Home › Forums › Open Discussion › Infrastructure decline…cause?
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December 7, 2012 at 10:05 pm #779121
DBPMemberDecember 7, 2012 at 10:42 pm #779122
DBPMemberCongestion is a determinant in most quality-of-life indexes. Although the feeling of “too many people around here” can be lessened by good urban planning, the principle of diminishing returns applies. Once you reach a certain population density, the cost of design changes you have to make to keep a place liveable skyrockets, while the benefit reaped goes up only marginally.
We are already seeing this in some of our most crowded, least liveable cities. From a 2011 article in Forbes:
So much for California dreaming: By our measure, five out of America’s 15 most stressful cities are in the Golden State, where residents contend with a wicked brew of job woes, high costs of living, traffic congestion and poor air quality.
Los Angeles tops our list, but New Yorkers should stop snickering, as their city comes in second, followed by Chicago, which comes in third. The Big Apple has the least affordable housing in the U.S., the most extreme population density and the highest cost of living — a mass of stresses tempered only by its current unemployment rate, 8.6%, which, while high, remains below the national average of 9.1%.
Chicago, meanwhile, has the worst traffic congestion in the country (along with Washington, D.C., which tied for the No. 1 spot); commuters there spend 70 hours a year sitting in jams. It’s also got an unemployment rate of 10.3% and is the fourth most densely packed city in the nation.
Washington D.C. and San Diego rank fourth and fifth, respectively.
You could counter that better mass transit will go a long way toward making cities feel less crowded, and you’d be right . . . but only if population remains steady. If a good mass transit system ends up being a population draw, then it’s just a matter of time before you’re right back where you started.
Look at Seattle’s own light rail system. Housing costs around the tracks are now rising to the point where the people who live there now (the ones who were supposed to benefit most from the service) can no longer afford to stay there. It wasn’t supposed to be like that, of course. But it is.
I don’t know why I’m even talking about mass transit in relation to Seattle, though. We’re at least 20 years behind where we should be in that area. Hell, we can’t even figure out how to do buses right.
December 7, 2012 at 11:17 pm #779123
wakefloodParticipantHey, it’s all a moot point once the bestest airborne mutation of bird/swine/giraffe flu gets rolling.
Should thin things out a bit.
He said, half kiddingly…
December 9, 2012 at 8:12 pm #779124
dobroParticipantIf you’d like to explore your outrage over too many people using food stamps try this…
http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/lifestyle/2012/05/mario-batalis-food-stamp-challenge/
Take the challenge. give yourself 29.86 per week to feed yourself 3 meals a day and see how many steak and champagne meals you can put together on that. Then let’s talk about how great those welfare queens have it.
December 11, 2012 at 5:36 pm #779125
dobroParticipantSome more news on the obscene military/empire building money we waste.The title of this article is “The True Cost of Empire”
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