
SF MUNI expects to lose the majority of its bus lines permanently - AndrewBissell
https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/Muni-will-lose-the-majority-of-its-bus-lines-15383544.php
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rjeli
On iOS reader mode bypasses paywall

“ It may take “public theater” to lure people back to Muni, Tumlin said,
noting that his staff is “literally looking at cleaning products that smell
like bleach.”

“Having our buses smell like cleaning products is pure theater, but may
actually be necessary” to comfort the public, he said.”

Amusingly that would totally work on me!

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throw03172019
So our terrible transportation is about to get worse?

~~~
AndrewBissell
S&P 500 just 10% off its highs though!

~~~
ecf
Isn’t the plan to temporarily prop up stocks by printing trillions of dollars,
then blame it all on the opposing party in power when it inevitably comes
crashing down?

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dredmorbius
The entire logic of cities is commerce, interaction, transport, and exchange,
whether commercially, socially, educationally, culturally, at work, at play,
or in services.

The challenge is that noxious phenomena as well as beneficial ones thrive in
such conditions. It's interesting to chart the topics topping lists of "urban
problems" over the years, decades, and centuries, they're actually quite fluid
and reflect overall trends, growth, decay, and stasis, fairly well.
Transitions over the 20th & 21st centuries, from growth to decline to
revitalisation to gentrification, and now, pandemic, areinstructive.

More critically, one comes to realise that cities don't exist as some ultimate
goal or end of all human progress, but as a dynamic balance between anabolic
and catabolic forces: the capacity to increase production or imports of vital
materials, the interactive benefits of increased interchange, and the ability
to both remove and exclude noxious substances and agents, of all descriptions.

Agriculture created the first cities, but hygiene acts as the brake on
size.[1] The modern metropolis, with early examples of London, Paris, and New
York, were the result of managing both waste streams (principally solid and
liquid, thouggh also atmospheric and industrial), public health, and modern
policing and crime-fighting.

Public transit haas been essential to supporting flows and densities, with
street busses, streetcars, and subways critical to moving the masses of people
between factories, offices, retail, education, and other service
esstablishments. (Trades, construction, and service work often being
excceptions). The de-densified, automobile-based, suburban-sprawl concept has
beentried, but results in congestion, smog, trafffic accidents, and vast
parking and street overhead (30%+ in most areas).

The key question to me is what the post-covid world's infectious-disease
dynamic looks like. Does Covid "just disappear"? Is it one in which SARS-COV-2
itself is endemic, much as rhinovirus, influenza, hepatitis, and HIV are? Is
this the first (or only most notably recently successful) of a new age of
frequent novel emerging diseases sweeping the globe every few years?[2] Or
only an, in retrospect, not _especially_ dangerous pathogen of the sort which
seems to sweep the world at 50-100 year intervals or so?[3]

That question hinges on whether disease is a largely exogenous environmental
occurrence, or a co-symbiant of human activities and behaviours, co-emerging
with them. My view leans toward the latter, based on both evolutionary
arguments and historical evidence --- see Kyle Harper's _The Fate of Rome_ for
an excellent argument that civilisations and their diseases co-evolve.[4]

________________________________

Notes:

1\. Almost certainly a generalisable proposition of any networked system. As
Tilly and Odlyzko note, network _benefits_ accrue as n * log(n) of nodes, a
decreasing though positive factor. If we assume an average network _cost_
funtion of a fixed value per node at any one time --- call it an
inconvenience, friction, or hygiene factor, net value becomes:

    
    
       n * log(n) - k*n
    

The effective size of a. network is then governed by the costant _k_.

Which, as noted, is (on average) the same for all nodes (with some good basis
for this),but not necessarily constant for the network _over time_. As hygiene
methods and practices improve, _k_ is reduced, but as noxious. vehaviours and
phenomena evolve, _k_ _my_ be increased. Thinking or planning that _k_ is
fixed in time is a critical error.

2\. Looking back, COVID-19 seems to fit a trend of frequent novel respiratory
illnesses dating to at least the 1990s: SARS, MERS, H1N1, bird and swine flus.
More broadly, AIDS, Zika, hepatitis variants, MRSA, and other infections have
become prevalent since the 1970s. Many viral, though bacterial infections,
increasingly with antibiotic resistance, are prominant as well.

3\. By some measures, Covid-19 is not _hugely_ infectious or deadly, said
_not_ to minimise risks, but to note that its enormous enduring global
economic impacts _could be far worse for a more formidable disease_. I'm
mindful that full and long-term impacts remain largely unknown. Uncertainty is
itself a major risk factor in novel disease.

4\.
[https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691166834/th...](https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691166834/the-
fate-of-rome)

