What solution would you recommend for them? Oh, that's right - "fuck them", because they live in a rural area, and thus they're shit. They and the tens of millions of people in exactly their situation across the nation. Fuck them all.
No, it's more 'fuck them' because their lives are reliant upon a low cost fuel source which is not sustainable in the medium to long term. Barring the creation of an useable fusion reactor and improved electrical cars/battery technology, anyhow.
Their lifestyle has been sustainable for hundreds of years, and has accomodated technology and fuel changes over that span. I'm not sure why suddenly, now, their lifestyle is invalid. You could at least have sent them a memo or something. "You should have known that we were going to artificially make your lifestyle invalid. Fuck you."
Their lifestyle during those hundreds of years did not involve commuting to other towns every morning, so...how is the rural lifestyle now comparable to the rural lifestyle then for you to claim they are both equally sustainable/regenerative?
That is maybe the biggest load of utter and complete BULLSHIT I have read on these boards.
Their lifestyle hasn't been sustainable for several decades without the government giving them welfare.
Not all rural people are farmers of goods that are subsidized by the government. Non-subsidized farmers, factory workers, miners, etc. all work jobs, that for a variety of reasons, exist outside of the city and no one wants to move into the city (no farmland, no mines, this factory smells like ass). Why are you so reluctant to try to find any sort of compromise on this issue?
Another problem with the plan of forcing people into cities through increased gas tax that I haven't seen mentioned here (but I may have missed it) is the further increase in the cost of city living it would cause. People live outside the city because it is cheaper. Your plan involves forcing people into the cities. This would further increase the demand for habitable space in the cities, which would drive the cost way way way up.
So instead of picking between paying $3/gallon for the commute, or buying a smaller place to live in for three times the price, people would be choosing between a $6/gallon commute, or a smaller place to live that costs five or six times as much, because of the increased demand your gas tax has caused. Really, it'd just make poor people poorer.
Yeah, maybe if prices remained constant for property in the cities, the gas tax would work. But the increased demand on property it would cause would more than offset that.
I demand that all farmers who grow corn and sell it to an ethanol facility purchase ethanol fuel cars and tractors! Time to practice what you preach bitches!
All cars use E-15. E-85 could become a new standard if Detroit (and Japan, &c.) would spend the extra couple hundred bucks on improved tubing and tanks. Even then it likely wouldn't since ethanol isn't all that great of a solution, but it can help to some extent. As for tractors...do you have any idea how much a John Deere costs? Getting a new car for shits and giggles is hard enough on most salaries, let alone one of those behemoths.
No shit. The kind of tractors superfarms use cost upwards of $750,000 each.
I myself just bought a mid-80's low-hour (tractors are guaged in hours, not miles, for the ignorant) mid-range Deere for more than what most cars cost today. On the other hand, I finally have a roof/closed-in cab and air conditioning! Unfortunately the cassette player ate my only cassette - Jimmy Buffet's Greatest Hits. All was not well in Margaritaville.
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ElJeffeRoaming the streets, waving his mod gun around.Moderator, ClubPAMod Emeritus
They could get a job closer to them. They could just suck it up.
Yes, I'm sure that my hospital administrator mother-in-law can find plenty of employment opportunities amidst the 30 miles of fields in between Orland and Chico. Because, you know, lettuce needs health care too.
How about instead of artificially spiking gas prices and immediately fucking people in the ass all across the nation in devestating ways, we let a more gradual force - say, for example, a market force handle things instead?
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I submitted an entry to Lego Ideas, and if 10,000 people support me, it'll be turned into an actual Lego set!If you'd like to see and support my submission, follow this link.
I demand that all farmers who grow corn and sell it to an ethanol facility purchase ethanol fuel cars and tractors! Time to practice what you preach bitches!
All cars use E-15. E-85 could become a new standard if Detroit (and Japan, &c.) would spend the extra couple hundred bucks on improved tubing and tanks. Even then it likely wouldn't since ethanol isn't all that great of a solution, but it can help to some extent. As for tractors...do you have any idea how much a John Deere costs? Getting a new car for shits and giggles is hard enough on most salaries, let alone one of those behemoths.
Corn ethanol sucks. We only hear so much about it because of how early Iowa is in the primaries. Sugar ethanol is better, and Brazil has their automotive industry set up around using it, so getting high ethanol cars is something that requires infrastructure rather than research.
And whatever you do, don't do whatever this draconian taxing business you are talking about too quickly. If it isn't phased very slowly then the economy will take severe damage from it, as people won't have time or be able to afford all these lifestyle changes you are talking about. You can't just magically have people stop living in rural or suburban areas, and if you try to with this then the prices of housing in the urban areas will skyrocket until the system can no longer handle it and collapse. Just saying "fuck'em" won't do you any good, because there will be one hell of a backlash.
That is maybe the biggest load of utter and complete BULLSHIT I have read on these boards.
Their lifestyle hasn't been sustainable for several decades without the government giving them welfare.
Not all rural people are farmers of goods that are subsidized by the government. Non-subsidized farmers, factory workers, miners, etc. all work jobs, that for a variety of reasons, exist outside of the city and no one wants to move into the city (no farmland, no mines, this factory smells like ass). Why are you so reluctant to try to find any sort of compromise on this issue?
