100% It's like when drivers slam Muriel Bowser as being, get this, too soft on violent crime because unenforced bike lanes are being installed. All because drivers are bitter that DC's transportation policy is no longer 100% focused on increasing convenience for metro area drivers while reducing costs and responsibility. |
^^this. I have had many conversations with coworkers who could metro but just like to drive and enjoy our ample free parking (despite the metro being literally in front of our building.) I seriously do not GAF if they find their car commute unfriendly. |
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Or it should be unacceptable for WMATA to fail. Fires, line shutdowns, loss of half the fleet, lapse in half the operators to not doing training.
But places like Alexandria will always support it, even when the shutdowns and year long delays to open a station destroy the city, because the Mayor is one of them and comes from a culture of this failure. |
this is true. wmata is not doing much to help … |
I am curious how much you will be LOLing as the commuters decide to stay away and the DC tax base suffers. The “rich” in DC just got one tax increase. That should give you a good indicator of where the DC government will make up shortfalls when revenues fall due to reduced commercial property tax revenue and lost sales tax. What you will quickly learn is that it’s not just pedestrianized zones that cannot survive without people coming in regularly and spending their money, but this applies to whole cities too. Cities cannot survive without the daily free movement of goods, people and services that seem to offend your bourgeois liberal sensibilities. |
You apocalyptic doom and gloomers are the best. Society isn’t going to collapse upon itself if cars can’t go 35 in a residential area |
Driving arguments to extremes doesn’t seem like a great way to deal with issues. No, society will not collapse. What will happen is that you will be paying increasingly higher cost for worse services and poorer quality of life. I keep hearing this call for a “vibrant” city but the policy choices are really to suburbanize the city, which seems like the worst of both worlds. |
When you say higher costs for worse services and poorer quality of life, that sounds like the deal we get with car dependency. You’re so close. |
You must be a millennial because you clearly cannot imagine a low quality urban future of empty storefronts and low quality retail establishments. What will be interesting is that it will be white flight to the cities that will destroy them. You want to turn your neighborhood into the cul de sac you grew up in. Cities however don’t work that way. |
yes, improving public transit and creating urban amenities is exactly what eroded tax bases. Exactly! People really hate it. Also I’m not sure why you are obsessed with “pedestrianized zones.” Some pedestrianized zones (aka parks and malls and plazas) are important amenities. but it’s also about making traffic slower & safer to share the roads. |
so let me get this straight: you need to be able to drive 60 MPH through DC’s residential neighborhoods, right to downtown, and then be able to roll up and park your car for free in front of Gallery Place to go to the movies? Or the zombie apocalypse will happen to DC? Have you … even ever been to a city? |
This is misguided and not business friendly. People will leave DC and downtown businesses will be hurt. It's also a policy that hurts middle and lower income workers who don't live on the metro line/live far out from DC. |
lower income workers are not driving into DC and paying $30 to park.You’re making an argument for better buses and metro. |
This. |
NP: There is no free parking (apart from Sundays) in DC. Parking is revenue generating for the city and it's now been vastly reduced. Who's driving 60 MPH. And if anyone ever does, why isn't it being enforced with points and tickets that would have a real impact on driving behavior (instead of cameras that don't issue any points for driving infractions)? |