You know, this is a systemic issue, not a “stupid politicians being stupid” issue.

You’ve got a population of seniors, people who are getting older and losing their physical mobility, who are less able to walk or bicycle or take public transit than younger and healthier people are - many of whom live in car-dependent subdivisions or in areas with poor public transit, like, say, rural Illinois.

These are people who rely on their cars for grocery shopping and medical appointments and socializing.

These are people, often on fixed incomes, often close to the poverty line, who struggle to afford the fees for rideshares or grocery deliveries.

And you can say “if they can’t pass the test they’re not safe to be on the road” - but from the article:

According to the Illinois Department of Transportation, in 2023 the crash rate for drivers 75 years and older in Illinois was lower than any other age group of legal drivers.

This bill is not about leaving unsafe drivers on the road - it’s about not adding unwarranted scrutiny and not making it harder for an especially car-dependent group of people to continue driving.

And it adds a provision that lets a senior’s family members report them if they believe the senior is no longer safe to drive.

This bill is a response to seniors who are genuinely frightened of losing their right to drive and becoming unable to meet their basic needs - and they have a right to be frightened of that, because we’ve built a system where a lot of people can’t meet their basic needs without driving.

In other words, if you build a system that makes driving necessary, you can’t really blame people for not wanting to lose the right to drive.

Of course it’s satire. I’m kind of shocked how many people don’t recognize it as satire.

I see your argument being brought up all the time - it was especially common a year or two back when the 15 minute city had a moment among conservative conspiracy theorists. “But what about people who like to live in suburbs?” “How dare you force people into filthy crowded crime ridden projects?” “Do you want to live like a poor?”

And my response is, people who don’t want to live in those dense walkable urban communities don’t have to live there.

Even in an idealized sustainable civilization where neighborhoods like the one in the video become the model, there will be other types of communities.

Here’s the thing. Life is a series of tradeoffs.

People want the big home, lots of space, and no neighbors, and also want all the benefits of dense urban centers - jobs, stores, services, community, etc.

And that’s what gave us suburbs, and urban sprawl, and car culture, and unsustainable mass consumption to fuel all those individual daily commutes from the urban center to the suburbs.

Because what we traded for the current American civic model, which lets wealthy people have both big houses and lots of land and all the benefits of densely populated urban centers, was using enormous amounts of land, and energy, and resources of all kinds, to build and maintain unreasonably large sprawling megacities, and the transportation infrastructure for daily commutes, and the fossil fuel infrastructure to fuel all those commutes, and so on and so forth.

But that’s not sustainable. It’d take the resources of four additional Earths for everybody to live like a suburban American. And the more climate change (and the attendant economic upheaval) impacts our resource acquisition and supply chains and so on, the harder it’s going to be to funnel those resources to the cities. The suburban/urban sprawl model is on its way out.

So how does one live in a city and get all the benefits of living in a city while consuming a sustainable amount of resources?

The tradeoff for a sustainable urban community is losing the suburban “bedroom communities” with the big houses and the daily commute and the unsustainable consumption. If you want the benefits of city life you have to actually live in the city.

If you want to live with a ton of space and live sustainably, on the other hand, there are rural communal models that allow that.

But the American car-centric urban sprawl lifestyle has an expiration date. If we don’t give it up willingly, geopolitical realities will put an end to it sooner or later. And accepting we can’t maintain the privileged lifestyle we’re used to is something we’re all going to have to do sooner or later.

But look on the bright side, I bet some politically connected contractors in Oakland made a whole lot of money off building it. That’s called investing in the local economy 😆

I’m not a huge fan of Porter. But between her and Kamala fucking Harris, whose big takeaway from the 2024 election seems to be “we didn’t run far enough to the right…”

I don’t know if I used the right term by saying “surcharge”. They built an extraordinarily expensive trolley line from BART to the airport about ten years back and are charging high fees to cover expenses.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oakland_Airport_Connector

The San Francisco Airport, on the other hand, has an actual surcharge - the main BART line goes direct to SFO but they charge like $5 extra. But SFO also has the same surcharge on taxis and rideshares :/

In case anyone is wondering, a one way trip from Oakland International Airport to the Civic Center station in San Francisco (the stop next to City Hall and the city’s largest open air fent market) is exactly $12.65.

The trip from Oakland to Civic Center is “just” $5.20, but like OP said, there’s a fuckass stupid airport surcharge for the last half mile or so.

That’s the point of the 15 minute city - that is, a city where everything its people need is within a 15 minute walk. People travel less and when they travel they walk or bike. The alternative, in other words, is better city design.