jon c. 

A thread about taxation belongs in P & R. Personally, I'm happy to pay my taxes. I like living in the first world and I'm willing to pay for it. You want to live in a nice place you gotta pay for it. The rest of the thread is nonsense. No one is going to force people to give up their cars. Sure, there will always be a voice or two out there trending in that direction but that doesn't come close to representing widespread movement. A few of the largest and most crowded cities in the world are trying to limit city center traffic to avoid gridlock. Makes perfect sense. No one wants to drive in those conditions anyway.

rykard

They have cameras all around London, and every other city, reading your number plate and automatically fining/charging you. We have average speed cameras here that go for miles of road.. The technology is there an has been for years.

SkinGriz

I read years ago that the cameras were installed to cut down in street crime.

How did that pan out?

SkinGriz

Opposite. Taxes are a sign of lack of civility. Anything taken by coercion or threat of violence.

base2 

So you are totally fine with forgoing all the services you use? Services like a tax payer funded potable water system or tax payer funded sewage transport and treatment? What about tax payer provided roads to tax payer owned public lands to hunt or fish tax payer owned animals while breathing tax payer protected breathable air and floating your boat on tax-payer owned water?...I mean, really you wouldn't consider taking all those things for your own personal exclusive use with out paying for it or anything would you? I shudder to think you of engaging in the uncivil behavior of theft for your own private gain at everyone else's expense.

You are on a computer using electricity...Off-grid system like a true independent man? Or does it arrive by way of wires affixed to poles on the tax-payer owned right of way? Should you, the tax-payer not be compensated for each 2 square feet of real estate each pole uses? I bet the power company would love to be freed of that expense.

Wi-fi or cellular? How do you use it with out utilizing the tax-payer owned and protected radiological spectrum? Perhaps you have some new technological breakthrough in energy transmission that doesn't use radio wave of any frequency? Quantum super-positioning? Do tell. How did you get such a device with out crossing any taxpayer owed border or tax payer negotiated trade agreement? You make your own electronic components from materials derived on your own land? You must be very, very rich & exceedingly resourceful.

Please enlighten us all how you, a man of infallible integrity, exist as a true and independent free man in a hermetically sealed bubble adjacent to this dimensional plane of reality?

Bully4

You lost me with the air--I don't recall any entity being able to sell or tax it yet! BTW- I also have a well. Guess you own that water, too! Boats require a license, hunting licenses help cover the costs associated with hunting.
I pay taxes as well on everything I use. My concern is that is spent wisely for its intended purpose. In total, that I figure is probably getting close to 50% of a person's overall wages. What is "fair share"? Seems to me that it's a moving target.

Let's agree to disagree.

Bully4

John C is right, this thread is off the rails. Sorry for getting carried away. I haven't been to a large city for years. Hope things work out. I'll have to take your word for it. I'll be too cheap to drive through and check.

I would venture a guess that everybody on here would be able to meet for a ride and probably have a good time. We all have different opinions; they don't always have to match to find common ground.

base2 

https://www.epa.gov/clean-air-act-ov...-air-pollutionhttps://www.epa.gov/clean-air-act-ov...-air-pollution


We all are concerned that money is spent wisely in a fiscally responsible manner. That is why population density (& the concept of a 15 minute city) makes a lot of sense. Quite simply the pipe in the street or whatever piece of infrastructure you wish to discuss, is utilized to a much higher average capacity with much greater utilization with the cost spread over a larger pool of tax payers even though the installation costs and lifespan and replacement costs are the same as that same pipe feeding a low value per acer area. Urban density is the fiscally responsible model.

SkinGriz

Logical fallacy of false dichotomy.
Doesn’t address voluntary vs coercive.

“Please enlighten us all how you, a man of infallible integrity, exist as a true and independent free man in a hermetically sealed bubble adjacent to this dimensional plane of reality?”

And finally the logical flaw that every aspect of another way of doing things needs to be detailed out ahead of time, when that same assumption isn’t held constant.

