Convenience über alles!

When you start with a town square that really is an irregular pentagon things go to hell in a hurry. Then you have to remember the Back Bay really was a bay and the Fens a tidal marsh. Even the Fens got redone when they dammed the Charles and it went from brackish to fresh water.

It adds charm. I enjoyed walking around the town when I had work in the area. 'Walking is the operant word. I'd drive down from NH Sunday night and park the car, only retrieving it to drive home Friday afternoon.

Cash for Clunkers? That worked so well. It was a windfall for people who could afford a new car which they probably would have bought anyway. It raised the price of used cars screwing the people who couldn't afford going up-market and hurt the charitable donation programs. At the end of the day there was a very minor increase in fuel economy.

As irony, my '86 pickup which has a very rudimentary ECU and couldn't pass a CA smog test on a bet wasn't eligible -- it was too old.

Would the firearms program mean I could trade in my 80 year old bolt action rifle for a shiny new AR?

You could do like Denver -- lay out the *grid* along the Platte, then decide that a compass points orientation would be smarter!

There's really no need to drive *in* Boston as public transit and other livery services abound. Moreso than many other metro areas.

And, the region is relatively dense. E.g., the core metro area would fit

If you're patient... The evening hours have sparse service. One company I worked for was on Memorial Dr. near Western and I had an apartment in Allston. Walking was faster than messing with public transportation. Another time I lived in Somerville on Winter Hill and if I did anything in the evening in Boston or Cambridge walking was much faster. I guess the Green Line finally got there. Ditto when I lived on Beacon Hill and was working at the old Schrafft factory in Sullivan Square.

Sometimes I'd go exploring and take the Green Line out to Cleveland Circle or another terminus and walk back but I never depended on it for transportation.

I didn't say there was no value. Gun sales are already restricted to some degree or another everywhere in the US, but in many of those places the laws that are on the books aren't enforced that well to begin with. Gun owners seem to be pretty much universally in favor of universal background checks and restricting sale to felons, people considered dangerously mentally ill, etc.

But as for singling out certain guns for special treatment, with 400 million of all types in circulation, yeah, I think it's a bit late to hope turning off a small part of the tap will help much.

And the mass shooter who buys their guns only a few days before their shooting is somewhat uncommon, most have already owned guns or had them available for months or years. These people aren't mass shooters until they pull the trigger, if they acquired their guns legally they're just "legal gun owners" before that, same as any other, and the guns they own are just part of the set of "the many out there" same as anyone else's.

Last I checked new cars are only getting more expensive and BEVs tend to be more expensive than most. Is this a trend you foresee as changing? I can't say I'm confident this will change anytime soon. Meanwhile 50% of the population is dead broke, 25% is afraid of ending up that way and the other 25% doesn't have a big problem with paying for $5 gas.

Like being silly? No I think there's been a concerted effort by government and industry to push climate change off on the individual and make it one more bullshit Puritan personal-responsibility kind of thing, like you'd better go buy one now or you're a bad person, while those guys f*ck around like business-as-usual and the US military dumps more CO2 into the atmosphere each year than all personal cars combined, and we send $50 billion for guns to Ukraine for a war that can't be won, like that's good for the planet.

So yeah a big "f*ck you" from Joe Consumer in response to some guilt trip about his personal car-buying choices is totally understandable. Let some of the fat cats get off their fat asses and do something if they care so much (they don't.)

Correction, that's too high. About 100 million metric tons for the military vs 600 million metric tons for all _passenger_ vehicles including light trucks and SUVs, IDK what it is if you exclude light trucks and SUVs.

I bet the military does give just personal "cars" like all sedans in the US a run for their money, though..

It was to stimulate the economy by pulling ahead spending, not start some green revolution. Obama the "Droner-in-Chief" was too busy blowing up peasant families in the Middle East for much of his tenure to really do much of substance on the environmental front:

If you have an 80 year old rifle and an '86 pickup you're not the type to trade them in anyway, you are likely an old-junk hoarder like Sanford & Son, saving rusty screws in a jar too.

They gave him the Nobel Peace prize and then he went on to blow up several thousand innocent peasants. "Mission Accomplished!"

No one is a mass shooter until the pull the trigger. You miss the point. They did not have any weapons until they bought them. So clearly, the point of purchasing a gun is a great opportunity to prevent potentially dangerous people from getting their hands on them. In many cases, these guys would set off alarm bells easily.

As an analogy, there are 250 million cars in the US, yet you can't get a drivers license without passing a test or below a certain age, having training. Is that too much to impose on people for having guns? Hell, in the waters of Washington, D.C. I can't paddle a kayak without a license.

You can throw up your hands and say "we can't do it", but that's just pure bullshit defeatism. We can have an impact and there's zero reason to not do it.

The idea of people "buying their guns legally" is the whole point. We need to be more strict about who can buy weapons. I think anyone of age to be in high school is too young.

I've heard that 87.4% of all statistics are made up! Yeah, when you make up your own statistics, you can prove anything you want.

You are ignorant of the facts. BEVs are selling, limited only by how fast they can make them, literally! Tesla has a months long waiting list. Instead of trying to promote BEVs by selling a lower end model, they've dropped all the cheaper versions, yet people are pounding on their doors with cash in hand! There's nothing you can say about people not wanting to drive BEVs.

