Anon questions modern society

Just one more lane bro

Classic: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/0dKrUE_O0VE
The Katy cost a mere $7 billion and it's still often a glorified parking lot. It's got less throughput than a single train for moving people, but I'm sure adding another lane will fix it. https://www.youtube.com/shorts/o-F-7Yc-A8U
- Love this reply

I used to just think of this as yeah sure things are just bigger in America, it's a huge place with lots of people... but then I realized that the cities with ridiculous numbers of lanes like this aren't any bigger than cities in the rest of the world. Houston (pictured) isn't even in the Top 200 biggest world cities.

I've looked it up and the Katy Freeway on the picture has an average of 219 000 vehiclra using it per day. Let's be very generous and assume an average of 1.5 person in each car, so around 329 000 people are moved each day thanks to this highway.
A single metro line or two tramway line moves more people per day than that.
- Its crazy. At its widest it has 26 lanes. It amazes me that they just kept widening it, instead of thinking "We've added 5 lanes, we should probably find an alternative solution".
Yep, just look at Tokyo.
- people argue that japan has an easier time doing public transport because it's a slim island that's roughly linear from north to south, so it's easy to serve it by one public transport line.
  But the same is true for the US, where most people live either on the east coast or on the west coast. You basically have two slim, linear areas that can be served by 1 line of public transport each.
It's sprawl. Building up costs too much via some combination of building taxes, NIMBYs, and construction overhead, so people build out instead. Building out means more and more miles of infrastructure (Roads, water, electric, natural gas, signs, gas stations, etc., etc.) per capita.
Then when the people in the sprawled-out suburbs want to visit the city centers anyway, because that's where jobs and shopping inevitably are (People live where people live), they have to build massive roads to get in and out.
I have never been on a road like the one in the picture.
I’d have a nervous breakdown.
There are 29 countries in America that aren't like this. It's really just the USA.
- The built-up parts of Canada are about as bad.

"Can I sit in the recliner at work?"

"No. You have to leave it outside so that poor people can't have apartments there."

Unless you're poor, then it's also your apartment
- But don't let us catch you using it as one, that's illegal.

How did this happen?

Convenience and Capitalism, what a wild duet!

It's ALWAYS capitalism, people STILL don't get this (I can't blame them they got propagandized into believing capitalism is the holy economy or some stupid shit)
- “Just a little more neoliberalism, bro, I swear we’ll usher in an era of prosperity if we just do it harder”
And it’s not even convenient…unless you purposefully destroy existing infrastructure and aggressively promote individualism in your society such that nobody has any other real choice! Walking distance? Never heard of her.
- Yeah whats actually convenient is being able to step out your home, jump into the tram, read the newspaper for 15 minutes, jump out and have teleported to work.
Well now it's fascism
- Fascism is capitalism in decline.
Trains are much more convenient.
This one is fully on capitalism.
- Trains are convenient until you want to go somewhere without rails :( which I guess could be solved with more rails...
I mean, the answer is in the line right above the question.

It's the bike lanes! 😡 /s

STAY IN THE BIKE LANE !!
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NPDXmtnLcak
Invidious: https://invidious.nerdvpn.de/watch?v=NPDXmtnLcak

My vehicle is also air conditioned, but weighs 1000 tons and has 2000hp and hundreds of couches:

Seethe in jealousy, non-Europeans!

Seethe in jealousy, non-Brits!
Still a subscription. Not quite to big oil, though.
- Yeah, but at least it doesn't carry the same environmental cost.
- Nope, no subscription. Check in, check out, pay as you go. https://www.sbb.ch/en/travel-information/apps/sbb-mobile/easyride.html
[哈哈哈/하하하/ははは]

Linking the page for my favorite hair pulling topic on traffic: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Induced_demand

By hyper subsidizing car road infrastructure we make it almost impossible to use anything else and competing infrastructure (trains, planes, seperated bus traffic) appears more expensive by contrast forcing more people to use cars.

