If the state doesn't at least break even then it goes bankrupt and can no longer serve the people.
Spending without considering how the benefits can be recaptured with taxes leads to this perverse situation. Say the government builds a new overpass that saves people 5 minutes on average in their commute. The benefits are calculated by multiplying those 5 minutes by the average wage in the area and the number of people driving that route. Say it's 2,500 people per day who make on average $20/hour. That's $4,167/day in supposed benefits, and $1.5 million/year. For a $2 million bridge that's going to last 30 years it sounds like a no-brainer. However, nobody actually gets extra money by having a shorter commute or quicker trip to the grocery store. Plus now they're incentivized to move farther out of town causing more problems. Even if these people really did realize those benefits in actual cash money, how much taxes on that income or property value increase, or supposed new retail sales will actually be generated, and how much of that will go to the town itself that built this overpass? The answer is usually low single-digit percentages. So what looks like a slam-dunk in the benefit/cost analysis is actually a huge loser. The government spends real cash money to build this thing, and to operate and maintain it over its lifespan (lighting, snow plowing, painting, repair work, repaving, etc.) but the benefits are just nebulous feel-good stuff that's given an imaginary dollar figure. These sorts of things are why governments are going bankrupt on all levels, because such investments are not returning enough to cover their actual costs.
If "government should be run like a business" then it can't run in the red or else it will fail.
The cliff and the rope aren't actively dangerous. Motor vehicles are. It's the driver's responsibility to be aware of their surroundings and act accordingly. If there's a lot of people around, such as in a downtown setting, then a very low speed is appropriate, despite what the speed limit might be.
More comparable situations would be someone throwing darts or knives in their front lawn, and some kit wanders by and gets struck. "I feel terrible" isn't going to get you out of being prosecuted. Same for shooting a gun up in the air and inadvertently striking someone half a mile away. Driving a motor vehicle is similarly dangerous, and it's the motorist's responsibility to operate in as safe a manner as possible considering the conditions.
The only reason motorists are usually given a pass is because of lobbying and propaganda from the likes of AAA back in the 1910s and 1920s. They invented the term (and crime) of jaywalking in an attempt to redefine the street as a place for cars/vehicles, despite that not having been the case for the entirety of human history. They provided boilerplate police report forms to municipalities to use, which described not "car crashes" or "collisions" but "accidents" that absolved the motorist of responsibility. Before then you'd see headlines about "motor killings" describing motorists as the entitled, self-important, and reckless operators of dangerous machines that they were and still are. But since nearly everyone drives now, people don't think "oh wow it could've been me that was hit by that careless driver" they think "oh wow it could've been me getting arrested for driving carelessly and hitting someone."
Protect the motorist from feeling bad for killing someone while operating heavy machinery? That's completely backwards, the pedestrian is the one who needs protecting. It's this kind of thinking that leads to sub-$100 fines for motorists that mow down pedestrians or cyclists while driving carelessly. Well sorry, but feeling bad about committing a crime isn't punishment.
This whole "no zoning in Houston" misunderstanding needs to end. Houston has ALL the same zoning laws as everywhere else, with the ONE exception of land-use. So while there's not technically any restriction on putting a store next to a house or an office next to an apartment, the fact that the city will enforce private deed restrictions and covenants means there's de facto land-use zoning in the sense of a government-enforced HOA. Sounds like the worst of both worlds to me.
Aside from that, the other aspects of zoning I mentioned, such as lot coverage maximums, floor-area ratios, setbacks, height limits, and parking minimums are all just as present in Houston as everywhere else, not to mention a DOT that thinks no road is a bad road and everything must be navigable by an 80' firetruck at 60mph. So it's not that the rest of the country has 100% zoning restrictions and Houston has 0%. Houston has maybe 85%, which is certainly less, but that's also why it doesn't really look all that much different than the rest of American suburbia.
Except those multi-protocol clients can't access the services that most people use now (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Skype, Snapchat, etc.) and even the ones that used to be their cornerstones (Yahoo, AIM, MSN) have either shut down completely or closed off their API's to 3rd party apps. This is most likely so they can shove advertising down your throat by forcing you to their native app.
