but I’m seeing time and time again that new roads are being invested rather than investment into other options.
This is politics more than anything else. I see loads of investment into transit in my daily life. But that’s because I live in California.
Say you could somehow largely remove cars from a conservative led area, somehow. Do you really think they would spend money on transit? Of course not, they would tell the poors to walk.
Transit spending is an absolute necessity in what you’re proposing, and all the band aid ripping in the world won’t force it to happen when the purse strings are controlled by conservatives.
There’s been this weird trend in young voters for a while now, along the lines of “if it just gets bad enough then it will turn good again, somehow!” If the Democrats lose badly enough they’ll start enacting progressive policies. If the economy gets bad enough we’ll increase the social safety net. If the climate gets bad enough we’ll start banning fossil fuels.
It’s some of the dumbest, most naive shit I’ve ever heard. There is no rock bottom. There is no wake up call. Ripping the band aid off likely just means we bleed to death.
I live in Australia and, here, regional residents have buses at a minimum and in larger regional towns, there are trains. In remote areas, there are roads connecting even smaller towns. ‘The poors’ here in our Metropolitan areas still have access to trains and buses but bus connections are not great, which convinces people to drive because cycling poses a risk on roads due to driver attitudes and lack of cycling infrastructure. Further, our public transport is still largely state owned.
I would say we’re in a much better position than the US in terms of PT accessibility, however, we do tend to follow your trends such as sprawling suburbs with no amenities, mega shopping centres, car centrism etc. In our Metropolitan cities, we absolutely do not need EVs because our cities are walkable with plenty of options to get around not in a car.
In fact, we had train lines going to the regional areas but past governments, as recent as the 90s, decided to shut them down because they wanted to cut back on public transport spending and increase investment into roads. In my state, there’s a monopoly on road infrastructure building and they’re in bed with our state government and dictate what projects can and cannot be put in. This means that our infrastructure budget is largely spent on new roads - that don’t actually need to be built - and provide arbitrary alternative infrastructure to tick boxes.
So from my perspective from down under, it’s possible to do away with both ICEs and EVs in Metro but we’re on the precipice of where you guys are at present - we still have alternatives but are actively gutting them in favour of roads. That and the giant SUVs are now our most popular vehicle because for some reason, our previous federal government decided to introduce a tax benefit to purchase them.
(As an aside, from what you say, sounds like your young voters are adopting the ‘let it burn’ philosophy possibly because they feel so helpless. Additionally, I honestly don’t understand how the Republicans are able to behave in such an insane manner and I absolutely resent it because our crazies here in Parliament have started to adopt the crazy in their arguments. Thankfully, there’s not many people here that would vote for a party that goes for policies like ‘ban trans people’ etc. and we have plenty of parties to choose from such as Legalise Weed, Animal Justice, Greens, many independents etc. So, our votes get distributed across a broad spectrum of views that better represent the country. Your voting system appears to lump all the crazies into one option and everyone else into one of two options which include the crazy group. It’s mad watching it from here.)
This is politics more than anything else. I see loads of investment into transit in my daily life. But that’s because I live in California.
Say you could somehow largely remove cars from a conservative led area, somehow. Do you really think they would spend money on transit? Of course not, they would tell the poors to walk.
Transit spending is an absolute necessity in what you’re proposing, and all the band aid ripping in the world won’t force it to happen when the purse strings are controlled by conservatives.
There’s been this weird trend in young voters for a while now, along the lines of “if it just gets bad enough then it will turn good again, somehow!” If the Democrats lose badly enough they’ll start enacting progressive policies. If the economy gets bad enough we’ll increase the social safety net. If the climate gets bad enough we’ll start banning fossil fuels.
It’s some of the dumbest, most naive shit I’ve ever heard. There is no rock bottom. There is no wake up call. Ripping the band aid off likely just means we bleed to death.
I live in Australia and, here, regional residents have buses at a minimum and in larger regional towns, there are trains. In remote areas, there are roads connecting even smaller towns. ‘The poors’ here in our Metropolitan areas still have access to trains and buses but bus connections are not great, which convinces people to drive because cycling poses a risk on roads due to driver attitudes and lack of cycling infrastructure. Further, our public transport is still largely state owned.
I would say we’re in a much better position than the US in terms of PT accessibility, however, we do tend to follow your trends such as sprawling suburbs with no amenities, mega shopping centres, car centrism etc. In our Metropolitan cities, we absolutely do not need EVs because our cities are walkable with plenty of options to get around not in a car.
In fact, we had train lines going to the regional areas but past governments, as recent as the 90s, decided to shut them down because they wanted to cut back on public transport spending and increase investment into roads. In my state, there’s a monopoly on road infrastructure building and they’re in bed with our state government and dictate what projects can and cannot be put in. This means that our infrastructure budget is largely spent on new roads - that don’t actually need to be built - and provide arbitrary alternative infrastructure to tick boxes.
So from my perspective from down under, it’s possible to do away with both ICEs and EVs in Metro but we’re on the precipice of where you guys are at present - we still have alternatives but are actively gutting them in favour of roads. That and the giant SUVs are now our most popular vehicle because for some reason, our previous federal government decided to introduce a tax benefit to purchase them.
(As an aside, from what you say, sounds like your young voters are adopting the ‘let it burn’ philosophy possibly because they feel so helpless. Additionally, I honestly don’t understand how the Republicans are able to behave in such an insane manner and I absolutely resent it because our crazies here in Parliament have started to adopt the crazy in their arguments. Thankfully, there’s not many people here that would vote for a party that goes for policies like ‘ban trans people’ etc. and we have plenty of parties to choose from such as Legalise Weed, Animal Justice, Greens, many independents etc. So, our votes get distributed across a broad spectrum of views that better represent the country. Your voting system appears to lump all the crazies into one option and everyone else into one of two options which include the crazy group. It’s mad watching it from here.)