It’s poll time!
[socialpoll id=”2412282″]
I’m not sure the thumbnail captures the full transphobic awfulness of the graphic for option number three, so here it is full-size:
In case you’re wondering, Saddam is not actually mentioned in the story.
If you haven’t guessed by now, I voted for option 3, though the car seat one is lovely as well.
Here’s an archived link of Return of Kings’ front page as of today, in case you want to read any of these posts. I didn’t bother.
@IP
It matters as to what mode(s) of transportation were important to the shoppers who most recently supported the district with their custom. If the main mode was “drive in by car” then cutting off the district from car traffic is going to be detrimental unless some other factor is built in to compensate for that.
Outside the US, the term might mean something different? Not precluding that.
@Mish
I was responding to this:
That read to me as “well, I know some pedestrian malls that work, full stop,” which doesn’t tell the real story. I mean, I know one that works, too. I apologize for being snippy; that wasn’t my intention at all.
@PoM
Yeah, that’s the conclusion I had come to. So, it’s not an inherent problem with “pedestrian malls” but rather a failing of US public transportation.
I hadn’t actually heard the term pedestrian mall before. I was only applying to my local areas my understanding of the concept from the previous comments in this thread.
There’s also a status issue. It’s not just that people prefer driving or that driving is most practical. A lot of times, people don’t want to take public transportation because it’s seen as something for people. While cars indicate that you have money. There are a lot of people who could take public transportation but don’t because they’re too snobby or too concerned with how it looks to others.
I’m not sure how to change that. The best answer I can come up with is to push the environmental benefits. But that will only work on more liberal leaning people. I can’t see it working in red states.
@IP
It’s not merely a failure of public transit, it’s also a failing of the way US cities are constructed. Historically the model to be emulated in the US was the “gentleman farmer,” the guy with a large tract of land who produces enough to be self-sufficient. That is still baked in the American city’s DNA, with the better parts of town always being the outskirts, where the parcels are large and the houses are large. The downtown is the less desirable area, where the poor and the recent immigrants live, and since the Civil War it’s also been where the black people are warehoused. It’s hard to keep a pedestrian mall above water when that is its context. It’s not just that the transit into the mall’s area sucks, it’s also that suburbanites just don’t want to go there and have to be coaxed. One doesn’t coax them by telling them that they have to leave their cars in a pay lot 3 blocks away.
I’m really enjoying the discussion between PoM and IP. However, since both of them have avatars of very similar cats, I can’t avoid the mental image that they are in fact the same cat embroiled in a dialogue with itself, Smeagol/Gollum style.
http://www.funcatpictures.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/fun-cat-pictures-gollum-cat.jpg
@PoM
True. To me, it’s interesting that “the suburbs” in the US is a calm place where people with money live in large houses, while “förorten” here refers to a concrete jungle for poor people and immigrants crammed into tiny, crappy apartments.
@PoM,
Oh, the rich people live outside, in the suburbs? Now I see even more clearly where you’re coming from. It’s the opposite here in some ways – the inner city and surrounding areas are seen as the most desirable, and in recent years have been developed to death.
There are certainly wealthy enclaves out in the distant ‘burbs, plus pockets of lower-income peeps near the city (despite best efforts of developers to get rid of them), but in general the ‘good’ postcodes are all in or near the centre.
I think I see another reason why we were talking past each other, now.
@EJ(TOO)
Me too, certainly – although I was under the impression there were quite a few of us in this conversation. Clearly our ninja powers are unknown even to us 😛
Oh, yes, that would make a big difference. In North America, there was a “white flight” out of city centres after the second world war. Developers started making what we call “bedroom communities” – pleasant little sleepy non-villages as satelites to the main industrial and commercial hubs. Post-war economic prosperity meant that everyone could have a car, and it was sort of a status symbol to live that way – commute to work and leisure while having a home that’s away from the city, with a picket fence and 2.5 kids.
(Of course, the reality was motivated a lot by racial integration during the civil rights era; “white flight” was a reaction to integration and de-segregation, if memory serves. We didn’t really have that up in Canada, so tend to be more urban without the same racial division between suburbs, exurbs and urban. To the best of my understanding – I’m woefully uneducated on this stuff!)
White flight was definitely racially motivated. However, what goes usually unsaid is the degree to which this was facilitated by federal policy, in the form of the Highway Act and Federal Housing Administration loan guidelines. For decades it was universally easier to get a loan to buy a new suburban house than to get the same amount of money to buy an existing urban house. Forget trying to get money to rehab said urban house. Even leaving aside policies like redlining, that alone is going to urge people to move out of the city. The government subsidized this by building highways that ran straight into/out of urban centers, so that people could live in the suburbs and comfortably commute to work.
FHA loan guidelines locked black people out of access to housing loans quite aside from redlining (which was a different kind of policy). So we had this “American dream” of a house in the suburbs with a white picket fence that the government actively facilitated, but which non-white people were not allowed to realize. That’s how white flight happened.
The car seat one is the one that offends me the most as a parent, the Saddam transgender one offends me as a LGBT person and as the stepparent of a trans child, the other two owns me as a feminist. It’s hard to pick.
@Mish:
You can be Frodo, then :p