Comment: Transportation officials are deliberately making driving more unpleasant, trying to force people to use public transportation. They openly admit it:
http://www.sun-sentinel.com/local/broward/fl-traffic-gridlock-20161028-story,amp.html
The ultimate goal of such social-engineering projects, as Steve has pointed out many times before, is to make suburban living undesirable, even intolerable, and concentrate whites in urban areas where folks have dogs instead of kids and vote for Democrats.
(The irony is that Dade, Broward, and Palm Beach counties are already heavily Democratic. Even the Miami Cubans aren’t solidly Republican anymore.)
“Until you make it so painful that people want to come out of their cars, they’re not going to come out of their cars,” Anne Castro, chair of the Broward County Planning Council, said during a meeting last year. “We’re going to make them suffer first, and then we’re going to figure out ways to move them after that because they’re going to scream at us to help them move.”
“Make them suffer” … “rub their noses in it” … what makes utopian leftists so blatantly sadistic?
• Cities are approving high-density housing at a rapid pace, bringing thousands more vehicles into urban areas.
• The state Legislature has fostered the problem by allowing cities to approve development without regard for the effect on traffic.
• Some cities are deliberately reducing the number of lanes on major roads to make room for bike lanes and wider sidewalks, while cramming more cars into a smaller space.
So the unelected public officials who are supposed to be serving the public are spending taxpayer dollars on “making [us] suffer,” so they can force everyone to take the bus.
I’m in Dade, not Broward, but I can report that the buses are as crappy as ever. Many key thoroughfares are served by routes with once-an-hour service, at best. (If the bus doesn’t show up, you have to wait another hour for the next one. And if that one doesn’t show up … you get the idea.) The Metrorail and Metromover cover only a tiny sliver of the county.
Meanwhile, revenues from the ever-increasing exorbitant tolls are earmarked for such useless projects as the construction of ugly walls lining the expressways that block your view of anything but the road. As these walls sprout like weeds, driving to work becomes ever more soulless and depressing.
COMMENT: * In US urban planning, the vague jargon “stakeholders” comes up a lot. (It’s usually paired with its twin “sustainability” which can mean whatever the speaker wants it to mean.) Often it’s used when reps from a quasi-governmental Regional Planning Agency swoop down on a sleepy, sedate, “white bread” town/suburb and try to convince the locals through faux-collaborative “visioning” presentations that there needs to be dense, mixed use cluster development in town. Rosy pictures of a pedestrian-friendly utopia are projected on screen, cars largely banished due to “traffic calming” street restructuring.
(If y’all like conspiracy theories, here’s an article about Regional Planning persuasion techniques that could be described as attempts at “manufacturing consent.”)
Who the stakeholders are is vaguely defined. The townsfolk and local business owners are the obvious acknowledged ones. Not discussed are the outside developers, social justice agitators, and government agencies looking to Affirmatively Further Fair Housing and spice up the peaceful whitopia.
Classic bait-and-switch: A proposed 200-unit development that is implied will be built to meet a stated need for aging Boomers to downsize and stay in town, with secondary priority given to other longtime town residents…
Then later: Actually, these units are for stakeholders in need, wherever they may be from. It would be racist to reserve any units for you privileged whites. New arrival Rigoberta has three Zika-head babies, and Dashawn and his mother Caprice need housing just as much as any of you. And making them pay market rent (or any rent) is just wrong.
If the locals see the scam and resist, the threatening mantra is uttered: Change is coming and you all have to get used to it.
* Government provided roads for fast car traffic create negative externalities for the neighbors (pollution, noise, deadly inattentive drivers) so those neighbors now ask the government to find methods to reduce those externalities. It’s not social engineering, it’s just politics.
WIKIPEDIA: Traffic calming uses physical design and other measures to improve safety for motorists, pedestrians and cyclists. It aims to encourage safer, more responsible driving and potentially reduce traffic flow. Urban planners and traffic engineers have many strategies for traffic calming, including narrowed roads and speed humps. Such measures are common in Australia and Europe (especially Northern Europe), but less so in North America.
In its early development in the UK in the 1930s, traffic calming was based on the idea that residential areas should be protected from through-traffic. Subsequently, it became valued for its ability to improve pedestrian safety and reduce noise and air pollution from traffic.
For much of the twentieth century, streets were designed by engineers who were charged only with ensuring smooth traffic flow and not with fostering the other functions of streets. Traffic calming initiatives have grown to consider other design functions as well. For example, it’s been shown that car traffic severely impairs the social and recreational functions of public streets. The Livable Streets study by Donald Appleyard (1981)[2] found that residents of streets with light traffic had, on average, three more friends and twice as many acquaintances as the people on streets with heavy traffic which were otherwise similar in dimensions, income, etc.
