> but allowing climate action to become a political issue
What the hell are you talking about? What?!? This entire issue was a solved problem with a simple carbon tax (which is a conservative leaning policy) and then one party decided their strategy was going to be deny, then delay, then pose it as a fait accompli.
I was pretty damn conservative on a lot of issues when I started college... as it became more and more clear to me -- from taking earth science classes -- that climate change was very obviously happening and that we've known about it since the 1960s and that no serious person trying to suggest that it's not being made worse by human activity, that's when I started to thing that the Republicans were not going to take this issue seriously, ever.
Any centrist or conservative person who takes the issues seriously has no idea what to do because on party just decided to just say "lol, who cares." How in the hell is that environmental movement's fault!?! You look at the UK and environmentalism is not a partisan issue. Here, we have idiots holding snowballs in congress trying to score cheap political points.
I think what you're saying is conservatives should have support climate action (like a carbon tax).
Obviously, they did not, however. The question is what could we (people who care about climate change) have done differently to get broader political support? The problem wasn't getting liberals to support action, it was getting conservatives to support it. Therefore, we needed to do something to appeal to conservatives.
>The question is what could we (people who care about climate change) have done differently to get broader political support.
Literally nothing. Environmentalists can have done literally nothing different. If an entire party is going to take it upon themselves to make "climate change is a hoax" and their constituents are going to go along with it, you just have a large section of the electorate making terrible decision that will make us all poorer.
This isn't something that's a negotiation. The leftist solutions were rejected, the liberal solutions were rejected, the conservative solutions were rejected, and even the right-wing "end our dependency on foreign powers" was rejected. This was a deliberate policy choice by the right, and it was an asinine one.
Study after study shows that money doesn't really effect the results of high-information elections. If it really did, Hillary Clinton would have been president twice. It's just that candidates with a ton of support tend to raise a ton of money.
Low-information elections are where money seems to help. I think we can throw that on the pile of 'your democracy is only as good as your electorate', and we have an electorate where most people can't even name their US House rep, much less their representatives in state and local politics.
Obviously campaigns need money to operate. The question is whether a random firehose of money will win an election, or if the reason we see that money is because the campaign already has a lot of supporters who want to contribute.
The underlying effects of where the money comes from seems to matter a lot more that that the money exists. If a campaign does not have money, they likely that that campaign does not have supporters. However the opposite is not true. If a campaign has money, it is still not certain whether or not that campaign has any supporters, because that money could all be coming from narrow interest groups.
“Study after study shows that money doesn't really effect the results of high-information elections“
Your earlier statement, in which you claim that “money doesn’t effect result” followed by a useless distinction of high or low info elections. You’re really trying to dance a fine line of nonsense here.
“ We find a positive and statistically significant relationship between campaign expenditure, campaign contributions and winning probability.”
From the same article you posted and the first academic journal result if you Google “studies on how money influences elections”.
>Our finding is in line with existing results in the literature regarding the US House elections that incumbent candidates gain less from spending, compared to their contender counterparts. This is due to diminishing returns that occur at a certain point, after which incumbent candidates can increase the winning probability only marginally (Green & Krasno, 1988). However, this finding is in contrast with other studies considering electoral systems in Brazil, Japan, or India, where spending effectiveness is equally applicable for both incumbents and contenders (Johnson, 2013; Lee, 2020; Samuels, 2001).
So yea, sorry for providing two scholarly journal articles from two different political eras that support my thesis.
I didn’t realize that this was a bad faith discussion. Now I know.
It's not enough to only look at elections. The topics that the media discusses, and therefore the options that people are aware of and the issues people base their vote on are decided by mostly privately owned and increasingly consolidated media companies. Nobody will know about candidates that are not approved by some part of the elite in this media landscape. Any opinions that go against the interests of the media owning elite will not see much coverage. Sure, maybe money during elections does not matter that much, but elections are the very last step of the process of picking leaders, and the preceding steps matter as well.
Also, if money did not matter during elections, I doubt we'd see so much spending on them. Studies are being funded by companies and the wealthy as well, so a study or two saying money doesn't matter is not definitive proof.
These studies fail to consider the nature of US politics the last 30 years or so. We had a breakneck election tie broken by the Supreme court in 2000 for some reason. We've had 2 out of 3 times in the hist of the US where the electoral college defied the popular vote.
You don't need to win most states in the US, nor most people. Just target 5-6 swing states and throw billions into the most wishy-washy voters in the country.
I just think it's weird that major events regarding the Epstein files always seem to be below the fold because something huge, that just happens to be entirely under executive branch discretion, ends up dominating the headlines.
