I think OP is on to something here. In particular the study design makes it hard to tease out issues specific to common knowledge verses anchoring or bias towards ones own knowledge. Notably each individual's information set makes B look worse than A or C.
I think the study would have been more compelling if the common knowledge favored A and C but each individual's total knowledge was neutral between the A,B and C. If results favored not B in that set up it would indicate that folks were specifically anchoring on the common knowledge itself rather than anchoring on their initial hypothesis.
What concretely changed after a year at the gym? Like did you get far more dating app matches? Were cold approaches in a public or social setting better received? Did women start approaching you when they didn't beforehand?
Wikipedia disagrees. Example: "In 1996, a federal jury ordered the city to pay a $1.5 million civil suit judgment to survivor Ramona Africa and relatives of two people killed in the bombing." The police commissioner was also forced to resign.
Presumably the lack of any contextualizing verbage. Like zero effort to connect the evidence presented with the assertion.
Notably the evidence presented has plain gaps. Consider the second link: "Goldstein's attorneys were unable to argue for protection under the First Amendment because the Supreme Court had ruled in 1915 that movies lacked such protection. (That ruling was overturned in 1952.)" That final parenthetical is critical because it suggests that a modern court would not rule the same way the court did in 1915 given similar facts.
To be clear, I don't have enough context to evaluate the merits of the statement in full just noting why it may have come across as glib and hence downvoted.
Companies like making money and historically class action lawsuits have made it easier for employees or customers to cut into profit margins based on wrongful action by the company. The incentive to join a class action suite was less than each individual filing there own case. Hence the dislike
But, as the article perhaps alludes to, the tide may be changing on that due to legal industry automation. If law firms can file nearly identical lawsuites at scale then the incentives can again favor consumers and employees. This may not have happened in this particular case due to courts being unable to scale, but it has happened to companies like DoorDash. See https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.latimes.com/business/story/...
> parking is probably private lots owned by the employer, not street parking. Picture a standard office park.
But this is still subsidized because regulations mandate that buildings have lots of parking. These regulations are typically quite extreme with requirements intended to support the 99.999% demand case (think peak hour of black friday) conditional on a parking price of $0. Most developments build the minimum amount of parking they can by law suggesting this isn't a free market outcome.
So if you want to have business you have to provide tons of parking and make up for it with higher prices for your goods and services. This subsidizes vehicle driving over other modes a transport. Especially so because giant parking lots make it harder to reach the store front by foot.
The standard solution to this is called an easement, which basically means I own the air rights over your property so that I can ensure my views are unobstructed.
Getting rid of the idea of owning the neighbors airspace entails figuring out how to fairly allocate easements that generally don't currently exist because of legacy reasons.
The issue (from a government perspective) with easements as opposed to zoning is that cities won't profit (as much) off the sale of easements. Governments make a lot of money from development, and they're not about to give it up.
> These things only work for some of the residents (predominately younger residents without families).
Leaving aside the fact that seeing families on buses is not remotely uncommon, the same statement could be said of automobile modes. Those who can't legally drive (which probably constitutes a quarter of the US population) along with those too poor to afford automobiles are at least partially excluded from the benefits of automobile infrastructure. Given current technology, a transportation system for everyone needs to facilitate the use of a variety of modes, even if no particular mode serves everyone.
> And those parts of Chicago suffer economically for it.
Do you have any data for that? Most of the literature suggests that the provision of free parking reduces economic prosperity. The simple theoretical explanation is that parking should be provided at cost, just like most goods and services. But there is also empirical evidence to back this up. For instance when Old Pasadena raised street parking rates in the early nineties to deal with a dearth of parking in their commercial district: "The cities sales tax revenue tripled within the first year."* That's one anecdote, but consider googling Donald Shoup for more literature and data.
There are two additional theoretical benefits to using pricing to adequately supply parking. First, it favors persons who value their time relatively more than their money, which are exactly the kind of people who tend to buy stuff in stores. And two, increased parking rates can increase turnover, which in turn increases total sales. For more info on the importance of turnover, check out this SNL sketch: http://www.nbc.com/saturday-night-live/video/the-olympia-res...
*Speck, J. (2012). Walkable city: How downtown can save America, one step at a time. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. (see page 134 for the quote on Google books).