I would consider how much the typical Asian person walks every day. It's not about exercising per se, just walking around to daily needs (work, school, shopping, etc.) compared to Americans who almost universally drive everywhere. A half hour to an hour of walking compared to sitting behind a wheel everyday can be the difference between gaining and losing weight in the long term, especially since it usually can't be avoided like going to the gym can. In the same vein, let children fidget and squirm in school all they want, because it burns an extra 200 calories or so per day. 200 calories per day, whether from walking or fidgeting, or both, can be up to 20 pounds a year one way or the other.
Electric cars and cyclists and "other road users" absolutely do contribute to the funding for those roads. Gas taxes go almost exclusively to highways, not local streets. Unless you're talking about an interstate highway or state/US highways (in many cases they have to be in unincorporated areas) then they very likely get $0 from gas taxes. They're instead funded through local property, sales, and income taxes, so everyone pays for them whether they use them or not. Those other road users are actually subsidizing the car and especially truck drivers, not the other way around.
Keep in mind that you probably can't use the whole building for power generation. The north side of the building will get virtually no direct sunlight at all, except at the start of summer where it will only be immediately after sunrise, and immediately before sunset. For the other 95% of the year, only indirect light from the sky, or reflections from other buildings, will hit the north side windows. That means it's probably not worth it to put these panels on the north side of the building.
Also, only one or two sides of the building will be generating power at any one time of the day, since the sun doesn't shine around corners very well.
Finally, most skyscrapers tend to have other skyscrapers around them to block out the sun. It may turn out that only the top half of any building is really worth putting solar-generating windows in.
After incorporating all these factors, using only 3/4 of the sides of the building, using only the top half of the building, and having the sun shine only on one side at a time, that reduces the 4.4 megawatt number to.55 megawatts. Of course, it's still better than just regular glass. Also, if the energy was used to feed the air conditioners, it would be generated where and when it's needed the most. If only these things were as simple and great as they sounded.
What bothers me is that most people here on Slashdot seem to think that anyone who downloads/uses open source software is going to "do something" under the hood with it. The open source software that I use, I use because it is the best piece of software I can find that does what I want. It has nothing to do with being open source or not.
Two programs I regularly use are Fire and Meteorologist. Fire is the best multi-service chat app for OS X (IMHO) and Meteorologist is the best menubar/dock weather app. As for them being OSS, I usually toss the source code as soon as I download these programs, because I can't do anything with it. I just want to USE THE SOFTWARE. I will report bugs that I find, but I can't do anything to fix them. I do this with non-OSS software too. The CAD software I use at work has some very responsive developers, and I've gotten patches to bugs I've found within a few days.
I am tired of hearing all these arguments that the people who download and use open source software are all going to edit the code and contribute to the project. Here's a clue, WE'RE NOT ALL PROGRAMMERS, but some of us are savvy power users who just want the best software for the job. Most people who download open source software have no idea what it means, nor do they care about proprietary data formats, full control of their system, running in a CLI, or being part of a community. They just want software that does what they want.
One place the change would cause huge problems is in the building industry. All our codes can be rewritten and architects can make the adjustment in time. Where it would be extremely hard is for the contractors and product suppliers.
Have you ever tried to get a drywall contractor, mason, plumber, or carpenter to "do something different"? It's not easy. Copper water pipes are sized in 1/8" increments. Bricks are 8" wide and when you stack 3 of them, 8" high. Concrete block fits within that module. Plywood and drywall come in 4'x8' sheets. Framing is usually 16" on center and comes in lengths to accommodate a single 4'x8' sheet of drywall once the wall is framed with top and bottom plates. I could go on forever.
There is such a legacy of "Imperial buildings" and the system is so ingraned into the day to day life of contractors that changing would really be a monumental task. Imagine trying to renovate a building in the future that was constructed with Imperial measurement, and you had to then use metric supplies. All the piping would need Imperial/metric adapters, studs would need to be ripped down to the right floor to ceiling height (hopefully they're not too short now), drywall will need to be trimmed excessively, and make sure you don't order 20,000 metric brick by mistake!
Unfortunately, the updated graphics drivers do not fix a standing issue with SimCity 4 that was introduced (or at least seriously exacerbated) in Panther. Since upgrading to 10.3, the game shows no shadows, building placement outlines, effect rings, or ANY "distressed" buildings (all you see is the ground tiles with no building on top. Aspyr said that this is a "bug with the ATI drivers in Panther" but since these new drivers in 10.3.2 don't make ANY improvement in the game, I'm thinking that Aspyr is full of crap.
