> public will being the primary
> impediment to progress.
> public will being the primary
> impediment to progress.
Most of American city-dwellers want to “have their cake and eat it too,” that is, they want to live in a major metro AND be able to easily drive and park everywhere they want to go.
Those two things (major population and easy driving) are mutually exclusive, because car oriented development doesn’t scale beyond rural / suburban size very well.
But so far I haven’t seen any public leaders or communities acknowledge that and start working on alternatives. Instead they play games like blaming Uber and Lyft and pretending that an extra tax on them will make any real difference, when in reality it’s political theater.
This may be true without implying any defense of something that is contrary to the public will.
The public can be totally awful and that doesn't mean people who have contempt for the public are any good.
After we acknowledge that “public will” is an impediment, we can then probe whether the problem is really so bad after all, what “public will” really means, whether it is self-contradictory, how strongly entrenched those interests/ideas are, whether there are ways of reframing the conversation to significantly sway public perception and action, and so on.
It might turn out that everyone loves griping about traffic congestion but isn’t really too bothered. Or that “public will” is just reflexive opposition to misunderstood alternatives conditioned by decades of deliberate propaganda. Or that “public will” is very weakly held and malleable if an alternative proposal does a charismatic marketing blitz. Or that the disparate powerful interest groups involved are in direct opposition and political progress working towards compromise is at a total impasse and impossible. Or ...
Not just that the public is generically “anti-progress”.
Roads are expensive and we don't have room to build anymore anyways. Without an effective way to increase capacity, something obviously has to give.