Sunday, May 26, 2019

Free parking. One of the largest car subsidies. #autosprawlsubsidy

When we find an open spot on the street, and there's no meter, it seems free — but it too is the result of government spending. The cost of the land, pavement, street cleaning, and other services related to free parking spots come directly out of tax dollars (usually municipal or state funding sources). Each on-street parking space is estimated to cost around $1,750 to build and $400 to maintain annually.
https://www.vox.com/2014/6/27/5849280/why-free-parking-is-bad-for-everyone 

Thursday, May 9, 2019

The bankers installed Trump to "take the oil"

When they tell you we can't afford #freetransit, this is where the money went

Saturday, May 4, 2019

Economists are not your friends

Nordhaus agrees that man-made Climate Change is happening—he is not a "Climate Change Denialist". However, his research actually encourages policymakers not to take the action that Extinction Rebellion demands, or anything like it. He instead recommends managing Global Warming so that the Earth's temperature will stabilize at 4 degrees above pre-industrial levels in the mid-22nd century
https://www.patreon.com/posts/climate-change-26594935 

Thursday, May 2, 2019

Essay from 1973, the car system gets worse as it grows. Prophetic.

The worst thing about cars is that they are like castles or villas by the sea: luxury goods invented for the exclusive pleasure of a very rich minority, and which in conception and nature were never intended for the people. Unlike the vacuum cleaner, the radio, or the bicycle, which retain their use value when everyone has one, the car, like a villa by the sea, is only desirable and useful insofar as the masses don’t have one. That is how in both conception and original purpose the car is a luxury good. And the essence of luxury is that it cannot be democratized. If everyone can have luxury, no one gets any advantages from it. On the contrary, everyone diddles, cheats, and frustrates everyone else, and is diddled, cheated, and frustrated in return.
This is pretty much common knowledge in the case of the seaside villas. No politico has yet dared to claim that to democratize the right to vacation would mean a villa with private beach for every family. Everyone understands that if each of 13 or 14 million families were to use only 10 meters of the coast, it would take 140,000km of beach in order for all of them to have their share! To give everyone his or her share would be to cut up the beaches in such little strips—or to squeeze the villas so tightly together—that their use value would be nil and their advantage over a hotel complex would disappear. In short, democratization of access to the beaches point to only one solution—the collectivist one. And this solution is necessarily at war with the luxury of the private beach, which is a privilege that a small minority takes as their right at the expense of all.
http://unevenearth.org/2018/08/the-social-ideology-of-the-motorcar/