Rockefellers Divesting From Big Oil

That environmental awareness is only as good as the conflict minerals and suicide nets that its printed on?

Not sure. Maybe the novelty wore off; maybe more people are carpooling and/or buying hybrids, all-electric, or really small cars. Expo Phase 2, though, is supposed to be a big tourist draw, especially since hotel prices in downtown Santa Monica are insane and parking is, well, impossible. It's assumed visitors would rather stay in a less pricey neighborhood and hop on a clean, quiet train that can get them from Union Station to the Pier and the Promenade in half the time the freeway would.

You can deal with inefficiency better at a central location (power plant), plus if you're interested in CO2 capture it makes more sense.

Cheaper fuel and fertilizer? Yes please.

Anyways, two different takes...

http://www.marketwatch.com/story/a-...el-or-even-40-2014-09-25?mod=mw_share_twitter

http://blog.pricegroup.com/2014/09/...n (Market Insights » Phil Flynn)#.VCQJVeoo62c

Wait, is that a blog?

Yep, and I addressed them as "takes" not news articles.

Cool, so if it's a "take", no need to go to the primary. This will no doubt confuse Federal Farmer even further.

The primary has been established in this thread, these are just context.

As for the latter, what doesn't?

Yes. Most privately owned cars spend 90% of their life just sitting there, wasting space. Car sharing that allows greater productivity from the same asset are the future.

Until now UberX, Lyft, and Sidecar have all just been new takes on taxis. However they are testing out true Ridesharing capabilities that have potential.

http://seattletransitblog.com/2014/08/13/rideshares-are-actually-becoming-rideshares/

The economy is improving, and while it may be true that Millennials aren't buy the latest and greatest TVs, tablets, computers, etc. they still own them.

They aren't buying cars, or even appear interested in buying cars, at nearly the rate of prior generations, even as the economy has improved. Other spending is going up, but not for cars.

Or maybe unlike prior generations Millennials don't see auto-ownership and suburban living as 'freedom'? Is it really that hard for you to accept that? I mean, the opinion polls show it, the data shows, just b/c you don't feel that way doesn't mean other people can't.

That's actually a horrible argument for forcing people to own automobiles as everyone driving out of a city is a recipe for gridlock and gas shortages. There simply isn't the road space for that. Nor the gas supplies.

Hang on ... did somebody advocate doing that?

I mean, it's entirely possible that somebody did and I just missed the post, but...

In this thread? Not sure. But yeah, lots of people believe zoning should be used to force people into auto-dependent lifestyles. Or that building infrastructure for anything but the automobile (or god forbid, reallocating existing roadspace for other uses) is SOCIAL ENGINEERING!!!11!

The last figures I saw indicated that a large number of them don't own TVs. Whether or not that's because they can't afford them, or don't want them I don't know. But the one thing that I remember about making "good money" is that I tended to not pay attention to what I was buying, and would just get things on impulse.

Besides electronic gadgets what are they spending their money on? The two most expensive things people generally spend money on are their home and cars. Are they taking that $20K they'd spend on a car and investing it in a nicer home? Putting it in stocks?

I also know that opinion polls don't necessarily reveal the whole story. For example, if you asked me if I would be interested in owning a brand new car (of any make and model) my response (and this is what's generally only measured by the surveys) would be "no." The reason for this, however, is that I can't afford one. If my income were to increase, I'd certainly change my mind, but as for right now, there's no point in me even thinking about it, since its so far out of my price range. "The map is not the territory." And a survey is only as good as the questions asked on it.

Who's saying that people should be "forced" to own cars? Or that everyone would drive their personal vehicle out of the city in such a disaster situation? If a major city like New York had to be evacuated in a relatively short period of time, say a day, it wouldn't be possible to do it using mass transit alone. There's simply not enough buses, trains, planes, and subways, on hand to accomplish this. Nor does it make economic sense to have so many vehicles just sitting around waiting for such an emergency to handle getting 7 million people out of the city.