Otherwise, I haven't noticed any problems with the update.
Large power plants are NOT very efficient. Your typical coal/oil/gas power plant only outputs about 30% of the input energy as electricity, the rest is lost as heat (entropy sucks).
"...and some towns even have trolley tracks buried underneath 2 feet of concrete..."
Um...more like 2 INCHES. It's not a good idea to keep paving over top of old surfaces. Also, if a road is paved in concrete, they usually dig down and redo the subsurface. On most roads with streetcar tracks, they just pave over it with asphalt. Whenever the road needs to be resurfaced, they grind it down to the old track level and start over. If they don't the curbs on the side of the road will be too low, and they'll have to raise all the drains and access covers.
I have no doubt that those Sharper Image filters work well, but only with the air that actually manages to get through them.
Think about it like this. Say that filter can remove 99.99% of all the dust particles that enter its intake. That's good, but it won't help if it's only moving a tiny amount of air. It'll clear out the dust in that corner of the room, but it won't affect much of the rest of the space since it can't capture any of the air in those other parts of the room. That's why getting your HVAC system well-filtered is the best way to reduce dust, because it moves the most air.
If you can't get any response from your HVAC guys, you could always try what my mom did in her office at school...put filters over the air supply vents. If you need to get your own air filtration unit, look for the highest CFM (cubic feet per minute) rating, so that it can move the most air, and thus catch the most dust.
Electrostatic filters do work quite well, but they need to have a fan...none of that ionic breeze nonsense.
Let's not forget where Apu went to get his computer science degree. I'm surprised they were even allowed to say Springfield Heights Institute of Technology in the show.
"The generalist knows so little about so much that eventually he know nothing about everything. The specialist knows so much about so little that eventually he knows everything about nothing."
"...it does disappoint me that so many people believe this when just 10 minutes of the most casual research can unearth mountains of material that debunk this myth."
And the same 10 minutes of casual research can unearth mountains of material that support it too. It's all a matter of what you choose to believe.
"Ridership peaked in the late 1920s, and had been falling off consistently for over a decade by the time the systems were dismantled in the 1940s and 1950s."
Yes this is true, but what also happened in the late 1920's hmm? Don't you think more people would be riding the streetcars if they actually had a job to go to? An important point to remember about this time is that the streetcar companies were not allowed to raise their fares either. Therefore, with ridership going down and fares staying the same the revenue goes down. When revenue goes down there isn't enough money to maintain and upgrade the system. When this happens people start to view streetcars (and interurbans and steam railways that had the same problems) as seedy and run-down. They then think that these shiny new buses are the wave of the future. Everything was against the streetcars in the 30's 40's and 50's. Also, during the war the systems couldn't extend routes or improve service because of materials shortages. I could be wrong about this, but I think at least one streetcar line in Cincinnati was coverted to trolleybus simply so they could pull up the rails and melt them down for the war.
"Streetcars are fixed route. Bus routes can be altered."
This is both a good and a bad thing. Because of all the infrastructure needed for streetcar lines, it instills a sense of permanence and investment in the community. These days it's no big deal if a bus runs through a neighborhood, in fact it's probably a NIMBY situation. When a streetcar ran through on the other hand, it was a big deal. The presence of a streetcar line built many inner city and near suburb business districts. These places worked, because the streetcar was reliable, and it (seemed) would always be there. With buses, there's none of that security. A major bus route can be re-routed almost at whim, and since many fewer people ride the bus than streetcars, it doesn't really matter anymore where it goes.
Forgive me as I start to digress.
