The Democrats are pretty right-wing all by themselves, being about on par with the Tories and more right-wing than the Conservatives in Canada. Groups like the Republican Party and AfD should be illegal for the same reasons that the Nazi Party is illegal in much of Europe. Just put a bullet in their ear and call it good.

Oh fuck off. The heritage foundation and project 2025 are known values and the Republicans have been using it as a checklist. Congrats on being completely ignorant of reality, though.

So just fuck the welfare of the American people, huh? Maybe shift the tax burden back to billionaires and corporations where it properly belongs instead of onto sales taxes, turnpike and transit fares, and use fees for parks.

leave your waymo doors open.

They took the long way around reinventing the trolleybus, but worse.

You pretty much nailed it and also pointed out why autonomous trains are possible but autonomous cars aren't.

The Urban Transportation Development Corporation absolutely thought of that. And they correctly surmised that machines can't understand, and it's impossible to work around this limitation. Hence why their solution to this was to control the variables: Put it on tracks, make it elevated/underground, never at grade, to limit the intrusion of animals and people, and put in detection systems far in advance to stop traffic automatically in case of a right-of-way intrusion.

Canada beat us to autonomous vehicles by 40 years thanks to UTDC's "foresight". And I'm putting it in quotes because this is fucking obvious to anyone who isn't a kool-aid swilling techbro looking down from the peak of Mount Stupid on the Dunning-Kruger curve. And half a million people ride it daily. Yeah, that hyperloop shit Elon's pitching? Even if it worked the way Elon thinks it should, best case scenario, it wouldn't be as fast, reliable, safe or accessible to those with disabilities as 1980s technology, and we know this because we researched this in the 1970s and it turns out, whoops, if you want high capacity, then that means large passenger capacity vehicles coming at a predictable (and preferably short) frequency, because otherwise you bottleneck the system the same way cars do on roads now. Probably why the elevator/hyperloop style select-your-destination-and-wait-for-your-personal-pod mode is only used late night, and the rest of the time it's just doing scheduled stop service.

And if you're butthurt about the price, well, then build a BRT like Eugene, Oregon or Salt Lake City did instead. Pretty popular option in latin america but even Quito's stretched it to the absolute limit they're gonna have to bite the bullet and replace it with rail at some point soonish.

The idea of having a vehicle that stops in the middle of the road, blocking all traffic, so kids can board and de-board was a fitting solution at the time it was deployed, in the early 19th century. It was a very different world back then, slower speeds, lower traffic volumes, less schools, fewer multi lane roads and fewer kids. School buses mostly stopped on rural quiet streets in those days, not the same clogged streets we have today.

Stroads weren't invented yet because cars weren't trying to absorb every available public space. Railroads were on a building spree, taking America from a couple hundred cities to the nearly 20,000 we have today, and all of them built around people walking to the station. And Republicans were still about a century away from losing their fucking minds and abandoning things that they championed in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, like universal education, working towards equality, and building that national railroad network.

In today’s densely populated, car-dependent society, these laws increasingly create inefficiency, safety contradictions, and inequitable burdens and they deserve reconsideration.

So do what worked before for us, and why Europe copied our example after World War II: Invest in transportation that works for humans, not just baby boomers with a car fetish. We don't need cars in cities, we need public transportation, cycleways and more homes. We're not going to get that wasting half of all available space in the built environment to the movement and storage of private cars. Congestion exists because cars do not scale in volume at all, they're rural machines for rural people who have space for crap like (what's effectively) a high speed tractor. Cars create the inefficiency and the unsafe situation in the public commons. Forcing everyone into a car is just asking everyone to pull $12,000 out of their ass, either magically, or sacrifice from real (not artificially created) needs to accomplish. The only reason we even built urban freeways in the first place is because Robert Moses convinced Eisenhower that it'd be good for urban renewal (never mind Moses reasons for doing this was genocide, and the neighborhoods removed to make room for cars were largely black, hispanic, queer and/or poor without exception).

I'm straight up waiting for someone to argue we don't need driver's licensing and to legalize drunk driving at this point. Like, is anybody actually convinced any of this shit works in the real world?

Because if you support autonomous vehicles, you absolutely are claiming you do. The best autonomous cars drive noticeably worse than the NPCs in Truck Sim.

Get your own email hosting. You'd be amazed how cheap it is. It's been a ticklist item with web hosting forever now.

Mostly the past. I think what's going on in the US, Israel and Australia is a good example of why you don't want your ass chip tied to a single entity you can't change.

If you're coming up with things that hurt the poor or are more racist, homophobic or transphobic than the next most conservative party (in this case, the Democrats), just dispose of them. I am entirely unconcerned with the safety, rights or security of fascist terrorists.

Leave it to the New York Times to come up with the worst possible angle for this. We wouldn't need so many domestic flights if our transportation infrastructure wasn't doubling down on the car fad, when they're too slow for long distance travel and too large for cities and suburbs. Nearly all of us aren't farmers living in BFE.

It's also a necessary term. If we're reliving history, we need to work out how we're going to Marshall Plan ourselves, and criminalizing Republicanism seems like a very obvious starting point.