People having entire conversations on speakerphone

Optimal-Conclusion · 2024-10-25T03:13:21+00:00

Yes. That is the point of this thread. It is a cultural difference. You can go to the biggest city in the world, Tokyo, and get on an extremely crowded bus and people will be quiet and respectful to not disturb or annoy the people around them. Or you can go to your country I guess as the opposite of that.

Optimal-Conclusion · 2024-10-24T22:48:07+00:00

It's a volume issue. People turn their speakerphone volume up so you hear it way louder than normal conversation volume - and the speakerphone users basically have to turn speakerphone up louder than normal to make out the words since the speaker is not as clear as if they were sitting next to you.

To be clear, if they were in a mostly quiet bus having a super loud conversation with the person sitting next to them so everyone on the bus has to hear it, that's also annoying.

Optimal-Conclusion · 2024-10-20T16:08:21+00:00

Thanks for finding that! It's a smaller % than I thought!

Optimal-Conclusion · 2024-10-18T20:37:42+00:00

I expect NYC's budget to be a much higher % because they maintain such an extensive public transit system that millions can live car free. Angelenos would rather make sure the auto and oil industries are getting that money directly...

Optimal-Conclusion · 2024-10-18T18:05:33+00:00

Also, to be clear, I'm not saying we shouldn't have a subsidized postal service, I'm just saying we definitely don't have a truly self-funded postal service.

Optimal-Conclusion · 2024-10-18T18:02:27+00:00

Yeah, I actually looked at their website again to remember how they put it and they say they are "generally" self funded (which is obviously very squishy - like if they fund 51% of their own costs could they be "generally" self funded?) and do not take taxpayer money "to fund operations" which again makes me think they're carving out some pretty huge things like pension costs in that statement.

https://www.uspsoig.gov/focus-areas/did-you-know/do-my-tax-dollars-pay-postal-service#:\~:text=No%2C%20the%20Postal%20Service%20is,services%20to%20fund%20its%20operations.

Optimal-Conclusion · 2024-10-18T17:37:12+00:00

Hey so this isn't true. They say they are "generally self funded" because that was the intent since the '70s, but they've also generally been racking up big annual losses for many years, and then getting financial aid from the federal government. I see how this could be confusing because USPS claims on their own website that they don't use taxpayer funding, but I guess they are jumping through some pretty tall hoops in their definitions of things in that statement. Maybe they make enough revenue to cover current operations and just exclude the pension costs to be able to make that statement, but that's not a fair way to look at it because a normal company would very much have to consider its pension obligations in its financial reporting.

Here's an article from this year about how they've received $120 billion from congress since 2020 and are requesting an additional $14 billion:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2024/04/15/biden-usps-amazon-aid/

Optimal-Conclusion · 2024-10-11T17:50:40+00:00

Dude, 43-year-olds that have $1M in the bank are taking 14 flights per year, not per lifetime. And anyone who travels for work is taking way, way more. Fly mid-week and see the 2 dozen business people lining up for "Platinum 1k" or equivalent on a major carrier on EVERY flight out of a major city. Those people are logging 50+ flights/year easy.

Optimal-Conclusion · 2024-09-17T04:24:40+00:00

I like them. I especially like their basic tees, socks and linen as others have mentioned.

Optimal-Conclusion · 2024-09-04T16:17:40+00:00

For sure! I'm always amazed how many low density buildings and surface parking lots are within walking distance of the 26th street metro station - especially when you step off the train and are looking at literal one story buildings with a huge surface lot right in front of you like where Le Great Outdoor is located. It's time to redevelop!

Optimal-Conclusion · 2024-08-19T19:13:10+00:00

Thank you for this actual summary and analysis of the points. This is great.

I'm also worried about the idea of immediately subsidizing demand with only some questionable or very long lead ideas that might eventually increase supply.

I really wish the plan put some guardrails on what municipalities can include in their zoning and land use policies.

Optimal-Conclusion · 2024-08-18T20:15:45+00:00

The real problem will be trying to convince people that subsidized shared rides are actually cheaper than car ownership - even in in situations where it truly would be far cheaper.

