LOL I read report, had a hunch about why Houston -- fastest-growing large city in US -- is broke.

My hunch was correct!! It's the actual cost of car sprawl coming due.

What's funny is, since the report was written by a right-wing/pro-sprawl org, they focus on "pension reform."

https://twitter.com/mayormcginn/status/1772604012405092842

Pension reform is important! But authors take pains to show pension liabilities as %, rather than actual costs.

And why is that?

Because Houston's net pension liability is less than 10% of sprawl liability. And Houston's conservatives love their massively-subsidized sprawl.

I’m presently on holiday and the first thing I notice when I leave US is, we really don’t have any idea what a civilized society looks or feels like, physically.

Most countries have infinitely more humanity in their streets.

We have banned it.

https://twitter.com/warrenjwells/status/1759089536997675289

And it’s not like bans on humans in our cities benefits anyone — aside from the car industry, which, compared to rest of world, utterly owns our government.

Shortest life spans, highest rate of violent driver injury and death, highest cost of living/transport in the OECD …

A bunch of years ago a very well-intentioned high school student convinced everyone he could sweep all plastic out of the ocean.

Oceanographers were quite frustrated by attention he got, because most of the plastic in the ocean is micron-scale.

And most of it is car tires.

https://twitter.com/jake_gotta/status/1752096870741266499

So we now have the phenomenon of well-intentioned environmentalists who drive everywhere they go, depositing plastic in ocean as they do, killing salmon and poisoning the food chain — and some of that driving is to attend protests to ban plastic bags.

You know. For the oceans.

[clears throat] "electric cars are good"

OK, with that out the way: An electric car is only good for the climate to the extent it is driven. That is, an old gasoline car that is only driven 50 miles per week will be lower-carbon than a new EV driven 50 miles per week. Reason is, carbon accounting on electric cars uses old CAFE standard -- how much pollution per mile?

And obviously, on per mile basis,* EVs have lower carbon pollution than gas cars.

*But the EV "break even" moment doesn't happen til EV has been driven news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/…

Thing non-violent drivers have to understand is how many drivers are openly violent and even talk openly about how they would kill a pedestrian or bikling if they felt the human walking or biking caused them delay or inconvenience or even just annoyance.

As an uncarred human I can not, from the crosswalk or bike lane, tell if the driver headed for me is violent or non-violent. All I see are people on their phones while sitting behind the wheel of a car — so, mostly violent drivers.

And because so many drivers are violent I don’t have the luxury …

It is so weird to be an American Jew.

Most of us are “white,” but whiteness is provisional/geographic — in more Republican/white supremacist areas, we’re less white & subject to racist terror attacks.

Most of us are liberal/progressives who despise Bibi & Likudniks but also … … have family (including ourselves!) who are literally only alive because of Israel’s existence.

Most of us support democracy & a two-state solution and are horrified by right-wing end-times evangelicals in the GOP who use Zionism as thin cover for Taliban-style objectives …

With 150 million Americans threatened by deadly heat today/this week, here’s a fun climate thought experiment — I can’t remember who taught me this but it was during a forum on geoengineering at a COP.

So, we’re going to be doing tons of geoengineering. I’m personally opposed but the car industry is too powerful/too many humans think driving is a human right, and anyway, we’ve missed all our targets for 1.5 and 2 degrees and the next tranche of heat (2.5 or 3 degrees C, our trajectory) would likely make much of the human built environment non-viable.

I have a story about the Bay Area that seems appropriate to share. It’s about venture capitalists.

I have a bunch of friends who are VCs. They’re brilliant. Most of the time I have no idea what they are working on because it’s a level of tech I don’t grasp.

But sometimes … … they say silly things.

One of these times was ~ 17 years ago, when solar was the rage. Big VCs were betting big on solar concentrators, claiming they’d beat silicon-intensive, traditional cells/modules.

To those of us who’d been in energy a while, seemed unlikely …

The fact that literally no one on the left demands that the car industry exclusively build brand new low-income cars kind of gives away the fact that this is always and exclusively about performative progressivism and not an actual concern for poor people.

https://twitter.com/j_smithcameron/status/1673431592713289728

Like, the car industry is **literally reducing production and only building luxury cars to increase profits** and leftists are saying "We're ok with the limited production part but could they limit it to affordable cars?"

No. No, they literally can not. autonews.com/sales/car-pric…

The clash between US cities and their suburbs has always been inevitable.

Suburbs expect cities to be clean, heavily-policed parking lots for their cars. And for much of last 75 years, cities have obliged.

But it was always a land use Ponzi scheme. And it’s reached the end.

https://twitter.com/nytimes/status/1670456356757729283

The battle over congestion pricing in NYC is the canary in the coal mine of the urban geometry crisis.

Geometry denial is endemic to suburban car dependence. People who prefer that lifestyle are geometrically illiterate, and force their lifestyle on those of us who are not.

I truly and unironically want drivers to demand that all forms of human mobility pay their fair share for the infrastructure we use. Biklings pay for bike lanes, pedestrians pay for sidewalks, buses pay for bus lanes, drivers pay for car lanes.

