I am currently ~400 pages into the Power Broker. I was motivated to pick it up again by a "read along" with Roman Mars from the 99% Invisible podcast. He's spacing out the book over the course of a year and interviewing fellow Caro fans and recapping major portions of the book. Never been a better time to tackle the beast! I am not sure I'll ever read a better biography in my life. At least, not until I read the Lyndon Johnson books.
Thank you for your incredible book Cliff. I found a copy when I was in high school about ten years ago and it changed my trajectory. It got me into hacking and tinkering with computers and led me to a career I love today. I always make a point of loaning my copy to anyone I see who was my age then with an interest in computers.
And thank you for your kind note -- the technology in the book feels antique today, but I suspect that many infosec people recognize both the story and my attitudes. Best wishes to you in your computing career!
Same. I don’t know where I’d be without it honestly. But certainly not where I am. It was the first and only thing that ever really clicked for me. Only I found it back in the early 2000s. Quite how I found it, I’ll never remember, but I found it at a dark time in my life and it had a profound impact then, through now.
Thanks, oh Shackleford. Dark times (in life, at night, or during an eclipse) can lead to remarkable observations and insights. I'm honored that m'book played a part in your own story.
A good chunk of southeastern Manhattan is dramatically underserved by public transit, despite what the MTA's map would have you believe.
I'm talking about from the Seaport all the way up to Alphabet City. I hope you've got strong legs.
Tangentially, this is one of the reasons that nearly-invisible corners of Manhattan like the eastern end of Cherry St and Water St still have serious crime problems today.
Honestly that whole stretch between Smith Houses and Vladeck Houses is pretty fucked.
If you are living in a place that forces you into car ownership as a means of transportation, then you are receiving a subsidy in the form of the infrastructure that enables car dependent city planning. You're also compelled to own a car, which is enormously expensive, getting even more expensive, and is probably the thing you do on a regular basis which is most likely to kill you. Sprawl is expensive, and so is car ownership.
Upvote; People complain about a congestion tax -- or traffic -- or bad roads. But they don't think about policy when when a car costs ~30% of a median salary, when insurance is "required", expensive (and part is because some choose not to afford insurance while driving a car). Beyond that car / driving enforcement is a drain on police preventing more dangerous crime, a top entry point of harassment and escalation by police, a drain on District Attorneys and the courts from enforcing other crime.
> If you are living in a place that forces you into car ownership as a means of transportation, then you are receiving a subsidy in the form of the infrastructure that enables car dependent city planning.
It costs more to build a road that supports a bus than it does to build a road that only supports cars. OTOH, the roads also need to support fire engines, so there's that. Certainly stores devote more real estate to parking than they would if I didn't live in a car dependent infrastructure, but I'm paying for that in some way or another.
Otherwise, what infrastructure do you think I'm getting subsidized? I don't have muni water or sewer, and the power and telco utilities certainly pass along their costs to me.
> Otherwise, what infrastructure do you think I'm getting subsidized?
The city you drive into is subsidizing your ability to drive into the city, the space to park in the city (which could be used for more housing), paying the cost of your emissions and noise, so that you can live a cheaper life in an area that's generally more expensive to sustain per-capita.
> I don't have muni water or sewer, and the power and telco utilities certainly pass along their costs to me.
The power and telcos generally do not pass these costs onto you. The costs are spread across the entire user-base, and it's more expensive to support you because it's more infrastructure for less people. Streets/roads/highways are also generally subsidized.
Suburbs and extreme white-flight areas are heavily subsidized by cities, especially if you're commuting into them for work. If the costs of sustaining your living situation were truly passed onto you, you wouldn't be able to afford to live there.
> It costs more to build a road that supports a bus than it does to build a road that only supports cars.
This isn’t true and it’s also missing a bigger point: you need many more lanes for cars than buses. That space is not providing economic value and has to be subsidized using general fund revenue when it could be used by businesses or for housing.
Busses weigh a lot more than most cars, and require a better prepared road bed if you want the road to last. If it's just private light duty vehicles, you can build to a much lower standard; gravel roads are perfectly servicable for cars, but will suffer heavy wear from frequent busses. Road preparation is especially important where many busses are expected to stop and wait for long periods of time, bus stops are often built to an even higher standard.
