Comment by toomuchtodo | Hacker News Reader

Comment by toomuchtodo | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

Physical systems don't care about your feelings. Live somewhere that ignores science and is financially irresponsible with infra dollars if that is your MO. We're not going to spend to build roads forever because people are ignorant and selfish, we can't even pay for the road infra we have today. And some folks are demanding more? Absolutely silly. "I'm not happy they're not building roads we cannot afford and will end up congested again, won't you think about my happiness!"

Bringing morality into an economic, fluid dynamics, and behavioral argument is not helpful, and the private car entitlement (which is demonstrably unaffordable and unfunded long term) is wild.

https://infrastructurereportcard.org/

https://pirg.org/articles/america-cant-handle-more-highways-...

https://usa.streetsblog.org/2020/04/13/we-could-never-afford...

https://taxfoundation.org/research/all/federal/road-funding-...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Highway_Trust_Fund

https://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/03/business/energy-environme...

What science is being ignored? Traffic expanding to fill capacity is not a bad thing, that is efficient use of capacity?

Fossil energy is artificially cheap (the price its consumers pay does not even begin to pay for the negative externalities of producing and burning it -- and most of it goes into private hands that don't intend to use it for any kind of mitigation anyway).

This causes all kinds of problems, has all kinds of causes, and is generally a disaster all around, but at the very least we shouldn't deliberately make it worse by also artificially juicing demand in one of the main fossil-fuel-burning sectors of the economy (any more than we already are). Every petroleum-powered mile not traveled (and energy is to a certain extent fungible, so in principle this also applies to electric cars burning "free" solar energy) is a win for human civilization.

This isn't hippy-dippy environmentalism, just soulless Chicago economics: mispriced commodities do real damage to a political economy, and in the globalized era, there is effectively only one political economy anymore.

Highways can be filled with electric cars.

If the real problem is fossil fuels then leave traffic engineering out of it

The problem with roads and highways is that they are inherently low-capacity, so it's very easy to fill them with traffic.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com