Mining and factory work, by their very nature, are highly amenable to car-pooling.
Another problem with the plan of forcing people into cities through increased gas tax that I haven't seen mentioned here (but I may have missed it) is the further increase in the cost of city living it would cause. People live outside the city because it is cheaper. Your plan involves forcing people into the cities. This would further increase the demand for habitable space in the cities, which would drive the cost way way way up.
Gentrification does not increase slum development or influence overall property taxes much in situations when it is federated rather than eating up super-blocks at a time. The overall increase in cost of living would be relatively low given the trickle of people moving in rather than a cascade and the capability of the market to increase population density as demand required. Also, the savings of not filling your tank weekly would carry over to the increased cost of living.
In other words, it's cheaper to live in the city than it is to pave over new land when you do it right. People tend not to do it right which is why you get neighborhoods being uprooted for new breeds of yuppies to have 'authentic' lofts.
I wonder how long it will be before everyone realizes that there is no solution to global warming/peak oil that doesn't involve fucking someone over. Like it or not a very large group of people, pretty much everyone in fact, is going to have to suffer in some way if we want to make any real effort to solve the problems associated with fossil fuels.
Also I really doubt that increased gas tax would prove to be an effective solution. It would just piss everyone off until the next election.
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ElJeffeRoaming the streets, waving his mod gun around.Moderator, ClubPAMod Emeritus
Is that thread supposed to deal with farmers/farm subsidies specifically, or anybody in the US who doesn't live in a metro area of at least 500,000?
Wait, there's a difference?
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I submitted an entry to Lego Ideas, and if 10,000 people support me, it'll be turned into an actual Lego set!If you'd like to see and support my submission, follow this link.
They could get a job closer to them. They could just suck it up.
Yes, I'm sure that my hospital administrator mother-in-law can find plenty of employment opportunities amidst the 30 miles of fields in between Orland and Chico. Because, you know, lettuce needs health care too.
How about instead of artificially spiking gas prices and immediately fucking people in the ass all across the nation in devestating ways, we let a more gradual force - say, for example, a market force handle things instead?
This "market force" you speak of, does it come in green?
I wonder how long it will be before everyone realizes that there is no solution to global warming/peak oil that doesn't involve fucking someone over. Like it or not a very large group of people, pretty much everyone in fact, is going to have to suffer in some way if we want to make any real effort to solve the problems associated with fossil fuels.
Pretty much. The problem I have with this whole "just tax gas olol" idea is that it doesn't exactly spread that suffering evenly. People who live in metro areas get better, faster, and cheaper public transit, and people who live between the coasts get the giant sword-dildo from Seven shoved up their ass.
Super.
Also I really doubt that increased gas tax would prove to be an effective solution.
Especially not in the absence of a large number of other measures, none of which are likely to happen.
They could get a job closer to them. They could just suck it up.
Yes, I'm sure that my hospital administrator mother-in-law can find plenty of employment opportunities amidst the 30 miles of fields in between Orland and Chico. Because, you know, lettuce needs health care too.
How about instead of artificially spiking gas prices and immediately fucking people in the ass all across the nation in devestating ways, we let a more gradual force - say, for example, a market force handle things instead?
This "market force" you speak of, does it come in green?
Renewables research is getting the brunt of venture capital being invested in it for the last 5 years or so. The money being used is mainly green. (thanks a lot, US Treasury and your fruity dyes)
Another problem with the plan of forcing people into cities through increased gas tax that I haven't seen mentioned here (but I may have missed it) is the further increase in the cost of city living it would cause. People live outside the city because it is cheaper. Your plan involves forcing people into the cities. This would further increase the demand for habitable space in the cities, which would drive the cost way way way up.
Gentrification does not increase slum development or influence overall property taxes much in situations when it is federated rather than eating up super-blocks at a time. The overall increase in cost of living would be relatively low given the trickle of people moving in rather than a cascade and the capability of the market to increase population density as demand required. Also, the savings of not filling your tank weekly would carry over to the increased cost of living.
In other words, it's cheaper to live in the city than it is to pave over new land when you do it right. People tend not to do it right which is why you get neighborhoods being uprooted for new breeds of yuppies to have 'authentic' lofts.
The entire point of Than's plan is to move everyone from the burbs to the city. You're saying millions of people moving into cities is not going to drive up demand, increasing the cost of apartments and houses greatly?
Another problem with the plan of forcing people into cities through increased gas tax that I haven't seen mentioned here (but I may have missed it) is the further increase in the cost of city living it would cause. People live outside the city because it is cheaper. Your plan involves forcing people into the cities. This would further increase the demand for habitable space in the cities, which would drive the cost way way way up.
Gentrification does not increase slum development or influence overall property taxes much in situations when it is federated rather than eating up super-blocks at a time. The overall increase in cost of living would be relatively low given the trickle of people moving in rather than a cascade and the capability of the market to increase population density as demand required. Also, the savings of not filling your tank weekly would carry over to the increased cost of living.
In other words, it's cheaper to live in the city than it is to pave over new land when you do it right. People tend not to do it right which is why you get neighborhoods being uprooted for new breeds of yuppies to have 'authentic' lofts.