Actually it isn't that hard. The land value is simply the property value minus the value of the depreciated physical capital (buildings etc.) on it (LV = PV - K). This calculation is already done in the market in order to determine the size of a home owners insurance policy. Property tax values aren't ideally precise, but are already common enough that replacing them with and land value tax wouldn't greatly impact tax code precision.
To address your more general critique, it might be better said that you are paying a location tax as opposed to a land tax. Specific locations have particular value and until we develop hand of god technology, putting multiple units of land in a given location will be impossible. So land vs. location is really just a semantic difference.
You either didn't read my entire comment or chose to talk past it. I said that the result of your calculation (LV = PV - K) actually still includes the value of improvements adjacent to or near the property. The value of some improvements bleed across property lines.
As such, that result still represents the improved value of land.
Roads increase the value of lands adjacent to the road, even if they are not on the land itself. Parks and greenways increase the value of land within a certain distance. Schools increase value. Shopping centers increase value. Police stations, fire protection stations, restaurants, theaters, museums, public transportation, and other improvements all affect the value of living near those improvements. There is even some value in living next door to an expensive-looking house rather than a shabby one, or an abandoned, empty lot.
I contend that if you factor out all those improvements-by-proximity--if you erect a magical barrier that prevents all human influence from passing it--the inherent value of a hectare in a city or suburb is about the same, or perhaps less, than a hectare in the middle of a cornfield--a field without an irrigation system, and far from any roads.
For the most part, the inherent value in land is as a place to put the improvements.
A location tax does not encourage efficient land use (by discouraging inefficient use). It discourages living closer to other people, which itself is a more efficient use of land. When home is where you hang your hat, people gather around the hatracks. As long as you are taxing desirable location rather than land area, you are addressing the movement of the people rather than the use of the limited resource.
If high-density housing is a more efficient use of land than low-density housing (a rhetorical conditional), then it is counterproductive to tax people for being closer together in more efficient cities, rather than less-efficient suburbs.
The theory is that people will drive more carefully if they perceive the roadway to be more dangerous. That is not the same as it actually being more dangerous.
Moreover, road safety is not fixed but rather dependent on the speed at which drivers drive on the road. Thus, if a roadway design causes drivers to drive slower on road B as opposed to road A, road B may be safer even if it would be less safe than road A if people drove the same speeds on both roadways. There is nothing particularly counter intuitive about this type of theory at all.
Also perceived danger to oneself doesn't take into account the risk one poses to others. This issue of externalities is what makes these 12 foot lanes so dangerous. As noted in the article, if drivers are driving slower, they are far less likely to kill or seriously injure pedestrians. And since F = (.5)mv^2 this is exactly what we'd hypothesize. Pedestrians are a non-issue on the rural highways that the 12 foot lane and other state road design measures are based on. But in the middle of a dense city, higher speeds, even if they aren't any less safe for the drivers, are far less safe for pedestrians and cyclists, not to mention far more unpleasant to be around. It is this concept, more than anything else, that traffic engineers are so often obtuse to.
And driver-less cars will have to be able to navigate the existing 10-foot lane roads anyways to be commercially viable, so I don't see how that is an issue.
> The theory is that people will drive more carefully if they perceive the roadway to be more dangerous. That is not the same as it actually being more dangerous.
Without the expectation that people will compensate for it, making the lanes narrower does make it actually more dangerous. There will be less space between each vehicle and less space between the vehicle and pedestrians on the side of the road, which reduces the amount of space available to avoid an obstruction, the amount of reaction time available to avoid a collision, etc.
> Also perceived danger to oneself doesn't take into account the risk one poses to others.
That is a counterargument to your position. If drivers aren't bearing the full risk then an increase in risk should cause them to undercompensate, not overcompensate.
> And driver-less cars will have to be able to navigate the existing 10-foot lane roads anyways to be commercially viable, so I don't see how that is an issue.
It is possible to be less safe without being negligent and that difference is still measured in human lives.
> making the lanes narrower does make it actually more dangerous.
I think you're being downvoted in part because the linked article refutes your viewpoint. There's even a pullquote saying "States and counties believe that wider lanes are safer. And in this belief, they are dead wrong." Followed up in the text by "Or, to be more accurate, they are wrong, and thousands of Americans are dead."
And "The lane widths in the analyses conducted were generally either not statistically significant or indicated that narrower lanes were associated with lower rather than higher crash frequencies."
