Comments by "" (@jasonreed7522) on "City Beautiful" channel.

  1. Another factor is coal fired power. Brown coal is ultra dirty and ultra cheap. Obviously cars don't help but it really takes coal to reach such insane levels. (China also has this problem, coal is too cheep and available to not be used to support electrification in these countries while everyone else if freaking out over climate issues(justifiably)). To me 1960's American traffic planning means terrible congestion and urban highway obsession at the cost of any decent mass transit which would have been far more efficient by basically all metrics.
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  2. One of the most surreal of these old/new adjacencies is how the pyramids of gaza egypt are normally photographed with just desert in the background but they are actually at the edge of a city with perfectly "normal" modern architecture.
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  3. The 1950s had some very effective propaganda, first selling the car as the definition of freedom and how that justifies car infrastructure to make that a self fulfilling prophecy (because now you actually need a car to go anywhere, hence a car has literally become freedom from the prison of your home). And the suburb was sold as the ultimate compromise between rural and urban life, all the safety, clean air, and space of the countryside with all the amenities and economic opportunities of the city. (The reality is not so much) And so today we may still be capable of great innovation, but too many are either still bought into the past's propaganda or unable/willing to try to fix the mistakes of our grandfather's. Even when we want to change its always expensive and political (politics will have people take a stance they know is wrong just so they can oppose their enemies, i hate politics)
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  4. The main reason to drive in Boston is usually work related, if you are visiting the city and have a tight schedule, the safest and sometimes only option is to just suck it up and drive while planning around the traffic. But as a resident, or a longer term visitor in a hotel or rental then you probably have the ability to actually get away without using a car. Sadly amtrak still sucks in the northeast, just because its better than in alot of places doesn't mean it doesn't have a long way to go.
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  5. My town has a "bike path" (multi use, motor vehicles banned) that is a just over 5km loop around a golf course that gets tons of use for recreation. (And doesn't meaningfully connect anything, one entrance is by the bus garage/golf course on the dege of town and the other is by an apartment complex on the edge of town) I think its safe ro say that people will gladly bike 5km if its safe and comfortable even without a destination. (And the stats for a place like the Netherlands is much further, but the average adult can go 10km without getting winded) Tldr, people will bike for for miles so extend that good separated/multi use path as far as you reasonably can and it will be used.
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  6. And a slightly less hidden benefit is as a location to host local festivals and similar events that really build a sense of community. Ideally this park is right on Mainstreet near other amenities like the library and restaurants. (And the mandatory icecream stand so you can get an ice cream and eat it in the park) Although the exact benefits of a park depend on its exact type. A series of public tennis courts will provide less runoff reduction than a manicured grass lawn style park for instance. A bike path may be great for recreation but its also likely to be long and narrow which isn't good for hosting events but can be a fantastic backbone to cycling infrastructure in the area. (Everyone would rather bike in a park than in a gutter)
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  7. Especially because the easy first step is allowing duplex and similar into the low density mix creating a lowish density that doesn't immediately clash with the ultra low density single family zoning. (Basically its a good weapon against NIMBYs) and once the density starts to rise you can move on up to more dense housing forms with an ideal higher end being "respectful apartments". (Basically have them well maintained and have thick enough walls to not hear your neighbors 99% of the time) Single family homes should be kept to areas that are still walking range to a denser "Mainstreet" feeling area like in small towns. (Basically keep them in small pockets no bigger than 10min walking time to the closest dense edge, and have actual sidewalks + bike infrastructure throughout)
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  8. At that point a condo building is functionally an apartment complex and need the same "building & grounds" level management, although condos are probably better long term as you technically own a subsection of the building instead of simply occupying it. But for a more traditional suburb of detached single family homes (and duplexes & the like that can "hide" in such a neighborhood), i can't imagine putting up with an HOA. If for nothing else they are enforcing sterility and uniformity, and growing up in a small town its genuinely 1,000 times more attractive to have a mix of houses. (Styles, colors, sizes, materials, ages, ect ) My town has a building that was a former stop on the underground railroad, a neighboring town has a 3 story pink house with white & purple trim, it definitely looks better than cookie cutter suburban house left hand symmetry #684648.
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  9.  @ernestcallenbach9953  suburbs litterally can't even bother to add a sidewalk (especially in residential areas). I hate to say it but i think we need actual laws about the minimum building density to mandate a sidewalk. (Obviously on back roads they aren't needed, but when you have the density of a small town village or generic suburb a sidewalk is needed despite the nimbys pretending they are on a rural backroad)
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  10. Gary's problems run very deep, to the point cops tell you to just leave and don't stop at the stopsigns until you reach a less economically depressed area. Its already become a "positive" feed back loop meaning the problems reinforce themselves.
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  11. Also remember, European cities grew to size long before cars were invented and as such had to be pedestrian friendly. American cites in contrast grew substantially after cars were invented and suburbs were built in the relatively cheap and available lands near cities. So many American cities were built with a fanatic obsession with cars which don't belong in cites. (Simple geometry) Now the consequences of this is that American cities generally are much less pedestrian friendly than European cities, however, local policy on mass transit is the final straw.
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  12. Additionally outside of HOAs you will see the full spectrum of housing which includes smaller, older, and more run down properties. (Not to mention environmental factors like proximity to a farm, never live downwind of a farm) In contrast he stated that 80% of new housing is part of an HOA by default, so how much of this 4% is from the housing simply being all new or not permitted to decay or suit lower income people. (Basically is this sample bias at work?)
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  13. It also could be important to ensure it stays open as late as the bars on weekends. Simply put drunk driving is bad, so giving people ways to get to bars and home where someone else drives them is preferable. Even if it isn't directly profitable i would imagine the slight boost to bar patronage and reduction in drunk driving related "accidents" would certainly pay for itself.
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  14. That psychological need to stick to the edges is called survival instinct/fear. Since childhood we are taught to stay out of the road for our own protection, and to be wary while crossing it because we ultimately can only trust ourselves to look out for our own well-being. This means its very ingrained to stay away from the middle of the road no matter what state its in. (Even on private logging roads with super low traffic volumes i walk along the edge and not down the center) A slightly different factor is that black asphalt gets really hot in sunlight so being on it sucks as a human. (Although this doesn't so much push you to the edge as completely off and into buildings or onto the grass)
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  15.  @Rahul_G.G.  thats just supply and demand, the demand is sky high and they are building more as fast as possible. Fuel cost is just one aspect of what determines the minimum profitable price a plant can operate at. The business side of the operation determines a cost as function of generation rate for the plant and then every plant submits this to the Independent System Operator who habe the job of telling everyone how much to generate to meet demand. The ISO always picks the next cheapest generator who sets the new "wholesale price" for the grid. If transmission lines into a region are at capacity then only local generation can meet new local demand and the price decouples from the rest of the grid. (Very common in cities on particularly high demand days) Wholesale price isn't what you pay as a customer, its what your distribution company/utility pays and then they normally offer a fixed rate to the customer. (You can get an unbuffered rate which can save you lots of money but in the case of exeptional circumstances can be very expensive) For a full explanation the channel Practical Engineering has 2 videos that are very helpful, one on the texas blackout in the icestorm and one on the 2003 blackout of the American northeast caused by Cleveland.
