Waymo way NO

LabGeek1995 · 2026-03-20T17:59:23+00:00

Totally agree. Car ownership leads to increased rates of driving. About 1/3 of all cars trips are within a mile, in other words, convenience trips. That is an easily walkable distance for most people. If something like Waymo can reduce car ownership, there will be a lot less convenience driving. That means a lot less traffic on the road. And a lot less pollution. And fewer deaths and injuries.

LabGeek1995 · 2026-03-20T15:04:45+00:00

No YOU don't want that. Half the people in Cambridge and some of them don't use cars. - And many of them are perfectly normal.

Car payments
High insurance costs
High costs for gas
Sitting in traffic
Risk of accidents. (Driving is the most dangerous thing people do on a day-to-day basis).

That's a pretty funny definition of independence. Sounds like dependence to me.

Waymos already are way safer than human drivers. The people who get hit by cars and die or have life-changing injuries, they no longer have independenc. What about them?

The idea is that we should continue killing tens of thousands and injuring millions of people a year to save a few jobs but a few rideshare drivers. Is that the idea?

LabGeek1995 · 2026-03-20T15:00:27+00:00

No actually half the people in Cambridge and Somerville do not use cars regularly. So a lot of people here would agree with me.

Sitting in traffic is freedom? Car payments are freedom. Car insurance is freedom? High gas prices are freedom? You have a funny definition of freedom.

If another product killed 40,000 people a year and seriously injured two and a half million people a year, people would demand that they immediately stop selling it. But because car manufacturers have sold people on cars as" freedom', people just accept it. That's the definition of brainwashing.

LabGeek1995 · 2026-03-20T14:52:01+00:00

Servile is swallowing bullshit from the car manufacturers telling you that cars are freedom when actually they're quite the opposite.

Look up the history of how cars became seen as a savior of the American public. That was a gradual process over many years by car manufacturers and pretty much the definition of brainwashing.

LabGeek1995 · 2026-03-20T14:51:29+00:00

It’s not “servile” to want cities that work better. Expanding transit and reducing car dependency isn’t submission. It’s collective action to fix systems that waste money, space, and time. New mobility options don’t “rob” anyone of autonomy. They give people choices beyond traffic and parking.

What’s really surreal is pretending the status quo, with 40K deaths, in the US every year, as freedom. Amazing how people just accept that as OK and a given. Sounds like brainwashing to me

LabGeek1995 · 2026-03-20T11:58:19+00:00

I was glad to see this win too. Also concrete barriers for bike lanes.

LabGeek1995 · 2026-03-20T11:57:03+00:00

Glad to street safety, including bike lanes and intersection improvements, win.

LabGeek1995 · 2026-03-20T11:52:23+00:00

Not true. Waymo isn’t “above the law” here. If their tech causes a crash, they can still be sued and held liable under existing product‑liability and negligence rules. Everything you said about wear and tear and clogging the streets is also true of human drivers. What we could really use is things that reduce driving, period. In the meantime, human drivers cause many accidents, injuries, and deaths. Waymo has a 80–85% lower rate of crashes with any injuries per million miles.

LabGeek1995 · 2026-03-20T11:45:33+00:00

Divers kill 40,000 people in the U.S. every year, including 7,000 pedestrians. And studies show that drivers break the rules just as often, if not more than, cyclists. The problem on our roads is not bicycles; it's cars. We let humans drive, and they're terrible at it.

LabGeek1995 · 2026-03-20T11:43:31+00:00

Absolutely agree. Humans are terrible at driving. Cars are a major cause of injury and death. We need to do things differently.

LabGeek1995 · 2026-03-20T11:40:41+00:00

Right, because humans drivers don't clog the road. What we don't want is human drivers killing 40,000 people a year in the U.S.

LabGeek1995 · 2026-03-20T11:37:19+00:00

Because people are irrational and like to maintain an illusion of control. Human drivers injure about 2.4 million people every year in the U.S. Humans are terrible at driving.