I'm building a golf simulator that runs a solver to solve strokes-to-hole from every point of the golf hole to then illustrate the game design aspects golf course architecture mathematically.
I mean, you're just talking about spending money. Google isn't trying to build data centers for fun. These massive outlays are only there because the folks making them think they will make much more money than they spend.
So, we're just doing whatever it takes to blame the Democratic Party, huh?
Cutting interest rates during a period of time when people were literally locked in their homes waiting for a vaccine to be manufactured? I mean, yea, there were mistakes made, and the PPP and Biden stimulus were very obviously bad decisions, but pretending that tariffs and literally threatening allies has nothing to do with this economy is just lunacy. Just look at what's happening to the American tourism sector. It's falling apart.
I spent Dry January working on a new coding project and since all my nerd friends have been telling me to try to code with LLM's I gave it a shot and signed up to Google Gemini...
All I can say is "holy shit, I'm a believer." I've probably got close to a year's worth of coding done in a month and a half.
Busy work that would have taken me a day to look up, figure out, and write -- boring shit like matplotlib illustrations -- they are trivial now.
Things that are ideas that I'm not sure how to implement "what are some different ways to do this weird thing" that I would have spend a week on trying to figure out a reasonable approach, no, it's basically got two or three decent ideas right away, even if they're not perfect. There was one vectorization approach I would have never thought of that I'm now using.
Is the LLM wrong? Yes, all the damn time! Do I need to, you know, actually do a code review then I'm implementing ideas? Very much yes! Do I get into a back and forth battle with the LLM when it gets starts spitting out nonsense, shut the chat down, and start over with a newly primed window? Yes, about once every couple of days.
It's still absolutely incredible. I've been a skeptic for a very long time. I studied philosophy, and the conceptions people have of language and Truth get completely garbled by an LLM that isn't really a mind that can think in the way we do. That said, holy shit it can do an absolute ton of busy work.
What kind of project / prompts - what’s working for you? /I spent a good 20 years in the software world but have been away doing other things professionally for couple years. Recently was in the same place as you, with a new project and wanting to try it out. So I start with a generic Django project in VSCode, use the agent mode, and… what a waste of time. The auto-complete suggestions it makes are frequently wrong, the actions it takes in response to my prompts tend to make a mess on the order of a junior developer. I keep trying to figure out what I’m doing wrong, as I’m prompting pretty simple concepts at it - if you know Django, imagine concepts like “add the foo module to settings.py” or “Run the check command and diagnose why the foo app isn’t registered correctly” Before you know it, it’s spiraling out of control with changes it thinks it is making, all of which are hallucinations.
I'm just using Gemini in the browser. I'm not ready to let it touch my code. Here are my last two prompts, for context the project is about golf course architecture:
Me, including the architecture_diff.py file: I would like to add another map to architecture_diff. I want the map to show the level of divergence of the angle of the two shots to the two different holes from each point. That is, when your are right in between the two holes, it should be a 180 degree difference, and should be very dark, but when you're on the tee, and the shot is almost identical, it should be very light. Does this make sense? I realize this might require more calculations, but I think it's important.
Gemini output was some garbage about a simple naive angle to two hole locations, rather than using the sophisticated expected value formula I'm using to calculate strokes-to-hole... thus worthless.
Follow up from me, including the course.py and the player.py files: I don't just want the angle, I want the angle between the optimal shot, given the dispersion pattern. We may need to update get_smart_aim in the player to return the vector it uses, and we may need to cache that info. We may need to update generate_strokes_gained_map in course to also return the vectors used. I'm really not sure. Take as much time as you need. I'd like a good idea to consider before actually implementing this.
Gemini output now has a helpful response about saving the vector field as we generate the different maps I'm trying to create as they are created. This is exactly the type of code I was looking for.
I recently started building a POC for an app idea. As framework I choose django and I did not once wrote code myself. The whole thing was done in a github codespace with copilot in agentic mode and using mostly sonnet and opus models.
For prompting, I did not gave it specific instructions like add x to settings. I told it "We are now working on feature X. X should be able to do a, b and c. B has the following constraints. C should work like this." I have also some instructions in the agents.md file which tells the model to, before starting to code, ask me all unclear questions and then make a comprehensive plan on what to implement. I would then go over this plan, clarify or change if needed - and then let it run for 5-15 minutes. And every time it just did it. The whole thing, with debugging, with tests. Sure, sometimes there where minor bugs when I tested - but then I prompted directly the problem, and sure enough it got fixed in seconds...
