But Trump says he’s going to fix all of this! 
I’d be curious to know if horse powered trams could still be an interesting alternative, on the economical and ecological point of view… Is the carbon footprint of horses even better than electric trams ?
Anyway this is a great video to illustrate how individual freedom can be detrimental to collective freedom and opportunities.
I found this nice article via No Tech Magazine :
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it seems like a little of the shine of capitalism is starting to rub off
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If it makes you feel any better, I-35 is no joy at the other end (that would be Minneapolis/St. Paul, and it doesn’t matter if it’s W or E, they both suck for their own special reasons).
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Oh ouch that is a bad travel time budget. Painful. There are not enough audiobooks in all the world for me to justify that kinda time as a daily commute (currently working my way through William Gibson’s trilogy, I read Pattern Recognition when it came out, now finally listening through Spook Country and then Zero History).
I have come to detest long daily commutes. I will do inconvenient things just to avoid traveling on-peak. I know the Los Angeles freeways are awful 24/7, I have personally driven in loathsome Atlanta megapolis traffic, and I am guessing commutes from NJ and PA into NYC are bad (but NYC is well-networked with public transit, comparatively).
I hope your time and mileage are billable.
A friend who is a general contractor in the building trades here in Austin swears by this–he spends a lot of time driving to different construction sites:
https://www.amazon.com/GideonTM-Cushion-Vibrating-Massager-Shoulder/dp/B018WMPQJ2/
He drives around with a travel mug of coffee the size of a 16-ounce coffee can. Loooooooong days.
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I’m currently shopping for a house upstate, while remaining in my Brooklyn Office. people who currently make the commute can weigh in, but from my back-of-the-napkin, it looks like it could be cheaper for me to drive in and pay for garage parking than to take the train. Especially if there are park-and-ride fees. I’m sure the drive would be a nightmare, but encouraging people onto public transit shouldn’t be all stick and no carrot…
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No, our monsters come in the form of an angry old man with bad hair.
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My time and mileage are billable, and there’s a company policy to not talk on the phone while driving. So that’s nice. But if that were my daily commute, I’d lose my sh** real fast.
Usually when I have to get into town I aim for arrival at 6AM. No other way to beat that traffic!
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What price would you put on your own happiness, wrt commuting?
How crowded is the train you’d be taking? Is there wifi? Would it increase your productivity? Could you sleep on the train? (I have no idea if that is even a good idea because I don’t know much about personal security and trains in New York; please forgive my ignorance.)
I have had the luxury of telecommuting a few days a week, and planning my trips into Austin to do office-based work to coincide with quotidian life maintenance: dental appointments, grocery resupply runs, spending too much money at REI, getting material objects fixed, lunching with pals in civilized environs like food trucks and food coops, etc. I own an old Honda free and clear, so I don’t service a loan, just depreciate what is already nothing special. The Honda has all kinds of airbags and is one of the more crash-worthy vehicles rated by Consumer Reports. I drove an even older Volvo but its mileage and lack of ABS brakes and side-curtain airbags eventually made me cut it loose from our family’s motley fleet. Fuel costs go up and down wildly and really mess up my ability to budget predictably; my next car will probably be a hybrid. I claim to be a treehugger, but will elide carbon footprint arguments here. Obviously train travel is less damaging to environment, this having been researched reliably for decades.
Yes, cars can mean freedom from the tyranny of train and other schedules. Freedom of movement’s a big deal in the happiness cost-benefit analysis. I have to say though, if I could get out from under my fuel and repair costs, auto insurance, etc. I would have a lot more money for things like… saving money for my child’s college tuition, my own health care, an actual vacation, home repair, and a bunch of other stuff I have been putting off (like solar panels and good batteries).
I see car accidents every single day I am in Austin. Every. Day. Sometimes, twice a day. I realize that train accident occurrences are increasing there on the East Coast. If I had the mathematical chops, I’d try to figure out whether train wrecks kill more people than car wrecks in a given area and commute-timeslot. A crap-ton of people I see next to me in traffic are texting while driving (it’s illegal and they do it anyway), and I find it extremely unsettling to share the road with them. Fully half the people in my neighborhood have been in car accidents (usually rear-ended), and our neighborhood is “out of town” by 20+ miles… nothing like your Brooklyn-to-upstate commute, I know, but it’s urban-vs-exurban traffic in either case.
If you are good at statistical analysis, that could be a fruitful way of evaluating whether cheaper is actually better.
If it were me, I’d also call my accountant, and find out just what kinds of cheaper are deductible and smart.
