Posts by Moz
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https://theconversation.com/modelling-for-major-road-projects-is-at-odds-with-driver-behaviour-63603
The Conversation chimes in with a timely reminder that when new roads are built people use their mental "travel time budget" to travel further rather than spending less time travelling. Then when the "new road" reaches equilibrium, they complain that their travel time has increased.
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Speaker: Confessions of an Uber Driver…, in reply to BenWilson,
it's hard for me to see any real advantage in it. The door-to-doorness?
Exactly. We live 800m from a train station and find it hard to get housemates who will walk that far. Instead we get less rent and people who whine that when we, like our neighbours, have four cars and one off-street carpark, that means that it's hard to find a park on the street.
Offering people the convenience of a train in terms of "jump in, play on your phone, jump out" with the bonus of not sharing with stinky poors and having it go exactly where you want, when you want, is huge. For people who don't, can't or shouldn't operate heavy machinery, there's the second advantage that they get those benefits without having to operate the heavy machinery.
cram themselves into a tiny box and scoot along in little lanes
While I agree with you about that, the evidence is not on our side - millions of people do it every day. Worse, they're adamant that what they do is the only possible way to get from A to B. I work with some of those people, who regularly (frequently!) spend valuable work time explaining to me that riding my bicycle seems dangerous to them (not a reality-based feeling), and that spending huge amounts of money on owning and operating a car is the obvious solution (to make them feel better about their bad choices, I assume). Amusingly, when I offered the most adamant proposer of that "solution" $200,000 cash to provide me with a less than 10 year old, road legal motor vehicle for the indefinite future he declined on the basis that that was not enough money. So he does have an idea of the cost, he just would rather not talk about it.
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Speaker: Confessions of an Uber Driver…, in reply to BenWilson,
I can see people picking much bigger vehicles
I can more easily imagine the opposite. Get a comfy armchair, add wheels, and only use it where hairless hominids aren't allowed to drive. Once your "car" is 1m wide and 2-3m long, you can fit a fukton of them into the roads we already have, and without all the baggage they can be quite zippy.
Think of it as a super-Smart car. Europe already has a microcar category (1000W,200kg) and Japan has their under-900cc category. 1kW sounds like a joke when the most gutless car you can buy has 20kW, but then that 20kW car is hauling 600kg of defences against other moronists around.
Sure, for a chauffeur service like you run, that's not going to work. But once the human-driver part of the problem is replaced by a few kilos of electronics, I suspect we will fairly quickly see "robot only" lanes, if not entire roads. When planners see the numbers they're going to piss all over the "right to drive" people, because with mesh networked robots I expect they'll more than double the road capacity... until some meathead tries to operate the machine themselves. Literal head-made-of-meat in this case.
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Hard News: Stop acting like the law is…, in reply to mark taslov,
we’d need shops to sell it but no one wants a tinny house at the end of their street
In that context, the list of "no-one wants a business selling X at the end of their street" has a lot of values of X, from aeroplanes, buses and coal to zebras. Pot is just one in the middle of the list.
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Speaker: Confessions of an Uber Driver…, in reply to Ian Dalziel,
Regrettably I have to concur with the utbe commenter who couldn't understand the lyrics other than the title line.
taxi drivers took Ecan (and people with mobility issues ultimately) for a ride…
Wholly sheet! It does seem to be a cunning fraud, in the sense that until very recently it would be extremely hard to show that it was taking place at a systematic level. I gather the mobility card holders weren't affected, so it's a classic white collar fraud "victimless crime" where the crime is against society in general rather than an identifiable person (am I still in the John Key on cannabis thread?).
I remain hopeful that a service merging electric cars, online routing and some kind of ride-sharing will prove to be profitable, even though the infrastructure costs will be significant. One of the things making that less likely is, of course, Uber.