Not sure why we had so different experiances. Maybe you are using other models? Maybe you miss something in your prompts? Letting it start with a plan which I can then check did definitly help a lot. Also a summary of the apps workings and technical decissions (also produced by the model) did maybe help in the long run.
I don't use VSCode, but I've heard that the default model isn't that great. I'd make sure you're using something like Opus 4.5/4.6. I'm not familiar enough with VSCode to know if it's somehow worse than Claude Code, even with the same models, but can test Claude Code to rule that out. It could also be you've stumbled upon a problem that the AI isn't that good at. For example, I was diagnosing a C++ build issue, and I could tell the AI was off track.
Most of the people that get wowed use an AI on a somewhat difficult task that they're unfamiliar with. For me, that was basically a duplicate of Apple's Live Captions that could also translate. Other examples I've seen are repairing a video file, or building a viewer for a proprietary medical imaging format. For my captions example, I don't think I would have put in the time to work on it without AI, and I was able to get a working prototype within minutes and then it took maybe a couple more hours to get it running smoother.
Also >20 years in software. The VSCode/autocomplete, regardless of the model, never worked good for me. But Claude Code is something else - it doesn't do autocomplete per se - it will do modifications, test, if it fails debug, and iterate until it gets it right.
I'm (mostly) a believer too, and I think AI makes using and improving these existing frameworks and libraries even easier.
You mentioned matplotlib, why does it make sense to pay for a bunch of AI agents to re-invent what matplotlib does and fix bugs that matplotlib has already fixed, instead of just having AI agents write code that uses it.
I mean, the thesis of the post is odd. I'll grant you that.
I work mostly with python (the vast majority is pure python), flask, and htmx, with a bit of vanilla js thrown in.
In a sense, I can understand the thesis. On the one hand Flask is a fantastic tool, with a reasonable abstraction given the high complexity. I wouldn't want to replace Flask. On the otherhand HTMX is a great tool, but often imperfect for what I'm exactly trying to do. Most people would say "well just just React!" except that I honestly loathe working with js, and unless someone is paying me, I'll do it in python. I could see working with an LLM to build a custom tool to make a version of HTMX that better interacts with Flask in the way I want it to.
In fact, in my project I'm working on now I'm building complex heatmap illustrations that require a ton of dataprocessing, so I've been building a model to reduce the NP hard aspects of that process. However, the illustrations are the point, and I've already had a back and forth with the LLM about porting the project into HTML, or some web based version of illustration at least, simply because I'd have much more control over the illustrations. Right now, matplotlib still suits me just fine, but if I had to port it, I could see just building my own tool instead of finding an existing framework and learning it.
Frameworks are mostly useful because of group knowledge. I learn Flask because I don't want to build all these tools from scratch, and because I makes me literate in a very common language. The author is suggesting that these barriers -- at least for your own code -- functionally don't exist anymore. Learning a new framework is about as labor intensive as learning one you're creating as you go. I think it's short-sighted, yes, but depending on the project, yea when it's trivial to build the tool you want, it's tempting to do that instead learning to use a similar tool that needs two adapters attached to it to work well on the job you're trying to do.
At the same time, this is about scope. Anyone throwing out React because they want to just "invent their own entire web framework" is just being an idiot.
The vast majority of the anti-social behavior on public transit not relevant in automobiles because (1) you can't turnstile jump the gas tank, (2) an automobile is effectively very expensive set of headphones, and (3) you can inhale whatever you want in your vehicle and your neighbor doesn't have to breath it.
Automobiles are a wildly inefficient and expensive form of transportation in urban areas. At the same time, we ought to be willing to ask why a significant amount of our urban population still prefers to pay all that extra money to sit in traffic.
I think they have a point. But the anti-social behaviors in a car on the road are mostly a different set of anti social behaviors than you’d see on a bus or train. But they certainly exist.
As someone who lives in the Bay Area we already have trains, and they're literally past the point of bankruptcy because they (1) don't actually charge enough maintain the variable cost of operations, (2) don't actually make people pay at all, and (3) don't actually enforce any quality of life concerns short of breaking up literal fights. All of this creates negative synergies that pushes a huge, mostly silent segment of the potential ridership away from these systems.
So many people advocate for public transit, but are unwilling to deal with the current market tradeoffs and decisions people are making on the ground. As long as that keeps happening, expect modes of transit -- like Waymo -- that deliver the level of service that they promise to keep exceeding expectations.