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  16.  @xaviercopeland2789  thats kinda the point, make transit more appealing than cars for most trips. Obviously if all you do is nuke parking it won't go over well, so the key part is make better transit so we can then kick cars out of urban cores where they litterally don't fit. (Said by a car owner who knows their value)
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  17. That sounds amazing, this morning i looked to see how long it would take to get places in the Northeast using options other than car and was greatly saddened. (Mainly seeing if i could enjoy a nice train ride instead of a 6-7 hour drive) The answer was so depressing. I am a 10min drive to a train station south of Hartford CT (basically dead center of the tiny state). And to visit Syracuse NY (center of the state) would take 4hrs by car or 8 by train (admittedly the mass pike and NY throughway are great for inter city travel which is what freeways are supposed to be used for). To get to within a hour and a half of my hometown would take me to lake placid or Plattsburgh NY (near the Canadian border due north of Albany) would take around 18hrs, and i still would have a 2 hour car drive left. I can go straight home in 6-7 depending on traffic and breaks needed. (3 of which are spent crossing mountains on 55-60mph roads, which admittedly is the only enjoyable part of the drive, interstates are so boring) Lets just say the American trains are not worth taking which is a shame, as Amtrak has 1 line that lets you take a car with you and that line connects 2 cities when it should be available for going to rural places where you objectively must use a car. (I had the idea of doing that before to get Americans on rails but DC to Orlando is an interesting choice for such an option)
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  18. Important Historical Context: Europe's cities are generally super old, like medieval old so they were built when pedestrian or horse cart were the only means of transportation. This resulted in much more compact cities and alot of stuff in the way of car centered infrastructure. American cites mostly grew in 2 phases, pre car which lasted longer in the east, and post car which was a period of major growth and suburbs became a thing. So with context America had a much better opportunity to be car centric and had lots of empty space to sprawl into since it was/is way more rural than Europe so it is expected that American cities would be less walkable. Now, we need to try to use the lessons learned from our mistakes to make healthier cities that dont involve cars or internal combustion engines. A good interface with rural regions would be park your car at a rural train station/airport and use public transit within the city. Since rural regions are highly dependent on cars.
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  19. Some people call that "brutalist architecture" i call it a hellscape. All they needed was some trees and "park like" infrastructure around the grounds to look decent, and then vet the residents to provide some level of piece of mind for the residents. (If you don't have piece of mind as soon as you get a better work situation you leave and don't look back, this will create a slum if only those who can't escape are willing to live there. Its basically the same as how districts where smoke from factories fell are still the poor parts of cities like London 100years after the factories closed, the air pollution drove away anyone who could move leaving behind a slum)
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  20. If the rail was half as fast as flying, but had a far more pleasant ride and station experience it would get used heavily. Especially if it connected all the "small cities" along the way, like Albany, Springfield, Syracuse, Hartford, as well as the Majors like Boston, NYC, Buffalo. And for the "slow rail" have a station placed to be on average under a 1hr drive from places and you would be amazed the amount of tourism that would happen from people who couldn't care less about cities visiting other smaller destinations.
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  21.  @steverempel8584  i think some mega cities with multiple cores are the results of two cities that each had 1 core having their suburbs grow until their was no obvious division between the cities. 1 case of how this could happen is that the Capital of NY is Albany and directly across the Hudson is Rensselaer but nobody even acknowledges the difference when talking about the region. (They are different counties) But for a mega/giga city to be truly unified you would need near perfect and fast public transit so that the different ends of town still have enough "weak connections" to not develop separate identities as nobody bothers visiting the far side if town for anything.
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  22. A simple way to make a traffic jam is to slam on your brakes or make someone else slam on theirs (by cutting them off). In short the people behind the braking car will brake more than you did eventually leading to a fully stopped car on the freeway, the jam will only clear if more cars leave the "traffic snake" then enter it. Surprisingly, driving like a good driver helps traffic and driving like a bad driver hurts traffic. Also the best solution to traffic is to not let personal cars into cities AND have good mass transit. (Rural places need cars since rural mass transit is economically impossible)
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  23. It seems like common sense for bars to want to be car independent. (Drinking and Driving is illegal for good reasons) And likewise patrons would prefer to be able to walk home from the bar, or atleast not have to drive themselves.
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  24. The only time i have driven in Boston is for work, going from about Hartford CT to MIT for a site visit (engineer for construction, they are always changing up their laboratory spaces) and that was bad enough. The caveats are that MIT is in Cambridge which technology isn't the City of Boston but its close enough, and it was my first time driving in a major city off the highway. (I grew up super rural, and drove in Syracuse at night once, and Syracuse has nothing on Boston traffic) The "what went wrong" that caused me to drive, if i tried taking Amtrak i would have arrived at 9pm, just in time for my field work from 10am-3pm. Its very frustrating being in transit and train friendly New England and having the trains still suck to the point you basically just have to drive everywhere anyway.
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  25. Boston has some crazy city borders. Just from a map perspective one would expect that Cambridge and Brookline would have already been annexed. Its also hilarious to me that "Harvard Bridge" connects directly between MIT and Boston. (The road does go to Harvard, but MIT is right there)
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  26. This explains people's obsession with property values. Since your tax is based on how valuable your house & land is i would assume you want the lowest value possible if you don't intend to sell it. (Many people will live in a house for many years before their life changes enough to justify a move, usually tied with a job change) I understand the intent of don't kick grandma out of the house she lived in for 50 years just because a bunch of people did things around her, but on transfer to someone else (like inherentence) it should go back to normal. And intentionally causing a housing shortage in an area plagued by homelessness is a very asshole thing to do. I don't think all NIMBYs are automatically evil, selfish, assholes so you should atleast try to figure out what their side of the argument is and incorporate a fair compromise. (For his example of the parking garage failing to be a 12 story residential building, why couldn't they shave a few layers off the top to only be a 7-10 story residential building, maybe turn the first floor into a park for the entire community instead of being so absolutist about everything)
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  27. If only more people would realize the best way to improve everything about driving is to have less drivers by giving people options to avoid driving.
