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Comment by JBReefer | Hacker News Reader

The findings confirm what people who talk about urban planning say, but it never seems to trickle into the wider world. You still hear people say that we have to restrict growth to keep costs down, widen highways to reduce traffic, etc. even though those ideas are thoroughly discredited.

It's incredibly disheartening.

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What made me extremely disheartened in my neighbors was joining Nextdoor.com and seeing what the majority of my neighbors thought was "bad" for our neighborhood. They literally complained about loud birds in the morning and tried to organize a protest against a stop sign due to fears of "increased urbanization." Also lord forbid you sit in your car while Mexican, very suspicious circumstances!! Turns out it was just dudes eating lunch in their truck between jobs. This is in the Bay Area Peninsula.

>This is in the Bay Area Peninsula.

Or any other wealthy area.

>Also lord forbid you sit in your car while Mexican, very suspicious circumstances!!

Only on weekends, the help doesn't come on weekends...

Try the city-data.com Baltimore or Chicago forums. Really interesting insight into how racist peoples' thinking becomes when issues of neighborhood and kids' school come into the picture.

Nextdoor is much the same in Seattle; not as asinine in my area, but... heh... yeah. It generally represents the distillation of NIMBYism.

Yeah. I was actually shocked that they were bothering to try and organize a protest against a stop sign- at an intersection where there are always accidents from people not merging correctly! - of all things. Unhappily for them, the stop sign was ultimately installed.

Wonder how effective that turned out to be in preventig accidents. I don't drive so I really have no clue but a stop sign seems like something that wouldn't influence me much - then again that's mostly why I don't want to learn how to drive :)

Do you not know that you're required by law to come to a complete stop before a stop sign? It's legally not up to you how much a stop sign "influences" you.

From what I've seen when I pay attention to someone driving it seems more of a judgment call - but then again I don't usually pay attention because I find driving boring.

It obviously sets the rules so you can assign blame easier but is it really effective as a prevention tool ?

> it seems more of a judgment call

Ummmm maybe things are different where you live, but I certainly hope whoever drives you around doesn't drive near where I live. Here it's definitely not a "judgment call" and people will be quite angry if you ignore stop signs.

If you've ever observed drivers, you will have noticed that stop signs and traffic safety laws in general don't influence any of them much.

The Washington, DC, neighborhood Hawthorne (a triangle along the city line with Maryland, running east from Rock Creek Park) for a while had many signs reading "no sidewalks in Hawthorne." Among the arguments against sidewalks was that they would attract crime. I don't know how many criminals are willing to commit felonies but not to walk in the street.

And yes, our neighborhood (not Hawthorne) listserve now and then has stuff about "African American male walking down the alley." This usually brings on a quick email storm, since a fair bit of the listserve is AA. Then everyone calms down for a few weeks.

> we have to restrict growth to keep costs down

This one always confuses me and cracks me up,classic correlation vs causation thing. Prices aren't going up because of new apartments, new apartments are going up because of rising prices. That people can't understand that drives me crazy.

I think it's both. Many people want to live in a dense neighborhood (hence urbanization), and if you restrict growth, you make your area unattractive to those people.

Yes, you get less people but the prices go up even more because "restrict growth" is the same as "reduce future supply"

Supply obviously decreases, but my point is that demand decreases so much that prices fall.

It is disheartening, but not surprising. Zoning officials and others in city government don't just bow out when contraindicated by evidence. Instead they just arrange for new research with what they hope will be different results.

They keep coming with excuses because they keep being asked for excuses.

You can't force people who don't want to live with the poor to live with the poor. Or, at least, nothing good will ever come out of it.

Ever heard about things like contempt and hatred? Humans are quite capable of ridding themselves of unwanted relationships.

We are all about voluntary relationships in our love lives and social lives. Not so much with the government. :)

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