Uh...have you been paying attention to the real estate market AT ALL recently? There's been a massive bubble in housing prices, where the excessive prices were sustained only by people making a lot of money out of the price hikes. Urban housing is prohibitively expensive for many people. It's only recently that the bottom has been falling out of it with the collapse of subprime mortgages. The effect of this collapse is wide reaching, it impacts other parts of the economy since home equity loans are going to start drying up, and the financial and law enforcement system is going to have to deal with a lot of forclosures and squatters.
Forcing people to live in urban areas through rapid draconian taxing will be like this but worse. Inflation will be the name of the game, as prices for urban housing will skyrocket as well as many other goods with the cost of fuel. This stuff is already happening without pushing even harder on the energy costs. And, in case you didn't know, a lot of inflation is a very bad thing.
Uh...have you been paying attention to the real estate market AT ALL recently? There's been a massive bubble in housing prices, where the excessive prices were sustained only by people making a lot of money out of the price hikes. Urban housing is prohibitively expensive for many people.
If you want to live in the heart of downtown, yeah. You do realize that cities encompass counties, not just the dozen or so skyscrapers that make up its skyline, right?
If it were so prohibitively expensive, please explain the current upswing in gentrification towards middle-upper middle income housing in huge swaths. Never mind the fact that it is this scale of centralized gentrification which is upping the price above what it would otherwise be if it were more federated. Also, many of the older buildings that are being torn down strictly to be able to demand higher prices/remodelled to increase square footage per condo increasing the margins don't need to be and are easily inhabitable, and at a fairly low price due to their age. Hell, Marina City is fairly affordable due solely to its age even though it's in the heart of downtown Chicago. Calatrava's Spire is a few blocks away and the cost per condo difference is likely going to be over an order of magnitude.
Dead, noone is saying that the full tax amount should be applied thursday. Even if that were the case it wouldn't cause a flooding of people moving into the city all at once. It would lead to increased Metra ridership, car-pooling, and some people deciding to get a home closer to downtown/their work.
Another related question, how many people that are convinced it is horribly inconvenient have tried it at all? For more than a week?
I take the bus 4 days a week even though it's horribly inconvenient (40+ minutes vs 5 minutes driving).
On one hand it takes forever because so few people take the bus and there's so much traffic in LA. On the other hand if everyone took the bus it would still take forever because it'd be stopping every 2 minutes to on/off-load passengers. If you try to counter that by having fewer stops, then traffic goes back up because people have to drive to the stops. And the buses need gas too - $5/gallon isn't going to help them out any.
In the early 80s LA cut fares drastically and ended up with more people on public transit than Chicago. Everyone complained, including the bus riders - too overcrowded, people were getting robbed, etc. They ended up increasing the fares to get people off the bus and have continued that way ever since, to the point where LA's about to raise fares to $120/month on a rider population with an average family income of $12,000. If they don't get the hike approved, they're cutting service by 1/3. Meanwhile, it costs over $1 billion to drill 5 miles of tunnel because no one who backs light-rail in this town wants it going through or over their neck of the woods.
So that, combined with mandatory car insurance ("I'm paying for the car anyways, so I might as well use it), will drive more people off public transit.
LA has a horrid public transit system. Which is kind of funny (also, sad) given that it has as good a population density as London which has a pretty good one. There are ways around the drawbacks to busses that you described, but none of them would be implemented so I won't go into it. Check out Curitiba's transit system if you're interested, although scale it back a hell of a lot.
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FencingsaxIt is difficult to get a man to understand, when his salary depends upon his not understandingGNU Terry PratchettRegistered Userregular
edited May 2007
Yeah, America in general has a thing or three to learn about public transit.
Another related question, how many people that are convinced it is horribly inconvenient have tried it at all? For more than a week?
I take the bus 4 days a week even though it's horribly inconvenient (40+ minutes vs 5 minutes driving).
On one hand it takes forever because so few people take the bus and there's so much traffic in LA. On the other hand if everyone took the bus it would still take forever because it'd be stopping every 2 minutes to on/off-load passengers. If you try to counter that by having fewer stops, then traffic goes back up because people have to drive to the stops. And the buses need gas too - $5/gallon isn't going to help them out any.
In the early 80s LA cut fares drastically and ended up with more people on public transit than Chicago. Everyone complained, including the bus riders - too overcrowded, people were getting robbed, etc. They ended up increasing the fares to get people off the bus and have continued that way ever since, to the point where LA's about to raise fares to $120/month on a rider population with an average family income of $12,000. If they don't get the hike approved, they're cutting service by 1/3. Meanwhile, it costs over $1 billion to drill 5 miles of tunnel because no one who backs light-rail in this town wants it going through or over their neck of the woods.
So that, combined with mandatory car insurance ("I'm paying for the car anyways, so I might as well use it), will drive more people off public transit.
Vancouver is in the same situation LA was in 50 years ago, and people still think building more highways is going to solve gridlock. So now they're about to spend three billion dollars building a fuckload of new highways that will fill up in about ten years. If everyone who drove a single-occupant vehicle to work carpooled instead, we would be able to continue using our current roads for another 10 years. The kicker is we already have a fairly nice transit system that would probably be a true alternative to driving if the government put some more money into it, say three billion dollars.
