Maybe design cities to be walkable and bikeable so that you have the option get things done without driving a car which is inherently trackable?
Why does everyone suggest this like it's easily done and the only reason that we haven't is due to lack of intelligence and/or will?
It's not. It's an effort that will take decades, cost trillions of dollars, and will face both legislative and legal hurdles.
Besides, with individual trait recognition technology and smartphones, you'll just be tracked regardless. You have to hold leaders to account for this sort of abuse of power.
Condoning the surveillance state because it makes the things they want people to like less comparatively worse is exactly the sort of evil "use anything as leverage to advance my goals" behavior is exactly how we got here.
I suppose we could wave more magic wands and say "ok, everybody with kids has to live in a city whether they like it or not" and wave some more magic wands and eliminate all concerns about crime or other dangers, but if we're going to wave this many magic wands maybe we should just wave one that makes it so children don't need to go to school at all because they are all magically educated already.
I live blocks from Costco in one of those cities but the option is either get on my bike and share the four-lane road with aggressive drivers in massive trucks/SUVs or use a tiny sidewalk that randomly stops and picks up again a block or two later.
In other words, if you want to bike to get your groceries, Costco is the wrong choice.
The lack of infrastructure is what makes the routine unpleasant, not failing to carry a small bag of bagels home. Not even the weather since riding a bike casually creates a breeze.
A place like Costco can only exist with the support of a large amount of car infrastructure. So if you want to go there that's what you have to deal with.
Swap Costco out with any place I might want to go, and my point doesn't change because whether I can carry a bag of six bagels or eat a pizza in their food court isn't up for debate.
You got one-shot by a triviality. The argument is not whether Costco should be the one building built in more density acoss our cities but whether our cities are hospitable to walking/biking.
Costco just happens to be an example of a business I used to like to bike to near me, but it's adjacent to many other businesses I could have mentioned instead like restaurants, a cafe, and my friend's apartment, not the sole reason the streets exist around it.
In my experience, people who live this way don’t have a problem with any of it.
You can’t just “undo” one piece of this without undoing everything else about our society. And that’s just not likely to happen in a democracy, as annoying as that may be.
Replace Costco with "some place I like to go" if that is less distracting.
The entire nature of commerce in much of the US is based around the automobile. You are expected to buy things in quantities that are best transported by a car. You are going to a place that is stocked by the truckload because it is placed near a road or highway.
The money is made because of the road network. That's why governments build highways and roads: to enable commerce that they then tax. It's more efficient for a lot of commercial purposes if you have commerce occur at the scale of a vehicle than it is if it occurs at the scale of a person.
If you want to go to a park or some other place "I like to go", sure, it's great to have those within walking distance, but that's not going to be enough to motivate political and economic will to scrap trillions of dollars in investment in infrastructure based on the automobile. It just isn't.
This just isn't true. You got distracted by my mention of Costco and then ran with it.
Do you know how people live in walkable cities without a car? Not unlike people who live a block from H-E-B, except passing by the shop is part of your day. You can pick up of quart of milk and some eggs and avocados for breakfast because it's no big deal to walk to the store and carry a bag.
> It's more efficient for a lot of commercial purposes if you have commerce occur at the scale of a vehicle than it is if it occurs at the scale of a person.
That's not what the data shows. We subsidize car infrastructure, and less density is worse for commerce, and land that could have been used for more business is eaten alive by surface parking.
I do not consider employers that do not offer showers.
The world will be great once we wealthy people move to the giant dome cities where we can rid ourselves of the requirements of being outside from time to time.
As for tracking, I want more of it by individuals just not centralized corporations. The porch pirate bosses often park in front of my place to watch their minions of whom snatch packages around the time that kids are getting home. Some of the porch pirate minions drive vans and could easily snatch kids. I have been encouraging many of the people in my area to install cameras that log license plates and catch faces and vehicles in multiple directions of their roads and highways. We've removed some of the organized crime and pushed some of it out of this area and we will continue to push harder.
Most people in the US live in urban areas. Most US citizens live in cities. The urban population of the US is about 80% of the population.
I do agree most students in the US arrive by bus or car, but that's not because most US citizens live on farms off country highways.
> kids in rural areas are just as valuable as kids in cities
I never said otherwise. I'm just pointing out its misleading to act like most of the US population live in rural areas.
> Busses and cars are not likely going away for the duration of this short civilization
The majority of this short civilization existed without busses and cars being a requirement. Seems strange it can't possibly exist without them now, or at least a significantly reduced societal need on them to have a basic functional existence for a decent chunk of the society.
Nearly half is entirely unpopulated. Once again I don't get why that matters about the discussion of school busses in general.
Rural areas cover 80% of Europe by area. Its not like rural areas are a uniquely American thing.
The census designation of rural is very stringent and you basically need more cows than people to meet it. That's where this "80% of the population is urban" stat you love to vomit up comes through.
Buuut, of that 80%, most do not live in any sort of "city" in the colonial sense though it may be called one on paper (because city vs town vs other is a state level administrative distinction)
The average and median american lives in some kind of suburb. It might be outer and not very dense. It might be inner and very dense. But at the end of the day it is somewhere that's not walkable/bike-able without being at a severe time disadvantage to car/bus transport in the typical (i.e. we're not talking about 1am leaving the bar) case.
Not true. The census actually doesn't really bother to define rural other than "not urban". So then it comes down to what the urban definition is. The urban definition is:
> To qualify as an urban area, the territory identified according to criteria must encompass at least 2,000 housing units or have a population of at least 5,000.
https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/geography/guidance/g...
> most do not live in any sort of "city" in the colonial sense
What do you mean about "the colonial sense"?
> it may be called one on paper
Its called a city on paper because it is a city.
> The average and median american lives in some kind of suburb
Suburbs, which usually exist in cities, yes. That's how we've built our cities here in the US, as sprawling suburbs.
> But at the end of the day it is somewhere that's not walkable/bike-able without being at a severe time disadvantage to car/bus transport in the typical
I mean I agree with that, hence my first comment being "I do agree most students in the US arrive by bus or car". Is being walkable a requirement for a city to be a city?
Right, and when you look at the size of these areas thats a really low bar
>What do you mean about "the colonial sense"?
Colloquial. Autocorrect
>Its called a city on paper because it is a city.
Not necessarily. The entire country is absolutely littered with small towns of say 40k population or less that are cities for administrative reasons either because they're incorporated that way or some other reason like being locally more important 100yr ago. Many of these "cities" are tens of thousands of people smaller, and way less dense, than bedroom community suburbs around major cities that are incorperated as towns and nobody would call a city.
It’s not really possible to build a large city where everyone gets to live close enough to their job and their kids’ schools and the stores they need to go to, unless everyone is moving their house every time they want to change jobs.
The best we could do is robust public transportation. Whenever I hear calls to make everything walkable I can only assume the person hasn’t thought about all the people with kids, or who do work that can’t be done remotely, or who don’t want to move for every job, or who can’t afford to live in the nicest parts of town, or who live in places where winter weather would turn a 20 minute walk into a 1 hour hike, or who are too old or injured to be walking long distances, or all of the other reasons people drive cars. Maybe if you’re young, have no kids, and work a high paying job that lets you live wherever you want these ideas seem obvious, but some form of transportation, public or private, is a basic necessity for the rest of the world.