Date: Sun, 13 Mar 2005 04:50:05 -0500 (EST) From: "Keith F. Lynch" <kfl at KeithLynch.net> To: WSFA members <WSFAlist at WSFA.org> Subject: [WSFA] Re: Portland Reply-To: WSFA members <WSFAlist at WSFA.org> "Mike B." <omni at omniphile.com> wrote: > It isn't useful for me to get to either meeting place. I'd have to > drive 8 miles to the nearest Metro station (or walk a mile to the > nearest bus stop, and spend up to an hour or so on the bus getting > to the Metro station after paying whatever the bus costs), ... Ok, it's not useful for you, considering where you've chosen to live. It is useful for those WSFA members who choose to live in the greater DC area. > find a parking place (not hard in the evenings, but almost > impossible weekdays), wait up to 30 minutes for a train to show up > (more likely wait is 10 mins though), then take the train all the > way downtown, possibly switch trains (with another wait), and ride > all the way back out to the meeting location, where I'd have a > longish walk or another bus ride. We've now turned a 30 minute, > 15-20 mile drive into a 1.5-3 hour 28+ mile trip. What would cost > me a gallon plus a little of gas ($2.19 as of last week) would cost > me about half a gallon of gas (or bus fare) plus a couple of dollars > in Metro fare (not sure what the cost is these days for a trip like > I'd need, but it's at least a couple of bucks, and probably up to > twice that, right?), plus another bus fare. That's not what I'd > call "useful". It's useful in the sense that it can get you there. As for the time it takes, I spend that time reading. And I'd spend that amount of time reading *anyway*. So there's no more point in complaining that Metro is slow than in complaining that my apartment is slow. As for the time I spend walking at each end of the trip, I'd spend that much time walking anyway, on my treadmill if nowhere else, as I need the exercise. To say that Metro is only useful for going to downtown DC is just wrong. There are Metro stations all over the region. >> I can get to every one of PRSFS's several meeting places by Metro, >> or by Metrobus. Or to pretty much any point in DC, Arlington, >> Alexandria, Falls Church, Fairfax County, Montgomery County, or PG >> County. > How do you get to Swain's Lock? If I wanted to get there, I'd take the T2 bus from the Friendship Heights Metro station. > If you need to be in Poolesville, forget it! No, I would take the 76 Ride-On bus from the Shady Grove Metro station. It goes right into Poolesville. > How do you get to Sugarloaf to go hiking? That isn't in any of the cities or counties I mentioned, i.e. it's not in the DC area. > Sometimes I think that people who rely on public transit have a view > of the world very much like that New Yorker cover that showed a "map" > of the USA... I have a good mental map of the DC area. And I know how to get from it to other metro areas. I'll admit that I had no idea where Sugarloaf was. I had to look it up. I've been to sixteen Worldcons. And I can't think of any Worldcon, ever, that I couldn't have gotten to without a car or taxi. I'll grant you that if you throw a dart at a map of the US, it will probably hit a point that I can't get to without a lot of hiking. You probably can't get to it without a lot of hiking, either, as roads don't go everywhere. > Then we agree, except for the "civilization" thing. Forcing > everyone to live in cities isn't an option. By "cities" I meant to include the suburbs. > The people who don't live in them do so by choice. It fits their > psychology and economic needs better that way. Sure. Some people prefer living out in the country. And it's a good thing, too, since otherwise where would our food come from? I prefer access to jobs, stores, WSFA, other people, etc. Presumably most WSFA members do, or they'd be members of the Hooterville Science Fiction Association instead. Or would be living alone in a shack in the woods, like the Unabomber except without the bombs. > Cars work over more area than public transit does, ... As I mentioned, they work well for travel at random times in random directions in low population areas that nevertheless have well- maintained roads. Or at least they would if everyone owned a car, and was able to safely drive it. But if people try to use cars to simultaneously commute into a city, that works very poorly. Transit works much better for that. > Some cars, like my SUV, will work in more places than other cars > (such as my dad's 280Z). Your SUV probably works better offroad than an average car. But how about on a narrow road with heavy traffic? When I'm biking on such a road, regular cars can squeeze by me, but SUVs typically can't. I'd be glad to pull over every couple minutes and let people pass, except that whenever I've done so, nobody has let me back into traffic, so I'm stuck there, punished for being a Good Samaritan. And what happens when you have to suddenly steer to avoid an obstruction? SUVs are more prone to tip over than average cars. And get worse gas mileage. > Getting between such cities is another matter...airlines are, in a > way, "public transit", ... As are intercity trains and buses. > Highways benefit just about everyone (city stores would be empty > without them and the economy would collapse). The same can be said for lots of things. Electricity. Farms. Oil. Coal. Steel. Medicine. Water. Schools. Trash disposal. Does it follow that everyone should be forced to cross-subsidize everyone else? No, people should pay for what they use, and not pay for what they don't use. If truckers paid the full cost of their road usage, passing it along to buyers of truck-shipped goods, people would pay in proportion to their usage. And it might turn out that it's more efficient to ship goods by rail, by ship, or by dirigible. Or to do more local production and less shipping. Without a non-subsidized free market, it's almost impossible to tell whether it's more cost-effective to make steel by shipping coal to iron mines or by shipping iron to coal mines. Or to forget the steel and make aluminum. Similarly with a million other decisions. Given enough random