Thread To Post NIMBY

The Sandbox Political Topics
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Why would you think that?

Material cost seems higher for a highway having the same passenger capacity. Prolly more steel in the rebar for the road than in the rails. highways need all sorts of water drainage, inter changes and they use a lot more land. I’m willing to call it a draw.

Again, the topic is how to relieve congestion. Private vehicles are kewl and all, but they need a lot of land. Each destination needs a place to park. If you ignore parking, then the roads aren’t all that usable. That’s gotta factor in somehow.

So far, I haven’t heard a compelling case being made for more roads and lanes in metro areas beyond “it’s what we do”, “people like trucks”*, and “how supposed to go shopping without cars”.

  • yes we register more trucks than cars in the USA. Rhode island just passed the 50%+ registration point last year, making it all 50 states now with more trucks than cars registered. Ya gotta luv modern advertising and marketing.
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I don’t love roads. But, they’re still needed to deliver goods, even in lower car use places like the UK, so some roads are actually required.

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I hope we can see more mixed use buildings soon. The international building code now includes “5 over 1” buildings. See link. A few have popped up in my town already.
Five/one info

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Also sometimes humans get lucky. California just replaced the last 20 years worth of drought water loss in one winter. We’re all good now.

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Do you have a source for that idea? My understanding of CA water sources are CO river reservoirs, reservoirs instate, snowpack, and groundwater. Many instate reservoirs may be at capacity (and actually need to release water for flood mgmt), but i think CO river isn’t at levels as high as the highest in the last 20, and groundwater recharge is a slow thing. Snowpack is very high, but that is a shorter-term source.

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I’m just being a bit facetious. Need some red font.

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Should have figured with the “all good now”

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I don’t know how you adjust for capacity but a mile of railroad track costs more than a lane mile of interstate. Estimates I’ve seen are $1 million for the interstate and $1.5 million for the track. Which is to say nothing of the train itself and the operating costs for the train. Offsetting that is the revenue, but the revenue isn’t always sufficient to cover the operating expenses.

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There was a bit of regret after the big rainfall lately in CA that they weren’t set up better to redirect the water to recharging the aquifers. Instead a lot of the water went straight out to the ocean. I think I read that it was a hard thing to get funding for, perhaps because it might be years before the next big downpour and people start wondering if they will ever get return on the investment.

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These are off by an order of magnitude. Here’s a link to the beltway project around Winston Salem, NC. The route is 34.5 miles and the cost is $1.74 billion. About $50 mil per mile. Should be a good estimate, since it mostly completed according to the NCDOT.

Congestion relief

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The issue is “who chooses?” If it is a nuclear power plant, I’m sure governments have lots of input. OTOH, if the issue is whether to have surface parking for an apartment building, the city can set a zoning rule, but a profit seeking private entity is going to decide whether they should build at all. The LVT is meant to be a factor that private parties consider, not a mandate or prohibition. (Re siting nuclear power, I’ll guess that the cost of transmitting that electricity is a bigger deal than the cost of the land.)

I’m not sure which number you are calculating. Maybe “economic value to the city”? I’ll agree with your earlier comment that the cost of “adding more freeway capacity to serve an urban core” needs to include the cost of adding parking for the cars.

My only personal experience is Minneapolis which has newer facilities for basketball, baseball, and football. They are all on the fringes of the downtown core, and none of them have significant surface parking. They all have access to multi-story parking which may be shared with other users (and also the only rail public transit in Mpls).

I get the dilemma. If I want to build a baseball/football stadium and want lower priced land I need to go out to where there is no transportation other than autos. If I want to spend less on land I can build up, but more land is cheaper than building parking garages. If I want to get close to other transit, I’m using expensive urban land. I agree that is a problem not only due to the market price of the land, but also due to reducing the value of the neighboring land any time except game days.

I actually liked shopping malls. People parked once then walked from store to store. They didn’t mind walking because they had a climate controlled space, the storefronts were attractive and interesting, and no cars.

To me, really walkable means separating cars and people, giving the people something to enjoy while they walk, and changing the climate. The last is very hard here in the midwest. I keep coming back to very dense – like buildings at least 10 stories high.

I wasn’t thinking the people buying lower priced cars are also buying suburban homes. I was figuring they are living in apartment buildings with surface parking lots, probably not in the urban core. They are able to participate in the private car economy.

I got my number from the lower income columns in the Consumer Expenditure Survey https://www.bls.gov/cex/tables/cross-tab/mean/cu-size-by-income-1-person-2021.pdf My number might be skewed by the proportion of people over age 65.

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That was per lane-mile. I assume the beltway has multiple lanes.

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I’ve read that about 40% of California’s ag production is exported.

This is a rather extreme example: Who keeps buying California's scarce water? Saudi Arabia | California | The Guardian

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Can you imagine replacing that beltway with a train?

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Total agreement. Cars and pedestrians do not mix. I am less concerned about the physical hazards (perhaps less concerned than I should be), but the stink and the noise makes for an unpleasant stroll. And children, well, we should be very concerned about the physical hazards.

I got a lot of satisfaction when I completed mundane shopping trips without a car. It helped create a community spirit kind of thing. It may not have been the best fish vendor in the city…but it was Our Fish Vendor.

Here’s a link to a site that is decidedly against government planning and transit projects you may enjoy. Two interesting points made are
*mass transit works best when the jobs are highly centralized- like NYC, Chicago. Philadelphia. It struggles when the jobs are decentralized. Makes sense to me.
*light rail stations often have crime issues. Factoring in security gets left out of many analysis.

Trigger warning to those who think govt planning is a good thing. It’s from the Cato Institute.

https://ti.org/antiplanner/?page_id=155

But if we do indeed want to improve things, it’s best to look at this from all sides before spending Avagadros number of dollars. And there probably isn’t a one size fits all solution.

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Also can be placed in “studies with obvious results” thread.

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Sadly, that’s a weakness in the blog. It’s based mostly on feels and “I’ve talked to lotsa folks”. Not much on studies or evidence.

Still, it’s worth being reminded that predicting what the world will be like in 2 generations is really fookin hard.

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If you’re determined to live without a car, then I’m sure it works in certain localities. But that would be a big hit to my standard of living where I am now. Something about hiring deliverers to buy packs of toilet paper and bottled water seems wrong to me. And the Costco is about a mile from the train station. And there’s no real sidewalk for parts of the way. And it’s raining.

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How so? In a way, I think bulk non-perishable groceries are the best example of delivery.

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Because I don’t like to impose on others to do things I can easily do for myself. And I don’t eat toilet paper. And the value-to-weight ratio of bottled water is pretty low.

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