Bicycles are an amazing transportation tool. Why are they so unpopular everywhere else?
For cars in the US it's the opposite: even when major cities get big enough to where cars clearly aren't scaling well anymore, cities are often reluctant to refactor car space for walking, biking, or transit, because a majority of current travelers go by car.
My city just created a law that motorists who don't leave a 1m gap between their vehicle and bike will be fined.
The problem is the "bike lane" is just a picture of a bike on what used to be the paved shoulder, the 30cm wide paved shoulder. And the biked lane can narrow down to nothing in some places. And it often includes vehicle parking in the same bike lane.
The roads here are very narrow here too so much that you have to drive into the other lane to get that 1m gap. If there is traffic coming the other way you as a driver of a vehicle have no choice but to crawl along behind a bike, even worse if it's two bikes side-by-side.
I am a bike rider and a vehicle owner but I can't agree with the law there is just no room. It absolves the bicyclist of everything and blames vehicle drivers for everything.
You often can't pass another motorist without going into the oncoming lane either.
The fundamental question is whether you see the road as a way for all people, or if you see it as primarily a resource for the wealthy, with the poor allowed provisional access based on their degree of disturbance to the flow of money.
You seem to see denying wealthy motorists the right to travel at their preferred speed as a more serious issue than denying the poor the right to safe travel in any form.
Actually no my concern is there is no room! The width of the road is barely enough for one vehicle leaving maybe 30cm on either side. Making a law to demand 1m (100cm) separation seems to ignore reality, and math.
Also, I could be ahead of a bicyclist and he can overtake me but I am now required by law to make room as he overtakes to my right. Even if there is a vehicle to my left I have to move over or be fined.
I understand the purpose of the law but it is poorly written.
It also has awesome weather for cycling all year round.
People are just hard to change.
Then car companies did a lot of lobbying.
Some of us just have kids and have noticed that all the city housing is either incredibly expensive or in slums, and the schools in the city proper are dangerous and terrible so we'd also have to pay for private school[0]. And we're not made of money.
I'd much rather live in the city—I hate the car-centric lifestyle—but living there if I have enough money not to but not enough money to also pay for private k-12 schooling would be irresponsible. Plus there's the issue of having to balance commutes for two people in a dual-income household—one of us would almost certainly need a car anyway.
[0] This is true for my city at least. YMMV.
Not all suburban cities are equal either, some makes it possible not to have to commute by car (at least near where I live).
So it's still a chicken/egg problem but a much tougher one to resolve than if schools having too little money were even a large part of the trouble. It's even a shitty situation for people who can afford to get their kids into better schools because there's pressure under this system to spend absolutely as much as you can on these things, because you will definitely be improving your kids' chances in life by doing so.
It's a craptastic coordination problem that's so bad things would kind of be better if we just assigned schools based on some combination of parental income and education level, since that'd put most kids more or less where they are when we use willingness-and-ability-to-spend-money as a proxy for those things (i.e. the current system) while keeping everyone from having to waste tons of money competing over blessed zip codes or paying private school tuition.
... however...
I can't even picture the political shitstorm that would happen if someone suggested (openly) segregating schools by parental income and education level.
Well, yes, but more to the point inner city schools suck in outcome terms because outcomes are driven more by parental educational attainment and other non-school factors (income is mostly irrelevant except that it correlated with parental education, and tax base is irrelevant as shown by the fact thst the problem is not particularly attenuated in states that equalize per pupil spending statewide, so that taking your tax money elsewhere has only a very weak effect on school funding) than by anything schools do, and no one has found (and most of the efforts of standardizing what schools do in the expectations of consistent outcomes detracts from the search for) interventions that address deficiencies in this area.
To fix inner city (or “poor rural” or other “problem” schools) you have to either first fix or, at least, find interventions that break the cyclical nature of the underlying social inequalities that actually cause the poor outcomes.
Money easily grows out of being well educated, assuming there aren't other barriers to accomplishment. You have the cause and effect relationship here backwards.
Since parental involvement is a really good proxy for wealth, and, as you point out, parental involvement correlates strongly with educational outcomes, wealthy children tend to have better educational outcomes.
However (and take it from a gifted and learning disabled person) the presence of better-educated (and more academically invested) students in a classroom can be a rising tide that brings up the more marginal students.
Overall, I don't think we actually disagree. Education is well-correlated with wealth. Parental involvement (given that parents who are able to be involved are more likely to be able to do that and stay financially functional) effectively "counts" as money spent on education, especially since it indirectly helps the entire cohort.
It takes a village.
Sidenote: > assuming there aren't other barriers to accomplishment
In my neck of the world, poverty counts.
It is more complicated than that. Some other factors are: Schools in "college towns" tend to be better and "neighborhood schools" where less than 5% of the kids are bussed in and the rest live in walking distance also do better than average.
I am not saying poverty is not a problem. I am saying that spending per capita on students in public schools does not have a good track record for correlating well to student outcomes.
Also, if you look at "The Tipping Point," it indicates that poor neighborhoods where middle class and better people are a certain percentage of the population fair much, much better than poor neighborhoods where those people drop below a certain percentage of the population. The lack of adequate "wisdom" being readily available seems to do more harm than lack of money per se. When it falls below a certain threshold, things rapidly come unraveled and you see crime and other problems shoot through the roof.
We are not doing such a great job of creating community in the world today.
I am not saying money doesn't matter. But I do believe that there are a lot of things that matter more and that cannot be solve by simply throwing money at the problem. Hopefully, that makes more sense.
Let's not beat around the bush; this happened back in the day because they took their taxes to the suburbs for mostly white schools.
See, we have a national costume that happens to be a 2 ton motorized suit of armor. And if you aren't wearing it, your loyalty is suspect.
And this: http://denver.streetsblog.org/2017/06/05/broadway-redo-sidew...
Like many things in life, douchebags tend to ruin good things.