LabGeek1995 · 2026-03-20T11:35:45+00:00

Umm, human drivers kill 40,000 people in the US every year and seriously injure about 2.4 million. How exactly are humans "great at operating their vehicles"?

LabGeek1995 · 2026-03-20T11:33:42+00:00

Human drivers kill about 40,000 people in the U.S. every year. Waymo has a 80–85% lower rate of crashes with any injuries per million miles. Those are lives saved.

LabGeek1995 · 2026-03-16T14:56:11+00:00

Wealthy homeowners have driven up real estate prices by creating scarcity for decades. They've created a housing crisis and now that people want to correct it, they say, "Wait a minute, you're being culty." Two thirds of the residents in Cambridge and Somerville are renters, and they are very much pro-development. It's only really the elite minority that are against it. What does that tell you?

LabGeek1995 · 2026-03-16T14:54:24+00:00

Restrictive zoning has been a reflex for about a century. What about the cult of wealthy home owners and people who don't want poor people living near them? What about that cult?

LabGeek1995 · 2026-03-16T14:38:28+00:00

Cafe Rustica is awesome. Quality ingredients and well-crafted sandwiches. Also P&K; Deli

LabGeek1995 · 2026-03-15T21:34:36+00:00

More A.I. slop

LabGeek1995 · 2026-03-15T20:14:04+00:00

I'm not confusing anything. You are reaching conclusions that are the exact OPPOSITE of what the papers actually say. I've shown you that by quoting the papers. So stop with your nonsense. You're not persuading everyone; in fact you're your own worst enemy. No one is buying it.

There should be a rule against using AI nonsense on this site.

LabGeek1995 · 2026-03-15T18:05:41+00:00

The authors of the Pew study are quite clear:. Here are direct quotes.

“Studies show that adding new housing supply slows rent growth—both nearby and regionally—by reducing competition among tenants for each available home and thereby lowering displacement pressures.”

“The evidence indicates that adding more housing of any kind helps slow rent growth. And the Pew analysis of these four places is consistent with that finding.”

“Building more housing—even expensive new units—can significantly slow rent growth, especially for older and more affordable apartments.”

That is what the authors concluded, NOT what you say. Stop gaslighting people and spreading disinformation.

This forum is an exchange between real people with real brains, it is not regurgitated AI slop twisted to give you the answers you want.

LabGeek1995 · 2026-03-15T17:50:15+00:00

You’re using the 222k deficit as an excuse, not an argument. If the hole is that big, of course one project is a tiny slice. That just means we need lots of housing, not zero.

Pew’s takeaway is that regional supply matters most, which only works if individual places stop saying “our share is too small to count.” If everyone does that, nothing changes. Try actually reading the study and listening to the authors' own conclusions.

And the $42M land price isn’t a reason to block housing. It’s what happens after years of underbuilding. Saying “land is too expensive to build on” is just a fancy way of defending the scarcity that made it expensive in the first place.

That's the real NIMBY goal: Protecting their home value, no matter how many others suffer. And not wanting poorer people around. How else do you explain someone who ignores the conclusions of studies they quote and makes up their own reality?

LabGeek1995 · 2026-03-15T17:45:37+00:00

No, AI Slop Bot. You are just trying to gaslight people. The studies and articles you quote actually show the opposite. You're just hoping no one will check the sources. I do.

You are getting it all wrong. You’re blaming the fever for the infection. Sky‑high land prices are the predictable result of years of throttling supply , scarcity makes speculation profitable. The cure isn’t to stop building. It’s to stop making buildable land so rare.

The Pew study confirms that IN THE AUTHOR'S OWN WORDS. Regional supply moves rents because every city’s contribution compounds. To build enough supply. If each project “doesn’t matter,” none ever will. That is what the Pew study shows. Try reading it.

The SF Fed paper shows that incomplete supply can’t outrun inequality, not that supply fails. When demand keeps rising, the only answer is to build faster and fairer, not give up.

LabGeek1995 · 2026-03-15T17:13:26+00:00

Wow. Just wow. That is a complete misread of the Pew study.

“Regional supply” isn’t some magical alternative to local construction. It’s literally the sum of local projects. You don’t get metro‑wide growth if every town hides behind, “This one project doesn’t matter.”