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  28. You could theoretically convert any normal unit to that one. Its just miles per unit energy, a standard burrito worth of calories is probably the hardest part of the entire process because that gives you miles per Calorie which is 1000 calories (a base unit that is equal to 4.81J and Joules are universal) You also gotta figure out the efficiency of food in to exercise out, ask a nutritionist that one.
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  29. It would make more sense if it expanded at certain density breakpoints to encurage areas to all build up to the 3-4 story range before expanding when its actually needed.
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  30. I would like to think that this act of kindness is an inherent part of the "American Way". Where you help your countrymen through any disaster regardless of your rivalries. This is actually something many liked about the aftermath of 9/11, for a time national solidarity was incredibly strong. (I was too young to remember any of that though) Not to claim any sort of monopoly on being decent people, especially as sometime it feels like we are loosing our sense of compassion. (Exacerbated by social media and the news/media both highlighting loud and attention grabbing opinions and making a select few terrible people louder than they ever should be, on all sides)
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  31. Honestly college sports are better than national level sports, for starters its your city/town's team, possibly your friends, has no stopping for commercials to play on TV, and the pep band makes a world of difference in crowd energy. (Also ticket price)
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  32. I suspect the reason for that is land value and space. I know very little about Phoenix other than the images of whats basically a small town that only grew out and not "up". So i assume that the economic factors in the city make it cheaper to just keep expanding low density structures into the "empty" desert than to bother building skyscrapers in the core of the city. For reference NYC (Manhattan specifically) has a record of some plots of land being worth over $2000 per square foot of plot, so obviously you would only build towers to try and get the most out of that land. If land in Phoenix is cheap then why bother making expensive towers?
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  33.  @francisdayon  green energy is not too expensive, it can be the cheapest option, especially economic "externalities" are considered. (It cost a factory nothing to polute a river with industrial waste, but that has massive social costs that the government will pay. This is why china stopped importing a bunch of recyclables from the US, the companies profited having sweatshops sort plastic by hand but the health effects were costing China's government big time) And who says the "developing" world has to climb the tech tree and make all the same mistakes as the developed world. They don't have to use coal and steam engines for hundreds of years, they can import specialty goods like windmills and solar panels. Hell india could start will concentrated solar in the south or the deserts near Pakistan, all that takes is mirrors and molten salt as the heat exchanger with a conventional thermal plant system. They have enough Brain power to have both nukes (weapons) and a space program, they could build nuclear power as an alternative to coal and build hydro in the Himalayas to serve as the battery for they concentrated solar. Upgrade transmission lines enough and they can make different regions capable of supporting eachother fully so you don't need to burn coal locally. (Also natural gas killed coal in the states thanks to fracking so I'm sure india could import nat gas or extract its own to avoid using brown coal, the dirtiest of the coals) Coal is simply cheap and dirty, unimaginably dirty with long term consequences. (Litterally creating the poor districts in western cities like London because were the smoke from the factories fell only the poor couldn't escape)
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  34.  @megalonoobiacinc4863  except if you look at his feet its super obvious that he is standing on that ground/slope and some grass is infront of him. Somehow this manages to be both more and less fake feeling than a green screen.
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  35. The name of the game is always jobs, if they could court some company to build a factory or offices in whatever counts as the nice part of town that would provide the hope and opportunity needed to get the ball rolling for everything else. What failed Garry was having 60% of the population employed by a single factory/employer/industry and not diversifying the economy to handle the shock of "what if they go under/decline?" which steel did in the states and the city lost its income with no backup.
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  36.  @neolithictransitrevolution427  very fair arguments, but for arguments sake living on the same campus you work at will save you alot of expenses owning a car. The problem being 99% of Walmarts are built on stroads so unless you owned a car you wouldn't have an easy time going anywhere other than box stores. (Making the only reason to stay in such a unit the rent, which hopefully is damn near free compared to any other apartments you could rent in the city) I definitely agree with you on the dangers of building "serf housing" everywhere, its just a concept that has had economic sense throughout history. (Like servents living in a castle, not that we want to return to such a society)
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  37. But they also attract a wealthy class of individuals (professors) who will have very high property taxes on their properties, and students who will spend a lot of money patronizing the local businesses and contributing to sales tax. If you want to complain about the whole in your property taxes, you must also compare it to the bump in the rest of your taxes to see if it even is a net loss for your city.
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  38. Why is it that skyliners/ski lift style transportation is almost exclusively used in themeparks/resorts. I understand i am not well traveled and they are point to point but it seems like there should be some use case in urban areas. (Possibly from a train hub to the middle of a shopping district, but it could also just a price factor)
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  39. I'm american and I don't get it either, but then again i grew up 30min south of the Canadian border in an area with minimal diversity and nobody really cared about race just who you are as an individual. (Although being racist was still a thing and very frowned upon. I assume most of America's race obsession stems from the south and sunbelt where racial diversity is much more prevalent and lasting scars still exist from the days of truly evil racism.)
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  40. I wouldn't say it doesn't create traffic. Traffic isn't about the mode of transport, its about how much congestion and backup and delay happens. Inside buildings when a hallway is crowded it is said to be a high traffic area. Its just bikes and pedestrians fit a lot easier than cars do into the same space and as such are less likely to cause "traffic" that inconveniences you. And i do agree with the idea of a bike "highway" just more in the sense of having a lot of multipurpose paths to take shortcuts intentionally unavailable to cars. Cars have a use, but that is more for rural regions and not urban and suburbs that should focus on transit and bike/pedestrian infrastructure.
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  41. A much less talked about form of gentrification than what urban communities face is what rural communities face. Often a lake will have a small hamlet or town on/near it and the super rich will buy as much property as possible and drive up land values until the locals are incapable of owning anything amd they turn a public body of water into their own private lake. (Personally this should be illegal and punishable with prison time) But even just a normal small farming community could face similar problems if overly rich folk drive up property values above what local jobs can pay for.
