And what would take for it to be noticed?
With 7 billion current humans, and many more dead, it is unlikely any problem was not noticed.
Sometimes it was intentionally setup to be a bother, other times the fix takes more resources than a single person can apply.
/lecture ended
So many great opportunities for light rail around here, especially because of the geographical constraints. If there were big subsidies for doing it, I think the city would get interested.
Americans have been so conditioned for the car, yet don’t realize that lacking transit is one of the largest drivers of wealth inequality.
Cities are expensive, so people move to the suburbs. Suburbs though being all single family we only built roads. Roads only have so much capacity, so traffic is terrible and there’s a limit for how large our cities can get before commutes are over an hour. Prices go up because the jobs are in the city and people have to figure out how long they can tolerate commuting.
Or, we built transit, which would create more housing further away from the city with fast connections into the city. Housing near the city is of course still worth more, but people can choose to live even farther away, so there are many less housing shortages.
Vs Portland/Vancouver WA, where Vancouver WA is a smallish town on the outskirts of Portland. They need to replace a highway bridge that’s already decaying. Portland is happy to pitch in more than their share to pay for it IF they can extend their light rail network across it to connect Vancouver to transit. Vancouver is screaming they don’t want it because homeless! Thugs! (Black people). Shooting themselves right in the foot. I’ve asked them how long it takes them to five in. “Well sometimes over an hour”. Morons.
I have found that most of the problems that have been around for a long time and whose solutions seem “so easy if only anyone would bother to do it”, are not actually that easy once you actually think about it.
Drug addiction. Its not necessarily easy to fix, but we know how to treat it and take care of our vulnerable, we just don’t: social workers, public services, shelters, safe drug sites with drug counselors. We’ve become so numb to the mass suffering on a societal and individual level.
Personal anedcote, a year ago, a man was dying of an OD next to our Tim Horton’s drive thru, splayed out in the middle of the road, and the dozens of people driving by cared more about getting their coffee and getting to work than to even call an ambulance. I went to the pharmacy down the road and got a narcan kit and administered it, but Jesus Christ I lost a lot of trust and faith in my fellow man that day. Not enough people care; even people I love and respect say disgusting things about homeless people.
Too many people just view scientifically sound treatment as drug addicts getting stuff for free, and get pissed off that someone else gets a “benefit” that they aren’t entitled to. They completely ignore the knock on effects that drug addiction has to those around someone going through it and just focus on what they perceive as unearned rewards for bad behavior.
I kind of think that a lot of people would be in favor of the same programs if they were pitched without being centered on the person getting treated for their addiction. Like, instead of saying, “This plan represents the best method we have to get people off drugs,” some of those same people that are totally lacking in empathy would be in favor of it if it were put forward as, “This is a way to get all those druggies off the streets and trains where they bother you, and it’s actually way cheaper than putting them all in prison, so it works out that we spend less of your tax money and save you in the long term.” Which is a pretty damning indictment of those people.
Motornormativity. Not all of it, it’s a huge problem, but there are so many really small bits that could easily be addressed. Like get rid of slip lanes, and make corners into side streets sharp right angles. When you’ve got a bike path (yes, putting in the bike path at all is one of those big difficult problems, but when you’re getting that done anyway), making sure it has clear priority when it crosses side streets through the use of wombat crossings and road markings.
I dunno how to get it noticed. Half the problem is getting people to acknowledge it even is a problem when it’s directly pointed out to them. Half the people are so deep in carbrain they refuse to acknowledge there’s even a problem with everything being centred around cars. And most of the rest buy into the neoliberal “pErsOnAL reSpONsiBiliTy” nonsense and blame crashes (or “accidents”, as they invariably call them) entirely on the bad driving (or worse—victim blaming it on the cyclist or pedestrian), rather than being willing to acknowledge that bad driving is inevitable and designing so that (a) bad drivers have other viable alternatives to driving if they want, and (b) the infrastructure could be designed to be forgiving of bad driving and reduce the likelihood and severity of crashes.
