Zohran Mamdani hires car-hating activist Ben Furnas for NYC transportation team: ‘War on drivers’
Car-hater Ben Furnas has been appointed to Mamdani’s transition team for transportation, climate and infrastructure – and his agenda is a nightmare for the city’s drivers.
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Good, Mamdani and Furnas should only be allowed to use public transportation for work purposes, otherwise they'd be hypocrites right? 🤔
There's a huge difference between personal behavior and policy. I'd rather see politicians who, while flawed in their personal lives, improve the lives of their constituents, than saints who sell out to the highest bidder.
But I suspect your snark does not come from a place of good faith, which is why you resort to cheap ad hominem attacks.
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Overall I agree with the push against cars in an extremely dense city. Emergency vehicles, public transportation, logistics trucks (delivery/moving/etc) should have priority. I also like it when people lead by example.
Who is leading by example in the U.S. at this point? You’re literally just preemptively removed and villainizing about an idea that would genuinely improve lives. Maybe just shut the fuck up instead of being a doomer and give things a chance to work before railing against good ideas and declaring the people advocating for them as hypocrites. I’m so fucking sick of your specific brand of asshole anymore.
I would hope they do, unless there's some work thing that takes them out of the city into bumfuck nowhere - which I can't imagine what that is.
Prefacing my comment with, as always, "I'm a car guy", I'll say this: Cities are not the place for cars, and NYC is fucking amazing for being carless, at least when I visited. It could of course be even way better, and as I understand, that's what Mamdani's trying to do.
We have better cities for public transit and walking here in Europe, but in terms of North America, I think NYC is one of the best.
Manhattan is far above any other us city on both walkability and transit. It’s the one place initiatives like this should be obvious and can succeed.
Meanwhile my city is one of the best in the us but far behind so I’m not sure I’d support such initiatives here. I did try a year without a car and it was mostly fine, and can only be much better now. We do have bus lanes for major routes now, fixed a lot of subways infrastructure and are building out bike lanes everywhere, but nothing like nyc. At the time I did feel like I still needed a car and wished there were options for long term storage, but that was before services like Uber/Lyft or short term rentals like ZipCar.
For the very long term, I have a lot of hope for the MBTA communities zoning law passed last year. Boston has long benefited from transit-based development, we have many pre-car towns with walkable centers, but now every town in the greater Boston area has transit-based development too!
Oh yeah, we walked around Manhattan and it was great. Nighttime was a lot fewer people than I would've thought for "the city that never sleeps", but then we randomly stumbled upon some guys freestyle rapping near Union Square (if I recall correctly), found a super weird grocery store that sold us alcohol at like 11 PM (in my country it's only legal to sell till 10 PM, after that only bars can serve and they can only serve open containers) (alcohol at 11 PM wasn't the reason it was weird, it was just... very different from everything else I'd seen, including in the US, interesting vibe lol - if I remember correctly, they had tables outside where we consumed said beer, so it was kind of a bar AND a grocery store? But I may be remembering wrong here)
Brooklyn was also pretty nice to walk around. The buildings were much prettier, and we also found random places to visit. Somewhere in Williamsburg there was literally like a mini music festival vibe place in an alleyway. Like multiple tents to buy drinks and at least one stage. No noticeable signs pointing to it IIRC, just a person who sold us a ticket at the entrance of the alleyway.
Didn't take much transit. Just the subway from our hotel near the airport to Manhattan or Brooklyn and then back at night. It worked fine, though wait times between trains were a bit longer than I'd expected for such a big city.
DC? I thought DC transit was pretty amazing
Boston. Also pretty good transit, but nothing in the us compares to Manhattan for walkability and transit
Isn't that the whole point? That's how transport works in functional cities.