Also the plot of Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988) if I recall correctly.
- Fascinating! Seems I have to thank the artists of my past for my supplemental progressive education.

Capitalism. That's how that happened. They shaped the world in such a way as to sell more stuff. In this case cars.

Car-dependent development was the workaround that government officials devised to keep housing segregation in effect after the Supreme Court ruled it illegal. If one needed a car to get around those new subdivisons, poor people couldn't live there. If Black people were largely poor, and if government programs like the GI Bill were denied to Black people, well, that wasn't a segregation law, so it wasn't illegal, right?
Subsidizing the white middle class with government money so that they could afford to buy cars happened to work well for the capitalists, too.
(By the way, this isn't a conspiracy theory. The people doing it weren't shy, and left explicit, written records of their racist intent.)
This isn't entirely the case, but the reality is actually no different. Long story short, a major reason that most of the US interstate freeways exist and have been built the way they have been is because they will stand up to moving heavy machines, like tanks. There's long strips of straight Highway that can be used as runways.
The highway system was built so that in the event of a civil war, domestic uprising, or invasion, the military could more or less operate very adequately anywhere with a decent stretch of highway available, and some way to get there.
Until then, automobiles rarely had to travel very far each day, and couldn't really run any faster than a few dozen miles an hour, partly because of the challenges of the terrain.
Automotive companies then took advantage of the newly built infrastructure and sold faster vehicles that could drive farther....
So blame who you want, but it was a joint effort between the civilian government, military industrial complex, and capitalistic automotive manufacturers, that drove (pun intended) us to where we are now.
- I have my doubts that military considerations were anything but a ruse to help sell the nation on the cost. That claim feels a lot like an utban legend, with embellishments like the design accommodating aircraft landings. The contemporary source material from the people supporting it cited the economic benefits mostly. As well, the military voiced support for the system, but the Secretary of Defense was Charles Erwin Wilson. He had been CEO of General Motors before taking office. At his confirmation hearing, he could see no conflict of interest. It was there that he uttered that famous quote, "What's good for General Motors is good for America."
  The capitalist automotive companies had captured the military industrial complex, so I think maybe there's a slight possibilty that the latter's support for something that benefitted the former so immensely may not have been wholly genuine.
- There's more to it. While the military bought in on it, the industries were the major pushers. Many towns had tram cars or cable cars (if you've ever been to San Fran, you've probably ridden these) but were bought and dismantled up by a then illegal collusion between like GM, Firestone, and oil companies a bit over 75 years ago and the legal cases lasted another 25 years.
  There is a famous antitrust case on this: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_streetcar_conspiracy
  Unfortunately this has resulted in such a profound malinvestment in public resources that it has turned a majority of the US into giant open paved areas: dangerous to kids, prohibitive of other small traffic, causes drainage problems, sun/wind exposure, urban sprawl, housing issues, huge parking lots, etc.
They?
Everybody wants pleasure and security.
The kaijus are just the really successful ones.

America has LUNGS and ARTERIES whereas
Europe has mere wimpy BRONCHIOLES and CAPILLARIES

Those arteries are pretty congested, cars are ld cholesterol, trains are hd cholesterol, and we are eating a diet of trans fat up in here.
- America, fuck yeah
- Nothing a triple bypass and a meat king supreme can't fix