And you wanna know what's really fucking retarded? In 30 years, none of those morons will be able to afford to drive because of gas prices! Haha, suckers!
I have to look around somewhat sheepishly on that one. I realize that gas is cheap here, I just tend to not think about that anymore. (Oddly, I have a diesel where if 400 didn't suck, I would get pretty good gas mileage, too. )
But parking, as cheap as it may be, would surely still run you more than 3 bucks a day, no? This would also get rid of the need for more and more parking decks downtown.
And, I do agree with the "if more people used it, then it would be faster" thing. But that just boils this down to a catch-22. (Which it may be.)
Well, a month of Marta is $53. When I rented a prime covered spot in Peachtree Center (Center, not City) just a few years ago, it was $85. Factor in gas and maintenance and all that, and sure, it's defintely more, just not a huge lot more is my point.
Ok, I will agree with that completely. That is why cost just isn't that big of a deal for me. I thought you said it flat out wasn't more expensive. So.... uh, yeah.
Uh...have you been paying attention to the real estate market AT ALL recently? There's been a massive bubble in housing prices, where the excessive prices were sustained only by people making a lot of money out of the price hikes. Urban housing is prohibitively expensive for many people.
If you want to live in the heart of downtown, yeah. You do realize that cities encompass counties, not just the dozen or so skyscrapers that make up its skyline, right?
If it were so prohibitively expensive, please explain the current upswing in gentrification towards middle-upper middle income housing in huge swaths. Never mind the fact that it is this scale of centralized gentrification which is upping the price above what it would otherwise be if it were more federated. Also, many of the older buildings that are being torn down strictly to be able to demand higher prices/remodelled to increase square footage per condo increasing the margins don't need to be and are easily inhabitable, and at a fairly low price due to their age. Hell, Marina City is fairly affordable due solely to its age even though it's in the heart of downtown Chicago. Calatrava's Spire is a few blocks away and the cost per condo difference is likely going to be over an order of magnitude.
Dead, noone is saying that the full tax amount should be applied thursday. Even if that were the case it wouldn't cause a flooding of people moving into the city all at once. It would lead to increased Metra ridership, car-pooling, and some people deciding to get a home closer to downtown/their work.
I already told you why that's been happening, the housing bubble. Bubbles are typically filled with irrational investment extending beyond ones means, especially towards the end, and this is no exception. People holding some real estate were making a killing based on the leverage low or no down payment mortgages provided. This promoted more and more debt, and shakier mortgages because it was always going up and a lot of people were getting stinking rich off of it. Who cares if your interest only mortgage pays off none of the principal if you can just refinance once the value of your house grows even more?
But a lot of this was extending beyond the means of affordability and taking large risks based on the assumption that price growth will continue and being blind to those risks. This is where the subprime mortgages come in, because a LOT of the people buying houses wouldn't be able to afford it in a saner market. But speculators and hedge funds were willing to foot the bill on this risk and bask in the wealth themselves, as risky investments tend to pay off well when they do pay off. Really it was just a game of musical chairs, in which you would hope you had a seat once the music stopped.
As for the fallout of this, we will see. I predicted forclosures, which should be unsurprising given the huge amount of bad debt floating around. A lot of people who were sitting on shakier ground will be wiped out from this, or at very least will have to make significant sacrifices. If it spurs on more inflation then the pendulum will swing back in the favor of the debtors, to the expense of everyone else.
Yeah, humans in general has a thing or three to learn about public transit.
With very few exceptions there is not a well integrated, modern public transportation system in existence. There are systems that exist which are better than others, but even the best aren't all that great from a macro perspective. Even Curitiba has its problems, and I'd put it as one of the exceptions. (I can't think of others off the top of my head. Maybe one of the city's China made last year)
As long as it is made clear that $5 gas is going to screw over the bottom third of the SES bracket of the US society a whole hell of a lot more than it will the top third (who will still drive their Hummers 90 down the freeway until you make gas 500 bucks a gallon) then go for it.
I don't want to see one story on the news bitching about the government gouging poor people though, cause, hey, this is for the greater good.
Two things that I've said before, that apparently people have missed:
1) I do not think the gas tax should be applied all at once.
2) I realize that not everyone in rural areas is a farmer, however they tend to have other options available to them--or that will be made available to them with the higher gas prices (like carpooling, park 'n' rides, etc.)--than farmers do, as far as cutting down on fuel use.
They could get a job closer to them. They could just suck it up.
Yes, I'm sure that my hospital administrator mother-in-law can find plenty of employment opportunities amidst the 30 miles of fields in between Orland and Chico. Because, you know, lettuce needs health care too.
How about instead of artificially spiking gas prices and immediately fucking people in the ass all across the nation in devestating ways, we let a more gradual force - say, for example, a market force handle things instead?
Higher taxes would reflect the true cost of the fuel, rather than the market cost. Markets are not perfect.
Also, I like how you truncated out the most likely, and easiest solution to their problem, sharing a ride with someone else to Chico.