I've spent my entire adult life advocating for transportation alternatives, and at every turn in America, the vast majority of other transit advocates just expect people to be okay with anti-social behavior going completely unenforced, and expecting "good citizens" to keep paying when the expected value for any rational person is to engage in freeloading. Then they point to "enforcing the fare box" as a tradeoff between money to collect vs cost of enforcement, when the actually tradeoff is the signalling to every anti-social actor in the system that they can do whatever they want without any consequences.
I currently only see a future in bike-share, because it's the only system that actually delivers on what it promises.
> they (1) don't actually charge enough maintain the variable cost of operations
Why do you expect them to make money? Roads don't make money and no one thinks to complain about that. One of the purposes of government is to make investment in things that have more nebulous returns. Moving more people to public transit makes better cities, healthier and happier citizens, stronger communities, and lets us save money on road infrastructure.
If a system doesn't generate enough revenue to cover the variable costs of operation, then every single new passenger drives the system closer to bankruptcy. The more "successful" the system is -- the more people depend on it -- the more likely it is to fail if anything happens to the underlying funding source, like a regular old local recession. This simple policy decision can create a downward economic spiral when a recession leads to service cuts, which leads to people unable to get to work reliably, which creates more economic pain, which leads to a bigger recession... rinse/repeat. This is why a public transit system should cover variable costs so that a successful system can grow -- and shrink -- sustainably.
When you aren't growing sustainably, you open yourself up to the whims of the business cycle literally destroying your transit system. It's literally happening right now with SF MUNI, where we've had so many funding problems, that they've consolidated bus lines. I use the 38R, and it's become extremely busy. These busses are getting so packed that people don't want to use them, but the point is they can't expand service because each expansion loses them more money, again, because the system doesn't actually cover those variable costs.
The public should be 100% completely covering the fixed capital costs of the system. Ideally, while there is a bit of wiggle room, the ridership should be 100% be covering the variable capital costs. That way the system can expand when it's successful, and contract when it's less popular. Right now in the Bay Area, you have the worst of both worlds, you have an underutilized system with absolutely spiraling costs, simply because there is zero connection between "people actually wanting to use the system" and "where the money comes from."
This gets repeated a lot, but is unpersuasive. How much money should a transit system lose? $20 per trip? $40 per trip? There might be mass transit systems that make sense (e.g buses), but most mass transit in the US is terrible quality and a terrible value. One argument is that it's a jobs program for the disadvantaged, but even there we could find a lot of things more useful than moving around empty seats most of the day.
Roads are used and essential to every single person whether they use a car or not. Every single product you consume was transported over roads.
Drivers are the problem, not roads. Drivers kill, maim, pollute, and disturb the peace in ways AVs do not.
It's not like only that the transit system is losing money? Every trip that's done with a car is also not fully paying for itself. We just keep ignoring how much hidden cost individual car rides have especially considering their use. Obviously heavier road users are even generating more costs, but they might have more use (like in delivering goods to a supermarket).
The claim wasn't they pay for themselves but that they don't generate any income. If we want to look at externalities, we'd also have to figure out how much the Iraq war cost.
"The U.S. generates approximately $17.4 billion in annual toll revenue".
"The total annual cost for road maintenance in the U.S. is in the hundreds of billions of dollars, with estimates showing over $200 billion spent yearly".
You're definitely right on (2) and (3). I've used many transit systems across the world (including TransMilenio in Bogota and other latam countries "renowned" for crime) and I have never felt as unsafe as I have using transit in the SFBA. Even standing at bus stops draws a lot of attention from people suffering with serious addiction/mental health problems.
1) is a bit simplistic though. I don't know of any European system that would cover even operating costs out of fare/commercial revenue. Potentially the London Underground - but not London buses. UK National Rail had higher success rates
The better way to look at it imo is looking at the economic loss as well of congestion/abandoned commutes. To do a ridiculous hypothetical, London would collapse entirely if it didn't have transit. Perhaps 30-40% of inner london could commute by car (or walk/bike), so the economic benefit of that variable transit cost is in the hundreds of billions a year (compared to a small subsidy).
It's not the same in SFBA so I guess it's far easier to just "write off" transit like that, it is theoretically possible (though you'd probably get some quite extreme additional congestion on the freeways as even that small % moving to cars would have an outsized impact on additional congestion).
>The better way to look at it imo is looking at the economic loss as well of congestion/abandoned commutes. To do a ridiculous hypothetical, London would collapse entirely if it didn't have transit.