In the city I live in, nearly all roads are one lane in each direction. Even if we had a lot more busses, I don't see how we would have fewer lanes. If we had a lot less traffic, one lane roads could work.
The minimum infrastructure for busses is more than the minimum infrastructure for cars. Although, if you're getting municipal roads, it makes sense to build them to standards so you can use busses.
This thread is about one of the largest cities in North America and that’s the context of my comment: if gravel roads are an alternative you’re not looking at congestion tolls, and you already need to build the roads to handle things like trucks.
Re: lanes, yes, rural areas are different but if you look around suburban or urban environments there are a ton of 4-8 lane roads, complex interchange ramps, etc. which exist only because people drive solo and the resulting congestion leads to a massive amount of dedicated space. If you count the number of people on a given block, it’s usually an amount which will fit on a single bus. This is really eye-opening if you’ve ever driven in New Jersey where there are these huge congested roads full of cars and a single train goes by with more people than every car in eyesight.
That was someone else, but I think the point of comparison was the New Jersey and Connecticut suburbs whose drivers are affected by this change rather than rural drivers. Those kind of places are where you see such a large amount of the local budget going to road construction and maintenance because they have the combination of high population and limited transit options.
What are you talking about? The roads in my city are paid for my taxes remitted to the city. I guess you could call that a subsidy but that's also just known as being paid for by taxes. And if you're in an area where everyone needs a car to get around then there's no argument that drivers are mooching off the tax revenue of non-drivers. I swear people are so salty about roads when they don't drive but nobody complains about public schools when they went to private.
Owning a car isn't enormously expensive except in online discussions where people quote the MSRP of $year+1 models and act like folks making minimum wage are actually paying that. My primary car is a 2012 Honda Fit that was $6000 when I bought it at 30k miles and is now pushing 120k. I bought it in cash, but the monthly payment with insurance would have been 15% of my rent.
The city also has to pay for utility lines, which are much more expensive in suburban sprawl than the urban center. Also, zoning laws make it more expensive to build apartments, so you really only get single-family houses in the suburbs and apartments in the inner city. If you use property taxes to pay for infrastructure, the inner-city residents (living in apartments, and likely poorer) are paying most of the money for infrastructure they never use.
This isn't even moving the goalposts, this is switching to water polo. You don't get to tally every cost of suburbia and then say that's the cost of people driving cars. The argument doesn't apply to someone who lives in a city and drives a car nor someone who lives in a rural town who drives a car.
You're really just arguing that suburbia is a drain on city budgets and I can agree with that, it's a drain on a lot of things. I think the reason it persists and gets special treatment is because a significant number of people consider it the goal and see themselves moving out of the city eventually.
But more generally people get so stuck in the idea that tax dollars will be spent on things that aren't for you. Am I the weird one that's unbothered by this? If your vegan you're paying for meat and dairy subsidies you don't use, if you don't have kids you're paying for schools you don't use, if your house is all electric you're paying for gas subsidies you don't use, if you're not outdoorsy you're paying for parks you don't use, if you're acab you're paying for police you don't want, if you believe that caging people is immoral you're paying for whole prison systems you don't want.
Most Americans do not drive solely on city/town roads, we rather frequently take highways and interstates which are federally subsidized - not mostly paid for by city taxes.
You or your city may be exceptions, you might drive only on city roads, but the parent comment's point about subsidies is broadly correct.
I don't think anyone here is under the impression that government subsidies don't come from taxes. The criticism above is that subsidies skew the observed relative prices of transport at the point of use.
Yes, but I think the poster's point was that their locality maintained the roads using tax dollars collected from the locality - i.e. their local roads are sustainable system.
All US dollars are created by the US government, the ability of the US government to create valuable dollars comes from the tax base, so of course everything eventually goes back to taxes.
Hugely agree on transit access to the airport, but it has gotten somewhat better. The GCT Madison connection has enabled another connection to Jamaica for the JFK AirTrain alongside LIRR and the E-train. And no longer do you need a separate MetroCard, as the Port Authority has finally modernized with contactless payments.
