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slimeyamerican t1_ivc5luy wrote

Reply to comment by IntelligentCicada363 in Cambridge City Council to consider citywide ban on ‘turning on red’ by superfakesuperfake

I’m all about sustainability and the desire to make neighborhoods more livable, but the idea that cars aren’t still needed in a place like Cambridge requires a pretty extreme ignorance of what many people’s daily lives are like. Setting aside contractors and the need for trucks to get in and out to make deliveries, it’s also just the case that many of the people who work in the Cambridge area don’t live there or anywhere near it, because we can’t afford to. There’s lots of demand for manual labor of various kinds in the city, but nobody seems to consider that if those laborers want to be able to afford a family and a house, that requires moving 25+ miles away, and a schedule that totally rules out relying on the commuter rail. I grew up in Somerville and I work as an arborist out of Malden-most of our clients are in Cambridge. If I ever want to buy a house in the MA area, I’ll be forced to do what basically everyone else at my company has done past a certain age: move to NH or RI and commute every day. I’m fairly confident the same can be said for quite a few people who work in Cambridge. That’s obviously a broader problem and not one that can be solved at the municipal level, but at any rate I suppose that’s why I suspect this will remain an ongoing problem for the rest of our lives, or at least so long as Cambridge is a desirable and thereby unaffordable area and cars don’t fly.

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IntelligentCicada363 t1_ivycry5 wrote

Honest to god I appreciate what you are saying and how it affects you, but then you are only for sustainability and livable neighborhoods in theory and not in practice.

You mention multiple times that you want to buy a house, which I presume means a SFH. That is a choice that you make, but inherently imposes your car and its associated pollution and deadliness on the population of the city whose housing isn't acceptable and/or affordable to you. This is a systemic problem over the entire region -- and fighting Cambridge over making its municipal roads safer for its local residents isn't the way to change things.

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slimeyamerican t1_ivze841 wrote

Assuming you’re actually responding to my comment and not the general noises you perceive me making, you’re not talking about making municipal roads safer, you’re talking about completely eliminating cars and trucks lol. Not only would that destroy Cambridge’s economy, it would remove the livelihoods of everyone who depends on those roads to make a living. I get the problem, but part of living in a complex society is compromise.

I’m not only for sustainability and livable neighborhoods in theory; the problem is always one of implementation in a complex and multifaceted reality in which things are already operating a certain way. If what you really mean is I’m only for sustainability and livable neighborhoods for overpaid tech workers and college students, and not for anybody who’s been priced out of the area by said people, then no, I’m not even for that in theory, nor should you be. It stuns me how quickly self-proclaimed progressive people will all but tell working class folks to go fuck themselves as soon as tolerating their existence becomes even slightly inconvenient. If one wanted to reduce cars, the answer is not merely changing infrastructure-you have to totally restructure the economy such that those cars aren’t necessary, not just pretend they’re already unnecessary and willfully ignore anyone for whom that isn’t already true. This is sort of like trying to end police violence by defunding or disbanding police departments without doing any of the other things necessary to prevent the obvious bad consequences of taking such a step. Changes like these aren’t simple, and trying to skip to the end goal from day one always results in disaster.

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