Funny you put it that way. That's not really thinking in any sense of the word. That's just you creating your own fantasy.

Nobody is laying a guilt trip on anyone else. Drive what you want. Give it a bit of time and your only choice will be BEV or drive 10 miles to find a gas station. Not too long after that, your gasoline will have a $5 a gallon tax, like in the EU. So it will be selling for $15 a gal. Drive all you want! I don't give a damn. You will be 1 in 100 and will be purely irrelevant.

The public transit in Boston is adequate-on-a-good-day at best, and a nightmare when the system isn't having a good day

Roads in the west (and to a lesser extent, the midwest) at least tend to be laid out to *some* sort of plan. And, often have *some* sort of naming convention that can assist the driver/navigator.

And, tend to be considerably *longer* within a given domain (e.g., Western Ave is ~30 miles *in* the city's limits).

OTOH, it was nice (East) to be able to get on TownB Rd, in TownA, and know that it would get you *to* TownB (at which point, the road would be renamed TownA Rd, curiously :> )

Patience is relative. Here (AZ), many routes run *hourly*. Heaven help the fool who misses a connection! I'm sure there's nothing after 11P (which kinda puts a damper in using it after a night on the town!)

And, stops are relatively far apart and outside the residential neighborhoods. So, a fair bit of walking to get *to* a stop and then a fair bit to get *from* the stop.

But the distances are relatively short. E.g., I could walk from The Zone to Park St or Charles St stations in almost the same amount of time -- considering a T at Park St would end up bringing me *to* Charles St whereas walking would get me there directly. :<

Or, Central Sq to CSDL in about the same time as from Kendall Sq.

I only found a car "useful" when driving out of the metro area... work in Westwood, trips out to Maynard, Methuen, etc. Visiting a cousin at BC was considerably less effort by car vs. T.

OTOH, *storing* a car was always tedious -- esp if you didn't have a driveway or parking area set aside for your use (on both ends of the trip).

I don't think you understand how "nightmarish" public transit can be ALL of the time!

E.g., my most common drive is to my volunteer gig. It's about 20 minnutes in a private vehicle.

If I had to rely on public transit (busses, here), it would mean a 1.25 mile walk to the bus stop -- hopefully timed to arrive just before a bus departs on the route in which I'm interested.

Then, a 22 minute (per their schedule) drive to another stop -- where I'd wait ~20 minutes (assuming all is going well!) for my connection. Then, a

At my 4MPH walking pace, that's ~25 minutes on foot plus 27 minutes on wheels. Almost three times longer than my "drive WHEN it is convenient for me to do so" approach. And, having to deal with *sharing* the vehicle with "others"...

Of course, I have no idea what the MTA is like, now as it's been decades since I've been there. And, I've not a clue as to how Big Dig is mucking with surface transportation...

Isn't that true for all transportation in cities? I know DC traffic has no upper limit for ETA.

Yes, I live far enough from Boston proper that if I wanted to get to South Station downtown as of 10 AM this morning without using a car or taxi at all my adventure starts with a 20 minute walk to a bus stop, then a 50 minute bus ride, then a 35 minute heavy rail train ride.

Google sometimes routes me a bit differently with a shorter bus ride and longer train ride depending on the time of day, but it always ends up suggesting a trip that takes over 2 hours. By car even in traffic the same trip would take me 45 minutes tops, it's only about 25 miles away I don't live _that_ far outside the city.

But housing closer in within easy striking distance of a light rail station tends to command a premium price tag.

The Big Dig has been done for pushing 20 years and made getting in and out of town by car a _lot_ better, but mucked with public transit in Boston a lot. A large amount of the debt for that got shoveled off onto the MBTA, circa 2010 a quarter of the MBTA's operating budget was spent on Big Dig debt service.

The system was running really threadbare for many years and it came to a head in 2014-2015 when the exceptional snowfall of that winter regularly ground the subway system to a halt, stuff was massively breaking down every week. The average age of a trainset a decade ago was like 32 years old or something.

The joke was the MBTA's general manager Beverly Scott had announced her resignation "before the snow had even stopped falling" which wasn't far from the truth.

As of a few years back they've begun investing more money in track & equipment upgrades and they've got several hundred new trainsets built in Springfield MA by Chinese state-owned CRRC (grumble grumble), however they're having teething troubles as new trainsets tend to do:

At the absolute peak of weekday rush hour it might take an hour.

The Mosin Nagant works too. Just ask Simo Hayha.

I miss Red Green. That, Austin City Limits, and a few other programs on PBS are about my only TV consumption.

The was one of the most egregious examples of affirmative action in history. Well, maybe since they gave one to Kissinger. It chafes me that I finally agree with him on something.

They're selling many other vehicles as fast as they can make them, too, prices for new vehicles are up across the board. 250,000 pickup trucks get sold every month in the US IIRC that's close to what Tesla sells in a year in the US.

Difference is Tesla buyers may be pounding on Tesla's door cash-in-hand but the average pickup buyer doesn't have cash in hand they're taking out 72, 84 month loans on those and I expect the number of people who're going to default over that timeframe is a lot.

It hardly seems sustainable just from a financial perspective. But simultaneously the imminent death of the ICE seems exaggerated.