So what about home owners in the suburbs and rural areas? Wouldn't they get especially screwed over seeing as their not in demand houses would be pretty much worthless and the high in demand city housing would be rather expensive? What about people with mortgages? Wouldn't this probably make their houses worth less than what they have left to pay off? Wouldn't this just fuck over everyone besides people already in the cities?
As long as it is made clear that $5 gas is going to screw over the bottom third of the SES bracket of the US society a whole hell of a lot more than it will the top third (who will still drive their Hummers 90 down the freeway until you make gas 500 bucks a gallon) then go for it.
I don't wnat to see one story on the news bitching about the government gouging poor people though, cause, hey, this is for the greater good.
Which is why we would use the money to increase the EITC, like I stated shortly after the OP.
So what about home owners in the suburbs and rural areas? Wouldn't they get especially screwed over seeing as their not in demand houses would be pretty much worthless and the high in demand city housing would be rather expensive? What about people with mortgages? Wouldn't this probably make their houses worth less than what they have left to pay off? Wouldn't this just fuck over everyone besides people already in the cities?
The slow transition would mitigate a lot of that, but a solution to oil dependence is going to screw a lot of people, it's just going to screw a lot more if we wait until later, when we're forced to solve it.
And most of our cities could be a lot more densely populated, and as buildings get torn down/rebuilt, they'll be built with that in mind, which will help control the costs of living there.
And let's be honest, here: it really isn't going to be all that hard to mitigate the extra gas cost by using public transit or carpooling from the 'burbs. Just a bit inconvenient. It'll mostly be something new renters/homebuyers take into consideration when getting their new places.
I already told you why that's been happening, the housing bubble. Bubbles are typically filled with irrational investment extending beyond ones means, especially towards the end, and this is no exception.
There's been a massive bubble in housing prices, where the excessive prices were sustained
Yet I asked you to explain how middle incomes were getting targetted by gentrifying neighborhoods rather than the upper class. At least, not exclusively the upper class. You claimed that living in cities is prohibitively expensive, and yet there are new developments (rather than just old buildings) which are not. Affordable housing is gaining a resurgence as well since the cycle of 'hey, urban renewal might work if we do it right' has come 'round.
So what about home owners in the suburbs and rural areas? Wouldn't they get especially screwed over seeing as their not in demand houses would be pretty much worthless and the high in demand city housing would be rather expensive? What about people with mortgages? Wouldn't this probably make their houses worth less than what they have left to pay off? Wouldn't this just fuck over everyone besides people already in the cities?
Not if that demand gets spread out over large areas rather than being concentrated in one or two neighborhoods/blocks. Gentrification does not inherintly promote slum development. According to Irond, Boston is coming along rather nicely with new developments happening all over the place patch-work style. If you suddenly undo the white flight back into places like Hyde Park which got devasted from it in the 50's and 60's, yeah things might go south and devastate the area all over again. So...don't do that.
LA has a horrid public transit system. Which is kind of funny (also, sad) given that it has as good a population density as London which has a pretty good one. There are ways around the drawbacks to busses that you described, but none of them would be implemented so I won't go into it. Check out Curitiba's transit system if you're interested, although scale it back a hell of a lot.
Yeah, America in general has a thing or three to learn about public transit.
Fun Fact: Arlington, Texas (pop. 360,000) is the largest city in the United States without conventional fixed-route public transportation! Yay bragging rights! :-\
Thankfully, I just moved from a suburb immediately outside of Arlington to an apartment in an outlying suburb of Dallas, though more because I work downtown.
Yeah, America in general has a thing or three to learn about public transit.
What is sad is that many American cities once had awesome trolley systems. Then from the 1930s to 1950s, GM bought them all up through third parties. They ran the trolley companies into the ground and sold all the cities shiny new GM buses.
So what about home owners in the suburbs and rural areas? Wouldn't they get especially screwed over seeing as their not in demand houses would be pretty much worthless and the high in demand city housing would be rather expensive? What about people with mortgages? Wouldn't this probably make their houses worth less than what they have left to pay off? Wouldn't this just fuck over everyone besides people already in the cities?
The slow transition would mitigate a lot of that, but a solution to oil dependence is going to screw a lot of people, it's just going to screw a lot more if we wait until later, when we're forced to solve it.
And most of our cities could be a lot more densely populated, and as buildings get torn down/rebuilt, they'll be built with that in mind, which will help control the costs of living there.
And let's be honest, here: it really isn't going to be all that hard to mitigate the extra gas cost by using public transit or carpooling from the 'burbs. Just a bit inconvenient. It'll mostly be something new renters/homebuyers take into consideration when getting their new places.
Ok, that's a good answer for the suburbs, but for the rural areas that doesn't really solve anything. If everyone who lives in a rural area and has to commute to the big cities to work moves to the big cities who is going to be buying their houses? As far as I can tell, no one. If everyone is moving to the cities/suburbs it will destroy the housing market in the rural areas. Not only will they not be able to get out of the rural areas, they won't be able to afford their homes. Should around 20% of the US be screwed over?