You're making my argument for me. Again, my concern isn't the day-to-day conveniences of funding, my point is that building a fragile system (a system where the funding is unrelated to the usability of the service) is a system that can fail catastrophically... for systems where there are obviously alternatives (say, National Rail which can be substituted for automobile, bus, and airplane service) are less to worry about, because their failure will likely not cause cascading failures. When an entire local economy is dependent on that system -- when there are not viable substitutes -- then you're really looking at a sudden economic collapse if the funding source runs dry, or if the system is ever mismanaged.
This is a big deal. When funding really actually does run out and the system fails, then if the result is an economic cascade into a full blown depression, then you would have been much better off just building the robust system in the long term. I just really don't think people appreciate how systems can just fail. Whether it's Detroit or Caracas, when the economic tides turn in a fragile system people can lose everything in a matter of a few years.
But my point is that noone has a robust system according to you in Europe at least - the bar is so high to cover all operating costs with fares (or is that your point - if so I'm lost - I definitely would not recommend replacing European transit networks with nothing?).
And National Rail isn't replaceable at all with bus/cars/planes. You really underestimate the number of people which commute >1hr into London (100km+). There is just no way to do that journey by car or bus. It would turn a ~1hr commute into a 3hr _each way_ and that's not even considering the complete lack of parking OR the fact suddenly the roads would be at (even more) gridlock with many multiples of commuters.
That's not even getting into what you consider fixed vs variable costs. Are the trains themselves a fixed cost (they should last 30-40 years)? Is track maintenance a fixed cost (this has to be done more often than the trains themselves), etc etc. The 2nd point is very important - a lot of rail operators in the UK can be made profitable or not on your metric by how much the government subsidises track maintenance vs the operators paying for it in track access charges.
Equally, are signalling upgrades (for example) fixed costs? But really they are only required to run more frequent services. So you could argue they are a variable cost?
>Are the trains themselves a fixed cost (they should last 30-40 years)?
Yes
>Is track maintenance a fixed cost (this has to be done more often than the trains themselves)
Yes
>Equally, are signalling upgrades (for example) fixed costs?
Yes
Fixed costs are the costs that don't go away when the passengers go away. Variable cost, typically labor, go away when you don't actually need that additional marginal train. You still have to amortize that train even if it's not on the tracks. You still need to buy that marginal train when the service levels require it. You still have to do track maintenance even when you're not running trains (though, yes, at the very margin there could be some small rate adjustments). When you want to upgrade the signals, it's basically the definition of a fixed cost, because you do it once and it's done.
>And National Rail isn't replaceable at all with bus/cars/planes. You really underestimate the number of people which commute >1hr into London (100km+). There is just no way to do that journey by car or bus. It would turn a ~1hr commute into a 3hr _each way_ and that's not even considering the complete lack of parking OR the fact suddenly the roads would be at (even more) gridlock with many multiples of commuters.
I don't want to speak to National Rail or British Rail that preceded it. I want to stick to the transit system that I know well.
My point here isn't that money shouldn't be spent on "getting things back in shape" here is where I waffle on the "pay for fixed capital costs and mostly have the marginal variable costs covered by the marginal rider." If a system needs the occasional cash infusion, I'm fine with that, as long as it comes with new leadership.
My concern here is that, in the Bay Area, many, many people are eager to pay $25 for a Waymo to pick them up (they are NOT cheap) while Muni costs $3 (a near 10x increase in cost). When folks are willing to pay that much of a premium, then something is very wrong with the transit system. Muni has had zero enforcement of their code of conduct for decades. When you have a system that are large section of the populous actively avoid when it's perfectly convenient, then something is very wrong with the system.
When I see BART stations that look like abandoned parking lots surrounded by single family home sprawl, then it doesn't surprise me that the system is not sustainable. The stations that may get removed are all in areas that require people to drive, to then take the train, instead of the cities zoning density and retail around the train stations. When I yell at the occasional people smoking in BART stations and I go to tell the station attendant and get a shrug back -- even when we are paying for them to have their own police force -- that's why they are failing. These are political choices that BART has made in how they operate their service
These systems aren't even doing the bare minimum in providing a reliable pleasant service, so people stop using them, and that makes sense. The entire point is that these services should be relatively inexpensive to operate because of economies of scale, but when you don't actually make people pay, when you don't actually ask people to behave like responsible adults, when your running the service like a failing business then we should expect the service to fail, and when it does, when bailouts are needed, they should (and often do) come with strings attached. BART now has gates that stop most turnstile jumping... and they were forced to be installed by the state of California as part of their second bailout. The reason I'm harping on having variable costs attached to ridership is exactly because the systems needs to be forced to respond when a sizable amount of people no longer find the service valuable.
