I kinda feel like we're all gonna die
Tonight I've been thinking a lot about the American transit fiscal cliff and it kinda makes me wanna stick my head in the blender.
When American transit systems were built, they were designed predominantly around people commuting from the suburbs to downtown for work. Over the years, cities have grown a lot faster than the transit lines, and densities in those peripheral areas have gone down. We can't expand transit out to all those areas -- first, because America can't build jack shit anymore for a variety of bureaucratic and political and economic reasons, and also because public transit becomes increasingly ineffective in less dense places.
A hundred years go by. Public transit systems rely on a mix of federal, state, & local funding, plus fares from riders for their funding. Fares only recoup some of the funding, due to both low ridership and intentional public policies. But that's OK, because transit is a public service like the roads are. The pandemic hits, everyone goes inside, and when we all come out again, a big portion of the workforce is working from home. Especially the white collar professionals who want to go downtown. Ridership goes down, transit authorities run out of money.
Simultaneously, rural Republicans are becoming... stressed. They see cities growing and state demographics getting more and more blue. They vote to cut off state-level funding to transit systems, and call these transit systems unsustainable. With nowhere to turn for revenue, the transit systems cut service and raise fares.
While all of this is happening, oil reserves are plummeting due to the war in Iran. Streets are overflowing with traffic as it is. Cars are only getting more expensive and tariffs pummel buyers at the dealerships. The way things are going, navigating your local area is going to be increasingly fucking impossible no matter how you do it. And when people can't get around, what happens to the few small businesses still standing?
Normally I like to imagine that things like this can have simple policy solutions, but it seems like what we're dealing with is this decades-long cascade of increasingly entrenched problems that are never going away. Even if we could fund the transit agencies, we can't fix the fact that the routes are arranged for a bygone era. And even if we could re-route them, we can't fix the fact that nobody goes outside anymore. Everyone spends 60 hours a day scrolling on TikTok instead of going to a local smoothie bar or whatever. You would need a massive, civilizational effort for decades and decades to fix it.
We're not actually going to die. We're just going to wilt like a malnourished plant. And that's what life will be like for the rest of my lifetime, just watching good things slip between our fingertips.
When American transit systems were built, they were designed predominantly around people commuting from the suburbs to downtown for work. Over the years, cities have grown a lot faster than the transit lines, and densities in those peripheral areas have gone down. We can't expand transit out to all those areas -- first, because America can't build jack shit anymore for a variety of bureaucratic and political and economic reasons, and also because public transit becomes increasingly ineffective in less dense places.
A hundred years go by. Public transit systems rely on a mix of federal, state, & local funding, plus fares from riders for their funding. Fares only recoup some of the funding, due to both low ridership and intentional public policies. But that's OK, because transit is a public service like the roads are. The pandemic hits, everyone goes inside, and when we all come out again, a big portion of the workforce is working from home. Especially the white collar professionals who want to go downtown. Ridership goes down, transit authorities run out of money.
Simultaneously, rural Republicans are becoming... stressed. They see cities growing and state demographics getting more and more blue. They vote to cut off state-level funding to transit systems, and call these transit systems unsustainable. With nowhere to turn for revenue, the transit systems cut service and raise fares.
While all of this is happening, oil reserves are plummeting due to the war in Iran. Streets are overflowing with traffic as it is. Cars are only getting more expensive and tariffs pummel buyers at the dealerships. The way things are going, navigating your local area is going to be increasingly fucking impossible no matter how you do it. And when people can't get around, what happens to the few small businesses still standing?
Normally I like to imagine that things like this can have simple policy solutions, but it seems like what we're dealing with is this decades-long cascade of increasingly entrenched problems that are never going away. Even if we could fund the transit agencies, we can't fix the fact that the routes are arranged for a bygone era. And even if we could re-route them, we can't fix the fact that nobody goes outside anymore. Everyone spends 60 hours a day scrolling on TikTok instead of going to a local smoothie bar or whatever. You would need a massive, civilizational effort for decades and decades to fix it.
We're not actually going to die. We're just going to wilt like a malnourished plant. And that's what life will be like for the rest of my lifetime, just watching good things slip between our fingertips.