It could almost be argued that the demise of streetcars was just as important as the building of highways in destroying American cities. The two do not have to be mutually exclusive, but in most cases they were. Think about the situation for a moment. After WWII the streetcar systems were in disrepair after being forced to make due with what they had. The systems needed overhauls and expansions to serve the new suburbs that were being built. Instead, the government decided that new highway funding was the way to go. Funds were focused on these new roads and on the new car suburbs they were subsidizing. Because the roads allowed people to spread out much farther there wasn't enough population density to support streetcar lines anyway. These highways cut through the older streetcar suburbs and the inner city, thus breaking apart a lot of that feeling of community investment and stability. As the streetcars continued to decline, so did the areas they once supported. Ridership went down further and eventually the lines were replaced by buses. Unfortunately buses don't have nearly as much appeal as streetcars, so most people who can drive will drive, instead of taking the bus. This disrupts old streetcar line business districts. Since people aren't taking the streetcars or buses, there are fewer people to support the stores. There's also competition from malls and new strip shopping centers. Stores in the old business districts start to close, or be replaced with less appealing tenants. Since most people have to drive there now, there's a lack of parking and traffic gets congested. The people who lived in the streetcar neighborhoods pack up and leave for one of the new suburban developments in hopes of escaping the traffic congestion of the now seedy neighborhood.
"Streetcars require dedicated rights-of-way. Buses share the road with other vehicles."
That's not true. Light rails, commuter rails, rapid transit, subways and the like require dedicated rights-of-way. Streetcars share the road just like buses. Why do you think they're called STREETcars? I will agree that this is a problem for both, as they are subject to the whim of traffic. However, since a broader range of people tend to ride trains than do busses, there would be fewer people driving on those streets that have a streetcar line. Hence, it's not as big of a problem.
If American cities didn't place such a focus on highways and kept investing in the streetcar systems we wouldn't be having so many problems with sprawl, traffic and urban decay. Los Angeles used to have a great streetcar system, now look at it. Many people today stress that the current way of development epitomizes the American way of capitalism with the private automobile and the freedom to live however you choose. The problem is that this view is blind. Streetcar systems were run by private companies with private investment and supported mostly by fares and parent companies. In many cities, there were a handful of companies running different lines. It wasn't until the Depression and after that many of them started consolidating and being taken over by the government. It took the massive Interstate Highway Program, government subsidization, buying out of lines and strict zoning to give us the so-called freedom of today. But what if you want to live near the city and don't want to drive to work? Good luck. Nice city neighborhoods tend to be expensive, and while buses do tend to run over old streetcar routes, the service is certainly not what it used to be.
You can cry conspiracy or debunk it all you want, but the fact remains that streetcars were better, and there was an effort by the powers that be to eliminate them.
Slashdot Mirror
#4 is called quality of life.
If the state doesn't at least break even then it goes bankrupt and can no longer serve the people.
Spending without considering how the benefits can be recaptured with taxes leads to this perverse situation. Say the government builds a new overpass that saves people 5 minutes on average in their commute. The benefits are calculated by multiplying those 5 minutes by the average wage in the area and the number of people driving that route. Say it's 2,500 people per day who make on average $20/hour. That's $4,167/day in supposed benefits, and $1.5 million/year. For a $2 million bridge that's going to last 30 years it sounds like a no-brainer. However, nobody actually gets extra money by having a shorter commute or quicker trip to the grocery store. Plus now they're incentivized to move farther out of town causing more problems. Even if these people really did realize those benefits in actual cash money, how much taxes on that income or property value increase, or supposed new retail sales will actually be generated, and how much of that will go to the town itself that built this overpass? The answer is usually low single-digit percentages. So what looks like a slam-dunk in the benefit/cost analysis is actually a huge loser. The government spends real cash money to build this thing, and to operate and maintain it over its lifespan (lighting, snow plowing, painting, repair work, repaving, etc.) but the benefits are just nebulous feel-good stuff that's given an imaginary dollar figure. These sorts of things are why governments are going bankrupt on all levels, because such investments are not returning enough to cover their actual costs.
If "government should be run like a business" then it can't run in the red or else it will fail.
The cliff and the rope aren't actively dangerous. Motor vehicles are. It's the driver's responsibility to be aware of their surroundings and act accordingly. If there's a lot of people around, such as in a downtown setting, then a very low speed is appropriate, despite what the speed limit might be.
More comparable situations would be someone throwing darts or knives in their front lawn, and some kit wanders by and gets struck. "I feel terrible" isn't going to get you out of being prosecuted. Same for shooting a gun up in the air and inadvertently striking someone half a mile away. Driving a motor vehicle is similarly dangerous, and it's the motorist's responsibility to operate in as safe a manner as possible considering the conditions.
