• Dessalines@lemmy.ml
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    3 years ago

    You can’t unfortunately, that battle was fought and lost. Neoliberals crippled the public sector completely by the 1980s ( starve the beast campaign ) and its not coming back. Cities and suburban ecosystems have been designed around the car, and tearing them down and redesigning them around an efficient transport system cannot happen.

    • wazowski@lemmy.ml
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      3 years ago

      tearing them down and redesigning them around an efficient transport system cannot happen

      i mean, the progress is painfully slow and difficult bc of corruption (lobbying 🙄), but the primary legislative factor that enabled and perpetuated car centric urbanism (single-family zoning) is slowly being rolled back in many places in north america, and ppl are slowly waking up to the awful consequences of car-centric urbanism, it’s slow, but it’s getting there, slowly

      if you look at prices of housing in so called streetcar suburbs (suburbs with reasonable density and mixed-use housing) in north america, you see that there’s a ton of demand, because even if subconsciously, ppl realize that these places are waaaaay more pleasant to live in, so i believe that as single family zoning is going to be rolled back further and further, more and more mixed-use places are going to be built, ppl will want to move there, demand will increase, developers will come etc etc

      being pessimistic about it won’t help it 🤷‍♀️

      you’re right in the sense that sprawling places are really hard to fix, but simply legalizing any type of other development will make it all much better going forward, bc right now sprawling car-centric development is literally a pyramid scheme, bc federal loans for new infrastructure are freely available to towns, whereas maintenance is regularly expensive, so that shit expands like cancer, ppl need to stop it immediately