Arby’s chicken is damn good, and I never get the sandwiches because of it.
going to Popeyes to make up for not having an Arby’s is like going to the Louvre to make up for the fact that you missed the local community college’s art fair
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Now you have to have this convo in the new thread I made as a trap for you.
yesterday I drove past 2 separate Popeyes in Indianapolis, and both had lines of cars backed up out into the actual streets for what I assume to be The Holy Chicken Sandwich. brilliant business move, Popeye, I gotta hand it to you
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this kind of thing really does outline why transit is so hard to do in the US
like, transit agencies basically have to become developers but with none of the actual capital that developers have and ALSO no land rights to the places they want to build
they basically just have to strongly encourage places to build where their lines are going OR the agencies are forced to build where the sprawl is
which is how you get LA kinda
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whenever someone says we should have high speed rail lines everywhere i think about the huge fight of building BART over the lake in Fremont
they had to fight for YEARS to build over the lake cuz building under would be SO FUCKING EXPENSIVE but Fremont people said building over would mess up the view
i imagine its like that building rails everywhere
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Highways and bypasses and other heinous road developments dont have this problem because they just eminent domain bulldoze poor neighbourhoods with all that mad gas tax money and broad popular support for specious claims of reducing congestion
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pictured, my pedestrian ass yelling at a driver for zooming through a crosswalk and almost running me over for the 93849328493rd time
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Once I was almost run over by a car taking an illegal right on red, so I flipped them off. This enraged the driver so much he decided to follow me into a parking lot to yell at me.
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another citylab post and also DEFINITELY IGNORE the don’t blame cars parenthetical because nowhere in the article does it say you should actually do that
but the reason transit agencies have no money is because of the way we structure how we pay for public works
donoteat has a bit in the first part of the public housing video where the “oldest trick in the book” is defined, and that’s essentially paying for the initial construction of the housing and then assuming or requiring that the housing operations budget can pay for itself somehow. there’s actually no real reason that operations should be able to recoup its costs, and public works in general have somehow become subject to this expectation because of capitalism, but if they’re public works in the truest sense then they should just exist and provide service and not have to worry about recouping their costs because they’re public
and this is entirely the case with transit (and it’s talked about in the article), whereby every big transit project in america relies on federal funding for the capital budget while promising that it’s operations budget will be covered by municipal local budgets which are increasingly running out of money and having to partner with private parties to pay for operations
this is how you get to things like caltrain where the weekend service runs essentially once per hour on non-transit-station stops. what person is going to take a weekend jaunt up and down the peninsula when missing a train means that they might have to wait up to an hour for the next one? but because caltrain’s operations are pretty much dependent on the revenue it generates from…its operations (with taxes and other things covering the rest of it) they can’t really afford to run the train more often, which makes it so that the people don’t want to use the train, which makes it harder for caltrain to run the train more often, etc.
(here’s the donoteat video posted with the time set to where “the oldest trick in the book” is talked about)
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As a minor comment, I don’t think public/private partnerships are complete poison when it comes to public works.
Like, sure: have a private company take on the risk, R&D, and build the momentum of the project for the first 10-15 years, building a backbone that basically just serves commuters. But have it built into the contract with the city that the city or state takes it over after that period so that routes to under served areas can be built (uh…in theory; it’s at least more likely than if privately owned).
I do think private companies can be more ambitious, aggressive, and rapid than public works. This is for a variety of depressing reasons, but I think it’s often the case.
So yeah: I don’t think private industry is necessarily a pure evil when it comes to public works. But it should be kept in its place.
Travel is way too important to a robust and quality life. Freedom of movement is a big leftist cause both for socioeconomic reasons (labor needs to be as free as capital in order to fight it) and for personal development reasons. We should be enabling normal people to travel more, not less. To the extent that we have a “carbon budget” that we need to stay under to avoid the apocalypse, we should be willing to dedicate a significant % of it to allowing people to travel recreationally.
Also, ban private flights.
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Travel, yes, long distance air travel no
Do you have any idea what a small percentage of the population flies regularly
Trying seriously to elevate the entire working class to that level of middle class would be a clusterfuck with current technology
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Like I do think it’s important to not be completely disingenuous about over shooting your political demands and this is one of the rare ones where trying to get something for everyone would actually be a catastrophe
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the key advantage of flight is haste so if we can generate a context where people can actually afford the time to do nothing but mosey cross the ol globe on gentler forms of transport, that’d be great
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Get everybody in the world to fly as much as middle class America / Europe and the earth will be 10x more fucked than now. Earth overshoot day is now in January!
The western way of life not sustainable and should be toned down
Private flights are awful but still a margin (8% of global air traffic apparently) removing them would be excellent but it won’t solve everything. Coherent leftist solution is : tax the hell out of air travel (private even more) give the money back to lower classes, and not: even more air travel, fuck the next generations
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yeah as much as the current discourse emphasizes never having to frame something you like as guilty/bad in political terms when instead you could try to motivate extending it to everyone else, saying that everyone deserves to be able to take a ten hour flight on a lark is like saying that everyone deserves to eat hamburgers
gotta take the L on your own privilege sometimes
I guess these would be interesting arguments if they were responding to what I said
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a merely national socialism seems like a bad idea
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