Obligatory Repo Man ref:
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It’s no contest in my mind, environmentally and mind-environmentally for sure, I hate jostling for position just generally in life, and adding the threat of death and maiming to it, and I just can’t. I get a pit in my stomach just thinking about driving up to see houses on Saturday mornings. I do appreciate this super-thoughtful breakdown, though!
The cheapness wasn’t so much a temptation as a head-scratcher. Given the myriad benefits of public transit, how are we stuck in a position where people do have to do a statistical analysis to figure out which they can stand more of, shedding dollars or sanity? Note: Despite being a database developer and having a undergrad degree in Sociology, I am not good at stats (don’t tell my boss, and you don’t have to tell my college advisor…)
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That was the rub for my last commute in Seattle. Either the Prius or the 400cc twist and go was cheaper round trip than one way on the bus plus the bus was 1.5+ hours one way vs. 30ish minutes in the morning and 50ish minutes in the afternoon. I would have been happy to take transit but $6/day and losing 3 hours of my day to round trip commute time… fuck that.
ETA I will say that the Seattle area otherwise has a pretty kick ass transit system just that work site was not on an easy route for where I lived.
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I work for a civil engineer, but leave all the statistical and other complicated math to people authorized to work them formula thingies with a lot of letters instead of numbers. My boss knows. And she knows that I’m halfway decent with spreadsheets but as I keep explaining to my fellow English-majors “programming is not math, it’s logic.”
Time is money.
Dollars vs. sanity probably has a damn formula, somewhere, already.
Insanity vs. dollars is probably at the core of this “solution” roundly criticized a while back:
Nice input here from an actual pilot re: navigation details for flying cars…
… but that kind of future is not here yet (excepting private helicopters), and not without its dangers along the X- Y- and Z-axes.
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Have you actually tried the commute? Do you cross the GWB? I can’t imagine making that choice, life is too short. I know people who work 10 hr days with 4 hrs of commute, and never see the kids they moved to the nice burb for. I chose to move to Jersey after seeing how long it would take me to get out of Brooklyn for recreation. I raised my kids in a city with a rep for awful schools and they turned out great.
2 great sites/blogs/podcasts about smart city planning: strongtowns.org, rationalurbanism.com
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I’m taken to understand that sleeping on the subway has a similar risk portfolio to standing in the pouring rain.
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In the late 80s, I moved from the bay area to Chico, California. What I noticed was that in Chico, they were ripping out unused rail tracks that ran down the middle of the downtown streets, while in San Jose and the south bay, they were installing a shiny new light rail system. I didn’t understand the significance then, but it sure did lodge itself in my memory.
Gotta say, though, it was fun watching those beast machines rip the steel rails out of the street, like they was spaghetti!
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Why do so many people in NYC, Chicago, Atlanta, Boston, you name it, necessarily have to be funneled in, from where they live, to work in an overbuilt area of a couple of square miles??
Hell of a lot cheaper to decentralize office work than it is to build transit to within walking distance of everyone’s door.
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Well, when transit was first built it WAS within walking distance of everyone’s door.
I live in what civic organizations call a streetcar building and what scholars call a taxpayer strip. It’s one of those blocks of two and three story row buildings with names or years set in stone over the doors, along the trolley tracks in the city and inner-ring suburbs. The reason our city got built up is that during the first half of the 20th century there were 2 major trolley tracks running parallel, and blocks of streets ran between and off them.
Then came the family car and the road systems, encouraged by short films at the matinees. Check out the Handy Jam films on archive.org for some slick propaganda from GM and Dow.
There’s tons of new office space going up in the exurbs, because white flight is still going on, and cutting down forests and fields and paving through them for new plywood-built mini-McMansions is quite profitable.
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Well, what’s done is done, and lots of people live in suburbs and exurbs now. Time machines are not a solution. A reality based approach needs to start with what we have now.
Because the city center is often too expensive to live in. We’re in the midst of an affordable housing crisis.
True. Part of that is affordability, which I noted above, and part of that was the wave of white flight from city centers in the 1960s and 1970s. We’re now seeing a reversal, but not everyone can afford to move into the city or within reach of work that pays their bills. Remember that wages have been relatively stagnant for quite a while now.
Actually, I think we’re seeing a reversal of that. People with means are moving into the city, driving up costs, and they tend to be white and wealthy. Where I live, it’s people of color who are now being pushed out into the suburbs, because they can’t afford to live in the city any longer, because elite whites want access to the city core.
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