And the Q60 bus serving LGA also couldn't be easier. It picks up from a clearly designated spot on the lower level and drops you off right at Jackson Heights for E and 7 access. Could there be a direct rail connection a la O'Hare? Yes, and there should be.
Great, now expand it to all of Manhattan, instead of just 60th and below.
And while they're at it, build the QueensLink so people actually take transit instead of just turning it into a park so that it can never be built.
It boggles my mind how unable NYC seems to be able to invest it its largest comparative advantage to every other city in the country: its density and transit access.
If you're referring to the number of folks who work in the central business district of Manhattan but have no choice but to drive (given the enormous catchment area of MTA services), that number is vanishingly small, and congestion pricing does have low income discounts.
If you're referring to those who drive taxis or cars-for-hire in Manhattan, yes, the idea is the cost should be borne by riders who choose those services instead of transit.
There is no "CBD" in Manhattan. It's a made up term created for this program to make the pill less bitter. Let's be real, it's half the fucking island and where mostly everyone in the city works and shops. That's no small number.
It's everyone making deliveries to those businesses. It's every one doing manual labor jobs requiring tools. It's city workers on low salaries who have to live so far out in the boroughs where the MTA isn't even a good option to get to work anymore. The whole FDNY is losing their shit over this congestion pricing in particular because it hits them fairly hard.
> There is no "CBD" in Manhattan. It's a made up term created for this program to make the pill less bitter. Let's be real, it's half the fucking island and where mostly everyone in the city works and shops. That's no small number.
But it's not half of the city. NYC is more than Manhattan.
I'm sure all the plumblers, electricians, etc (the people who actually do the hard work of making the city actually function) are taking all their tools and materials around town on the buses and subways.
This also assumes that Amazon never gives up the ghost and finds ways to make sideloading books onto Kindle more difficult than it currently is.
I've always been surprised that they haven't cracked down on it, given the relative ease with which you can circumvent the necessity of the Kindle store for the majority of popular titles. Simply load up Calibre, pop almost any file type into your library, and away you go. We're really living in the Limewire age for e-book piracy, even if we don't realize it.
My guess is, someone has run the math and figured out that it's better to keep people on a Kindle device and occasionally spending a few dollars, in exchange for the slow death of physical media and legitimate alternatives. When those become less readily available, then perhaps you can begin to boil the frog.
You can be sure I won't buy a kindle if I can't sideload onto it. I buy at least 5/6 new hardcover books a year from local independent retailers to support authors I like. I wish more authors would allow an e-book copy to be distributed with hardcovers they sell. Do what vinyl did.
What makes you think replacements haven't filled the gap left by W.CD? The community is definitely not as fun or interesting, but it's definitely done the job for me.
W.CD had everything. Literally (almost) everything. But the replacements are not even close to it. So unless you’re from a certain geography and looking for a certain language you’re just out of luck.
And community is downright, well, let’s not get into that.
While what happened itself was less than ideal, I'd be curious if there are any more detailed explanations other than this account of what exactly happened, and how the issue was resolved. I'll certainly be on the lookout for more posts in this series.
It's like a little bit like engineering "competency porn", but I enjoy stories like this. I read The Phoenix Project a few years ago, and while it was fictionalized and a heavy handed introduction to Agile and DevOps (I'm a data analyst so it was new to me), I liked it, and would like to read anything similar, if anyone has any recommendations.
Dickerson quickly established the rules, which he posted on a wall just outside the control center.
Rule 1: “The war room and the meetings are for solving problems. There are plenty of other venues where people devote their creative energies to shifting blame.”
Rule 2: “The ones who should be doing the talking are the people who know the most about an issue, not the ones with the highest rank. If anyone finds themselves sitting passively while managers and executives talk over them with less accurate information, we have gone off the rails, and I would like to know about it.” (Explained Dickerson later: “If you can get the managers out of the way, the engineers will want to solve things.”)
Rule 3: “We need to stay focused on the most urgent issues, like things that will hurt us in the next 24–48 hours.”
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