Really. No more pretending. Let’s see if drivers love their hobby enough to actually pay for it. None of this “Ah well, drivers may maim and poison 4 million and liquify the bones and organs of 46,000 people per year but that’s, uh …”

That’s a part of the cost of driving, fucking pay 100% of it.

A common misperception is cities like Los Angeles and San Francisco and Detroit were "built for cars," but actually, they were "built for bicycles."

The car industry stole all the land & violently ejected humans from our streets. But bicycles came first.

vox.com/2015/6/30/8861…

https://twitter.com/willigula/status/1669092442845614080

Very, very true story, actually.

https://twitter.com/mateosfo/status/1599269613900271616?s=20

Something lost on the "cars can solve climate change" caucus is how cost of car ownership has doubled in 10 years, while cost of walking, biking, and transit has remained same.

This is not a caprice of nature; the car industry has a deliberate strategy. jalopnik.com/the-average-mo… Most cars sold in the US today are giant trucks and SUVs, and while the median price of a new *car* is under ~ $40,000, most trucks and SUVs go for $60 - $75k.

And today, most cars in the U.S. are ... trucks and SUVs. arstechnica.com/cars/2023/01/t….)

In a past life, I worked with an investigative team to dig up sources of climate denial & expose them for spreading fake science through media.

The strategy was simple: Publish something outrageously false, launder it through Fox News, and it became Republican catechism.

https://twitter.com/resnikoff/status/1640099180277567489

And so using this same assessment, I am also fairly confident the original source of vacancy trutherism — the national lie there are millions of vacant homes in cities, that landlords are hoarding apartments to sell them for a profit later — are a handful of notorious LA NIMBYs.

https://twitter.com/sp6runderrated/status/1643230455829757953

LOL the trust funder Mayor of Beverly Hills thinks people believe him when he claims to care about affordable housing.

How many subsidized affordable homes have been built in Beverly Hills during your tenure John, post the number, we’ll wait.

Ah screw it why wait

https://twitter.com/JohnMirisch/status/1642540203939360768

During his ~ dozen years in office, John Mirisch has lived a comfortable life off the Wall Street profits in the trust fund portfolio his daddy gave him but he hasn’t proposed a single affordable housing bond to increase the amount of affordable housing in Beverly Hills.

Everyone needs to go back and re-read original Strong Towns manifesto, but we also need to be constantly vigilant about scale of liabilities pawned off on us by car culture --

Yes, freshly paved roads to new exurban subdivisions are smooth and fast! strongtowns.org/journal/2020/5… ... until they're not. A road surface wears down with use, and rate of wear accelerates with size/weight of cars using it.

But most cars in the US are no longer, in fact, cars -- they're trucks/SUVs that weigh 2-3x what cars used to weigh.

That gets worse with electrification.

Some personal news: Neighbor who used to block the church driveway with his car came home couple weeks ago with a Rad Power Bike.

Saw him yesterday, told him, cool bike bro.

He said they got rid of 2nd car, now he rides everywhere in town.

“My stress levels have evaporated.” City leaders in Berkeley, like city leaders in most US cities, are failing their residents.

Their minds seem broken around a status quo of permanent car dependence that is not, in fact, permanent.

Never, ever elect city leaders who fail to understand this.

Little-known fact, but American Association of Retired People can arguably be seen as the first & largest YIMBY org.

They've been fighting for walkable, accessible, non-car-dependent communities for decades. Because, obviously:

Cars are great, until your eyes and reflexes go.

https://twitter.com/resnikoff/status/1640504630303133696

This is something that is already happening, was confidently and accurately predicted, and that we ignore only if we truly do not give a shit about the suffering of the elderly.
vox.com/2015/6/12/8768…

I love me a good MattY hot take, but this one is slightly too hot.

Those of you who are old enough to remember Enron and Kenneth Lay: A Twitter history of why Texas is actually the leading renewable energy state in the U.S.

🧵

https://twitter.com/mattyglesias/status/1639986858602946560

Nobody likes to remember this, but at end of the 1980s and early 1990s, when the clean air act was being amended, Ken Lay was everyone's favorite Texan -- because, at the time, the entire environmental movement *loved* methane gas.

It was cleaner than coal & cheaper than nukes.

Hey check it out, the thing a lot of neutral observers said would happen is happening.

There’s no plan to figure out how to make electric car charging work outside the home. Because … it probably won’t! bostonglobe.com/2023/03/26/bus… “But Tesla!!” yes, Tesla includes the cost of its charging network in the $65,000 price of its vehicles.

If you want to sell a $30,000 electric car, you’ll have to not provide a charger. Or you can go bankrupt I guess

So here’s the thing: The USA spends 15% of GDP on cars, which is also what typical household spends on cars.

Those dollars are THE impediment to efficient/reliable transit. You can’t re-do urban geometry to change that. Free fares don’t fix it either. itdp.org/2019/05/23/hig… We can’t have car culture AND great transit. Our economy/infrastructure are already strained to breaking point accommodating cars; they’re massive money-losers for everyone involved, & physically impede flow of transit.

We actually have to spend *less* on transportation.