tbh, if you don’t have few million dollars laying around, outside of just taking public transportation and paying for it, there isn’t much you can do financially
what you can do, however, is go to your local city’s planning referendum, or a place where citizens can voice concerns/propose stuff, or your local equivalent to that, and ask about plans for public transportation, if there aren’t any, ask why and explain the benefits, get engaged, bring some friends lol
it’s slow, but this is one of those things where just plunging into the bureaucratic machine is the best way 🤷♀️
You could join a group that aims to get your own neighborhood better urban design. Support people who talk about the subjects, many people just don’t know.
You can’t unfortunately, that battle was fought and lost. Neoliberals crippled the public sector completely by the 1980s ( starve the beast campaign ) and its not coming back. Cities and suburban ecosystems have been designed around the car, and tearing them down and redesigning them around an efficient transport system cannot happen.
tearing them down and redesigning them around an efficient transport system cannot happen
i mean, the progress is painfully slow and difficult bc of corruption (lobbying 🙄), but the primary legislative factor that enabled and perpetuated car centric urbanism (single-family zoning) is slowly being rolled back in many places in north america, and ppl are slowly waking up to the awful consequences of car-centric urbanism, it’s slow, but it’s getting there, slowly
if you look at prices of housing in so called streetcar suburbs (suburbs with reasonable density and mixed-use housing) in north america, you see that there’s a ton of demand, because even if subconsciously, ppl realize that these places are waaaaay more pleasant to live in, so i believe that as single family zoning is going to be rolled back further and further, more and more mixed-use places are going to be built, ppl will want to move there, demand will increase, developers will come etc etc
being pessimistic about it won’t help it 🤷♀️
you’re right in the sense that sprawling places are really hard to fix, but simply legalizing any type of other development will make it all much better going forward, bc right now sprawling car-centric development is literally a pyramid scheme, bc federal loans for new infrastructure are freely available to towns, whereas maintenance is regularly expensive, so that shit expands like cancer, ppl need to stop it immediately
Raising the money seems like only half the task to me – otherwise you could spend your lifetime fundraising, only to see it spent on some trash like Hyperloop (at best: “public transport” that only helps if you already drive a car, at worst: deliberate waste of public transport funds) or the UK’s HS2 (connect commuter dormitories to London 4 minutes quicker by tearing up half the countryside, instead of restoring the 50% of the network that was axed in the 1960s and never came back)…
I think the best use of people’s cash right now would be a high-profile grassroots campaign – like the red car in Norway, or “Stop the Child Murder” in the Netherlands.
If you are able to choose where you live you can choose to live in a location where there is functional public transport.
pulbictransport,pubicpublicahh yeah, thanks for the correction
Proper public transport infrastructure needs huge up-front investment and planning efforts, so it’s nothing you can easily crowd-source or even just do if you had the resources (except maybe for bus lines). If you have time on your hands, you could start lobbying or try to find a ngo that does.
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