Federal policy towards cities

[lio45]

Originally Posted by niwell

He hasn't exactly been consistent with what he wants to do with it...

I would tend to think that if Trump-era deficits are already astronomical, then it's going to be a hard sell to Congress to suggest drastic increases in military spending without the slightest reason or plan to do anything with this newly more powerful military.

Again: what exactly would be the point of that? Let's hear at least one good reason for it, and then maybe we can place it back into the basket of promises likely to see the light of day.

Another thing - at this point, I do make a difference between promises made on the campaign trail, and promises reiterated after the election. Did he take a stance on military spending after the election? Sincere question (if he did, I missed it).

[JManc]

Originally Posted by bobdreamz

San Francisco to Los Angles high-speed train ($65 billion)
300-MPH train from New York to D.C. ($100 billion)
300-MPH train from Houston to Dallas ($10 billion)

Maybe they should get the guys proposing the Houston-Dallas train to plan the ones for DC-NY and LA-SF as well. That's a huge disparity in costs. I know I'm being simplistic but..

[mousquet]

Originally Posted by JManc

Maybe they should get the guys proposing the Houston-Dallas train to plan the ones for DC-NY and LA-SF as well. That's a huge disparity in costs. I know I'm being simplistic but..

Just wow, though....

Topography, some landscapes to be preserved, distances... I don't know, there must be various constraints like these to explain this amazing gap between costs, but the Texas efficiency still seems spectacular here.

Texans won't forget to fairly pay their workers, right?
Yeah, I know they won't.

[lio45]

... TX 300-mph train built by undocumented, illegal Mexican labor?

Maybe that's the secret

[202_Cyclist]

Folks-- we are screwed. Although far from the most alarming thing in Washington this week (that would be the gathering of pro-Trump Nazis) two of the names mentioned for possible DOT Secretary are John Mica, Amtrak's biggest Congressional foe and a senior person at the Reason Foundation, a vehemently anti-transit lobbying group. If you think cities will benefit at all during the next four years, you are unfortunately delusional.

[eschaton]

Originally Posted by 202_Cyclist

Folks-- we are screwed. Although far from the most alarming thing in Washington this week (that would be the gathering of pro-Trump Nazis) two of the names mentioned for possible DOT Secretary are John Mica, Amtrak's biggest Congressional foe and a senior person at the Reason Foundation, a vehemently anti-transit lobbying group. If you think cities will benefit at all during the next four years, you are unfortunately delusional.

To be fair, self-driving rideshare is almost certainly going to kill inter-city rail on a 10-15 year horizon, so I'm not sure losing Amtrak is the disaster it would have been a generation ago.

[202_Cyclist]

Originally Posted by eschaton

To be fair, self-driving rideshare is almost certainly going to kill inter-city rail on a 10-15 year horizon, so I'm not sure losing Amtrak is the disaster it would have been a generation ago.

I support automated vehicles and there will be a lot of benefits from them (reduction in congestion, reduction in injuries and fatalities from auto crashes) but where are you going to park these driverless vehicles? Also, I think the 10 - 15 year time estimate is greatly ambitious.

[eschaton]

Originally Posted by 202_Cyclist

I support automated vehicles and there will be a lot of benefits from them (reduction in congestion, reduction in injuries and fatalities from auto crashes) but where are you going to park these driverless vehicles? Also, I think the 10 - 15 year time estimate is greatly ambitious.

Ideally speaking, driverless vehicles available for hire on an hourly basis would never be parked, allowing for the vehicles to continually collect revenue for the owners. In actuality they will need to be parked in most cases in the middle of the night of course. But rideshare is ultimately going to cause a net reduction in the total number of parking spaces needed, since one rideshare could replace a half dozen sparingly-used, personally-owned vehicles. In addition a self-driving car could park absolutely anywhere like a random suburban strip mall lot in the middle of the night, provided it didn't need to be serviced or refueled.

The first commercially available driverless cars should hit the roads by 2020 or so, although it's likely there will still be human drivers in case of emergency by then. It will probably take a few more years after that to get to an empty Uber picking you up, but certainly by the mid 2020s that should be possible.

Inter-city rail (or bus) is one of the types of mass transit which is probably most vulnerable to replacement with rideshare once full automation is possible. Not only will it have to worry about cost competition, but also schedule flexibility. Inter-city rail is well known for having spotty schedules - particularly out of the Northeast Corridor - which already makes it fairly inconvenient unless the rail trip itself is meant as an integral part of a vacation.

[Steely Dan]

^ i could still see city center to city center very high speed rail service in bos-wash as potentially viable given the traffic crunch in those cities.

but elsewhere in our spread out nation, driverless cars do seem like a very real threat to intercity rail over the coming decades.

