People Who Live In Suburbs: Classy, Icky, or Dudes?

light rail 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buses

the thing thats getting to people about iatee's argument i think is that it seems to be built on the idea that city-dwellers are making an altruistic/moral/selfless choice, which is disingenuous.

okay I should have avoided bringing this down to a personal level - I believe that the idea of the suburbs is selfish on a macroscopic human-sized level. I don't think many people think about these things when they decide where to live - 'selfish' was a poor (/troll-y) word choice. suburbs are 'inefficient to the point that they are not something that can exist on a global level, thus not something that we can act like we are 'owed' as a human on this planet'

buses suck because they are underfunded, they don't inherently suck. they can be fast and cheap and efficient.

iatee, what about rural dwellers? I'm pretty sure they use more energy than urban-dwellers, too. Should they all move to the city, too?

Is light rail an attempt to rehabilitate people's perceptions of PT as clean and modern without fixing the real problem(s)?

Laurel is pretty much otm, I think that the main reason people were so interested in light rail is that buses are mediocre, seldom available, and have a bad rap around here. They're wisely relocating our transit mall (a block downtown where all of the bus lines converge) to a new station near the revitalized nightlife area, so I'm hoping that means that we'll have a lot more bus traffic in a decade. And, you know, a bus or two that runs after 7PM in a place I want to go.

Light rail is awesome but it doesn't exactly go anywhere useful unless you build long tracks throughout the already congested city.

The light rail here goes all the way from one end of the metropolitan area to the other. It pretty much takes me 90% of anywhere I need to go.

there's a lot of small bore stuff u can do to make bus experience better, like gps locators on buses keyed to subway-style "arrival in" displays at stops. make it more train-like and predictable and ridership increases (maybe)

― goole, Wednesday, June 9, 2010 1:20 PM

these are great

http://www.flickr.com/photos/mildlydiverting/2449462/

iatee, what about rural dwellers? I'm pretty sure they use more energy than urban-dwellers, too. Should they all move to the city, too?

that, or we could continue spending billions of dollars building them their own bridges, roads and spending most of our homeland security money there.

which is, well, what we're gonna do, so,

dude that is completely insane

(lol hooray for the senate)

dude that is completely insane

i am honestly unable to respond to what you seem to be arguing here at this point because i cant even take your points seriously anymore.

fwiw most rural dwellers have pretty shitty roads and the only things that get maintained are interstates and major highways, the majority of which carry mostly semi traffic. Obviously what we need is REAL rail between rural areas.

^^^

IE Amtrak not pretending to be a for-profit entity but instead a public utility

iatee, what about rural dwellers? I'm pretty sure they use more energy than urban-dwellers, too. Should they all move to the city, too?

― fuck being hard, suburbs are complicated (The Reverend), Wednesday, June 9, 2010 3:26 PM (6 minutes ago) Bookmark

historically this is what rural dwellers have done all on their own!

ha, well yeah

Actually, just more freight lines between areas would be huge. Imagine what would happen if we could somehow convince Wal-Mart to do most of their warehouse->store distribution via freight train.

anyway the "energy use" of rural life is sort of thrown out of whack since they are growing everybody else's food

holy christ

i am honestly unable to respond to what you seem to be arguing here at this point because i cant even take your points seriously anymore.

what is crazy about "rural americans have lifestyles that are massively subsidized by the federal government"?

we need robots to grow the food and package it for us

goole: true

lol @ afred's occasional incredulous interjections itt

i don't get these light rail opinions

urban and suburban americans have lifestyles non-starvation options that are massively subsidized by rural dudes for starters xxxpost

lol @ alfred being too left-wing for the democratic party and yet a status quo apologist w/ this stuff

also i am trying to imagine where you are going to put all these people in the city

the idea that we'd all starve to death if the government didn't subsidize certain rural areas is also pretty lol. farmers around the world loling along.

you are like the king of strawmen!

i suppose we could just sprawl out and build some new urbs outside the city limits for them to live in

xxpost yeah see now you are just being willfully obtuse

lol @ alfred being too left-wing for the democratic party and yet a status quo apologist w/ this stuff

Cuz in your mind "left wing" and "status quo apologist" are irreconcilable? Lead the revolution into Costco.

we need robots to grow the food and package it for us

This is almost the case already? There isn't much farming done by farmers at this point in South Dakota where my Mom's family comes from.

no i mean literally robots

If there's anything the "left wing" got consistently wrong in the twentieth century, it's trying to change people's minds about perceptions, biases, and the other elements which make us human.

"Rural" is a lot more nebulous than "suburban," guys. There are a lot of different sorts of rural, everything from living on a farm to living in a small town but not being directly connected to farming to just having an acreage and working elsewhere (or being retired).

iatee, you are basically the urbanist equivalent of get-off-my-lawn type dudes who grouse about welfare queens taking all their tax dollars.

if history has taught us anything it is that massive urbanization is the best possible environmental outcome

I really should back off the thread for now, since I'm at work and our customer base is 100% rural and I shouldn't be opining about this shit on company time, heyo.

if history has taught us anything it is that massive urbanization is the best possible environmental outcome

this is 100% true

(in 2010)

iatee, you are basically the urbanist equivalent of get-off-my-lawn type dudes who grouse about welfare queens taking all their tax dollars.

right except this is isn't an imaginary black woman, it's an actual thing that's happening and nobody is denying? urban areas DO massively subsidize the rest of america. on the county-level, on the state-wide level, on the federal-level.

iatee, wtf planet are you living on?

crazy alternate one apparently

by that logic all of us in flyover country are just suckling on the coastal teat too though right?

most of the time. is this something you didn't know?

I think you're ruffling feathers because instead of saying good interim steps and being productive, you're talking about things that make sense across the 50-150 year range. Increased urban transportation, encourage in-fill of urban neighborhoods instead of suburban expansion, and decreased immediate rural subsidies make sense. Scoffing at all subsidizing, assuming that we can move the majority of rural people into urban areas, and getting pissed off because people do not want to live and work in the same relative area is kind of concentrating on the larger picture so much that no one wants to be in your club.

Late to the party, was going to say that I don't think hardly any individual privately owned "family" style farms are hardly feeding ANYONE, relative to the total population and not to how many people belong to a CSA in your locality (which I am all for, just ftr). So it's not like the rural folk are out there harvesting your food, no matter how many caps say "If you ate today, thank a farmer" which is nice and all but it's all agribusiness now.

Agribusinesses that are massively supported by the government, did I mention.

If anything, it's probably the suburbs that do most of the subsidizing, because that's where a majority of taxpayers live. And the idea that you aren't creating imaginary people to rail against is laughable.

If there's anything the "left wing" got consistently wrong in the twentieth century, it's trying to change people's minds about perceptions, biases, and the other elements which make us human.

― Filmmaker, Author, Radio Host Stephen Baldwin (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Wednesday, June 9, 2010 3:41 PM (3 minutes ago) Bookmark

ease up on the pol pot business man!! we just want better designed bus service, in addition to internment camps for soccer moms

so when we all live in LA and NYC, what the hell do we do with all this stupid land were stuck with.