That's not a refutation, it's a contradiction. The evidence offered is not sufficient to actually prove the assertions. In particular, those crash frequencies need to be normalized against the reduced capacity in order to be a meaningful comparison. If narrowing the road decreases crashes because fewer people are using the road, you don't have a safer road, just less road, and you may have merely shifted the crashes to alternative routes. On the other hand, if narrowing the lanes makes people drive more carefully without significantly constricting flow, that's a real result that deserves to be stated clearly.
I chose my words carefully. The quote in the article is in turn a quote from http://trb.metapress.com/content/x7854w1160551331/ . The article links to that publication. The abstract of that publication says:
> This research investigated the relationship between lane width and safety for roadway segments and intersection approaches on urban and suburban arterials. The research found no general indication that the use of lanes narrower than 3.6 m (12 ft) on urban and suburban arterials increases crash frequencies. This finding suggests that geometric design policies should provide substantial flexibility for use of lane widths narrower than 3.6 m (12 ft). The inconsistent results suggested increased crash frequencies with narrower lanes in three specific design situations. Narrower lanes should be used cautiously in these three situations unless local experience indicates otherwise.
It it turn builds on, for example, results by Hauer, et al, Strathman et al. which appear.
You then raised another objection, which is, I believe, that a 10' lane causes people to use alternate routes because of decreased capacity on those lanes, so there are simply fewer people on the 10' lane roads to cause accidents.
This may well be. It's a subtle network effect that is hard to analyze, and not covered in this article. (The article does comment that capacity is unchanged, but I think its literature citations are weak. It quotes Petritsch who in turn quotes a summary of an unpublished literature search.)
However, your objection is not what was refutated. AnthonyMouse proposes that narrowing lanes lead to a higher accident rate since it "reduces the amount of space available to avoid an obstruction, the amount of reaction time available to avoid a collision, etc." While true for country roads, those above papers show that the same correlation can not be identified on city roads.
Now, what I know is only from this article, and it may be that the author cherry-picked the few papers which show that the 'reaction time' hypothesis is unsupported by the evidence. But "refute" means "to deny the accuracy or truth of", and certainly the article refuted that hypothesis.
> And "The lane widths in the analyses conducted were generally either not statistically significant or indicated that narrower lanes were associated with lower rather than higher crash frequencies."
And this is the problem. "Not statistically significant" means that the effect is very small. This is what you would expect if narrower lanes make driving more dangerous but then drivers compensate by being more careful; they approximately cancel each other out. The author is making much hay out of the possibility that drivers might be not only compensating but overcompensating for the reduction in safety, theoretically causing a (small) net increase in safety.
The fallacy of this is that intentional danger is not the only possible way to increase driver vigilance. As one example, we could promote self-driving cars. That allows us to capture a much larger safety increase because the increase doesn't have to be weighed down by the counterbalancing cost of having narrower lanes and less room to maneuver.
As a quibble, "not statistically significant" means "cannot tell if there was an effect, either positive or negative, because it's smaller than the noise." The only difference is that one can't use it to argue that it 'theoretically [caused] a (small) net increase in safety'.
You use the phrase "intentional danger". The flip side is that "illusory safety." A 12' lane may feel safer even though it actually isn't. But it feels like you stress the "intentional danger" part when the label is irrelevant - the questions are the number and severity of crashes, of human injury, of overall traffic capacity, etc. How one labels the emotional aspect of the driver's internal state isn't relevant to the outcomes.
Also, as secabeen pointed out, driver vigilance isn't the only concern. To add another one 12' of road surface is simply more expensive to repair, clean, and replace than 10' of surface.
Regarding self-driving cars - sure, but how does that change anything in the next 10-20 years of road design? The underlying factors won't change unless a large percentage of vehicles are self-driving. You might as well argue that enforcing a 10mph speed limit would be safer as well, as another example of a solution which, even though correct should it occur, won't affect anyone's planning now.
Right, but you're missing the author's point. Smaller lanes make the space feel more human-scale and friendly to pedestrians and bikers. Traffic engineers argue that larger lanes are safer. These studies show there is no evidence of that. Given that smaller lanes are more appealing, and have no measurable impact on safety, the trend towards larger lanes should be reversed, and smaller lanes implemented on new roads.
I think the study would have been more compelling if the common knowledge favored A and C but each individual's total knowledge was neutral between the A,B and C. If results favored not B in that set up it would indicate that folks were specifically anchoring on the common knowledge itself rather than anchoring on their initial hypothesis.