Quote:
Originally Posted by bunt_q
Cirrus always says there's no war on the car. He's wrong.
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It's possible to admit that we can't give all competing interests 100% of what they want all the time, without it being a war on some of them. Sometimes that means telling bicyclists they have to compromise on a bike lane a block away. Sometimes it means telling transit riders they have to compromise on a bus instead of a train. And sometimes it means telling car drivers they have to compromise on only having 3 lanes rather than 4, so there's room for a bus lane.
So there
is a war on the notion that car drivers should get what they want 100% of the time. But that is
not the same as a general war on cars. It's a simple fact of geometry that if you have a 50' street and right now all 50' of it are designed to prioritize cars, making it more multimodal will require at least a short term trade-off. Advocating for that does not make one anti-car, nor does it logically follow that such advocates hate cars or want to eliminate cars or want to make cars impractical to use.
The only controversial thing about it is that for decades we never asked car drivers to compromise for other modes (or asked them so rarely it didn't matter), and now sometimes we do.
And just like when you start to charge for a previously free commodity, or just like when the secular government starts to tell a religious majority that "religious freedom" doesn't mean the right to discriminate against minorities, some people who felt entitled to getting 100% of what they want will feel attacked for being asked to compromise on only getting 99% of it.
But that doesn't mean asking them to accept only 99% of what they want is a war on them.
You know that. You agree with that statement.
Quote:
Originally Posted by bunt_q;7156127 today
We're proactive and want to make things better - we want to make it easier to get around for all people by all modes.
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Aren't you frequently complaining about how our transportation planning environment suffers from a failure to admit that hard decisions sometimes have to be made, and that we do too much "everybody gets what they want" and not enough actual prioritization? I could search the archives to quote our last discussion about the problems with US-36 corridor transit planning, but I'm pretty sure we all remember it (and were all on the same page about its shortcomings).
"We want to make it easier for everyone" is all well and good until you have divvy up that 50' of road space, and right now one mode is getting all 50' of it. That's why we have plans. That's why we require everyone to compromise sometimes.
This is not a controversial thing to say. It's not a fact of life you disagree with.