“It’s not like the government is forcing you to buy a car!”

If you live in a city with parking minimums, yes they fucking are.

  • FireRetardant@lemmy.world
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    12 hours ago

    Most cities cannot afford their extisting road infrastructure maintaince. Once built transit systems and walkability are far cheaper to maintain.

    • chiliedogg@lemmy.world
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      7 hours ago

      Great.

      Your still haven’t offered a solution for how to pay for it.

      Our roads are 30 years behind on maintenance, but we can patch them here and there and do one out two major projects a year. And when a street collapses it’s relatively easy to get a bond to fix it because the citizens want their roads back.

      We can’t patchwork a public transit system, and the citizens are overwhelmingly against it anyway. We tried buying a single bus to shuttle people around and we had a new city manager following that backlash.

      Planners aren’t kings. We’re public servants subject to the will of Council, which is made up of people who represent voters, who overwhelmingly don’t want more density, new people, etc. We have pretty much zero input on the direction of the city.

      Shit… we spend way more time reviewing swimming pools for code compliance than actually developing plans. When it does come time to do a new comp plan or transportation study, almost every city outsources that to a third party company.

      • FireRetardant@lemmy.world
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        7 hours ago

        We pay for it by redeveloping massive multi lane roads into multi transit corridors when their major repair/resurfacing work is due. A few places have used this strategy to redevelop car centric areas into areas with better transit and pedestrian accesses.

        • chiliedogg@lemmy.world
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          6 hours ago

          That requires a public process.

          And guess what voters and politicians want? More roads and more barriers to the “unwashed poor” who use transit.