As a Eugenian, I was looking for this in the article. I guess it's a potential future extension.
It would be awesome to have high speed rail to Eugene, and I think it'd be the cheapest part to build given the terrain. But I'm not sure a metro population around half a million could serve as a terminal stop.
Cities change over time. We should make sure those changes improve the city.
So which city are we going to tear down and rebuild first?
It's not a good idea to tear down a city and build a new one centraly planned. Don't be Bob Moses. We want gradual, community directed, increases to the density of cities, and we want to stop building new stroads.
We have to come up with some new laws like you can only own a home that's within walking/biking distance of your work.
That's a bad idea. We should just tweak the existing zoning laws to allow high density everywhere, and mandate it in some places.
[Remote work] accomplishes most of what you propose
I strongly disagree. The commute to and from work should not be the only transportation need in a healthy life. People should also visit shops, visit friends, and visit parks. These trips should not require a personal car. Not to mention the large (majority?) number of jobs that absolutely cannot be done remotely.
The pandemic did not cause large changes in uban design, and absolutely did not make streets safer for pedestrians, so I disagree that remote work accomplishes most of my goals.
I'm talking about urban design. If you live on a farm, this doesn't apply to you. However, it does apply to the 98% of people in America who don't live on farms.
if you design a city with the assumption that people won't have cars, you can make it easier to bike and walk to most of the things you need. This kind of urban design is superior to the car centered urban design in that it's cheaper, healthier, safer, and more environmentaly friendly.
Japan's bullet trains have famously never had a fatal crash in it's 59 year history.
This cannot be said of their conventional trains.
I like the idea of paying for internet services, but $5 a month is way too expensive for me.
I don't like the idea of getting answers from a search engine. That gives too much power to the company that runs the search engine. Id prefer to get a variety of links from independent sources.
By hopping around, do you mean changing your account to one on another instance, or viewing a list of communities on an instance, or something else?
I don't feel that changing accounts is necessary because of the magic of federation. But I don't know how to view a list of communities in an instance without leaving your home instance. That would be a cool feature, but is only really important when you're initially picking all your subscriptions.
I don't understand what you mean. Isn't the point of federation that one account on one instance is as good as an account on every instance? I've never felt the need to hop between instances.
I guess we'll have to recycle what we can, and put the rest in a landfill. Just the same as what we do with run down cars today.
I guess recycling will be a bit harder because we will not be using the materials to make new cars.
I think the transition away from cars will be slow enough that this wont be a problem. In the ideal situation, people will just stop replacing their broken down cars.