My hope is that it will also help launch small electric vans/people-movers, not least because I want one :) Or at least access to one, coz the car-share programs generally don't work for my annual-ish use of cars, and actually driving scares me (I have a licence, but driving less than once a year means I'm not even close to being a safe driver. To further reassure you all, I normally rent decent size trucks because that's usually why I need a motor vehicle "ya can't move that on ya bike, mate").
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Hard News: Stop acting like the law is…, in reply to Russell Brown,
the more they policed, the more they could claim harm. It was absurd.
It seems apt to ask "what were they smoking"? That's actually very creative in a perverse sort of way.
That would be useful as an example of perverse incentives in public policy.
Albeit I originally meant "policing cost" in the sense of destroyed lives and so on, rather than counting the spending on criminalisation as part of the monetary cost of drug use. In economics I'm sure they call it "lost potential" or "diminished future earnings" or something, rather than using moral terms. In Australia we have some absolute world-best practitioners of "separate the economics from the morals", and that does extend to policing and the law, as you might be aware from the recent media coverage of the remarkably cost-efficient efforts in the NT "helping the youth obey the law" programs.
(Sadly, a lot of Australian politics doesn't so much skirt Godwins Law as deliberately aim for it and drive right on out the other side)
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Hard News: Stop acting like the law is…, in reply to Russell Brown,
they’re all easier to address when the law isn’t in the way. Māori aren’t only more likely to be arrested and prosecuted for cannabis possession, they’re also markedly less likely to get the help they need.
No argument there. I'm not suggesting that cannabis is harmless, just that if you ranked drugs by harm it wouldn't be at the top. Although if you include the harm from making it illegal and policing it, that pushes it much higher (but somehow the legal side of this debate never does that).
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Hard News: Stop acting like the law is…, in reply to Rich of Observationz,
I don't think anyone's suggesting compulsion
My point is more that from a "we should ban smoking" perspective, making it legal to smoke something new doesn't make sense.
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I'm amused by the very small difference between pain relief and pain relief with terminal illness - the shift is barely detectable and it's entirely between decriminalise and legalise.
I think you're also seeing an issue that divides The Greens. Some supporters are old school anti-smokers who wouldn't smoke anything if their life depended on it, any more than they're use depleted uranium bullets to kill an invasion of Godzillas, or use asbestos brake linings in their trains. Those things are just wrong, the end.
I'm kinda in that category, except that it's also something where the libertarians have enough of their anarchist roots showing to encompass my position: do what you like, but don't harm others. The usual consumer protections should apply, just as they do to alcohol and tobacco. But any harm reduction stuff should start with the drugs of most harm.
I would quite cheerfully see people made bankrupt when they eventually get out of prison for crimes like planting marijuana in National Parks, and I think people who smoke around people who have not consented should be prosecuted. But what they smoke in private is entirely up to them, as is who they buy it from and how it's manufactured. I don't think it's reasonable to say "cigarettes grown and manufactured using slaves in grossly unsafe conditions are fine, but P made at home by drug addicts is unacceptable". Draw the line, consistently.
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Speaker: Confessions of an Uber Driver…, in reply to goforit,
The so called app developers, IT geeks, computor engineering nerds etc dont live in the real world.
I think you have the worlds flipped. Motorists live in this fantasy place where there's infinite oil that can be burned with no consequences, we can build infinite roads similarly without consequences, and everyone is naturally both capable and inclined to drive safely, so cars make perfect sense as the major form of transport for everyone.
Where I live, we've burned so much fossil fuel that it's an open question as to whether techological society can survive, and we definitely can't afford to have everyone driving a car the way we do now. Los Angeles is the nameplate example of the limits to building roads for transport, and we directly kill hundreds of people every year because we're unwilling to lose the "convenience" of being stuck in traffic.
Meanwhile some places are building or rebuilding their cities around public transport, walking and riding. One side effect they're finding is that the cities are much nicer for people. It appears you can't have both "nice for cars" and "nice for people", although you may not be able to have the former at all.