What would have improved your lives even more is a good bus system, so it wouldn't have taken two hours to get to work because of bus transfers, or 40 minutes to get home from the grocery store. Poor people without cars have to pay a steep time tax, and forgo jobs they can't access without a car, and use dangerous roads with dangerous sidewalks (or no sidewalks) and dangerous bus stops with no safe way to cross. In contrast, poor people with cars have to pay a big chunk of their income on a car. And meanwhile here are the PPs, complaining about having to pay $1 an hour to park when they go out to eat in downtown Bethesda on a Saturday. |
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2 more years til retirement. Cannot wait to leave MOCO and Maryland.
I stopped going to Bethesda several years ago. |
Nice try, but no, the car and being able to drive ourselves places improved our lives. The more you talk, the more bratty and entitled you sound. |
But do you want to encourage or discourage people from patronizing local businesses? You may discourage people from driving to a particular shopping center, but that doesn’t mean they’ll walk. They’ll either drive further to do what they want without having to pay for parking, or they’ll go online and have goods delivered to their door. Either way, you’re not making them more environmentally friendly, you’re just creating resentment and hurting local businesses. |
I SO agree with you, PP. I am the kid of immigrants and also grew up poor taking the bus everywhere. That other PP is a joke and I agree that he/she sounds entitled and annoying. But hey, she knows what is best for all of us, so we should listen. Good luck with that, sounds like the Council wants to destroy local businesses. |
It is possible to encourage people to patronize local businesses without encouraging people to drive. |
I'm sure it did. The point is that your parents shouldn't have had to "scrape up enough money" to buy a car, in the first place. Everyone should be able to get around the county conveniently - including people who don't own a car, or don't have access to a car, or can't drive. |
| Government’s job is to promote safety and convenience and sponsor projects that cannot be efficiently and economically coordinated by private industry. It is not the government’s place to engineer society or to deprive people of the right to choose for themselves between reasonable alternatives. America is a mobile society. The idea that driving is evil is gaia worship nonsense. Behemoth buses and trucks create huge amounts of pollution and are deadly to other vehicles and pedestrians, but all we ever hear about is private passenger transportation. It’s a silly product of a narcissistic, controlling mindset that considers nothing, however inconsequential, to be too insignificant that somebody else shouldn’t be telling people what to do. |
I don't drive, my taxes shouldn't pay for your free parking, you rich, entitled brat. |
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In this thread: angry car owners who think the government should pay for their parking. Or non-car owners in the form of taxes. Seems selfish.
Not in this thread: people who want to take responsibility for their decision to drive everywhere. |
You're absolutely right! And yet, for the last 90 years, that's exactly what government has been doing: engineering society to make private cars the only realistic transportation option for most people. It's long past time we stopped doing that. |
I don’t have a kid in public school. My taxes shouldn’t pay for schools. See how it works when you want to turn everything into a user fee? |
If you want to live in a state without funded education, go for it. See how that works out for you. (Hint: education benefits everyone, car parking does not) Jesus the people on the board have gotten dumber. |
Let’s play this game. I don’t use the Library, my taxes shouldn’t pay for your library books. I don’t have kids in school, my taxes shouldn’t pay for your kids education. I don’t use county parks, my taxes shouldn’t have to pay for your recreation. I don’t take the buses, my taxes shouldn’t have to pay subsidize your public transportation. Anyway, it’s been fun playing this game with you, but I’m done with your obnoxious entitlement. |
DP. Public libraries, public education, public parks, and public transportation benefit everyone in society, whether or not they use them. "Free" public parking doesn't. |