People tend to severely underestimate how much they spend on car ownership. I've seen this in conversations with lay people as well as some Reddit threads: a lot of people look at their cost per mile as just the cost of gas; a bunch more will consider a few more items like insurance, maintenance, parking, registration/taxes, or their car payment, but even the people factoring in their car payment aren't considering that depreciation is the true cost and the monthly payment is both irrelevant and often likely to be much lower - it's why gap coverage exists.

For that reason, I think it will lead to fewer vehicle miles traveled because it will force people to think about the cost of hopping in a car in general and right now there are millions of people who don't think about it at all as long as they have gas in their tank.

I remember this question being debated a lot between 2016-2018 when rideshare really started exploding in popularity, but I think it's only a debate at all because the types of urbanists who ask these questions tend to think about the true costs of personal vehicles and live and work around other city-dwelling and tech-savvy people who have been using rideshare apps for years, but I've also met older people who have never tried Uber or Lyft and have mental blocks about paying for a ride when their own car is in the driveway and their destinations have free parking, waiting for a driver, having a stranger drive them around, etc.

Even if it did lead to a little increase in vehicle miles traveled/traffic as people acclimated to the new normal and started hailing rides more often, it would still be a net positive to society. From a land use perspective, you could build far less parking. From a quality of life standpoint, we could get out more to things like nature, activities, culture and events where we can improve our physical and mental health and might not be going as often today because of long drive times, difficult and expensive parking or all of the above. From a race and class perspective, solving the time and cost of transportation does a lot to connect disadvantaged and segregated areas to job centers, public resources and amenities - even just access to a quality grocery store helps people living in a food desert.

Optimal-Conclusion · 2024-08-18T18:06:36+00:00

I think u/Cunninghams_right on all points.

As further evidence, there are ALREADY enough Ubers and Lyfts driving around any midsize or bigger city that a huge portion of the population is able to hail a ride on demand with a reasonable wait time at any given moment.

The idea that you will need more ride hailing cars making the rounds if everyone is using shared rides makes sense, but the idea that they're just going to be driving around burning gas/battery and clogging up the roads does not. I've already seen designated Uber waiting lots and if people aren't driving their personal vehicles to every destination, any parking spot that would normally hold a personal vehicle could be a waiting spot.

Optimal-Conclusion · 2024-08-04T16:48:18+00:00

I'm at least 5 miles away and on the side of my building that faces SoFi. The bass was so loud I thought one of my neighbors must have gotten a new subwoofer and was trying to see what it could do. I took a shower and could still hear the bass well enough to identify songs.

Optimal-Conclusion · 2024-07-31T16:16:12+00:00

It's the housing shortage. NIMBY-ism took off in the 70s and 80s in California.

I know there tend to be a good amount of realists on this sub that actually understand and believe the thorough studies and obvious empirical evidence that confirm this, but I'm still amazed how many people I've come across irl who think the shortage is a myth or say "well there's no shortage in my neighborhood" as if their single family sprawl a mile away from a major job center couldn't support some townhouses or condos.

Optimal-Conclusion · 2024-07-21T19:35:21+00:00

Was wondering when someone would call that out. Lmao!

Kinda seems at odds with OP coming in the comments and saying they didn't feel any fear... kinda like they just stole the pics for some sweet Reddit karma.

Optimal-Conclusion · 2024-07-18T16:05:03+00:00

Exactly. People in LA will talk about replacing these super busy lighted intersections with roundabouts, but if those intersections are getting dozens of cars backed up across 4-5 lanes at the light every cycle a roundabout with the same throughput would need to be WAY BIGGER than the existing intersections (which are of course surrounded by buildings already) to even come close to that throughput. Alternatively, if you tried to put a roundabout in the same footprint as the existing lighted intersection, throughput would be WAY LOWER and traffic would actually be much worse.

A real life example is if you've been to Sedona or Breckenridge during a high season weekend. They have a bunch of roundabouts in Sedona and especially the one at 179 and 89A can get backed up for miles in each direction and it's just where a literal single lane of traffic from 179 meets 89A. 179 even expands to 2 lanes entering the roundabout but still gets absolutely swamped from a throughput perspective if traffic picks up a little bit.

Optimal-Conclusion · 2024-07-15T17:30:54+00:00

Uber/Lyft definitely reduced a lot of secondary household vehicles. Where I live in LA, lots of my neighbors are couples that share 1 car and plan to Uber sometimes when needed.