Fun Fact: Arlington, Texas (pop. 360,000) is the largest city in the United States without conventional fixed-route public transportation! Yay bragging rights! :-\
Thankfully, I just moved from a suburb immediately outside of Arlington to an apartment in an outlying suburb of Dallas, though more because I work downtown.
I got another one: Phoenix, AZ (city 1.5M, metro 4M) is the largest city in the US with no rail system, relying entirely on busses instead. It's also the largest city in the country without cross-country passenger rail service, but considering that the US doesn't seem to give a shit about intercity passenger rail anyway that's not as interesting.
And seriously, the bus system in Phoenix sucks giant donkey dick.
Two things that I've said before, that apparently people have missed:
1) I do not think the gas tax should be applied all at once.
2) I realize that not everyone in rural areas is a farmer, however they tend to have other options available to them--or that will be made available to them with the higher gas prices (like carpooling, park 'n' rides, etc.)--than farmers do, as far as cutting down on fuel use.
See, that isn't a senseless position, it's just that some of the rhetoric clouded it a bit. Internalizing the externalities of gas consumption is a sensible approach to the problem, you just need to be slow enough such that the market can adapt and have good enough predictive power that you can set appropriate targets. With those conditions the market can then appropriately adjust around the "true" costs.
I already told you why that's been happening, the housing bubble. Bubbles are typically filled with irrational investment extending beyond ones means, especially towards the end, and this is no exception.
There's been a massive bubble in housing prices, where the excessive prices were sustained
Yet I asked you to explain how middle incomes were getting targetted by gentrifying neighborhoods rather than the upper class. At least, not exclusively the upper class. You claimed that living in cities is prohibitively expensive, and yet there are new developments (rather than just old buildings) which are not. Affordable housing is gaining a resurgence as well since the cycle of 'hey, urban renewal might work if we do it right' has come 'round.
Maybe living in the Seattle area and Socal all my life has skewed my thinking about this, but "affordable" housing sounds like a euphamism for debt slavery.
But as to your question, middle incomes were big players in the housing bubble so it's not surprising that there would be development targeted at them in cities. But a lot of the cost of urban housing comes from the value of the land that the building is sitting on, and not just the building itself. So housing in an urban area relative to suburband or rural housing is likely to be of lower quality, due to there being less space or a worse construction, or due to the neighborhood, which could be crime infested. Or it could be that the housing targetted at the middle class continued the pattern of overextending on affordability systematic to the housing bubble.
Yeah, America in general has a thing or three to learn about public transit.
What is sad is that many American cities once had awesome trolley systems. Then after WWII GM bought them all up through third parties. They ran the trolley companies into the ground and sold all the cities shiny new GM buses.
Trolleys are worse than busses with dedicated lanes more often than not thanks to being unreliant on any fixed infrastructure and capable of acting independently when needed. Trolleys look nicer, though, and their lines can be covered in grass unlike a bus lane for albido/heat island/rain water management. The thing is, nobody has dedicated bus lanes.
Also, decreased ridership leading to cuts in funding as cities emptied out to the 'burbs thanks to the way the system was setup after the war making loans easier to get for suburban development rather than urban. Also, highways.
Posts
Their lifestyle during those hundreds of years did not involve commuting to other towns every morning, so...how is the rural lifestyle now comparable to the rural lifestyle then for you to claim they are both equally sustainable/regenerative?
Not all rural people are farmers of goods that are subsidized by the government. Non-subsidized farmers, factory workers, miners, etc. all work jobs, that for a variety of reasons, exist outside of the city and no one wants to move into the city (no farmland, no mines, this factory smells like ass). Why are you so reluctant to try to find any sort of compromise on this issue?
So instead of picking between paying $3/gallon for the commute, or buying a smaller place to live in for three times the price, people would be choosing between a $6/gallon commute, or a smaller place to live that costs five or six times as much, because of the increased demand your gas tax has caused. Really, it'd just make poor people poorer.
Yeah, maybe if prices remained constant for property in the cities, the gas tax would work. But the increased demand on property it would cause would more than offset that.
No shit. The kind of tractors superfarms use cost upwards of $750,000 each.
I myself just bought a mid-80's low-hour (tractors are guaged in hours, not miles, for the ignorant) mid-range Deere for more than what most cars cost today. On the other hand, I finally have a roof/closed-in cab and air conditioning! Unfortunately the cassette player ate my only cassette - Jimmy Buffet's Greatest Hits. All was not well in Margaritaville.
Yes, I'm sure that my hospital administrator mother-in-law can find plenty of employment opportunities amidst the 30 miles of fields in between Orland and Chico. Because, you know, lettuce needs health care too.
How about instead of artificially spiking gas prices and immediately fucking people in the ass all across the nation in devestating ways, we let a more gradual force - say, for example, a market force handle things instead?
Corn ethanol sucks. We only hear so much about it because of how early Iowa is in the primaries. Sugar ethanol is better, and Brazil has their automotive industry set up around using it, so getting high ethanol cars is something that requires infrastructure rather than research.
And whatever you do, don't do whatever this draconian taxing business you are talking about too quickly. If it isn't phased very slowly then the economy will take severe damage from it, as people won't have time or be able to afford all these lifestyle changes you are talking about. You can't just magically have people stop living in rural or suburban areas, and if you try to with this then the prices of housing in the urban areas will skyrocket until the system can no longer handle it and collapse. Just saying "fuck'em" won't do you any good, because there will be one hell of a backlash.
