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Replying to @mateosfo
“but if we add more homes to my neighborhood, where will i park”
“in a liberal, free-market democracy, Susan”
(((Matthew Lewis))) cults & consequences
147.2K posts
(((Matthew Lewis))) cults & consequences
@mateosfo
Housing theory of everything, buses, bicycles. Be the strange you wish to see in the world. Words for @cayimby, now available on Bluesky! Same handle.
- If you live in a city whose leaders/traffic engineers say they won’t put in bollards because they might damage a car, you live in a city governed by monsters and should vote them into the trash heap where they belong.
- The thing you have to remember about traffic engineering in the United States is, someone with an actual civil engineering license stamped this design and spent taxpayer dollars to build it. These dead-end, useless sidewalks and are not accidents. They are malicious.
- I can not stress enough this point: Literally every last person in the United States who complains about how “crowded” our cities are, is talking about cars. America is not crowded, anywhere. Half the land in our cities is four-lane roads and parking lots!!!!!!!!!
- A bunch of years ago a very well-intentioned high school student convinced everyone he could sweep all plastic out of the ocean. Oceanographers were quite frustrated by attention he got, because most of the plastic in the ocean is micron-scale. And most of it is car tires.
- Next time someone tells you the United States is banning Chinese electric cars “for safety reasons” tell them that the real reason is you can buy one for under $10k and a handful of car executives in Michigan can’t make yacht payments at that price so, we can’t have them.Do people realize just how good Chinese EVs are now?
- In the United States you can get a $7500 tax credit to buy a $55,000 electric car but you can’t get a $7500 tax credit to rent a condo in a walkable neighborhood where you don’t need a car. And they call it “climate policy.”
- Last week I was in a thread where someone wondered about heat, human survivability/habitability, and climate change. I've done some technical work on this specific question, so, quick thread on basics, and what to worry about. Key term to know: The "wet bulb" temperature.
- Remember folks: Every time a driver hits a safety feature with their car, a human being gets to live the rest of their life.Hits inanimate object in parking lot because he can't see over his bulbous truck hood, blames fast-food restaurant. Clueless.
- If you think public transportation is a money-loser, wait til I show you the spreadsheet on car culture. You will probably want to be sitting down for this.
- Cars were a massive, historic mistake and tethering our national economy to their production is the single biggest barrier we face to progress and prosperity.Tell me your most radical position that cannot be placed on the left-right political spectrum
- In fairness, this is also the Democratic transportation plan, they just argue that since the cars will be all electric, maybe, someday, late this century, it’s fine.
- Hypothesis: Riding a bicycle for everyday trips is the gateway drug to local activism, and to realizing the crisis of democracy is government serving loudest voices, rather than majority. First thing that happens when you ride a bike for errands is, drivers try to kill you.
- Driver violence is so normalized and politically acceptable that it took six different violent assaults over *seven months* for the cops to even realize, oh shit, we might have a serial killer on our hands. What are license plates even for.