The only reason motorists are usually given a pass is because of lobbying and propaganda from the likes of AAA back in the 1910s and 1920s. They invented the term (and crime) of jaywalking in an attempt to redefine the street as a place for cars/vehicles, despite that not having been the case for the entirety of human history. They provided boilerplate police report forms to municipalities to use, which described not "car crashes" or "collisions" but "accidents" that absolved the motorist of responsibility. Before then you'd see headlines about "motor killings" describing motorists as the entitled, self-important, and reckless operators of dangerous machines that they were and still are. But since nearly everyone drives now, people don't think "oh wow it could've been me that was hit by that careless driver" they think "oh wow it could've been me getting arrested for driving carelessly and hitting someone."
Protect the motorist from feeling bad for killing someone while operating heavy machinery? That's completely backwards, the pedestrian is the one who needs protecting. It's this kind of thinking that leads to sub-$100 fines for motorists that mow down pedestrians or cyclists while driving carelessly. Well sorry, but feeling bad about committing a crime isn't punishment.
This whole "no zoning in Houston" misunderstanding needs to end. Houston has ALL the same zoning laws as everywhere else, with the ONE exception of land-use. So while there's not technically any restriction on putting a store next to a house or an office next to an apartment, the fact that the city will enforce private deed restrictions and covenants means there's de facto land-use zoning in the sense of a government-enforced HOA. Sounds like the worst of both worlds to me.
Aside from that, the other aspects of zoning I mentioned, such as lot coverage maximums, floor-area ratios, setbacks, height limits, and parking minimums are all just as present in Houston as everywhere else, not to mention a DOT that thinks no road is a bad road and everything must be navigable by an 80' firetruck at 60mph. So it's not that the rest of the country has 100% zoning restrictions and Houston has 0%. Houston has maybe 85%, which is certainly less, but that's also why it doesn't really look all that much different than the rest of American suburbia.
Except those multi-protocol clients can't access the services that most people use now (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Skype, Snapchat, etc.) and even the ones that used to be their cornerstones (Yahoo, AIM, MSN) have either shut down completely or closed off their API's to 3rd party apps. This is most likely so they can shove advertising down your throat by forcing you to their native app.
I would consider how much the typical Asian person walks every day. It's not about exercising per se, just walking around to daily needs (work, school, shopping, etc.) compared to Americans who almost universally drive everywhere. A half hour to an hour of walking compared to sitting behind a wheel everyday can be the difference between gaining and losing weight in the long term, especially since it usually can't be avoided like going to the gym can. In the same vein, let children fidget and squirm in school all they want, because it burns an extra 200 calories or so per day. 200 calories per day, whether from walking or fidgeting, or both, can be up to 20 pounds a year one way or the other.
Electric cars and cyclists and "other road users" absolutely do contribute to the funding for those roads. Gas taxes go almost exclusively to highways, not local streets. Unless you're talking about an interstate highway or state/US highways (in many cases they have to be in unincorporated areas) then they very likely get $0 from gas taxes. They're instead funded through local property, sales, and income taxes, so everyone pays for them whether they use them or not. Those other road users are actually subsidizing the car and especially truck drivers, not the other way around.
Keep in mind that you probably can't use the whole building for power generation. The north side of the building will get virtually no direct sunlight at all, except at the start of summer where it will only be immediately after sunrise, and immediately before sunset. For the other 95% of the year, only indirect light from the sky, or reflections from other buildings, will hit the north side windows. That means it's probably not worth it to put these panels on the north side of the building.
.55 megawatts. Of course, it's still better than just regular glass. Also, if the energy was used to feed the air conditioners, it would be generated where and when it's needed the most. If only these things were as simple and great as they sounded.
Also, only one or two sides of the building will be generating power at any one time of the day, since the sun doesn't shine around corners very well.
Finally, most skyscrapers tend to have other skyscrapers around them to block out the sun. It may turn out that only the top half of any building is really worth putting solar-generating windows in.
After incorporating all these factors, using only 3/4 of the sides of the building, using only the top half of the building, and having the sun shine only on one side at a time, that reduces the 4.4 megawatt number to
Two programs I regularly use are Fire and Meteorologist. Fire is the best multi-service chat app for OS X (IMHO) and Meteorologist is the best menubar/dock weather app. As for them being OSS, I usually toss the source code as soon as I download these programs, because I can't do anything with it. I just want to USE THE SOFTWARE. I will report bugs that I find, but I can't do anything to fix them. I do this with non-OSS software too. The CAD software I use at work has some very responsive developers, and I've gotten patches to bugs I've found within a few days.
