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Korean Job Discussion Forums
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Sister Ray
Joined: 25 Mar 2006
Location: Fukuoka
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 Posted: Fri Feb 20, 2015 6:24 pm Post subject: |
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| Steelrails wrote: |
Your tune will change if your job changes to one where you have to go around during the day to random locations and involves carrying a laptop, blueprints, files, and material samples. Or perhaps if you have three kids and need to buy groceries for all of them. Or have to take grandpa and his wheelchair someone.
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You always come up with these preposterous hypotheticals involving wheelchairs and families with 4 kids, ignoring the fact that the vast majority of car journeys are single occupant commutes to work.
| Steelrails wrote: |
| Only if energy is unsustainable. If renewable, clean energy is found, then it absolutely can be. |
Well, the energy is unsustainable and is already having a huge detrimental impact on the environment.
Furthermore, private cars are totally unsustainable from the perspective of land use. What if every citizen in Tokyo wanted a car? (Current ownership rate is 260 vehicles for every 1000 people.) Fortunately, Tokyo is designed with a superlative public transport system. If it were designed using the same principles as most mono modal North American cities it would be a disaster. As it is, however, with its light traffic and incredible rail network, it is universally praised as an eminently liveable megalopolis.
And yes, I am ignoring the countryside. It is not my concern. I don't live there. I never will live there. And, yes, rural needs are certainly very different from urban. But, it is not my area of interest. I am, and always have been, talking about cities. |
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Steelrails
Joined: 12 Mar 2009
Location: Earth, Solar System
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| Posted: Sat Feb 21, 2015 2:48 am Post subject: |
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| You always come up with these preposterous hypotheticals involving wheelchairs and families with 4 kids |
Yes, the disabled and families are preposterous hypotheticals. Everyone out there is an able-bodied 18-45 year old single adult. 
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| What if every citizen in Tokyo wanted a car? (Current ownership rate is 260 vehicles for every 1000 people.) |
Not all of those people are adults or physically certified to drive. And if you want to buy a car, buy one. If you don't don't. Nothing wrong with encouraging an efficient public transportation system and financing it with public money, but when you start reaching the territory of coercive and punitive measures to force people not to drive, that's the limit.
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| And yes, I am ignoring the countryside. It is not my concern. I don't live there. I never will live there. And, yes, rural needs are certainly very different from urban. But, it is not my area of interest. I am, and always have been, talking about cities. |
Well, then you're basically talking fantasy land. In most countries, outside of island nations and city-states like Singapore, the city is dependent on the countryside. Even those places are dependent on someone else's countryside. Motor vehicles are essential for them. You need them so people can go and grow and extract the raw materials in the countryside that enable life in the city.
Then you've got places to assemble all of those raw materials. Now since people don't want factories with smoke or dangerous substances near them, you know the things that build and assemble your public transportation infrastructure that you are dependent upon, you have to build them outside of the city and away from that transportation infrastructure. Well, unless you restrict your employees working in those factories to some kind of Dickensian slum-barracks next to the factory, they'll live elsewhere, maybe forming a suburb around the factory. And since land is cheaper, they might chose to buy property and build homes, rather than live in apartments. And since land is something that can be privately bought and sold, this is possible.
Now, you may say that you are against factories and pollution as well, but how exactly do you propose to forge the track and manufacture the rolling stock that services your system? That can't be contracted out to individual machinists or the local blacksmith. These things have to have regularity and uniformity in order to work and be serviced. You have to build a factory to make them.
So I take it you're in favor of more factories moving into downtown Seoul? Maybe right next to your house?
This is the difference between theory and reality.
As for your beef with Atlanta, take that up with Tecumseh Sherman. If he hadn't burned it to the ground to help defeat the slave-holders, it might have had a more compact, public transportation friendly shape. Then again, the reason Atlanta was such a target was because it was a rail hub, you know those efficient people movers you are so fond of. Cities don't spring up ex nihilo, with some philosophy based on public transportation or the automobile. They are an evolving phenomenon. |
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maitaidads
Joined: 08 Oct 2012
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| Posted: Sun Feb 22, 2015 12:54 pm Post subject: |
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| Actually, many of Atlanta's major streets were built on top of Native American walking trails- nothing to do with Sherman. And in this age of the automobile, Koreans had the foresight to eliminate a major highway to help revitalize the Cheonggyecheon. Something very similar is happening in Seattle. |
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