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  42.  @Jetliner  ACC definitely feels like its in its infancy as a technology, like if cruise just locked the throttle at whatever percentage of max you had it at instead of giving more or less to maintain a target speed. ACC is currently (as far as i can tell) only using instantaneous position/distance to set the target speed so when you get cut off or someone jumps in that gap because people drive with cat logic (if i fits, i sits) it will notice the distance collapsed and set its new target like 20-30mph lower for this distance and start braking. What it needs to do is at a bare minimum take the derivative of the position data, smooth it slightly because dervitives amplify noise, and then use this relative speed to determine if it really needs to slow down. (It could also just find out exactly the speed the other car is going and make that its target if that speed is lower than yours while trending towards the desired follow distance.) As far as lane sense and blind spot monitoring, go to setting and disable the chime, i only have it on for long road trips where fatigue is a concern. And lane sense is similarly poorly implimented with it just turning the wheel a fixed amount instead of dynamically inreasing it to keep on its side of the line, i leave mine off since it isn't actually able to do its job. (At best the wheel turning is an alert you drifted, amt worst it actively fights you) I think the real leason here that can be applied to self driving cars are that programmers apparently don't drive or many of these issues wouldn't be a thing because its common sense that cruise isn't just lock the throttle at 45% because that only works on perfectly level ground with 0 weather. Overall these technologies are a net positive even in their current form, but that doesn't mean they are perfect yet. (I still wish other drivers would just use normal cruise, let alone the fancier assist features)
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  43. I definitely think the signs that just show your speed back too you and blink if you are way to fast are more effective as they just provide immediate feedback and get you attention that "here is a speed zone, slow down". But like everything it requires maintenance, and while this isn't the scope of the video in my area their are many signs that have been swallowed by trees so its become very easy to miss a speed sign. It also doesn't help that the set limit and the actual "natural speed" aren't in sync when this happens.
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  44. Fundamentally you need jobs (that pay above poverty line wages and aren't government), with those most people cam support themselves and the local government will have enough money to pay the social programs needed for the rest. Admittedly its much easier said than done to create jobs that pay and affordable housing options. And if Vancouver is the only Canadian city that has a survivable winter for the homeless then all Canadian cities need to work on their homeless creation problem and provide sufficient shelters so they aren't forced to move to Vancouver or litterally die to the Canadian Winter.
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  45. I think part of it is that most of Europe is significantly older than the USA so the economies of the cities are more diversified. Gary was born in the 1920's as a steel foundry barracks, when 60% of the population is employed by 1 employer/industry, its highly likely that the rest of the population is basically just service for them and not other self supporting buisnesses. (Restaurants and stores that have 90% of their clients be employed by a single factory or mine will close when that factory closes) I think the USA just has more of these Boom towns that were originally just a village that suddenly found gold, oil, or build a steel foundry and one day the well runs dry, the gold or coal gets mined up, the factory closes and then the city/town has nothing else to offer anyone so its economy crashes and everyone moves away. Compare this to NYC or London which have very diverse economies supported by financial, legal, trade/shipping, political, 30 different industries, ect. They have such a diverse economy that if one industry implodes that the entire economy won't collapse with it. Part of this diversification is time and part is city planning, actively finding ways to get other income sources to move into the city. If you have steel maybe you can get cars and canned goods as well, in modern times electronics are huge, even Universities can support a smaller town by litterally importing students from other areas who will pay tuition amd spend money in stores, the university then pays professors good money who then pay taxes and spend money in stores which distributes some income to the area around the university. I think america just has a lot more single industry towns & cities than europe.
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  46.  @davidmendelsohn1583  good use of tax dollars: building quality transit, actually helping low income populations, providing public services like schools, police, ems, ect. Bad uses: giving to the rich, ripping up useful infrastructure, 1 more lane bro-ing, building useless crap, corruption
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  47.  @grantr9745  that's hilarious and kinda embarrassing for the Titans. I used to ticket prices for less atypical situations being $10 for a mens game at my college and $100 average for the Montreal Canadians. (Plus travel expenses if applicable)
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  48.  @isaaccastillo5080  you have discovered the concept of the metropolitan area, (technically this breaks for small cities). The metro is all contiguous counties that are highly urban in what most would recognize as functionally 1 city. For instance Albany NY is only the west side of the Hudson, and Rensselaer NY is the county on the east bank of the Hudson, but functionally it is just 1 city divided on a historical border determined when rivers where hard to cross and the place was basically just a small fort town. The real questions are why is Staten Island in NY and not Jersey (states, and cities) and Yonkers hasn't been absorbed into NYC yet. The answer is basically just a bunch of historical legacy nobody is willing to clean up and a local myth about sailing around islands.
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  49. Hongkong was leased to the UK as mudhuts on an island for ≈100years, then in 1997 the lease was up and it was returned to China. However, by then Hong Kong was a very western/capitalist metropolis we think of it as, but China was an authoritarian communist nation, so China decided to let them have autonomy in the short term until the culture fell back in line with the despotic government. Although i think the City should have gone to Tiawan as the Republic of China made the treaty and was chased off the mainland by Mao during WW2 (taking full advantage of the Japanese invasion).
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  50. And then you have pheonix Arizona which is a litteral sea of suburbia in a desert and as such doesn't have much motivation to grow "up" vs "out".
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  51. Legally speaking "Mainstreet" is the street city hall is on. But the image i have of Mainstreet is the one in my Hometown of Canton NY, the road is 4 lane total (mainly turning lanes) and is the merger of 310 and Route 11 (i believe they are state and federal respectively but maintenance gets contracted down to the towns). We have several of historic brick buildings that house various buisnesses including restaurants, a movie theater, and small stores. Their is a large park with an "iconic" fountain, and just off Mainstreet is the library and an ice cream stand and a church all of which face the park. The town legally has 6,500 people but has 2 colleges that are walkable to the downtown area. And of course city hall is on it. (The county court house is on court street, i wonder how that got named) and parking is facilitated by metered street edge or a couple lots behind the buildings, one of which serves a strip mall that is now dead. But is still easily walkable to anywhere in "downtown". And nearby is Potsdam where the street that feels like Mainstreet is actually called Market street and Mainstreet is a "L" interection at the end and has the movie theater. (Potsdam has a weird road network)
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  52. This seems like something small towns could do. The St. Lawrence River marks the NY - Canada border and on the streets closest to it there are a bunch of stores/restaurants and i think the towns should close the streets to all vehicles except scheduled deliveries in the summer. And they could put up temporary shade structures cause blacktop in direct sunlight in 80°F weather is awful. And reopen the steets for fall - spring cause nobody dines outside in -10°F snowing plus wind-chill. (Or likes being a pedestrian in it)
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  53. But on the other hand Universities pay their professors well and attract a lot of what is effectively long stay tourists who become patrons at local businesses. So while the university itself may be a giant tax exempt hole in the land area/property tax, they also boost taxes outside the university through things like property taxes for professor housing, and sales tax from all the students drinking at bars, grocery shopping, and commodity shopping. Atleast in my area, higher education is basically 20% of the tax base/economy. Before complaining that the university is a drain on the city budget, see what the difference is if the university didn't exist and stopped attracting so many students and professors to the area.