SkinGriz

I like 15 minute cities, as long as I’m not forced to stay.

It can get really ****** really fast when the city becomes a ghost town. Or if someone more enlightened than you decides to put a wall around the city and prevent you from leaving.

FBinNY 

Has anyone started a pool for when the mods either close this or move it to P&R?

If not, and if others, like me, believe the end is near, I'd like to put 5 bucks on post #65.

base2 

I don't wanna by Richard Mozzarella, on Flickr

Do you not see the contradiction between a dense vibrant walkable city that is diverse, interesting, full of opportunity & wealth and the hollowed out ghost town you are scared it could become? A building occupied is never vacant. It can never be blight. That is key. Mult-use buildings easily configured to whatever use or mix of uses appropriate to that time and place. Shops, manufacturing, grocery, tailors, bakeries, appliance or furniture sales, etc...on the ground floor put business ventures both within reach of residents but within reach of proprietors to take a gamble on the future. While residential in the floors above provides a steady stream of foot traffic to see the proprietors wares. Free-market capitalism works better.

If you are taking most American towns that can barely support a Dollar General as the soul sign of any economic activity at all as your inspiration...I don't know what to tell you except Main Street was bull-dozed for the car and whatever model that town was built on was shucked out the window long ago in favor of the least density as possible and no services rendered from single use buildings with onerous parking requirements depriving the land owner of the freedom to build out his land in the most effective way possible. They followed the opposite model of the 15 minute city.

A single use Chik-fil-a can only be a Chick-fil-a and will only be so for about 15 years while only supplying fraction of the taxes to the city as the 1920's multi-use building it replaced. And the car dependent nature of far-flung residents trying to get to that temporary single-use building ensures that the cost of maintaining those roads will weigh very heavy on the towns balance books. That's poor planning if the city even had a plan at all.

Roads and houses do not create economic output but they do have a very high cost. It's no wonder people leave as soon as they are able for greener pastures. Their town is bankrupt or eventually becomes bankrupt and unable to keep up with the cost of running a town and the personal cost of living there is too high.

Many people consider being near amenities, services, opportunity to be in their rational best self interest. The concept of the 15 minute city in urban planning arrived organically from this realization.

Do you have any examples of any cities that were walled off and isolated? Is there one example of a town in say Kansas or wherever with a McDonalds & a Wal-mart that "They" walled in and held the voting tax-payers captive? How many miles of fencing is that?

cooker

The state motto is not "use our highways for free". Somebody has to pay for them. Do you not think you should? Highways are socialist and costs are shared. If they were capitalist they would all be tolled, right down to back alleys, and you would pay a lot more.

I-Like-To-Bike

Care to name some recent examples where free-market capitalism is at work with dense vibrant walkable city that are diverse, interesting, full of opportunity & wealth in the U.S.?

Please omit naming small neighborhoods (outliers) in a cities that as a whole are not walkable, nor full of opportunity/wealth for a diverse population; also omit relatively small towns dominated by large university and associated employment and transient student body that can hardly be described as having a diverse population or any manufacturing or business ventures not dependent on the University.

base2 

The problem presented from a few different angles:
https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/...stments-md2020

https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2015/5/10/lafayette


https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/...y-has-no-money


...And the solution:
https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/...city-wealthier
Lafayette is doing much better once they figured out where their wealth was and came up with a plan.

Bully4

Seems to me like they're working towards it!

cooker

infrastructure for traffic consumes more money than all the taxes designated for it, and if we did get more people out of their cars, it actually would reduce government spending on roads, highway patrols, emergency medical services, and other spinoff public costs associated with car use.

cooker

It's hard to compare apples and oranges, of course. In my very large city we have market value assessment, so I pay more tax on my smallish central lot than the provincial Premier in his low density suburb and twice as big a house, because of location. Yet it costs the city much less in pipes, pavement and police patrols to keep my neighbourhood infrastructure in shape, because distances are much shorter. If his neighbourhood was densified and diversified like mine, everybody's property taxes would be lower .