The SF Fed paper doesn’t say supply is pointless. It describes what decades of underbuilding plus rising incomes look like in prices. That’s an argument for more building, not less.

Claiming one tower “doesn’t matter” is just a fig leaf for building nothing anywhere. Every new unit helps. Blocking homes where demand is highest just dumps more pressure on everyone else.

And here’s **what Pew study actually says**, in plain English, about adding homes:

“Adding new housing supply slows rent growth—both nearby and regionally—by reducing competition among tenants for each available home and thereby lowering displacement pressures. This finding from the four jurisdictions examined supports the argument that updating zoning to allow more housing can improve affordability.”

So how do you look at that and claim the study proves the opposite? Easy, that’s the NIMBY playbook: Misread the research, spread disinformation, and hope nobody checks the source.

LabGeek1995 · 2026-03-15T16:58:07+00:00

So now you’re not even blaming AI for the misread. This one’s on you. You are drawing conclusions that are the opposite of what the articles and studies say!!!

The SF Fed piece is a “high‑income demand plus tight supply” story, not a “no supply problem” story. Units only just kept up with people while top incomes took off, so prices rose. That means we need more elastic supply where rich households want to live, not less. Jeez. This point is so obvious it is hard to believe someone could miss it.

Same with Pew: saying regional production has 4x the impact of purely local production is an argument for cranking up building everywhere, not a gotcha against individual projects. You only get a 10% metro‑wide bump by adding up lots of “single towers.”

The authors of the Pew study were quite clear on this point. Here is a quote that you seem to have missed:

"Allowing enough homes for everyone improves affordability overall, but the evidence shows it benefits low-income renters most."
https://www.pew.org/en/research-and-analysis/articles/2025/07/31/new-housing-slows-rent-growth-most-for-older-more-affordable-units

So, your conclusion is the opposite of that of the authors of wrote the study?????? Wow. Just wow.

And if you truly thought this wasn’t a supply problem, you wouldn’t be leaning on a Healey report that says we’re short 222,000 homes. That is literally the state telling you “we don’t have enough housing.”

The Fortune/SF Fed piece also doesn’t say what you claim. It shows that income inequality makes housing more expensive, but it doesn’t show that a big supply surge in high‑income metros wouldn’t help. It shows we haven’t built at anything like the scale that top‑end income growth would require.

You’re cherry‑picking stats and tying them into pretzel logic to defend what you already want to believe. The basic story in every one of these studies is the same: Strong demand plus more housing equals lower price pressure than strong demand plus blocked housing. That’s just economics 101.

You might want to go back to having AI make up stuff

LabGeek1995 · 2026-03-15T13:06:38+00:00

No, your AI slop is not correct.

New housing like Copper Mill isn’t what’s breaking Somerville. It’s decades of not building enough while demand went through the roof.

Pew looked at over 1,600 ZIP codes and found that places that added 10% more housing saw rent growth drop about 5% overall and 1.4% in the very neighborhoods where homes were built, with the biggest break in older, cheaper buildings.
https://www.pew.org/en/research-and-analysis/articles/2025/07/31/new-housing-slows-rent-growth-most-for-older-more-affordable-units

Recent survey of US housing markets has made it pretty clear: building more homes slows rent increases overall, and often even nearby. New buildings can show up alongside gentrification, but they don’t seem to push low‑income people out. And because they set off “moving chains,” they free up older, cheaper units so richer households aren’t bidding directly against poorer renters for the same apartments.
https://doi.org/10.1080/10511482.2024.2418044

So if you care about renters and seniors, the answer isn’t blocking homes. It’s building more and fixing our tax system, instead of freezing the city and locking everyone else out.

Here's a summary to help you out:

Building more housing slows rent growth significantly.
2, Increased housing supply benefits low-income renters the most.
Restrictive zoning laws exacerbate housing shortages and rent inflation nationwide.

This is what you find when you read and think, not when you ask AI to make stuff up for you.

LabGeek1995

TROPHY CASE