mach-e 0-60 in 3.5 seconds, the tuned VTEC is not gonna cut it lmao

longwinded reply incoming:

when i say we "prioritize" cars i'm talking about the amount of space we give to cars in our urban design in the USA. cars are far and away the top priority. NYC is no exception, despite a majority of households not owning a car.

most NYC streets have 1+ lanes for car travel, plus at least 1 lane for side parking (usually 2). bikes are lucky to get a lane, usually unprotected, and usually full of double parked cars. peds get pushed onto to narrow sidewalks and have to dart across intersections like frogger, despite being the dominant mode of transportation. so it's in the space allocation that we see the (warped) priorities.

your citibike reference is a perfect example of how cars are favored. a citibike rack packs in dozens of bikes in the space of just a few parked cars. this works out to servicing dozens or hundreds of riders a day. parked cars would have accommodated far fewer people in the same space, and might have had little or no turnover during the same time period. so we give (and subsidize!) more space to cars despite them moving fewer people, less efficiently, and with higher pollution and cost. again: priorities. (this article sums it up well.)

of course parking should be available, but alot of drivers get awfully entitled to free & easy parking as far as the eye can see, despite living in the densest city in the nation, where 55%+ people don't own cars, and where we already carve out a huge portion of our very valuable & scarce resource (space).

I think the fare is probably underpriced at the moment, plus we have no zone pricing. I don’t think it’s a regressive stance to say we’re probably due for a fare increase.

Obviously so many other financial problems should be fixed at the MTA before touching the fare price, but this is something that would be comparatively easy to enact, and sometimes you gotta grab the low hanging fruit.

There are LOTS of ways to reduce the standard fare — from reduced fare cards to monthly unlimited cards.

It’s almost like prioritizing public space for people to store their cars for hours a day makes zero sense in the densest metro area in the nation 🤔

if we've decided as a society that this huge volume of deliveries should be a part of life here, we need to acknowledge that there is a role that society needs to play.

i understand the POV that these delivery services add a strain to the city's infrastructure and that they should do more to accommodate the waiting/resting element of these services. creating hubs throughout the city makes sense as a burden they could bear. but i'm not convinced that it would be desirable (people already cry that delivery costs too much; this new cost would be passed on to customers) nor would it be sufficient (are they really gonna put rest stops in college point? in inwood? will the companies share?)

with the drivers widely distributed across the city, sometimes in sparse numbers, we need a way for them to wait/rest in a more informal or small-scale capacity.

the schumer plan strikes me as refreshingly smart and like a bit of a win-win. by voting against it, the UWSers are choosing sloppy, improvised solutions. right there in the article one of the drivers is quoted saying “The community has to understand that, whether they want us or not in that community, we are already in that community.”

100%

i have no doubt that there are a LOT of rackets going on between vendors and govt. procurement, but you gotta spend—probably inefficiently!—to rapidly respond to a crisis