9 Comments

Interesting read! The series "The Good Place" was based on an interesting take on Heaven/Hell in a similar vein.

It's a tough line between market demands and government regulation. I think we need a little of both, and sometimes we need regulations to nudge us towards a future we never imagined possible. I wrote about that this weekend when it comes to greatly reducing smoking over the course of a few decades: https://heathracela.substack.com/p/can-we-solve-this

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Cool!

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Seems like a distorted (maybe intentionally, maybe altered by memory in the pre-VCR age) version of a Twilight Zone episode: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Game_of_Pool_(The_Twilight_Zone,_1959)

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Ha, that is probably it!

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Actually, I think it's a mix of that one and this one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Nice_Place_to_Visit

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So how did you end up getting to the steak house?

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I've been writing about the want-vs-need issue a lot recently. It's a big thing that planners & engineers aren't used to thinking about. They just roll with "community engagement," not thinking deeper. You can rarely serve both public interest (what they want) and public good (what they need).

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I kinda don't like either of your concepts for addressing this. To boil your first example down, it's essentially "I know what's best for everyone" which is true for literally any politico--a city councilman isn't passing laws that only affect people that agree with him! It's universally true and so of little value to mention. To suggest a solution to a societal problem is to suggest that you know what's best for everyone. There's also some implied subtlety, which just comes across as the now-debunked theory on nudges.

I think your second concept of how to talk about parking minimums also misses the point--small business owners are the first to think they need parking minimums. This [https://findingspress.org/article/24497-local-business-perception-vs-mobility-behavior-of-shoppers-a-survey-from-berlin] study, in particular, I remember reading about (esp interesting given it's non-USA and in Berlin, an environment with much less reliance on cars!). I think it also generally sounds like a workshopped Third Way talking point (that is: "government intervention is bad" is accepted as true, a far from uniform opinion within the cities where a parking minimum would be decided).

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Well, to your second point, the context was storefronts that sit empty or underutilized *because the cost of complying with the parking minimum is so high.* In that town there is no parking issue at all, even Main Street's street parking rarely fills up. I think business owners and prospective owners especially would take different views on this.

But my point is that changing these regulations means giving people more options and flexibility, not telling them exactly how to do things. We probably have different audiences, but one of the number one objections I hear is "you don't like cars" or "you want to tell us how to live" or some such.

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