This is about sustainability, because the marginal tax dollar is better spend on something like providing people with the healthcare they need than it is providing people a bus service they're not even willing to actually use.
As a fellow public transit fan, you're on the money. Even the shining stars of transit in the US --- NYC MTA subway and CTA --- have huge qualuty of life issues. I can't fault someone for not wanting to ride trains ever again when someone who hasn't showered in 41 years pulls up with a cart full of whatever the fuck and decides to squat the corner seat closest to the car door and be a living biological weapon during rush hour. Or "showtime."
That's before you consider how it takes 2-4x as long to get somewhere by public transit outside of peak hours and/or well-covered areas. A 20 minute trip from a bar in Queens to Brooklyn by car takes an hour by train after 2300, not including walking time. I made that trip many, many times, and hated it each time.
It doesn't matter in this context. What matters is the hypothetical person in my post thinking "this is what will happen if my city proposes a train" and voting against any legislation trying to bring this forward where they live, even if they hate driving everywhere.
Lighting money on fire by funding an extremely expensive system that most people don't want to use is not an "investment." It's just a good way to make everyone much poorer and worse off than if we'd done nothing. The only way to change things is to convince the electorate that we actually do need rules and enforcement and a sustainable transportation system.
This isn't just happening in America. Train systems are in rough shape in the UK and Germany too.
Ebike shares are a much more sustainable system with a much lower cost, and achieve about 90% of the level of service in temperate regions of the country. Even the ski-lift guy in this thread has a much more reasonable approach to public transit, because they actually have extremely low cost for the level of service they provide. Their only real shortcoming is they they don't handle peak demand well, and are not flexible enough to handle their own success.
I'm not sure if this was intended or not, but this is a common NIMBY refrain. The argument of "This thing being advocated for that I'm fighting against isn't something people want anyway". And like walkable neighborhood architecture, extremely few Americans have access to light rail. Let alone light rail that doesn't have to yield to car traffic.
Regardless, the cost arguments fall apart once you take the total cost society pays for each system instead of only what the government pays. Because when you get the sum of road construction & maintenance, car acquisition, car maintenance, insurance, and parking, it dwarfs the cost of the local transit system. Break it down on a per-consumer basis and it gets even uglier. New York City is a good example to dive into, especially since it's the typical punching bag for "out-of-control" budgets.
Quick napkin math pins the annual MTA cost at $32-$33 billion and the total cost of the car system between $25 and $44 billion per year. Since the former serves somewhere around 5.5 million riders, and the latter only about 2 million, the MTA costs $5,300-6,600 per user annually where the car system costs $12,000–$22,500 per user annually.
People want transit as long as that transit reasonably meets their quality of life standards. The reason why automobiles have been so popular -- even while being wildly more expensive -- is exactly that they allow the user to adjust their travel to their optimal quality of life expectations.
Public transit advocates need to be honest with themselves that anti-social behavioral issues really matter to people. People are willing to pay more to have a more pleasant experience. When a transit system fails to meet that standard, then you'll suddenly find yourself with a transit system that people don't want to use.
> I AM saying "people don't want ride trains that allow 5% of the riders to smoke cigarettes on enclosed train platforms and in enclosed train cars."
Just don't allow that then?
> Public transit advocates need to be honest with themselves that anti-social behavioral issues really matter to people. People are willing to pay more to have a more pleasant experience. When a transit system fails to meet that standard, then you'll suddenly find yourself with a transit system that people don't want to use.
"we can't have good transit because a few people who call themselves transit advocates have bad opinions" is very defeatist. Weak-spined politicians find it much easier to just set money on fire than actually solving problems, so even though most transit advocacy groups in the US emphasize quality and being less wasteful with budgets, your politicians usually prefer the worse options.
>> I AM saying "people don't want ride trains that allow 5% of the riders to smoke cigarettes on enclosed train platforms and in enclosed train cars."
>Just don't allow that then?
>"we can't have good transit because a few people who call themselves transit advocates have bad opinions" is very defeatist.
My point here is only that this is a hard problem, not a trivial one. When the transit advocates in my area just say "transit should be free" in response to "transit pricing is a complex problem that affects system fragility" and they say "stop hating homeless people" in response to "quality of life concerns matter to keeping the system functional long term" then we're in bad place, because the non-transit advocates literally want to get rid of the system. The last TWO Muni funding bills in SF failed.