subsidies, pretty soon you'll find farmers are feeding subsidised bread, instead of non-subsidised grains, to their livestock. > Public transit (also paid for mostly by taxes...all that I've heard > of are heavily subsidized both for construction and for operations) > benefits only those who use it. If the alternative to transit is for every would-be transit rider to drive a car, then transit benefits every motorist who encounters lighter and faster traffic, more open parking spaces, and fewer car crashes. And it benefits everyone who breathes less car-produced air pollution. If the alternative to transit is for every would-be transit rider to just stay home, then it benefits everyone who is a customer of any company at which a transit rider works. Or who has a transit rider as their own customer. If every transit rider were to stop showing up for work, that would have the effect of a massive general strike. Transit is subsidized, but car infrastructure is subsidized far more. As is commercial aviation. I'd like to see an end to all subsidies. There used to be profitable private transit companies, but they were run out of business by subsidized government-run transit. > Someone calculated that if you look at the total cost of BART > (I still wish they'd named it "'Frisco Area Rapid Transit"), in > terms of money, energy, materials consumed, pollution generated by > construction and operations, etc., and compared it to an alternate > plan, consisting of dividing the existing highway lanes in half and > handing out 6 million low pollution commuter cars to fit in them, > free of charge, the 6 million little cars idea cost less in all ways > initially and over time. Many of those cars would have been promptly sold, since the new owner was not capable of safely driving it, or could not afford the necessary insurance, fuel, parking, title, taxes, licensing, maintenance, etc. Or because they didn't have the papers to prove they were who they claimed to be. Then how would these people have gotten anywhere? And the rest of those cars? BART was founded 33 years ago. By now nearly all of them would be rusted hulks leaching oil into some landfill. > You keep ignoring my point that "everyone" can't make use of any > conceivable public transit system no matter how many seats it has > or how often it runs. Almost everyone except farmers and those who need to carry hundreds of pounds of stuff with them to random locations at random times, e.g. refrigerator repairmen. >> riding a bus or train -- their time is a complete waste. > They do spend more of it at the end points though. You read for the > 2 hours it takes to get somewhere on public transit...I drive for 30 > minutes and read or do other things when I get there with the extra > hour and a half. So I get more total reading time. >> It seems to encourage criminal behavior, based on how many drivers >> routinely violate traffic laws. > Same is true of the tax laws, anti-jaywalking laws, litter laws, and > public transit (I'm sure you've heard the various scams for cheating > Metro?). Those aren't the sorts of crimes that get innocent people killed. And people don't casually admit to cheating Metro or littering, as they do casually admit to speeding or to driving drunk. The *majority* of police work effort is against rogue motorists. > We have enough oil here, and we can make more if we want to. It's > just cheaper to buy it from the Middle East for now. Then why the long lines at gas pumps, and the odd and even days, when OPEC decided to stop selling us oil for a while? > There are folks working on alternative plans though...like hydrogen > fuel cells, which are almost ready for prime time. Where's the hydrogen supposed to come from? My understanding is it's usually extracted from petroleum. You'd get more energy just by burning the petroleum directly. > In a society where you can't know everyone personally, but where > there is need to be able to individually identify people at times, > some form of identification is going to be mandatory in many > instances. How did people do it before there were drivers licenses? And how have I managed to do without any such ID? (Well, ok, I do have an expired passport, but I've only used it for international travel.) > Zoning laws have done a lot to create a need for cars though. You > can't live where you work in most areas these days... Right. This is perverse. I can understand not wanting to live next door to a noisy smoky factory, but what's wrong with mixing homes with offices and stores? > It is possible to set things up so you can walk to most places you > need to get to regularly...that's the way it was in Scotland where i > lived when I was a kid. We'd walk to school, to the local stores in > the village, ... Same here in Vienna. >> No road would need to have more than one lane in each direction. >> Taxes would be lower. People would be healthier and wealthier. >> There would be far less air pollution. People wouldn't be afraid >> to walk or bike on the public roads. > Most of today's people wouldn't exist in the much smaller and lower > powered economy...everyone would have a pony, and need it...things > would move slower and the average life expectancy would be lower... You misunderstand. I'm envisioning a larger and higher powered economy, since vast amounts of land wouldn't be wasted on highways and parking lots, enormous numbers of person-hours wouldn't be wasted staring at the back of the car in front of you, tremendous amounts of energy wouldn't be pointlessly burned in millions of cars idling in heavy traffic, and tens of thousands of productive people wouldn't be killed by cars each year. All of these resources could be devoted to other things. > We used to have pretty much what you are describing, Yes and no. The 19th century was a *lot* more productive than one would intuitively think, given the lack of capital, infrastructure, and knowledge. This was largely because there was no car-related waste of time, energy, lives, and space. > and we gave it up at the first opportunity. Why was that? We didn't. It was forced on us by a system of perverse incentives.