[brickell]

I think this tells you all you need to know

President-elect Donald Trump says he's "seriously considering" Dr. Ben Carson for housing secretary.
http://money.cnn.com/2016/11/22/news...y-trump-tweet/

[jtown,man]

Originally Posted by Crawford

Yeah, right. The alt-right is going to endorse a massive urban infrastructure agenda.

And the Gordie Howe Bridge is already 100% funded (by Canada).

I'm a conservative. I'm pretty politically active. I heard about the alt right about 4 months ago from a liberal friend. So how long have you known and looked into the alt right?

[dimondpark]

$1 trillion on infrastructure?

Sounds great.

But how are you going to have massive cut taxes and significantly increase spending in defense, infrastructure etc and not have a deficit?

[chris08876]

Originally Posted by dimondpark

$1 trillion on infrastructure?

Sounds great.

But how are you going to have massive cut taxes and significantly increase spending in defense, infrastructure etc and not have a deficit?

He's going to raise taxes and prioritize the budget, making cuts where needed once he realizes thats what it will take. The white Obama in the making, at least I hope.

But in theory, I hope his infrastructure plan and spending happens and that we make allies with Russia and China. Both very good things.

[mousquet]

Originally Posted by dimondpark

But how are you going to have massive cut taxes and significantly increase spending in defense, infrastructure etc and not have a deficit?

I think Donald expects your faithful allies to do more efforts in that respect, which would be some relief to your country. He's right, at least if that's what he actually meant. You still don't know what that guy is actually about. We'll see in a couple of months.

Here's my point about this. You guys need upscale, faster transit means to connect everything in your country, while we need some more serious defense to be more credible on the global stage.

You may not care (which I myself don't care about), but if the French consertives are elected over here in 6 months, France's economic and foreign policies are very likely to suddenly get more aggressive. Their policies will be harsher to ourselves first (if that's any comfort to you, yes, we're going to have our asses kicked), then to foreigners as well. And we're just about to notify the Germans that they really need to spend more of their taxpayer money in our common defense, cause we're getting tired of paying for them.

Assuming all people on both sides of the Atlantic will agree on that point, to the least.

[C.]

All of this sounds great and, if Trump can deliver on those initiatives, could very well make a difference to spur development in cities. The problem is, the president-elect has never spelled out how he would pay for these proposals or get a spendthrift Congress to back them. Detroit has already received more than $250 million in commitments to tear down abandoned buildings, but to get that, Democrats in Congress had to press colleagues to raid existing funds for other purposes.

And a federal disaster designation for blighted communities brings lots of questions: Congress would have to approve it, and funding would have to be allocated.

How long would these disaster designations last? What would the legal process be for tearing down presumably privately owned abandoned properties in short-order? Does vital infrastructure include schools, roads, the Internet? Would a city be given funding to hire more police, or would some other group be called on to police inner-city streets? When Trump made this bold proposal, the Free Press asked his campaign these specific questions: We were referred only to his speech, which didn’t address them, though he has said he will cancel payments to a United Nations climate change fund and put $100 billion over eight years into America’s inner cities.

How would this even work??

http://www.freep.com/story/news/poli...igan/93613586/

[Reverberation]

Originally Posted by jtown,man

I'm a conservative. I'm pretty politically active. I heard about the alt right about 4 months ago from a liberal friend. So how long have you known and looked into the alt right?

I share your experience. I had never heard of it before Hillary Clinton said something about it and suddenly all of the news networks were talking about it too. Given that it was not a recognized or organized movement at this time last year, I don't expect them to have a well documented transit policy.

[fflint]

Originally Posted by Reverberation

I share your experience.

Same here, although obviously I'm not a conservative.

I had never heard or seen the neologism "alt-right" until Hillary Clinton chose to publicize the term as part of her campaign strategy. Now, that doesn't mean it didn't exist, but to me it indicates that prior to then, if we can say there was an "alt-right," it was unimportant, small, disorganized.

As best I can figure, the Clintonistas intended to take an obscure and poorly-defined term which nobody identified with and define it in a way that could be used as a weapon against their domestic enemies, e.g. "Saying Hillary won't win on November 8th is illegitimate because that is an alt-right talking point, you racist!"

[lio45]

"parroting the fabricated alt-right narrative" would seem to be the most typical use of that newish concept in here.

[ChargerCarl]

The alt-right was definitely a thing before Clinton and they were well known in the internet blogosphere. Scott Alexander has been writing about them for a while, as has Ross Douthat at the NYTimes.

[lio45]

But it's actually pretty new and, most importantly, still only vaguely defined.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alt-right

Basically, looks a lot like the "ordinary" classic "right", with the added disctinction of "a disdain for mainstream politics" (to quote my own wikipedia link).

On the other hand, a certain dislike for government, suspicion of whatever it does, and resistance to increasing its size, have always been among the core features of the "right" anyway... so I'm not even sure that's all that new.