Modern American society, mind you

Even though the USA is clearly the worst, still almost all countries have about twice as many people driving as taking other forms of transit, and in many more, the majority. So the image applies to the majority of people in most countries.
- Even the Netherlands. poster child of biking 😔
- And for most of the countries that don't have a lot of cars, it's not because they've decided to invest in public transit and bike lanes, it's that people are poor and can't yet afford cars. Like, India and Brazil aren't places where people love public transit, they're poor.
  What happened to China is likely going to happen to them as they get richer. Even if the world switches over to electric vehicles that's still vast resources plowed into massively inefficient sofas on wheels.
- I wish the statistic include motorcycle/moped, then show the statistic from Asian country like Taiwan or Philippines or Malaysia, car and motorcycle have equal share on the road yet it still a fucking mess here(at least in Malaysia).
- Very anecdotal so feel free to disregard, but I've traveled across the whole Europe and haven't seen anything like that in the picture.
  Maybe the closest thing was a toll gateway somewhere in France where road widened up to about 20 booths. But then it immediately narrowed back to three.
- If you add up the India bars, you're quite far away from 100 % still... Mass NEET is the answer I guess.
- almost all countries have about twice as many people driving
  No country except the US, according to your own graphic. 67% or more of "Own car" is the criterion.
  Unless, of course, by "driving" you also mean motorbikes, boats etc. and there's a sizable portion of these in some countries. The graphic doesn't show that.
American society is 99% in on it, but many other places are trying to go there too.
- We're mostly going the other way in Western Europe
  Not particularly quickly in most places, mind, but we're heading in the right direction on that at least
Modern US American society, mind you.

Everybody wants a back yard, nobody wants buses or trains

I don't want a back yard. What I want is the noise isolation and the feeling of safety and personal space. I also like having the ability to use that space for personal projects if I want to.
I have seen condos and other urban spaces that are well-built enough to provide the same benefits that I see from a back yard. But they're very expensive.
My basic point is that people sometimes forget what they really want, and instead focus on something that has given them those benefits.
Busses work perfectly well for suburban neighbourhoods with back yards. With 1000m² each, you can place more than 250 lots around a bus stop, so that no one will have to walk more than 500m. With average families of four, that's a thousand potential passengers. Not enough for a metro station, but more than enough for a bus service every 10-20 minutes to get to the next train station.
What also works well: Build a few 3 story apartment buildings, a supermarket, a few small stores, a school, a kindergarten and a pub around a train station. Build the single family homes around that infrastructure and you have the perfect place for almost everyone. Families can live in the outer area, when the kids get older they can move out into the apartments and still be around. When they start their own family they move back into the garden homes and the grandparents who get too old to work their gardens can move to the apartments. And all that within 15 minutes walking distance of a train station.
- And all that within 15 minutes walking distance of a train station.
- My neighborhood used to have three bus lines. I think it's down to one, and we recently put in the laziest bike lanes. (Painting a bicycle in the hard shoulder is not sufficient!)
- ...no one will have to walk more than 500m.
  Well I would walk 500m.
I wouldn't mind living in an apartment building, so long as it's equally co-owned by the people who live in it, and by nobody who doesn't. And that it has a green space on the property for recreation and a community garden.
I don't want a backyard, I want a park within walking distance.
I don't want an expensive hunk of steel and plastic, I want a train that picks up every ten minutes.
I know a large number of people who feel the same way. But none of them have billions of dollars to lobby my mayor or governor or President. Hell, even when we do get a bit of outright bribery to bend things our way, a single petty asshole can foul the whole project.
I have both (not so much on the train front unfortunately).

It's my comfort box. Everyone is subject to my comfort box.

I can have the comfort box with the high end everything or the misery box that mostly functions as I'm broiled alive sitting in traffic. But we're all stuck on the same Turnpike together. It isn't as though I have an alternative to the twelve lane interchange.
- I'm gonna go for the ok-ish comfort box that was kinda cheap and missing fancier new bits but was kinda decent when it came out just kinda old now and somehow mostly still works
https://youtu.be/T6fO3xYJR30 it's my Cadillac Hour

That's a lot of lanes. I've never been anywhere more than like, 10 wide and that's counting both ways, and that's in the city.

Looks like Houston TX to me. Horrible experience there, they are allergic to public transportation and sidewalks.
- I once had to visit a client in Dallas and noticed their office was right next to a hotel, so I booked myself in there expecting to be able to just cross the relatively small side road on foot. NOPE.
  Even doing it in the car was close to a half mile round trip if I followed all the rules of the road.
I hear if they just added one more all problems would be solved.

What if we made two separate sections that you could add or remove? Even better, let's add a special vehicle to the front, with a trained driver. To aid the driver; rails. Oh, more people want to join? Let's add a hitch system to the front and back of each "car" so we can add as many as we want.