FBinNY 

Yes, earmarked taxes, ie. fuel/road taxes, are a political scam. Money is fungible, so there's no solid linkage between the earmarked funds and the money spent.

In reality, all spending; roads, police, sanitation, etc. comes from a general fund, and whatever is raised by earmarked taxes, will be offset by a reduced contribution from the general fund.

So, the same process always happens. Budgets are set based on need (or political voodoo), and whatever is raised by earmarked taxes is spent first, reducing the general fund contribution.

The only exception is where the law is such that the budget is 100% (not more or less) funded by earmarked taxes, such is often the case with local school spending.

StarBiker

Same crazy people that were posting on here five years ago.

50PlusCycling

If that were actually the intention of planners, no one would be vilifying it. I live in Tokyo, and I can find anything I need within 15 minutes of where I live. That wasn’t the result of organized planning, it was the result of, ‘gasp’, capitalism. People move where the jobs are, businesses and retailers move where the people are, and that’s all there is to it. Leave people alone to take care of themselves, their families, and their businesses, and they can do perfectly well, and any big city worthy of the title is already a 15 minute city.

The problem is that planners use ideas like “15 minute cities” as an excuse or smokescreen to pursue other social agendas, the results of which often being opposite to what was promised or expected. California’s Proposition 47 is a good example. It was called “The Safe Neighborhoods and Schools Act,’ and with a title like that, people thought it must be a good thing, and voted for it. But it turned out this act actually rolled back the penalties for theft, fraud, and drugs, and instead of making neighborhoods and schools safer, it has caused an explosion of crime and violence, and an exodus of businesses and people from California’s largest metro areas. There are parts of San Francisco which could have been considered “15 minute cities,” but retail theft, crime, violence, and homelessness have caused entire blocks of businesses to close, meaning that you can no longer walk to a nearby shop or store (because they’ve all left), you have to drive much further out.

cooker

A lot of planning went into the design of Tokyo, just like any city. However, one thing they did better than many US cities is more flexible, less restrictive zoning. So in fact they permitted the organic development of mixed use neighbourhoods where many American cities historically actively discouraged it. They also built and maintain a far better public transit system, and they heavily tax and put other restrictions on car ownership and use, and have widely outlawed on-street parking. So it is a mixture of both government interventions and laissez faire.

Capitalism has its own responsibility for crime in San Francisco too - capitalism has destroyed the living wage and bought up the supply of houses, condos and rental apartments, making it impossible to live an honest working class life in lots of American cities. Some people are going to respond to this with rage and antisocial behaviour.

Viich

But that IS the intention of planners. They want to undo what was done with uniform zoning all over North America. No one was ALLOWED to put a store in a residential neighbourhood for decades.

I don't know anything about California or proposition whatever, I'm not going to follow that red herring. But in order to change decades of misguided planning they need to plan a little, not just undo the restrictions and allow anything anywhere. Hence planning the concept of 15min cities. Like you say, many cities outside of North America are already laid out like this. The point is to bring retail and commerce into the suburbs as well as the downtowns.

SkinGriz

The US is not a capitalist society. The EU is not more socialistic than the US.
They are both just different shades of fascism (or corporatism if you prefer a more PC word that has the same meaning).

SkinGriz

It seems insincere to praise Japan without admitting to Japans dire and overwhelming mistake.

Everyone had a pension. So the responsibility for everyone’s retirement shifted from the nuclear family to society.

So all nuclear families realized it was in their best interest to have fewer children, while at the same time society needing a greater population to take care of the future elderly.

All of the developed world is starting to go down the Japanification of lack of children.

At least the rest of the world doesn’t seem to have as much xenophobia as Japan does, so hopefully they can figure it out.

I do get a kick out of the stories of elderly Japanese committing minor crimes to get thrown in the clink as a type of retirement community. Makes my “work to rule” union heart chuckle.