Thread by @asymmetricinfo

Okay, so a number of people have responded to this by saying basically, "You can't expect AOC to live as if she's already in the GND world. Wanting better public transit doesn't mean you have to take the inadequate stuff we have now."

And fair, except ... her district's in NYC.

https://twitter.com/asymmetricinfo/status/1102228488264843264

NYC already has excellent public transit. Yes, even in the boroughs. It's not going to get substantially better under the Green New Deal, for a couple of reasons.

So first of all, it's not "Green" to run buses/trains in off hours so frequently that you never have to wait more than a few minutes. Moving a mostly empty heavy vehicle around consumes fossil fuels.

Nor is it cost-efficient. It's really expensive to buy a bus and pay someone to drive it around empty.

If your idea is that the Green New Deal somehow means that outer borough transit will operate like transit in the dense business core ... that's not how public transit works anywhere.

Moving to a world where public transit is ubiquitous & cars rare means moving to a world in which you frequently have to assemble an inconvenient string of busses/trains to get somewhere you want to go. No one's running a line direct from your house to everywhere else in the city

Doing so would be incredibly expensive and inefficient.

If you're envisioning a world where everyone enjoys the transit convenience of living in Manhattan or the near-in bits of Brooklyn/Bronx, you're having a fantasy.

I mean, we could make these things somewhat more convenient by building loop lines in both NY & DC (the cities I know), but still--yes, often it will take you an hour or so to get somewhere specific that isn't in the dense core! That's how public transit works!

Which brings us to the important point: unless you're ideologically devoted to environmentalism, the only reason you would prefer transit to cars is congestion. (There are people who take transit rather than driving because they can't afford a car, but they don't *prefer* to)

AOC's staffers are presumably taking so many Ubers for the same reason everyone else does: unless you're in a very dense, very congested urban core, it's way more convenient than transit.

And this is a big, big problem for any plan to shift people out of their cars to transit. So it is, in fact, worth noting that while AOC is preaching that the world is shortly going to end, her staffers are prioritizing personal convenience over environmental benefit.

Because everyone else feels the same way! Unless they're planning to get drunk, or traffic/parking makes driving a hassle, no one wants to sit in a vehicle that takes a circuitous route and stops frequently rather than just going directly to wherever they're trying to go.

Europe has neatly solved this problem by being really dense and having a lot of streets that were constructed centuries ago. America neglected to size its urban centers to the span of a donkey's hind-quarters, so it's going to be harder to get folks out of cars.

Unless you have some way to get around these voter preferences, you have very little chance of passing any laws that will force people in areas that aren't Manhattan into a car-free lifestyle.

For the same reason AOC's staffers declined to do the envirofriendly thing.

If your argument is "Yeah, but it would be *really* time consuming for them to try to do all their business on public transit", you are yourself providing the best argument against the Green New Deal.