We've built a system that can fail catastrophically, in large part, because transit advocates don't want to deal with the realities of running a functional transit system. This is why I get grumpy when people say "all this work is impressive, but I'd rather have better trains" when it's very clear why Waymo is succeeding as Muni is failing, but it is exactly because Muni is mostly disconnected from market forces that we've got to this place, and the "solution" being proposed by most transit advocates is to just completely remove all market forces which will very obviously be worse is the long run.
It's worth noting that, at least for bart, the reason that it is facing bankruptcy is precisely because it was mostly rider supported and profitable, and not government supported.
When ridership plummeted by >50% during the pandemic, fixed costs stayed the same, but income dropped. Last time I checked, if Bart ridership returned to 2019 levels, with no other changes, it would be profitable again.
You can't say that BART "is facing bankruptcy is precisely because it was mostly rider supported and profitable, and not government supported" when it is very obvious that BART would be in a much worse situation if it had had more government support... because all those governments are facing massive budget deficits right now.
BART has already been bailed out by the state, twice. It has already failed, twice. It very much needs to reduce the level service it provides if it wants to be sustainable, or seek other forms of revenues while we wait to see if ridership returns. Many have suggested BART explore the SE Asian model of generating revenues by developing residential housing, which seems fairly straightforward.
If ridership never returns, then we ought not continue throwing good money after bad, and we ought to adjust the level of service to meet the level of revenues. Obviously the main problem here is that it's literally illegal to just build high density corridors directly adjacent to the transit stations... which is what we ultimately need to prioritize.
> You can't say that BART "is facing bankruptcy is precisely because it was mostly rider supported and profitable, and not government supported" when it is very obvious that BART would be in a much worse situation if it had had more government support... because all those governments are facing massive budget deficits right now.
I don't think this follows. Government budgeting isn't zero based. A hypothetical Bart with 2x the government funding in 2019 would have faced cutbacks, but likely has more money today than what we have now!
> or seek other forms of revenues while we wait to see if ridership returns.
Yes, this is called "taxes".
> If ridership never returns, then we ought not continue throwing good money after bad
Agreed if it was stagnant, but ridership is up more than 10% y/y and that was also true last year. It's on track to be revenue neutral again in a few years. Gutting services today would be exactly opposite of what you'd do for something like a startup showing clear path toward profitability.
> Obviously the main problem here is that it's literally illegal to just build high density corridors directly adjacent to the transit stations... which is what we ultimately need to prioritize
While sure it's hard, there's lots of these that exist. There's new stuff in oakland basically constantly, and were even seeing midrise stuff along Bart in SF, but it's units being built now, so they won't be available until 2027, which is when your proposed service cuts would hit.
>Government budgeting isn't zero based. A hypothetical Bart with 2x the government funding in 2019 would have faced cutbacks, but likely has more money today than what we have now!
A hypothetical BART with 2x the government funding wouldn't have existed... because it didn't exist.
>Agreed if it was stagnant, but ridership is up more than 10% y/y and that was also true last year. It's on track to be revenue neutral again in a few years. Gutting services today would be exactly opposite of what you'd do for something like a startup showing clear path toward profitability.
You're mistaking what I'm saying. I want BART to flourish, but I want it to be sustainable. The choice isn't "keep it open" or "close it." How it is operated matters significantly. I'm very obviously going to vote to increase funding, my point is that it shouldn't have to come to a vote. If service is reduced to a more sustainable rate, the system could recover organically. The revenue jump that has happened at stations immediately after the gates were installed, for example, shouldn't surprise anyone. I'm a transit advocate, BART is mostly irrelevant to this discussion anyway, because we're talking about situations where Waymo is a viable alternative, which really doesn't apply to BART.
Where does the extra money come from in a deficit period?
> BART, Muni, Caltrain, AC Transit — which an independent analysis confirmed face annual deficits of more than $800 million annually starting in fiscal year 2027-28
Nearly a billion dollar shortfall per year going forward. That’s nontrivial, and the state has lost patience with the systems after providing two bailouts already.
Taxes? The same place tons of other stuff we buy as a society comes from. I expect the ballot measure this fall will pass, worst case they file bankruptcy and will probably need to reduce service
I mean, sure? I'd prefer to have a system that has a system built in that raises and lowers the level of service in accordance with the number of people using the system rather than having to have random elections that decide whether or not we're going to effectively scrape a large parts of the system.
1. You want to be forward looking, not backwards looking. Cutting services means less ridership means less revenue means cutting services means...etc. Bart is super useful for me during the week because headways from SF to West Oakland are often 5m. As I'm writing this (11 on a Friday) I missed a train and had to wait 20 minutes. Every seat on the car is also full, and while not packed, it's standing room only. If my choice is to wait 20 mins for the next train, other ways of getting places become a lot more appealing.