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  54.  @neolithictransitrevolution427  i think if you define a legal minimum they have to meet for quality of life reasons then it should be possible to not have a distopia end result. Basically mandate that for corporate on site housing to be used as permanent residences for workers that a certain minimum of amenities and maintenance be included. (Obviously this is only as good as the standards and enforcement of them so its not a guarantee of avoiding a distopian outcome)
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  55. In my town delivery trucks always park in the midblock crosswalk next to my office because Mainstreet is lined with angled parking and apparently they can't be bothered to drive around back and use that entrance to the "mall". (Its hard to describe, its basically a hallway with shops and stuff like a mall but its way smaller and very pedestrian friendly)
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  56. In this case he did point out that "free" just meant no tolls and its more of "included in the price of admission". Likewise "free" transit is payed for by taxes. The goal of "free" transit is usually to get enough people on it that it causes enough economic activity that you don't need a dedicated tax for it and instead just have less car accidents and more shopping pays for it. I fully agree with the sentiment of don't say "free" just because the real payment is hidden elsewhere. My biggest gripe for this is "free" college and healthcare, someone has to pay to the staff and to maintain and upgrade facilities and who you want to do it is the source of a very heated debate.
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  57. It used to be common to just sleep in your car and drive home (also drunk driving was a lot less taboo in the 80s) now you have to prove your vehicle reached its present location while you are sober or you will get a drunk driving ticket (making it illegal to "sleep it off" in your car). Now its common practice to have a designated driver who stays sober to drive their drunk friends home. Also, many bars are also restaurants that are perfectly normal to go to as a family and not drink any alcohol. This is different from a nightclub the is exclusively about the alcohol crowd, and nightclubs are basically always in walkable nieghborhoods or are walkable from a local college. As far as the math on parking spaces per unit of usage for different types, that math definitely needs an upgrade to reflect modern times and a "driver factor" (basically account for expected share of patrons to drive themselves vs take a cab, uber, walk, bike, or mass transit)
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  58. I think anyone not born into suburbia hates it for the blight it is, its like trying to live in a city and small town at the same time but only getting the worst of both. Cities generally have lots of amenities and density, small towns generally have a close knit community, nature, and historical character with varried house styles and a classic mainstreet that still resembles photos from the 1800s. Suburbia only has cars and cookie cutter homes, of course everyone hates it.
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  59. I'm a fan of bikes on the sidewalk (separate from people if it is busy enough to cause any safety concerns) and give them a cross walk button just like everyone else. In terms of collision damage potential a biker is far closer to a pedestrian than a car so they should be treated as such and not as a 2 ton steel box of safety. (A car is safe to be in but not necessarily around, i hope that makes sense)
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  60. Maybe I'm weird but I greatly prefer the bells and whistles. Adaptive cruise reveals just how terribly everyone drives on the interstate leaving half a car length not the 3 thats recommend to not crash before your brain even sees the crash coming. The proximity sensors are nice for nowing if you are too close to something or if you have reached the usual distance from the wall infront of where you park, and if you are regularly using a garage where the spaces are tiny (i visted MIT once, i had red on both sides of my jeep and could barely get out the door) then you are in an area too dense for cars anyway. And finally, nobody can convince me a backup camera is a negative the same way seatbelts are mandatory life saving devices, its simply an additional rearview perspective in addition to mirrors and windows, and it covers a major blind spot. Tldr; if you keep tripping your safety features and need to keep turning them off, take a moment and consider if its really the safety feature thats the problem or should you go back to driver's Ed or give up your keys entirely?
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  61. School districts should be a fair approximation of the community/shortest travel times. If the local area is poor then the state should fund the difference, in addition to per student funding. I grew up in a small town (5miles outside it technically) and the elementary, middle, and highschools were connected as 1 building and busses had the full spread of kids from kindergarten to 12th grade on them. I find so many if the things urban and suburban school districts do to be so weird. We litterally couldn't segregate if we wanted to, each grade had ~100 kids and the area was something like 95% white (northern edge of NY, only whites and natives intentionally settled here before the Erie canal made us the middle of nowhere, colleges are slowly changing this figure towards diversity). The only private school was a Catholic school that partnered with the public school and only went to grade 6. We were also poor because rural rust belt and then 2008 housing crisis. (Not inner city levels of poor but still lots of complaints from faculty about it)
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  62. Heating/cooling isn't 100% unnecessary, when its -20°F before wind chill no amount of passive home design will save you. (Unless you live in a litteral bunker) But the simple act of placing decidous trees on the south side of buildings (in the northern hemisphere) helps alot because shade in the summer reduces cooling and when the leaves drop in the fall you get extra warmth in the winter. Other practices can help such as having water parks (swimming holes/beaches not theme parks) and cooler outdoors areas so people can leave their homes to escape heat. (Also full and half basements are cooled by the earth offering shelter from heat without breaking out the air conditioner) Granted not all of these work for big buildings but for 2 - 3 story buildings they are a great start.
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  63.  @AdamSmith-gs2dv  and who said the Supreme Court was always morally right, there is a rather famous case "Dred Scott" where they ruled in favor of slavery. The US system may have one of the best frameworks, but its still limited by the people running it. If Nazis or Communists gained overwhelming popularity they could break the system just as easily as any other system in the world.
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  64. You can modify the cul-de-sac design to include multiuse trails (bikes and walkers) for shortcuts and have trams/street cars on main roads with stops in convient places (like infront of schools, stores, and apartment complexes as well as every few "blocks" of culdesac spurts off the main road. You could even try having higher density on the main roads with the low density on short culdesacs to balance everyone's needs and not "need" a car for everything. Obviously not everywhere can ditch the car but urban and suburban can atleast minimize the dependency and have a interface with the countryside through train stations on the outskirts that have extra large parking so those people can park outside the city for free/cheap and take transit in.
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  65.  @soulman888  i guess i autotranslated new subdivisions to new housing since alot of America's growth is in the suburban ponzi scheme.
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  66. Occasionally its the fault of the road design, although the natural speed of the road and the enforced speed are noticably different you just have to pay attention or if the conditions permit just set cruise to the correct speed. But in general yes, the guilty party hates being held accountable.
