On Thursday, June 21, 2018 at 3:28:33 PM UTC+1, Sepp Ruf wrote:
Andre Jute wrote:
The Kochtopus Crushes Nashville Transit:
https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/...ville-transit/

Imagine my surprise: Poor people voted against astronomical sales tax, fat
people voted against limited availability of plus-size seating.

The article is satire, which I imagine someone with your smooth English knows.

And the site actually almost contains a little bicycle tech content, check
out the wheelchair's tire!
https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/06/talia-lavin-new-yorker-smears-war-veteran-justin-gaertner/

National Review is a conservative magazine of elevated standing. I knew its founder, William F. Buckley, to say hello to when I was the boy genius of advertising. I don't normally read the newspapers or magazines (not even the ones I write for -- if they contain something I need to know about, someone is assigned to tell me) but when I discovered the 2016 presidential election campaign was going to be fun, a schadenfreude way, I needed an honest source of news. I thought first of the Christian Science Monitor, which led me to the late Bill Buckley's magazine by a process of association (Buckley's conservatism includes a certain religiously-based Judeo-Christian morality, and he and the present management appear to be not overly particular whether it be useless Episcopal, less dignified but more thrusting evangelical Christianity, Catholicism or straight out of the Talmud); the contributors are literate and very well informed and often distinguished, and they don't tell lies for politics or any other reason. As you can imagine, they are patriots who, when some NY siren of slime slimes a handicapped veteran, come down hard on her. I must say, now that you've pointed out Justin Gaertner's tyre choice, Schwalbe's Marathon Plus, that I imagine he's a bit of a hard-ass; when I rode on those harsh tyres, or their Bontrager workalikes, I developed callouses on my backside.

The Global Warming Faithful and other Clinton Voters had better stay
clear. Sample quote: "Even in Portland, Ore., where light rail is
considered a raging success, the system accounts for only 0.9 percent of
passenger miles traveled."

Gee, I wonder if a considerably higher "proportion of (inner-city) trips
traveled" wouldn't look as attractive as 0.x in promoting the journo's argument.

He's not making an argument. He's sending up slanted, ill-informed, biased, politicized reporting.

Andre Jute Don't shoot the piano player; I was a liberal before you were
born.

And what kind of financing would you propose to have Portland's vital
trans-Lycabettus bicycling arteries "re"paved after Jay convincingly
demonstrated that they resemble, in their current state, crumbling, yet
polished, moss-turtle infested ruins?

You're assuming that I wouldn't just dismiss, out of hand, clearly crap ideas whose unquantified and uncosted and uncertain benefits will (maybe) accrue after the year 2300, like this dumb Nashville rapid transit, California's even dumber bullet-train boondoggle, Portland's crazily expensive and incompetent transport planning, etc, etc. You should read "liberal" in my sig line above with a capital and think 1911 British Budget, and, just in case I'm not clear yet, let's add that I'm a laissez-faire capitalist; I spit on American "liberals" as dangerous touchy-feelies who shouldn't be allowed to cross the street by themselves. I assign zero validity and neither cost nor benefit value to paranormal effects like global warming and other apocalyptic nonsense, and as for the "feelings" of the environmental faithful, they're responsible for a monstrous genocide by hunger and disease of hundreds of millions of the poorest and most defenseless people on earth, and that's just counting the unnecessary banning of DDT, without even touching on their attempts to ban genetically modified foods; you will not be surprised to hear that I spit on them too (except when they're on fire), starting with Rachel Carson, the patron saint of genocides.

If you force me to make a fully footnoted argument, the simplest way is to cost the expected benefits and compare them to the actual cost of construction, factoring in the full cost the necessary borrowing, preferably under a regime that holds anyone who deviates from the agreed budget criminally responsible for a jailable offense. In short, none of that "just in case there's global warming" aka "precautionary principle" bull****. In this regard, I'm the surviving inventor of the proprietary Agostini-Jute Algorithm, based on one of my dissertations, which determines from the economist's sub-discipline of demographics the population flow towards some point of interest; we used the science to determine where malls should be built to have the largest customer base but the principles and corollaries also apply to siting and routing public transport and other infrastructure development. A fully rational cost-benefit analysis, without any resort to political wet dreams, is therefore eminently possible. Whether it is ever wanted -- as distinct from its pretense -- is a different, fully political matter.

I hate to agree with a fascist bully like Frank Krygowski even this far, but I have even less faith in mickey mouse schemes to separate cyclists from motor traffic. Effective, large-scale schemes (much, much more draconic than the ones in New York and Portland) are a perfect political impossibility in developed modern societies because they're already car-centric and will remain so for decades to come. What has to be changed is the culture in which a cyclist's life is worth less than that of a motorist. What's different in The Netherlands isn't so much what you can see, the infrastructure, but that the culture is cycle-centric, starting in the hearts of the majority of the people, and expressed in laws which effectively hold a motorist who hits a cyclist culpable unless he can reasonably prove that he took due care.

Under the present arrangements outside places like The Netherlands the problem with agreeing with Krygowski even part of the way is that his preferred option of Vehicular Cycling then goes too far, well beyond the point where the velocities of automobiles and cyclists are so vastly different that the very speed of automobiles, before we even consider the difference in mass between an automobile and a cyclist, becomes a danger to cyclists. (That's aside from the patent nastiness of the only enthusiasts for VC that I've ever met. If the VC enthusiasts weren't so wretchedly unlikeable, I think most reasonable people on RBT would be more likely to admit that, up to a point, they too follow Forrester's simple rules of thumb. )

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Df-dB5-XUAAzqCY.jpg

A fabled Norman Rockwell illustration from the Saturday Evening Post in the days when people still had a sense of humor! Or a very good pastiche indeed. And a good joke!

Andre Jute
A little, a very little thought will suffice -- Wish I Said That First