I am tired of hearing all these arguments that the people who download and use open source software are all going to edit the code and contribute to the project. Here's a clue, WE'RE NOT ALL PROGRAMMERS, but some of us are savvy power users who just want the best software for the job. Most people who download open source software have no idea what it means, nor do they care about proprietary data formats, full control of their system, running in a CLI, or being part of a community. They just want software that does what they want.
One place the change would cause huge problems is in the building industry. All our codes can be rewritten and architects can make the adjustment in time. Where it would be extremely hard is for the contractors and product suppliers.
Have you ever tried to get a drywall contractor, mason, plumber, or carpenter to "do something different"? It's not easy. Copper water pipes are sized in 1/8" increments. Bricks are 8" wide and when you stack 3 of them, 8" high. Concrete block fits within that module. Plywood and drywall come in 4'x8' sheets. Framing is usually 16" on center and comes in lengths to accommodate a single 4'x8' sheet of drywall once the wall is framed with top and bottom plates. I could go on forever.
There is such a legacy of "Imperial buildings" and the system is so ingraned into the day to day life of contractors that changing would really be a monumental task. Imagine trying to renovate a building in the future that was constructed with Imperial measurement, and you had to then use metric supplies. All the piping would need Imperial/metric adapters, studs would need to be ripped down to the right floor to ceiling height (hopefully they're not too short now), drywall will need to be trimmed excessively, and make sure you don't order 20,000 metric brick by mistake!
Unfortunately, the updated graphics drivers do not fix a standing issue with SimCity 4 that was introduced (or at least seriously exacerbated) in Panther. Since upgrading to 10.3, the game shows no shadows, building placement outlines, effect rings, or ANY "distressed" buildings (all you see is the ground tiles with no building on top. Aspyr said that this is a "bug with the ATI drivers in Panther" but since these new drivers in 10.3.2 don't make ANY improvement in the game, I'm thinking that Aspyr is full of crap.
Otherwise, I haven't noticed any problems with the update.
Large power plants are NOT very efficient. Your typical coal/oil/gas power plant only outputs about 30% of the input energy as electricity, the rest is lost as heat (entropy sucks).
"...and some towns even have trolley tracks buried underneath 2 feet of concrete..."
Um...more like 2 INCHES. It's not a good idea to keep paving over top of old surfaces. Also, if a road is paved in concrete, they usually dig down and redo the subsurface. On most roads with streetcar tracks, they just pave over it with asphalt. Whenever the road needs to be resurfaced, they grind it down to the old track level and start over. If they don't the curbs on the side of the road will be too low, and they'll have to raise all the drains and access covers.
Have a look here to see what's left in Cincinnati, and how the tracks still show up in places. http://homepage.mac.com/jjakucyk/Transit1/
I have no doubt that those Sharper Image filters work well, but only with the air that actually manages to get through them.
Think about it like this. Say that filter can remove 99.99% of all the dust particles that enter its intake. That's good, but it won't help if it's only moving a tiny amount of air. It'll clear out the dust in that corner of the room, but it won't affect much of the rest of the space since it can't capture any of the air in those other parts of the room. That's why getting your HVAC system well-filtered is the best way to reduce dust, because it moves the most air.
If you can't get any response from your HVAC guys, you could always try what my mom did in her office at school...put filters over the air supply vents. If you need to get your own air filtration unit, look for the highest CFM (cubic feet per minute) rating, so that it can move the most air, and thus catch the most dust.
Electrostatic filters do work quite well, but they need to have a fan...none of that ionic breeze nonsense.
Let's not forget where Apu went to get his computer science degree. I'm surprised they were even allowed to say Springfield Heights Institute of Technology in the show.
"The generalist knows so little about so much that eventually he know nothing about everything. The specialist knows so much about so little that eventually he knows everything about nothing."
"...it does disappoint me that so many people believe this when just 10 minutes of the most casual research can unearth mountains of material that debunk this myth."
And the same 10 minutes of casual research can unearth mountains of material that support it too. It's all a matter of what you choose to believe.
"Ridership peaked in the late 1920s, and had been falling off consistently for over a decade by the time the systems were dismantled in the 1940s and 1950s."
