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US spends billions on roads rather than public transport in ‘climate time bomb’ (www.theguardian.com)

submitted 6 months ago by throws_lemy@lemmy.nz to c/fuckcars@lemmy.world

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[-] themeatbridge@lemmy.world 40 points 6 months ago

Widening highways does not reduce traffic

[-] PatFussy@lemm.ee 18 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)

Before you think this is a Biden issue, funding from the federal government has been given to states with broad flexibility on how to use it and state authorities, by and large, have chosen to persist with car-centric infrastructure. The Biden administration’s department of transportation did advise to prioritize road repair, rather than expansion. States like Texas and California have chosen not to follow this guidance.

[-] Hanrahan@lemmy.world 4 points 6 months ago

How is it not a Biden issue ? Surely it is if you're not setting more stringent guidelines and just throwing buckets of money out. You could have stated no new roads can be built, hell I'd argue the stipulation should have been no money for roads ... at all. Build a light rial line or a heavy rail lone or a new subway station, build some bike lanes etc.

[-] PatFussy@lemm.ee 2 points 6 months ago

States should know what they need most. If your suggestion is to micromanage the entire road situation for all counties in every state then nothing would get done. Not all solutions are solved with throwing money at it but this is not a place where "build a light rail line or heavy rail" even makes sense. The US already has the most amount of rail of any country on earth. Your suggestion of 'get a new rail bro' doesn't make sense and will likely only be useful for a handful of people whereas fixing the existing infrastructure makes more of an impactful change.

[-] FenrirIII@lemmy.world 2 points 6 months ago

Texas roads are under a constant state of construction 🚧

[+] BradleyUffner@lemmy.world -35 points 6 months ago

You mean the roads that busses use too?

[-] awwwyissss@lemm.ee 44 points 6 months ago

No need to spend so many billions of taxpayer money expanding roads if people use buses.

[-] magiccupcake@lemmy.world 8 points 6 months ago

But people don't use buses, mostly because they are slower than driving, and too expensive. Free buses would save money in the long run because you wouldn't spend as much on roads.

So buses are not treated as a serious solutions transit (except for few places with dedicated bus lanes) , and neither are trains.

[-] Max_P@lemmy.max-p.me 34 points 6 months ago

Kind of a catch-22: public transport sucks after decades of neglect and underfunding, to the benefit of private transportation like cars.

As it is, it's seen by most as the solution for people that can't afford cars, so it's got quite a reputation hurdle to overcome too.

I'm from Montréal, and it's a shock how unusable public transport is in the US. Everything's a solid 30+ minutes away by foot even when bordering the city, and buses are so slow and infrequent you're still better off walking. So, I take the car, and I can understand how people that never experienced good public transport would be hesitant to fund it any further.

Classic America to be fair: butcher every public service until it's unusable and then use that politically as a demonstration of how terrible it is and how we should just hand it off to private companies.

[-] KlavKalashj@lemmy.world 8 points 6 months ago

Classic America to be fair: butcher every public service until it's unusable and then use that politically as a demonstration of how terrible it is and how we should just hand it off to private companies.

This is happening in Sweden too right now.

[-] uriel238@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 points 6 months ago

According to Das Kapital it's an inevitable outcome of any system that rewards the owning class when they present capitalist solutions. Representatives depend on experts to represent, and the owning class will promote and endorse experts trained to justify their interests.

Ultimately, regulatory departments get captured by the industries they are supposed to corral.

[-] awwwyissss@lemm.ee 12 points 6 months ago

People would use buses if the government spent our tax money on public transportation instead of roads. There would be more, faster, safer buses.

[-] vividspecter@lemm.ee 17 points 6 months ago

Unless they have their own dedicated lanes then they are not a viable alternative to driving. If they were converting existing lanes into bus lanes than that would be an affordable and reasonably effective option.

[-] biddy@feddit.nl 3 points 6 months ago

Not those roads, highways. Highways are designed to enter, stay on the highway without stopping except to wait in a traffic jam, then leave. This is terrible for buses which need to stop in-between.

Ideally they would take the opportunity while building the highway to build a parallel busway, but that tends not to happen

[-] Abucketofpuppies@lemmy.world 1 points 6 months ago

No, the other roads

this post was submitted on 01 Mar 2024

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