Yeah, but I believe she did this because the domocrat leaders in the House and the Senate (who both happen to be from Brooklyn) thought the unpopularity of congestion pricing amoung swing voters may cause Republicans to win the house of representatives.

Now they aren’t going to vote for another 2 years, when congestion pricing will probably be popular, so it’s safe to get it done now

It’s common to call products dumb when they have the marketing strategy of tricking gullible people into thinking they need it.

This fun city nerd video is somewhat relevant: www.youtube.com/watch?v=IsbkvsyN-O8 Cities where the lowest percent of median income goes to median (housing + transportation). The winners were Seattle and San Francisco. This suggests that salaries may be able to compensate for increased housing costs. Of course, a longitudinal study would be necessary to answer this question.

The problem comes when people who insist on living away from civilization demand the perks of civilization by being able to drive to a city and park their cars for free.

This becomes very expensive, and degrades the quality of life of those who live in the City.

That puts you at an extreme, where there are not many like you. So I don’t care if you have a gas car. But you should not stand in the way for most people to live more ethicaly, without a car. Support dense cities so there are plenty of pristine caves for hermits to live in.

In America, it’s 5:1 urban to rural. https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2017/08/rural-america.html

And the threshold for rural is 500 people per square mile. So the 5 minutes to neighbor is at a rare extreme. https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/publications/2016/acs/acsgeo-1.pdf

You can have nice land to work on in rural village. Being miles from your neighbor is not a sustainable way to live. And probably not healthy for a social animal like humans.

Transit between rural villages and the nearest city is possible and has been implemented in other countries

Very few people ought to be living that way. I think it’s fine for those people to use ICE cars. I also don’t care very much if the tractors use fossil fuels.

Electric cars are bad for the environment since they require mineral mining and polute the city with micoplastics from tire dust. They are almost as bad as ICE cars.

Ebikes are the way to go.

Do you think anyone ought to go to prison?

If a person has harmed others, and is likely to do more harm in the future, it’s appropriate to remove them from society. This is why prisons exist.

Drivers licence suspension typically is the consequence of crimes that are too minor to warrant prison. In this case, the perpetrator has the chance to make changes to their life to avoid prison. For example, they can accept slow public transit, bike to work, get a closer job, move to a place where it’s easier to live without a car.

Obviously, It will be challenging for the perpetrator to reorganize their life in a way that does not require them to risk harming others, and many will fail.

But your argument that society is required to accept being victimized by dangerous drivers because it would be inhumane to force them to use alternative forms of transportation (used by millions of people too poor to afford a car, even in the most car dependent cities) is absurd.

In Amsterdam the mode share for all trips is like 30% for biking and for walking and like 20% for driving and for transit

Even with those concerns, I still like tolls

A. Driving a car has externalities that are currently not priced in the gas tax / registration fees. This means that having toll free roads are also regressive in that they are forcing people who do not drive (often due to poverty) to subsidize those who do drive. It makes sense to make the drivers pay for more of the harm they cause others, and tolls are a simple way of doing this. They are also can help discourage driving since paying every time you drive in a certain area is probably more noticable than paying once a year when you register your car.

B. This is a real issue in 205 where there is another bridge right next to it. Maybe in this case, you can add a toll to both bridges. But generally, the urban growth boundaries in Oregon make it easy to find places to find put toll booths where there is no way to drive around it.

Polls have a margin of error and election results have generally been within the 80% confidence interval 80% of the time.

It is true that when there are less polls (like in special elections) it’s harder to get an understanding of the state of the race.

Polls have been remarkably accurate in the last few election cycles.

The “polls are wrong” talking point is a convenient way for politicians to ignore the will of the people. Trump has done this for a long time, and recently Biden has taken up this practice to pretend that the “Real Americans” think he is fit to be president for another 4 years.

So please don’t repeat this talking point, or at least read a bit into historical accuracy of polls before you declare them bullshit.

Biden is absolutely not leading. State polling has him behind in every swing state. Nate Silver’s model gives Biden a 30% chance of winning, slightly down from the debate.

They did this in California and Oregon, then the schools went to shit.

Also, property taxes are a good way to encourage density, which is necessary to fight climate change

Tolls would also work

I’ve received the advice that you should always make your charts so that you numbers are proportional to a length, since people aren’t good at comparing areas (or volumes).

So the numbers here probably ought to be proportional to diameters

hitting refresh in firefox reader mode works for me.