| >I mean... That was exactly the point. Great. So we agree it is cherry picked. > Sure. It provides an even better illustration about how the runaway urbanism resulted in breaking the previous trend of increasing living area. I don't follow the logic here. Why would 2015 be the tipping point? What's so special about that year? The US has been increasingly urbanizing since WW2. https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/usa/uni... > You might have cause and effect confused here. Just to be clear, you're suggesting that people are having fewer kids (fertility had a recent peak in 2007) because new builds (which are just a small percentage of total housing stock!) have lost a few square feet? I find that to be laughable. > Why is it strange? In the counter-factual world without the dense office core, the new transit would have been useless. 1. There are more than just offices in CBDs. There are also retail, restaurants, entertainment venues, residential, etc. 2. This ignores the benefit to the worker. And employer/employee relationship goes two-ways. You assign all the benefits to the employers (who gain access to a larger talent pool), while ignoring the fact that this benefits workers too by increasing the pool of jobs they can reliably and comfortably commute to. 3. Economic gains for employers are not purely extractive. A thriving and dynamic centeral business district helps provide income for residents, drive increased investment, and foster innovation. > And none of them requires the amount of traffic that justifies $150k per household. Sports venues. Concerts. Festivals. Parades. Any large gathering of people. Not to mention that it's still a good thing to have for general use to go anywhere, even at non-max-capacity times. https://mynorthwest.com/kiro-opinion/sound-transit-3-34-5-bi... Not seeing that $150k per household number anywhere in that article. Looks like $10k per person is the number they come up with. Expensive to be sure, but not quite the number you somehow arrived at. |
Got it. You have no idea what you're talking about. "Cherry-picking" means finding parts of data that go against the actual trend but "confirm" your point.
> I don't follow the logic here. Why would 2015 be the tipping point? What's so special about that year? The US has been increasingly urbanizing since WW2.
The tipping point was around 2010-2011, it just took some time to become visible. I love bureaucracy; it's the greatest invention of humanity. I traced the policy changes that started the enshittification in earnest to around that time.
For example, that's the year when Seattle's DoT changed the road scoring method so that a field with trenches would get a perfect score. SF started its war-on-cars around the same time and passed the "Twitter exemption".
> Just to be clear, you're suggesting that people are having fewer kids (fertility had a recent peak in 2007) because new builds (which are just a small percentage of total housing stock!) have lost a few square feet? I find that to be laughable.
People are having fewer kids because inner cities are inimical to having _multiple_ children. One child is fine, but 3 children are almost impossible without a parent staying at home.
It's not the _sole_ reason, but it very much is _a_ reason. And you can trace that correlation throughout all the developed world, including the bike hellscape of the Netherlands. And transit availability only _strengthens_ the correlation.
> Sports venues. Concerts. Festivals. Parades. Any large gathering of people.
So basically: nothing. Nothing here justifies the ginormous expense and the associated deterioration in the quality of life.
> 1. There are more than just offices in CBDs. There are also retail, restaurants, entertainment venues, residential, etc.
No, there is not. Entertainment venues, restaraunts, etc. can just as much stay distributed through the city.
> 2. This ignores the benefit to the worker. And employer/employee relationship goes two-ways. You assign all the benefits to the employers (who gain access to a larger talent pool), while ignoring the fact that this benefits workers too by increasing the pool of jobs they can reliably and comfortably commute to.
Ha. I have numbers for that ( https://www.nature.com/articles/s42949-021-00020-2 ). A worker in the 80-s US could access 2x workplaces compared to their counterpart in Europe within a 30-minute commute. Because of cars.
If you shackle yourself to transit, your world rapidly shrinks into tiny "beads" of accessible area outside of stations. While a car provides you true point-to-point travel freedom.
> Not seeing that $150k per household number anywhere in that article. Looks like $10k per person is the number they come up with.
This is the _additional_ expense per _person_. I have calculations from the recent estimates.