2. Government services should be good. This is good both because it makes people interested in using them (see 1) and because people who don't have other options deserve good services. The point of government is, at least in part, to serve those who can't serve themselves. I don't expect Bart to be revenue neutral for the same reason I don't expect CalFRESH to be.
> Cutting services means less ridership means less revenue means cutting services means...etc.
That's not true. If you have stations that are revenue positive and stations that are net negative, then cutting ridership at the net-negative stations can put the system in a much better financial position. E.g. If BART didn't end at Antioch, and instead continued to Rio Vista, it's entirely likely that the Rio Vista station would just cost more to operate than is worth operating. It takes time to go back and forth, nobody will ever want to be picked up there because it's car-dependent sprawl. Maybe have one or two stops there during rush hour, but you'll likely be better financially cutting most service.
>headways from SF to West Oakland are often 5m
Nobody is suggesting cutting service between SF and Oakland. I'm sure it's a wildly profitable route. Crossing the bay is the main benefit of BART.
>The point of government is, at least in part, to serve those who can't serve themselves. I don't expect Bart to be revenue neutral for the same reason I don't expect CalFRESH to be.
I also don't expect BART to be revenue neutral. I expect it to be funded -- in very large part -- by taxes. I'm only arguing it should be sustainable. It shouldn't get to the point of literal collapse during economic downturns (again, it's already been bailed out by the state and feds, twice, in the last six years).
I really don't think people realize what I'm getting at. I'm saying the system needs to be functional and needs to function long term. Yes, I think we should subsidize low-income users. Yes, I think people who can't afford it should still be able to use it. But that has to happen in a way that doesn't drive away significant numbers of other users. There's nothing about being low-income that means anti-social. I'm talking about anti-social behavior. I'm talking about people smoking cigarettes and using drugs on BART platforms and in BART cars. I'm talking about people who are actively bothering significant numbers of people around them by their behavior -- behavior that is against BART policy, but is tolerated.
You can't sit here and tell me the current system is working when BART is perpetually collapsing. I care about BART. That's why I'm articulating the systemic problems in the system.
over the long term, this is solved with a wealth tax, but undoing what rich ppl have done to society (i.e. making lots of poor people) will unfortunately take many, many years; so many years that it will never actually happen
My entire point is mostly not even about the money. It's about the system having to respond as a service to the fact that people don't want to use that service and are willing to pay a huge premium for alternatives like Waymo.
My entire point is that the failures you point out in public transportation are due at root to the wealth inequality: Wealth inequality produces a negative feedback loop that destroys public infrastructure.
Rich people want their own methods of highly convenient transportation; they don't want to share with everyone else. They don't pay taxes. Public infra gets worse and the average person taking public infra is poorer. Over time your city has people who don't have houses or jobs, or who do drugs. Inevitably they are relegated to public spaces since they own nothing. The rich people avoid interactions with the poorer members by building gated communities and private infrastructure--rich techies now have concierge physicians and monopolize high quality teaching at their absurdly expensive private schools. Each decision is rational. This is the social rot that is wrought by an oligarchic, and generally value-extracting rentier class.
I’m not advocating that they do. Fixed costs should be fully subsidized. I’m only advocating that revenues are set so that during a median year, each additional rider on average, provides income that is proportional to the level of service needed to move that rider through the system.
SaaS companies are effectively both "software maintainers" and "price gouging middlemen" at the same time. The difference between the bid and the ask for SaaS is part of a simple math problem for whether the company should try to create their own version of the software they need. It may be the right decision, it may be the wrong decision, but it will be the right decision for a non-trivial number of firms. And that means SaaS businesses will both lose customers and have downward pressure on their margins. That means valuations of B2B SaaS firms go down.
What the hell are you talking about? What?!? This entire issue was a solved problem with a simple carbon tax (which is a conservative leaning policy) and then one party decided their strategy was going to be deny, then delay, then pose it as a fait accompli.
I was pretty damn conservative on a lot of issues when I started college... as it became more and more clear to me -- from taking earth science classes -- that climate change was very obviously happening and that we've known about it since the 1960s and that no serious person trying to suggest that it's not being made worse by human activity, that's when I started to thing that the Republicans were not going to take this issue seriously, ever.
Any centrist or conservative person who takes the issues seriously has no idea what to do because on party just decided to just say "lol, who cares." How in the hell is that environmental movement's fault!?! You look at the UK and environmentalism is not a partisan issue. Here, we have idiots holding snowballs in congress trying to score cheap political points.
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