Mining and factory work, by their very nature, are highly amenable to car-pooling.
Gentrification does not increase slum development or influence overall property taxes much in situations when it is federated rather than eating up super-blocks at a time. The overall increase in cost of living would be relatively low given the trickle of people moving in rather than a cascade and the capability of the market to increase population density as demand required. Also, the savings of not filling your tank weekly would carry over to the increased cost of living.
In other words, it's cheaper to live in the city than it is to pave over new land when you do it right. People tend not to do it right which is why you get neighborhoods being uprooted for new breeds of yuppies to have 'authentic' lofts.
Also I really doubt that increased gas tax would prove to be an effective solution. It would just piss everyone off until the next election.
Wait, there's a difference?
Pretty much. The problem I have with this whole "just tax gas olol" idea is that it doesn't exactly spread that suffering evenly. People who live in metro areas get better, faster, and cheaper public transit, and people who live between the coasts get the giant sword-dildo from Seven shoved up their ass.
Super.
Especially not in the absence of a large number of other measures, none of which are likely to happen.
Actually no. Gotta run for now, though...got corn to pick, or something.
Renewables research is getting the brunt of venture capital being invested in it for the last 5 years or so. The money being used is mainly green. (thanks a lot, US Treasury and your fruity dyes)
Uh...have you been paying attention to the real estate market AT ALL recently? There's been a massive bubble in housing prices, where the excessive prices were sustained only by people making a lot of money out of the price hikes. Urban housing is prohibitively expensive for many people. It's only recently that the bottom has been falling out of it with the collapse of subprime mortgages. The effect of this collapse is wide reaching, it impacts other parts of the economy since home equity loans are going to start drying up, and the financial and law enforcement system is going to have to deal with a lot of forclosures and squatters.
Forcing people to live in urban areas through rapid draconian taxing will be like this but worse. Inflation will be the name of the game, as prices for urban housing will skyrocket as well as many other goods with the cost of fuel. This stuff is already happening without pushing even harder on the energy costs. And, in case you didn't know, a lot of inflation is a very bad thing.
If you want to live in the heart of downtown, yeah. You do realize that cities encompass counties, not just the dozen or so skyscrapers that make up its skyline, right?
If it were so prohibitively expensive, please explain the current upswing in gentrification towards middle-upper middle income housing in huge swaths. Never mind the fact that it is this scale of centralized gentrification which is upping the price above what it would otherwise be if it were more federated. Also, many of the older buildings that are being torn down strictly to be able to demand higher prices/remodelled to increase square footage per condo increasing the margins don't need to be and are easily inhabitable, and at a fairly low price due to their age. Hell, Marina City is fairly affordable due solely to its age even though it's in the heart of downtown Chicago. Calatrava's Spire is a few blocks away and the cost per condo difference is likely going to be over an order of magnitude.
Dead, noone is saying that the full tax amount should be applied thursday. Even if that were the case it wouldn't cause a flooding of people moving into the city all at once. It would lead to increased Metra ridership, car-pooling, and some people deciding to get a home closer to downtown/their work.
I take the bus 4 days a week even though it's horribly inconvenient (40+ minutes vs 5 minutes driving).
On one hand it takes forever because so few people take the bus and there's so much traffic in LA. On the other hand if everyone took the bus it would still take forever because it'd be stopping every 2 minutes to on/off-load passengers. If you try to counter that by having fewer stops, then traffic goes back up because people have to drive to the stops. And the buses need gas too - $5/gallon isn't going to help them out any.
In the early 80s LA cut fares drastically and ended up with more people on public transit than Chicago. Everyone complained, including the bus riders - too overcrowded, people were getting robbed, etc. They ended up increasing the fares to get people off the bus and have continued that way ever since, to the point where LA's about to raise fares to $120/month on a rider population with an average family income of $12,000. If they don't get the hike approved, they're cutting service by 1/3. Meanwhile, it costs over $1 billion to drill 5 miles of tunnel because no one who backs light-rail in this town wants it going through or over their neck of the woods.
So that, combined with mandatory car insurance ("I'm paying for the car anyways, so I might as well use it), will drive more people off public transit.
And you wanna know what's really fucking retarded? In 30 years, none of those morons will be able to afford to drive because of gas prices! Haha, suckers!
Ok, I will agree with that completely. That is why cost just isn't that big of a deal for me. I thought you said it flat out wasn't more expensive. So.... uh, yeah.
I already told you why that's been happening, the housing bubble. Bubbles are typically filled with irrational investment extending beyond ones means, especially towards the end, and this is no exception. People holding some real estate were making a killing based on the leverage low or no down payment mortgages provided. This promoted more and more debt, and shakier mortgages because it was always going up and a lot of people were getting stinking rich off of it. Who cares if your interest only mortgage pays off none of the principal if you can just refinance once the value of your house grows even more?