Yes this is true, but what also happened in the late 1920's hmm? Don't you think more people would be riding the streetcars if they actually had a job to go to? An important point to remember about this time is that the streetcar companies were not allowed to raise their fares either. Therefore, with ridership going down and fares staying the same the revenue goes down. When revenue goes down there isn't enough money to maintain and upgrade the system. When this happens people start to view streetcars (and interurbans and steam railways that had the same problems) as seedy and run-down. They then think that these shiny new buses are the wave of the future. Everything was against the streetcars in the 30's 40's and 50's. Also, during the war the systems couldn't extend routes or improve service because of materials shortages. I could be wrong about this, but I think at least one streetcar line in Cincinnati was coverted to trolleybus simply so they could pull up the rails and melt them down for the war.
"Streetcars are fixed route. Bus routes can be altered."
This is both a good and a bad thing. Because of all the infrastructure needed for streetcar lines, it instills a sense of permanence and investment in the community. These days it's no big deal if a bus runs through a neighborhood, in fact it's probably a NIMBY situation. When a streetcar ran through on the other hand, it was a big deal. The presence of a streetcar line built many inner city and near suburb business districts. These places worked, because the streetcar was reliable, and it (seemed) would always be there. With buses, there's none of that security. A major bus route can be re-routed almost at whim, and since many fewer people ride the bus than streetcars, it doesn't really matter anymore where it goes.
Forgive me as I start to digress.
It could almost be argued that the demise of streetcars was just as important as the building of highways in destroying American cities. The two do not have to be mutually exclusive, but in most cases they were. Think about the situation for a moment. After WWII the streetcar systems were in disrepair after being forced to make due with what they had. The systems needed overhauls and expansions to serve the new suburbs that were being built. Instead, the government decided that new highway funding was the way to go. Funds were focused on these new roads and on the new car suburbs they were subsidizing. Because the roads allowed people to spread out much farther there wasn't enough population density to support streetcar lines anyway. These highways cut through the older streetcar suburbs and the inner city, thus breaking apart a lot of that feeling of community investment and stability. As the streetcars continued to decline, so did the areas they once supported. Ridership went down further and eventually the lines were replaced by buses. Unfortunately buses don't have nearly as much appeal as streetcars, so most people who can drive will drive, instead of taking the bus. This disrupts old streetcar line business districts. Since people aren't taking the streetcars or buses, there are fewer people to support the stores. There's also competition from malls and new strip shopping centers. Stores in the old business districts start to close, or be replaced with less appealing tenants. Since most people have to drive there now, there's a lack of parking and traffic gets congested. The people who lived in the streetcar neighborhoods pack up and leave for one of the new suburban developments in hopes of escaping the traffic congestion of the now seedy neighborhood.
"Streetcars require dedicated rights-of-way. Buses share the road with other vehicles."
That's not true. Light rails, commuter rails, rapid transit, subways and the like require dedicated rights-of-way. Streetcars share the road just like buses. Why do you think they're called STREETcars? I will agree that this is a problem for both, as they are subject to the whim of traffic. However, since a broader range of people tend to ride trains than do busses, there would be fewer people driving on those streets that have a streetcar line. Hence, it's not as big of a problem.
If American cities didn't place such a focus on highways and kept investing in the streetcar systems we wouldn't be having so many problems with sprawl, traffic and urban decay. Los Angeles used to have a great streetcar system, now look at it. Many people today stress that the current way of development epitomizes the American way of capitalism with the private automobile and the freedom to live however you choose. The problem is that this view is blind. Streetcar systems were run by private companies with private investment and supported mostly by fares and parent companies. In many cities, there were a handful of companies running different lines. It wasn't until the Depression and after that many of them started consolidating and being taken over by the government. It took the massive Interstate Highway Program, government subsidization, buying out of lines and strict zoning to give us the so-called freedom of today. But what if you want to live near the city and don't want to drive to work? Good luck. Nice city neighborhoods tend to be expensive, and while buses do tend to run over old streetcar routes, the service is certainly not what it used to be.
You can cry conspiracy or debunk it all you want, but the fact remains that streetcars were better, and there was an effort by the powers that be to eliminate them.
Jeffrey Jakucyk
jeffreyjakucyk@flashmail.com