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[Discussion] What are your opinions on this Not Just Bikes comments on "fixing" North America?
(lemmygrad.ml)
this post was submitted on 01 Aug 2023
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The US is fixible more quickly... with the political will. Cutting the defense budget in half for several years and intelligently spending that money would go a long way.
I just don't see it happening without major reforms to get the government out of corporate hands though.
You agree with JustBikes then. Cutting the defense budget with fascist threats like China and Russia is difficult. By half? Impossible.
Russia is no longer a threat to anyone except, perhaps, a small neighboring country with no defensive capabilities. China, on the other hand, is certainly a growing problem. While the USA maintains a significant technical advantage, China is set up to out-build the west from a manufacturing perspective.
Yeah, I don't think it's impossible to fix the US. Or frankly anything else. But possible and practical are very different things. It's possible, but it would take a massive amount of time, money, and political will that would have to basically come out of nowhere. It's not practical to expect that in the foreseeable future.
But just because we can't "fix" it doesn't mean we can't at least make improvements. Fixing isn't really a binary. Even if we can't do much for existing suburbs with their massive sprawl and absolutely nothing you can walk to, we can make city centers more walkable and expand public transit within them. We can avoid building more suburban sprawl. We can make walkability an important criteria for new neighborhoods. Even if we can't fix things for everyone, we can at least improve things for a significant number of people and that's absolutely doable.
My Canadian city has been improving in recent years. We got an LRT in the past 5 years or so and it's amazing if you're on its corridor (and that has prompted more and better development along it). We've added a bunch of bike lanes (proper ones with concrete barriers), removing car lanes in some cases. In our downtown, the sidewalks got expanded and street even closed to vehicles to be pedestrian only (and part of it is full of picnic tables and stalls for festivals). We still have a long way to go and the city still down have a bunch of suburban sprawl, but it is getting better and we should not give up on improving it.