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  67. I have a video request, i found that Amtrak has 1 route where they let you take your car with you, it goes from DC to Orlando. I would like to know your thoughts on this method of getting Americans to take the train. Obviously its terrible to have cars in major cities but to connect 2 small towns i would love the option if the train averaged at least as fast as driving would be i would call it worth it to take a comfortable ride without putting vehicles and then drive the "last mile" to my parents house for example. (Granted they don't even have line to within and hours drive of my parents house) I think its a cool idea to get people on trains and get the funding and support needed to make the trains worth taking. (For reference amtrak takes 8hrs to do what a car can in 4 to go from Hartford are to Syracuse NY, which is pathetic even if the throughway is rarely congested)
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  68. They are places of rememberance, you go there to grieve and feel connection with the deceased. And in Mexico they have a 2 day holiday (or is it technically 2 separate back to back hollidays?) Called Dia de los Muertos and Dia de los Angelitos (day of the dead and day of the little angels) which specifically include being in cemeteries over night for a happy rememberance of their deceased ancestors (day of the dead is for adults, day of the little angels is for children). Technically Memorial Day in the states is supposed to be spent in cemeteries remebering the dead (specifically dead soldiers). They aren't a fully outdated landuse, although there certainly are more efficient means of creating such places. (For instance the ultra creepy catacombs of Paris France, or in the modern day i imagine a skyscraper mousoleum could make sense as a place that holds urns of the cremated) Tldr, cemeteries are infact for the living but its weird to treat them like a typical city park.
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  69. I think one of the most important things for any city, and especially every town, is to have a very good park right on Mainstreet. My hometown has one and after moving away i miss that little park, its the perfect place for community building events like festivals & parades as well as farmers markets. And on regular days its nice to get an icecream and eat it in the park. I consider this the most important type of park, and i think Boston's Commons counts for this purpose but being significantly bigger it has more amenities than a water fountain and a couple benches & trees.
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  70. Thats sad, also i thought the first rule of a good transit system is having the different forms connect to eachother. Basic example being that the busses should stop at the subway entrance, airport, light rail, intercity passenger rail, ect. Its the famous "last mile" problem of sure you can take a train to a city but if you can't get to your destination easily from the station you may as well drive and save on the hassle.
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  71. Has California not heard of "Eminent Domain", because the government wrecked by grandfather's farm to build a highway through the field. (They had to blast a cut through a hill and burried the rocks too shallow in his field) The payed him for it but you know it wasn't close to a proper compensation. If NY (maybe it was federal) can wreck ariable land then California can build some proper homeless support and not just vile spikes anywhere they would want to sleep. (So called hostile infrastructure)
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  72. All true, but considering its obviously along a stroad its doing pretty good. The concrete is as wide as is typical along any Mainstreet so all it is missing is on street parking for a wall of steel protection. (But you can clearly see its empty so its not being used as much as we would hope, principly because of the reasons you stated of being better but not good enough to be family friendly since it still feels very exposed.)
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  73. After this i checked out (google earth) a town near where i grew up on called De Kalb Junction where the tracks are visible from "Mainstreet" (technically Mainstreet is US Route 11 and the tracks and 11 run sude by side for a while) and it resembles the T town plan in that the town is almost completely on 1 side of the tracks. Granted its also a tiny hamlet in upstate NY, but it is larger than the Hamlet of De Kalb for which it was named that sits on the river. Meaning the railroad and possibly Highway helped it out grow its namesake, even if the station apears to be long gone.
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  74. A sidewalk is communism, interesting, i thought it was a mandatory part of any town/city road even if left in bad shape by years of frost and tree roots. They are basically the only form of transit small towns can have other than inter city connections, you would think suburbs pretending to be a "small town feel" would atleast know that much.
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  75.  @HarryLovesRuth  very interesting situation, im used to NY where the government owns a large area on either side of the roads, technically its that the road allowance is wider than the built road to account for drainage ditches and sidewalks and what not. (Usually the allowance if 5ft past the edge of the original road they built, beyond that they have to aquire the property through various means from purchasing to eminent domain) I would generally expect that as land gets annexed into a municipality that such amenities as water management infrastructure, sidewalks, ect would be extended to the city/village limits as appropriate. (So when a road gets redone and only to the last house if it is in the budget, but adding a sidewalk can reduce local traffic by alot as you no longer need to walk through people's yards to reach local destinations. Theoretically a good sidewalk has more capacity than a lane of traffic, and certainly is much more pleasant.
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  76. Thats cool, 2 things i always wondered about for highspeed rail (or maglevs, or generally any fast train) is if Amtrak could build them along existing highway right of ways (its already reserved land for noisy transit with a wide footprint, i figure highway interchages pose the bigest obstacle for this idea, but it should be easier than having to get through residential NIMBYs) And 2, can trains have premium services to have your car loaded on as cargo at the back to solve the last mile problem, admittedly more usefull for rural destinations where you get dropped off in car dependent small town america. (The place cars actually make sense, not NYC) For reference bibwas checking out Amtrak's website to see if i could take the train home for Christmas (laughably bad at 20hrs to have the track stop 3hrs from my hometown, i can drive it in 6-7hrs, and going to destinations that have stops a car is twice as fast and doesn't end in the middle of a car dependent city), anyway I found 1 line they operate between DC and Orlando that advertises a take your car with you service to bypass I-91 in comfort which sounds so much better, especially if it makes the same time or better. Anyway i wonder what your end result was, i know college papers can end in unexpected results first hand. (I did a paper on how to handle nuclear waste, turns out the cheapest and best option is to find a filled in subduction trench and bury it 3km deep in clay in land bound for the mantle and in the time it takes to surface as lava its already decayed to nothing. Hardest part is convincing Seattle to let you put it in the cascadia subduction zone clay filled trench)
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  77. The city had already decided they wanted to minimize/ get rid of highways in the city and the earthquake taking down the Embarcadero was a perfect excise to get rid of the thing. Highways are useful in the countryside as rapid connection between population centers. (And built for the express purpose of allowing the US military to rapidly respond to an invasion in any part of the country. For reference in the early 1900's it took over 60days to do the "Cannonball Run". And in the craze of how good an interstate system was the federal government gave out lots of grant money to build them, and city planners took advantage of the opportunity to bulldoze "undesirable slums". (Read poor neighbors, almost always minority ones) Fortunately today we know enough that the highway and cars belong outside cities but not everyone has cought on and we still widen highways in cities like lunatics.
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  78. An idea i have to help bridge to not needing a car, its a train just have a service to put some cars on the back. Functionally make it a premium ticket (pay more), booked in advance, and an earlier arrival time. Then you have a valet experience where they load your car on and unload it at the destination, and since its booked in advance they can optimize loading/unloading to minimally add delay to the stop. As long as its reasonably cheaper than rentals people would use it, i know its not ideal for people who dream of no car cities but it would get people on rails and get the train network built.
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  79. They are placed at the sign where the speed changes, and you have to slow down before the sign not after regardless of what the UPPER limit is 2 feet infront of the sign is.
