it
certainly isn't always a bad answer. In an effort to cut down cars
coming into the city, bridge tolls are only collected on the way in,
certain lanes of the highway are restricted to cars that have 3 or more
people, etc. These measures aren't enough. This isn't an argument that
mass transit is cheap (though sponsors of cars never seem to count the
cost of the roadways), but rather that autos don't fill the need.
Parking costs of $2 an hour don't keep the cars down to a useable level
(and private garages get that price).
Nobody can claim that cars aren't more desireable to each individual
than transit is. The $20 a day surcharge proves that (there are various
costs to the driver and the transit rider that I'm not listing, and this
is a very rough estimate). But even for that price the city can't
support them. It's true that the transit is subsidized, but not enough
to get enough of the people to ride it... (there's a problem here: if
you make it too cheap, then people don't think it's worth caring for,
and you get increased problems with vandalism of various sorts. So you
can't just use taxes on cars to subsidize the transit...besides, the car
drivers are still the large majority, and they wouldn't vote for it even
to make it possible to park.)
The result is that people who really NEED to use cars, salesmen, etc.
for example, are greatly hindered. This will probably lead eventually
to the development of cities based around each of the major surburbs.
E.g., San Jose and the Santa Clara Valley. But they are already showing
signs of heading the same way. The population is less, but the streets
are laid out. The major streets have already been widened, some of them
twice. The orchards have been gone for decades. And the air pollution
is already worse than San Francisco, because they are cut off from the
ocean breezes. And for some silly reason when they implemented their
local mass transit, they used a different gague of rail than the BART
system does. So it's impossible to make smooth connections between the
systems. The worst of both choices!
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