Why did my brain go to motorcycle sidecar when you said a separate section you can remove? But yeah trains are the correct solution, this is coming from someone who loves his 01 Tacoma.
- Yo, not bad.
  Check it; double rail.. side by side connectable trains. Somehow.

We all now how

Our entire continent has been given almost wholey over to the automobile, and despite it being a wasteful, ultra expensive, and inefficient way of transporting people and goods, because of entrenched interests we cannot well improve on it with even interstate freight and passenger rail being opposed by oil companies and car companies and probably Road repair companies and everyone else.

A real popular government would rally the population to overcome those entrenched interests and make a viable Interstate freight and passenger rail, it will not get any easier in time and it has to be done.

It would be a proper use of borrowed money as it would pay for itself many times over and lower the cost of living and doing business and make the us more competitive.

Without needing automobiles we could have higher standards of living with vastly lower expenditures.

This biggest argument i see is people somehow think things like transit will remove their freedom of mobility, when in reality it vastly improves mobility, especially for those who can't or don't want to drive.
- My grandmother was trapped inside her house for years at the end of her life. All she could do was wait for people to visit her because she couldn't drive.
  When I lived in a small city in Japan, if I went out during the day, there were ancient people all over the place who had taken the bus into town.
  Anybody who would say that the American way of throwing elderly people to the wolves is better... Well, anyone who says that is just an inhuman monster, aren't they?
- It blows Americans minds when they hear about how people go skiing in Switzerland, taking public transit from their front door to the foot of the ski hills.
  On the way back, they can warm up with a gluhwein before taking public transit back. No worries about driving drunk since they're not driving.
- "Cars are freedom!" ... so long as you register it with the government, insure it with a private insurance company, carry a photo ID from the government. Where a train you just pay and get on, or a bike you just ride.
- Relying on the automobile has made us exceptionally vulnerable. At any time our only means of achieving an income can be removed. We spend magnitudes more money than we could otherwise and everything from building infrastructure to support so many cars everywhere, to the cost of cars and repairs, too the ability of others to take that away from us at a moment's notice.
  With designed cities we could have housing on a direct line to our business sectors on a public transit, which would free up a substantial portion of our income, while if the housing was constructed intelligently and fairly we would free up the better part of half of our costs to live.
  Also remote work could Free People from the commuting nightmare in White Collar work.

I'm happy to never see wherever the fuck that is.

Houston

When you look at old cars, they were simple. Small, just enough power to get around. SUVs are monstrosities that shouldn't exist.

Old car:
- See, that's art.
  Wildly unsafe for those inside, but art doesn't have to be practical.
- I love the look of older vehicles. I even want a few. I just don't want to have to drive them anywhere. I'll be content with a few bikes and a nearby train station.
- I mean it's pretty long and probably not great on gas mileage, but hey, it's dead simple.
- Hey found the guy that can point out the exceptions. How hard can I roll my eyes.

With all those luxuries, why not just live in this thing and avoid rent?

Many people do sadly

Hey at least you also wind up doing your job mostly over the Internet with people that aren't anywhere near your office when you get there.

How is that picture 1200x0, but I can see it?

Edit:oh wait they just named it that. I'm not always smart.

A good music video if you want to feel bad about the Manifest Destiny we've been doing to nature.

If you take that exit and then a right at the light, you have one of the narrowest and most faded bike lanes around (assuming they haven't fixed it yet)!

There was a brief moment when one nation was so wealthy that everyone could afford that.

Only in US

TIL Australia doesn't exist.
Canada too. Europe was adopting it, but their Continent is already too population dense for the ponzi scheme of car centric design to really take off.
"Cars" were the "superior" invention to rail, so wide spread adoption was attempted in most places.
Pretty sure car centric design is everywhere.
- not to the same degree everywhere, most European cities do have plenty of infrastructure for cars, but also plenty for public transport; I live in a city where it's possible to get everywhere without a car, which is why I don't own one