Having a mix of evacuation methods also makes it easier on the surrounding areas which have to absorb the evacuees. Instead of them being concentrated in just a few areas (say cities located 100 miles inland), they can spread out over far broader areas. Remember all the bitching that happened in places which held Katrina evacuees, who'd been brought there by the government? It would have been a lot better for everyone involved if they evacuees had been much more widely dispersed. The more methods people have for getting out of an area in a time of disaster, the better.

I'd be interested in seeing those figures. Was it compared to ownership rates of prior generations at the same point in their life as the automobile figures are?

I don't remember, nor do I remember exactly where I saw them. This Daily Fail article is a bit old, but mentions the drop in ownership, particularly among those in the 18-49 demo.

It doesn't give a better breakdown than that, so its impossible to see if there's a steep decline in one portion of that group or not. Millenials are also not moving out on their own as quickly as previous generations, so its possible that they don't have the need for TVs because they're not living on their own.

Presumably, Neilsen has the data, the question is if they make it publicly available to people.

A full 24 hours? Easy. Could probably do it in half that. Current commuter rail service in the NYC region moves almost 1M people a day, and most of that is within only a few hours (AM and PM 'peaks' - people going to and from work). That doesn't include all the buses MTA has as well as Amtrak and other passenger rail service.

I'll keep my car. I don't find being struck by a car on a bike, or sitting next to some smelly bloke on the bus/train appealing.

Riding is much more relaxing for me than driving, on the most part.

Oh, and for a while I had two early 20-somethings living with me. I had Netflix, a PC hooked up to my TV so that they could watch anything on the web on the TV, and often as not, they'd just sit on the couch watching something on their laptop that they easily could have put on my 32" TV and had a better viewing experience, IMHO.

Take a good hard look at this statement, then think about whether it makes economic sense to have all those cars sitting around doing nothing in parking spots 20 hours out of every day. Then think about the other 4 hours, spent in traffic -- that's four hours storing the car on a public road. Is this economic efficiency?

Unless it snows. Or rains too hard. Or it's cold enough to freeze the switches. Or there's a train stalled in a tunnel for no known reason. Or a jumper. Or a water-main break. Or...

That's why ZipCar is flourishing.

Actually, no. During normal operation, the system is moving people to and within the city, so the numbers are misleading in this instance. Assume, for the sake of argument, that the whole subway system during the morning rush hauls 100K people within the city, at no point in time are any of those trains unoccupied, they always have people on them. In an evacuation situation, at least half the time the trains are going to be completely empty as they travel back from where they've dropped their passengers off.

Then you've got the matter of certain subway lines being useless in terms of actually getting people out of the city. They can take them to a point where they can get on a bus, or an Amtrak train, or to one of the airports, but they won't get them out of harm's way.

Not for me, it's not. Well, unless I'm driving though Chinatown. They must give drivers licenses away to those folks, because they fucking suck at driving. And walking. And courtesy.

Its worked pretty well for over a century now. I'm not belittling mass transit, or saying that everyone needs to own a car, but I'm saying we need to have our options as broad as possible for worst case scenarios (which sadly, are looking to be more likely to happen than not).

There are certainly more efficient ways in which we could deal with parking in cities, than we're presently doing, even if we don't expand the number of lots and spaces available. Just replacing the giant asphalt parking lots with underground garages in 90% of the shopping centers would be a huge help.

You didn't read my post. I said COMMUTER RAIL, not subway. I explicitly didn't mention the subway. I'm talking about Commuter Rail service, which is most definitely commuter (and thus peak) oriented.

False. Cities built around the automobile in general have lower life expectancy and quality of life for their citizens, higher per capita pollution and resource consumption, and less economic output than traditional cities.

That is why he made no mention of the subway. Commuter Rail specifically moves people between the city and areas not in the city. Run all trains as express only between downtown stations and the outlying terminal stations, and you can move 8 million people in 24 hours, no problem at all. And this is also true for other cities with well developed commuter rail systems. Boston could move out the 1.5 million day time population, likewise for Philadelphia and Chicago. It is true that few other cities could do it just by rail, but the argument is that if you design a city properly, then an evacuation without significant reliance on private vehicles becomes possible.

At six times normal capacity, with people panicking, and carrying all kinds of crap that they probably shouldn't be, but refuse to leave behind.