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  80.  @EnjoyFirefighting  i have never felt that they were telling me to slow down before i needed to. Then again i like to coast down to speed if no one's behind me. Your comment made it sound like the flashing sign was half a mile outside the city limits and not that it was at the transition and you felt like it was flashing early. (Besides its a sign not a cop, ignore it if you think its too agressive. The only thing it can do is tell you how fast you are going and blink if its greater than whatever value they programmed it to blink at.)
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  81. As an EE i quick correction to your electricity efficiency. Overall efficiency is multiplicative so for an EV it would be generation x transmission x charging x driving. Electrical transmission is near perfect at 95% efficient (losses is resistance times current squared, higher voltage lowers current for same power, hence we use very high voltages). Generation on the other hand sucks because of the laws of thermodynamics, specifically for the closed loop power cycle, the absolute best efficiency is based on the temperature of the hot source (how hot the fire is) and the temperature of the cold sink (how cold the air/river/lake is) and for practical plants it comes to about 35% for thermal power plants (coal, nat gas, nuclear, concentrated solar, ect). The end result is the grid is basically 1/3 efficient overall in the US. Other generation sources have different efficiencies or we don't really care. Like for hydro perfect efficiency is the flow rate and head drop but its also a river so the "fuel" is basically free. Likewise for wind, we care about individual turbine efficiency but at the end of the day wind is free fuel. As we move away from thermal plants we will finally see the grid efficiency rise but for now 2/3 of the energy content of fossil fuels is lost to get to the outlet, mainly in the power plant itself because of unavoidable physics.
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  82. Mainstreet is legally/traditionally the street that the town/city hall is on. And organically grown mainstreets would be centered on this important building with other core services like parks, and libraries. And then shops and restaurants would clunp together along this main hub of commerce and eventually would build taller. The classic 3ish story brick buildings could rent out the uper floors for either more shopping, storage for the shops, or apartments. And they act as a pretty good wall to the noise of Mainstreet. For reference my town's Mainstreet is the merger of 2 main roads (US route 11, State Route 68, and the Terminal of State route 310 90's on the end of whats reasonable to call Mainstreet), granted its a small town but even in the park near Mainstreet its not that loud and the park is used to hold farmer's markets and other town events including the "block party" and "dairy princess parade" (its farm country). I suspect Suburbs could be much improved by zoning parallel streets every mile or so as "Mainstreet". (Meaning mixed use commercial with the intent to replicate small town mainstreets, if its walk/bike able to get there even better) this should reduce the volume of car traffic to cities and reduce car dependecy in suburbs.
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  83. Buildings are heavy and physics states that in order to float you must displace a volume of water of equal mass to you. Most buildings in cities would never float because the floods aren't deep enough, you would be better off making the bottom floors of the skyscraper watertight, and having pumps in the basement capable of handling the inevitable leaking. You also should ban people from living on barrier islands which are basically just sandbars that will always take the full wrath of ocean storms which protects the lagoons and cities behind them. As a bonus they serve important ecological roles and are ideal nature preserves.
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  84.  @Techischannel  you clearly know very little about such vessels. Every ship has a characteristic called its draft, or bow deep into the water it sinks. (Like how 90% of an iceberg is underwater) So heres a list of drafts of various vessels: Cruise ship (Oasis class): 30ft6in (9.3m) Aircraft carrier (Nimitz class): 37ft, won't enter less than 41ft of water Frieghters: -ULCV (biggest) : over 49.9ft -great lakes: 29.5ft My dad's 18ft long pleasure boat: 3ft I couldn't find anything for a typical house boat. Point it a skyscraper would be most comparable to a "floating city" like a cruise ship or aircraft carrier and you will notice that these vessels need over 30ft of water to start to float. Using some basic physics and rough estimations (I'm going to use the Empire State building because its stats are easy to find): first its dimensions are 381m tall (roof) by 129.2m by 57m for a footprint area of 7,364.4m^2. its mass is 331,000,000kg which must be displaced by water to float (boyancy 101), the density of water is 997 kg/m^3. We must therefore displace about 331,996m^3 of water. Assuming the tower is a perfect prism and not its terraced shape, the water would need to be atleast 45.08m deep or 147ft deep. (From the base of the tower which is already above see level) Using this as an estimate of the percentage of a buildings height that need to be under water as draft we get 45/381 = 11.8% for a perfectly rectangular empire state building. Please tell me how a massive 10ft flood event is supposed to float a skyscraper with a 147ft draft? And this ignores how the building will immediately fall over into a much more stable position without massive rails. It was a fair question to ask if we can make stuff float, but basic physics and math says that the dense core of a city will never float. Low density houses cam float but this introduces a lot of other problems like utilities connections, not getting washed out to see, landing back on your foundation, having the building handle wave action and not spring any leaks. Louisiana has decided to instead build houses on stilts above the expected flood level.
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  85.  @domehammer  stationary batteries can use very common materials so that really isn't a problem. A stationary battery doesn't care about weight or size, just efficiency and not catching on fire which makes lithium terrible for stationary battery storage.
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  86. Another factor for married people is the high probably that they have kids, and they may decide it's better for their children to be stable and stay in 1 school with the same friends in the city their spuce has a job and then just super commute to their high paying job. Hopefully most office workers are able to telecommuting more in the future. I find working in an office to be most productive, but having the option to work from home is nice, especially in the north east where winter likes to make driving extra risky and not worth it. I grew up in upstate NY so i can handle snow, but CT doesn't like to plow it out of the road and off the shoulder making the road narrow as everyone insists on speeding in potentially icy conditions. As for why someone would intentionally commute by plane and need to leave at 5am and get back at 9pm i have no idea, thats 9hrs spent home, that isn't a life, you can't even sleep 8hrs and take care of life tasks unless you use the flight for sleep, but that just sounds peak dystopia.
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  87.  @UserName-ts3sp  technically most cars have electronic governors somewhere around 100mph. And i wouldn't worry about GPS adaptive governors for a while yet, android auto tries to show the speed limit to be helpful but its often missing or simply wrong, and my adaptive cruise is only using instantaneous position and not relative velocity so when a masshole cuts me off it thinks it needs to brake despite to 20mph difference between us. (You can't win on the mass pike, you are simultaneously too slow and too fast no matter the speed or lane, and nobody recognizes safe follow distance and instead obeying cat logic of "if i fits, i sits")
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  88.  @barryrobbins7694  most private universities are non-profits, the for profit ones are almost universally scams, so no they aren't just like the other businesses in towns and are alot more similar to churches and government buildings.