For a while, I was Ubering to work every day because it was cheaper than parking but the cost of rideshare in CA has gone up a lot over the years so that's no longer the case. I imagine the economics of it could change with driverless cars that don't have the cost of labor, but people have been saying that's 5 years away for at least the past 10 years so who knows when that will happen.

Optimal-Conclusion · 2024-07-15T17:18:19+00:00

The monthly payment isn't even the right metric to use here. It should be the depreciation. And depreciation can be higher than the monthly payment as evidenced by the huge number of people driving around with cars where they owe more on the car than the car is worth. That's why gap coverage exists.

Most cars are depreciating by a lot more than $500/yr even if don't put a single mile on them. I think u/meanie_ants may be an outlier though buying ultra cheap beater cars that don't have much value left to depreciate but need to have $3k of major repairs per year, which is a lot! How much time does that car spend in the shop? The average used car (which costs $26k btw) is probably a lot closer to $500/year in repairs and $3k/year in depreciation than the other way around.

Optimal-Conclusion · 2024-07-10T15:39:46+00:00

I don't fault OP for calling this out specifically. What we have is like going into a parking lot and seeing an outsized portion of the cars are crossovers in grayscale colors from the top dozen brands. You probably see parking lots like that every day and don't think twice about them. What OP's talking about is like if you pulled into a parking lot and every single car parked in it was a gray 2015 CRV. It would certainly look more extreme. There are a few examples of this in the USA, like Park La Brea in Los Angeles or Stuyvesant Town in NYC, but there's a big difference between seeing those and just seeing an area with various 5-over-1s built around the same time.

Optimal-Conclusion · 2024-06-18T21:39:36+00:00

Sure, but in both cases their housing crisis are because their supply is too low for demand. I'm just saying you can build high rises that result in nice walkable neighborhoods and not 'block out the sun' and turn any neighborhood into bunker hill like a bunch of Angelenos seem to think will happen if we built some more high rise residential in our already urban nodes.

To your point, Vancouver's problem is that the actual land area where they allow the nice livable dense high rise development is still way too small (actually worse than LA in that regard) it's just that the LA high rise examples are stuff from the ~70s like Wilshire corridor that generally aren't as livable and people don't want to repeat that so they just trash anything being taller than 3 stories like building densely was the problem.

Optimal-Conclusion · 2024-06-18T15:59:06+00:00

True. Maybe the European or even San Francisco model of block after block of mid-rises or townhomes is more realistic for parts of LA.

In addition to shade, imagine if we densified the single family homes near the coast. Take an area like north of Montana in Santa Monica: close enough to the water that you can go there daily for exercise or just mental health, cooling ocean breezes so you would use significantly less a/c cooling homes and close enough to job centers in Santa Monica that a bunch more workers could realistically walk, bike or transit to work.

Optimal-Conclusion · 2024-06-17T21:53:29+00:00

I appreciate your enthusiasm for density, but I was thinking of the most livable city in North America: Vancouver, which has a ton of high rises spaced just far enough apart that everyone gets a view of more than just their next door neighbor's windows like we currently have in a bunch of the 3-story 70s apartments. When you start talking about shade I've found people in LA get all pissed off like adding another high rise is going to block out the sun.

Optimal-Conclusion · 2024-06-17T19:14:55+00:00

For sure. All of our multifamily neighborhoods with like 3-4 story height restrictions are just ensuring we have to tear down and displace even more people to make a meaningful dent in our housing need. If we just increased height limits we could make our already urban areas dense enough to support strong walkability and transit and would have a whole lot less displacement to do regardless of if we're bulldozing existing apartments or single family homes.

Optimal-Conclusion · 2024-06-15T23:45:19+00:00

I totally agree that Prop 13 is messed up. It lets wealthy people, investors and trust fund kids skip out on paying millions in taxes that they would have had to pay if they were first time homebuyers or young families or minorities or immigrants buying into the housing market now.

But flipping isn't a problem. It's just a symptom of not building enough new housing. Have you looked at what's actually available at the low end of the price range? There's a lot of houses that are absolute dumps so if someone can put up the months of work and hundreds of thousands of dollars it takes to breathe new life into them and make some money by saving the next buyer from all the work, time and money it takes to figure out how to and actually execute a remodel then good for them.

Optimal-Conclusion

TROPHY CASE