But a lot of this was extending beyond the means of affordability and taking large risks based on the assumption that price growth will continue and being blind to those risks. This is where the subprime mortgages come in, because a LOT of the people buying houses wouldn't be able to afford it in a saner market. But speculators and hedge funds were willing to foot the bill on this risk and bask in the wealth themselves, as risky investments tend to pay off well when they do pay off. Really it was just a game of musical chairs, in which you would hope you had a seat once the music stopped.
As for the fallout of this, we will see. I predicted forclosures, which should be unsurprising given the huge amount of bad debt floating around. A lot of people who were sitting on shakier ground will be wiped out from this, or at very least will have to make significant sacrifices. If it spurs on more inflation then the pendulum will swing back in the favor of the debtors, to the expense of everyone else.
With very few exceptions there is not a well integrated, modern public transportation system in existence. There are systems that exist which are better than others, but even the best aren't all that great from a macro perspective. Even Curitiba has its problems, and I'd put it as one of the exceptions. (I can't think of others off the top of my head. Maybe one of the city's China made last year)
I don't want to see one story on the news bitching about the government gouging poor people though, cause, hey, this is for the greater good.
1) I do not think the gas tax should be applied all at once.
2) I realize that not everyone in rural areas is a farmer, however they tend to have other options available to them--or that will be made available to them with the higher gas prices (like carpooling, park 'n' rides, etc.)--than farmers do, as far as cutting down on fuel use.
Also, I like how you truncated out the most likely, and easiest solution to their problem, sharing a ride with someone else to Chico.
And most of our cities could be a lot more densely populated, and as buildings get torn down/rebuilt, they'll be built with that in mind, which will help control the costs of living there.
And let's be honest, here: it really isn't going to be all that hard to mitigate the extra gas cost by using public transit or carpooling from the 'burbs. Just a bit inconvenient. It'll mostly be something new renters/homebuyers take into consideration when getting their new places.
You said
Yet I asked you to explain how middle incomes were getting targetted by gentrifying neighborhoods rather than the upper class. At least, not exclusively the upper class. You claimed that living in cities is prohibitively expensive, and yet there are new developments (rather than just old buildings) which are not. Affordable housing is gaining a resurgence as well since the cycle of 'hey, urban renewal might work if we do it right' has come 'round.
Not if that demand gets spread out over large areas rather than being concentrated in one or two neighborhoods/blocks. Gentrification does not inherintly promote slum development. According to Irond, Boston is coming along rather nicely with new developments happening all over the place patch-work style. If you suddenly undo the white flight back into places like Hyde Park which got devasted from it in the 50's and 60's, yeah things might go south and devastate the area all over again. So...don't do that.
Fun Fact: Arlington, Texas (pop. 360,000) is the largest city in the United States without conventional fixed-route public transportation! Yay bragging rights! :-\
Thankfully, I just moved from a suburb immediately outside of Arlington to an apartment in an outlying suburb of Dallas, though more because I work downtown.
What is sad is that many American cities once had awesome trolley systems. Then from the 1930s to 1950s, GM bought them all up through third parties. They ran the trolley companies into the ground and sold all the cities shiny new GM buses.
GM Streetcar Scandal
Ok, that's a good answer for the suburbs, but for the rural areas that doesn't really solve anything. If everyone who lives in a rural area and has to commute to the big cities to work moves to the big cities who is going to be buying their houses? As far as I can tell, no one. If everyone is moving to the cities/suburbs it will destroy the housing market in the rural areas. Not only will they not be able to get out of the rural areas, they won't be able to afford their homes. Should around 20% of the US be screwed over?
I got another one: Phoenix, AZ (city 1.5M, metro 4M) is the largest city in the US with no rail system, relying entirely on busses instead. It's also the largest city in the country without cross-country passenger rail service, but considering that the US doesn't seem to give a shit about intercity passenger rail anyway that's not as interesting.
And seriously, the bus system in Phoenix sucks giant donkey dick.
See, that isn't a senseless position, it's just that some of the rhetoric clouded it a bit. Internalizing the externalities of gas consumption is a sensible approach to the problem, you just need to be slow enough such that the market can adapt and have good enough predictive power that you can set appropriate targets. With those conditions the market can then appropriately adjust around the "true" costs.
Maybe living in the Seattle area and Socal all my life has skewed my thinking about this, but "affordable" housing sounds like a euphamism for debt slavery.
But as to your question, middle incomes were big players in the housing bubble so it's not surprising that there would be development targeted at them in cities. But a lot of the cost of urban housing comes from the value of the land that the building is sitting on, and not just the building itself. So housing in an urban area relative to suburband or rural housing is likely to be of lower quality, due to there being less space or a worse construction, or due to the neighborhood, which could be crime infested. Or it could be that the housing targetted at the middle class continued the pattern of overextending on affordability systematic to the housing bubble.
Trolleys are worse than busses with dedicated lanes more often than not thanks to being unreliant on any fixed infrastructure and capable of acting independently when needed. Trolleys look nicer, though, and their lines can be covered in grass unlike a bus lane for albido/heat island/rain water management. The thing is, nobody has dedicated bus lanes.
Also, decreased ridership leading to cuts in funding as cities emptied out to the 'burbs thanks to the way the system was setup after the war making loans easier to get for suburban development rather than urban. Also, highways.