Comment by AnthonyMouse
16 days ago
> to offer free public transport to people, we now have to solve housing at a societal level. To solve housing, we have to fix zoning laws. to fix zoning laws, we have to fix NIMBY-ism which needs partisanship to be solved. To fix partisanship...
Aren't half of these wrong?
NIMBY-ism isn't particularly partisan. Find a suburb and it's probably full of NIMBY zoning rules regardless of which party has the majority there. This is one of the things which isn't red vs. blue, it's "got mine" vs. the people who don't get a vote because they can't afford to live there because they don't get a vote.
You also don't have to "solve housing the societal level" to keep the homeless from using the subway as a bedroom. That's the better way to do that, but you can also do things like build homeless shelters that resemble (and therefore have the density of) college dorms in places where the "neighbors" are auto salvage yards, warehouses, prisons, abandoned buildings or the like and are correspondingly less likely to object to putting them there. And then anyone you catch being disruptive on the subway gets a free one-way ticket to the shelter.
They are wrong but also unrelated to the issue of free public transport and hence include trade offs which don’t directly affect public transport.
Effectively, to offer free public transport, you have to reduce the power of lobbyists and dark money in politics.
To promote solar power, you have reduce the power of lobbyists and dark money.
To promote anti-vaccine ideology, you have to reduce the power of lobbyists and dark money.
To promote a strictly equal society where every person is judged by their abilities and not ethnic history and skin color, you have to reduce the power of lobbyists and dark money.
There are vested interests in every debate and saying we should aim for wholesale societal change for every low hanging result is a recipe for inaction (or at least, very delayed action)
> Effectively, to offer free public transport, you have to reduce the power of lobbyists and dark money in politics.
Do you actually though? Or do you just have to do it in a way that they won't stop you?
There are at least three ways to do that. You can do it in a way that it actually doesn't cause trouble for them, you can do it in a way where they can't stop you (e.g. at a different level of government where they have less influence), or you can do it in a way where they can't see what you're trying to do until after it's already done.
"Reduce the influence of lobbyists and money" doesn't even mean anything. If you want something to happen or not happen, you're lobbying. If you spend time or resources trying to achieve your goals, that's money. What people mean is they want to reduce the influence of people they don't like. It's fully generic, you might as well say that in order to win you have to defeat your opponents.