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  89. As someone from NYS i can assure you frost does infinitely more damage to our roads and sidewalks than our maples and oaks lining the streets do with roots. Generally speaking roots tend to be a mirror image of the branches above the surface, except instead of seeking sunlight they are seeking water and minerals, so as long as you have a normal water table of say 5-10ft down most roots will go downwards. If all the water is near the surface or mainly comes from the surface (meaning you don't have enough green space for infiltration or have otherwise impermeable/wet soil) then roots will concentrate more near the surface. Also, morbid fact, roots love mineral rich bones and will grow in the shape of burried skeletons, which can either be really cool or really creepy depending on how you look at it.
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  90. Half of the sealevel rise in NYC is from the land sinking, not from any human activities but from Glacial rebound. 3miles of icesheets were heavy and pushed the crust down which pushed the land immediately around that depression upwards so now the Canadian Shield is rising and NYC is sinking. This is separate from land subsiding due to soil compaction and/or ground water pumping, and is not meant to detract from than point, just state than in some places its happening from factors outside of human control. Also part of sealevel rise in not due to the melt water but instead gravity. Ice that is floating displaces a volume of water equal to its mass so melting sea ice doesn't make the oceans deeper. What would happen when you melt the arctic is that all those ice sheets are massive enough to gravitationally pull on the oceans like how the moon causes the tides, and when they melt it will release that gravitationally bound water away from the poles and towards us. (Not that it will be in some huge wave, just a slow rise like the rest of climate change)
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  91. Cities on the great lakes have such a special advantage over most others. The lakes are very well connected both to eachother and to the ocean (limiting factor for ship size being lock size right now) and get all the advantages of being an ocean port city. But they are also inland and nothing can reach them, not sea level rise (climate change will still cause issues but not the ocean coming for you) and not hostile foreign powers (except when Canada and America weren't friends). Plus Chicago is probably the closest to once of our most reliable exports (grain from the mid west) so they get to be just as much of a port city as NYC, Boston, or New Orleans. I was raised a little south of the St Lawrence in NY and still have pride for the lakes and river. I moved near a city for a job and seeing "street homeless" for the first time in my life is definitely an unsettling experience. (I hope this phrasing doesn't sound bad to people)
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  92. The "City of London" was born as a Roman Fort, and then "London" grew outside its walls, possibly forming as several towns merged. But the Fort wanted nothing to do with the non-roman city surounding it. (This is an incomplete summary)
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  93. I'm from Canton NY its pop is 6,500, and its the standard town size in the area, the legal cities are 10,600 (Ogdensburg), and 12,100 (Massena) the closest real cities are either Canada's Montreal and Ontario (both around 2+hrs driving) or Syracuse NY at 3hrs south. The Closest interstate was well over an hour away in Watertown. And that is Paradise to me. I can't even comprehend how anyone could want to live in a real city like NYC which is at the opposite end of the spectrum from my corner of the state. Our county started a bussing program a while back (inter town is the only thing that makes sense, and helping the college kids get around the towns but i believe the colleges pay for that privilege on behalf of the students). I sat through a town board meeting once (for school) and one of the issues discussed was about the Amish bringing to many chickens on the bus. Also anyone who bitches about bikers being a hazard on the road can shut it until they come drive in Amish country and almost kill themselves, the Amish family, and the horse because the Amish refuse to put any reflectors on solid black buggys and drive at night in the rain, my dad drives school bus and dreads the day a bus-buggy accident kills a bus of children which is what it will take to enforce that basic safety to use the roads. (Religious exemption has to stop at endangering the welfare of others)
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  94. The subside is probably justified as either an accessibility/aid service, in which case its primary goal is mobility for those unable to use personal cars, im which case its finances are more like medicare/medicaid than traditional transit finances. If its intent is exactly the same as traditional transit then its subside can be equal to the net societal benefit of the service and still be considered a win. Otherwise its a failure and the money is better spent elsewhere, like using the vans to shuttle people to and from transit stations.
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  95. As an EE, it seems incredibly outdated to use averages for building type. In the national electric code the last resort for calculations are the multipliers for building area based on the kind of building you have, normally you go with much more project specific calculations. In the case of a Mall a reasonable calculation would start with the expected occupancy and derate for "other mode share", for instance if you have a bike path near the store and expect 20% of customers to bike to the mall replace 20% of parking spaces with bike rack capacity (indoors and watched by cameras). Expected occupancy probably having its own formula based on a combination of historical data (other walmarts) and building nameplate max occupancy. Just saying a box store should have .1 parking spaces per square foot of shopping area is something you do in the 50s before modern data analytics was possible. (And it sounds like they didn't even collect any data to set the number per unit area)
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  96. I moved from the countryside to a small city and the best appartment i found was a "gated community" consisting of a fence around the building grounds that is mostly parkinglot. Being a gated community results in lower rent because it increases trust in the residents to not trash the place. Also they pay for heat in CT and most of the other places you paid for electric heat (hairdryer resistive heat) so the rent looks lower but is going to jump in the winter. Personally i would be fine with living in a non-gated community, but i was raised in an area where for a long time you didn't lock your doors, and some still only lock the front door. Moving to a city was a culture shock to see homeless on the street and i don't know how urban areas aren't ashamed to have people living in such situations. (Fix the problem, don't install anti homeless spikes)
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  97. The problem is that Mainstreet existed and became a major tavel path to the nearby towns and then 50years later the car was invented and eventually a state/national highway was built to connect the town up the the network and so the most used travel path is now a class A highway and Mainstreet gets upgraded to the same standards. And then the "outer Mainstreet" becomes a classic "natural stroad" which is kinda inevitable and fortunately the least offensive class of stroad. The purpose built stroads are what end up as a 6lane one way monstrosity, atleast the natural ones are usually just 2lanes + shared left hand turning lane which is relatively safe, and definitely more comfortable than a 4lane stroad.
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  98.  @tuhnutuhnu4257  and i think that the difference is than america still widely regards biking as a recreational activity you go and do, where as Europe considers it to be a real mode of transportation for adults to use to complete their daily life tasks. (My hometown has a bike path that is a 5km loop around a golf course with 2 entrances both on the edge of town, and it gets heavily used in the summer when we dont have Canadian Winter levels of snow on the path nobody is plowing. Just imagine if it actually went somewhere instead of being a destination you drive to. I have since moved to CT and we litterally don't have sidewalks on roads the clearly should have them.)
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  99. A reasonable example is that in rural areas charging infrastructure for EVs is very lacking (to the point your own home is probably your only charger), and its much more likely that FedEx or UPS could maintain 5 electric delivery vehicles for a town than every resident upgrades to EVs in the same timeframe. (This assumes EVs are made ethically and will have lower lifecycle emissions than ICEs, generally this is true)
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