Transit agencies are now demanding that Congress give them at least $25 billion so they can continue infecting people with COVID-19. Restaurants, bars, shopping malls, amusement parks, and barber shops are all supposed to shut down, but let’s keep transit running even though one study has found that “mass transportation systems offer an effective way of accelerating the spread of infectious diseases within communities.”
At least one transit agency, Portland’s TriMet, is now admitting that it’s too dangerous for people to ride transit and that they should stay at home (or drive) instead. But it is still running its buses and trains. Why? For “medical staff, first responders and other essential workers.” So we’re encouraging health care and other “essential” people to use the form of transportation whose riders are nearly six times more likely to suffer from upper respiratory infections. That’s smart!
Speaking of smart (as in smart growth), the New York Times is blaming the high incidence of coronavirus in New York City on the city’s dense population. The newspaper-of-record noted that the nation’s largest and densest major city has 26 times as many cases and 18 times as many fatalities as the nation’s second-largest city, Los Angeles.
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“Density is really an enemy in a situation like this,” the paper quoted an epidemiologist as saying. “That’s where it’s going to spread the fastest.” Maybe smart growth wasn’t so smart after all.
New York has about 28,000 people per square mile while Los Angeles is still pretty dense at 8,000 per square mile (most of the nation’s 50 largest cities are under 4,000). But New York is also unique in having the highest amount of transit usage — 224 annual trips per capita compared with just 44 in Los Angeles and 36 among the nation’s urbanites as a whole. Density plus transit — the smart-growth prescription — is also the prescription for high infections in a pandemic.
Really, Randal? I have lost much of the intellectual respect I had for you since you chose to post this codswallop. It’s amazing to me how ideologues are using the CV outbreak to reinforce whatever a priori biases they had.
For an informed discussion of how density is mostly irrrelevant to the spread of CV, see this https://streets.mn/2020/03/24/its-not-density-thats-driving-the-american-pandemic/
Basically, many of the highest density cities in the world — Hong Kong, Seoul, Singapore and most Japanese cities — have had minimal outbreaks. The pathetic state of our public institutions and health systems count a lot more than urban density per se.
True, the outbreaks of disease is byproduct of the quality of public/personal hygiene and sanitation.
To which China………..is a foreign concept. It wasn’t always so, but their rapid pace to keep up with the west the last 30 years they’ve chased out………….
All and all despite US infections, deaths have been light.
Italy on the other hand…..3000+ since the outbreak.
The state of their public institutions and health systems count a lot more than urban density per se?
No it’s the result of withholding care/medicine on folks deemed unsuitable to spend resources to be saved………Another example of what happens when Govt runs your healthcare
Fewer than 150 people in my county have tested positive, and one has died. Out of 900k people living in the county. Fake news. So the state can bail out everyone who was about to fail and grab more power.
Msetty I agree with you 100%. If you even look at NYC the least dense of the 5 boroughs, Staten Island, has the highest rate of confirmed coronavirus cases in NYC.
https://www.silive.com/coronavirus/2020/03/staten-island-reaches-highest-rate-of-confirmed-coronavirus-cases-in-city.html?fbclid=IwAR0k0z99O92juOJAPt6h75c19t4g7DhFYcbCp0_11MQSWAFA2ULarr5RprU
Hmmnnn, intelligent comments here. What will be next? :-0
Lazy Reader, you are right that sanitation practices and prepared institutions like they have in South Korea make all the difference. And it is not racist, unlike what some woke morons are saying on Twitter et al, to point out that Chinese “wet markets” and most of the wildlife trade for “delicacies” have got to go, or at least be forced by the Chinese health departments to follow basic sanitation (it’s not rocket science, woke idiots!)
The U.S. has open air fish and farmers markets, but here we don’t pile live animals on top of one another, unlike China.
Msetty,
I’m just quoting Dr. Steven Goodman, an epidemiologist at Stanford University. I even said that I thought transit was a major factor. Even though, density is a factor, and all of the push for density in the past few decades was never a good idea anyway; this just makes it a worse one.
As with all things, one factor doesn’t control everything.
Density + terrible governing equals the NYC crisis. Too many stupid things to relate, but DeBlaiso’s regime has:
1. encouraged people to congregate by the 1000’s to celebrate Chinese New Year. After which things exploded.
2.
2.
I live in a single family house in a suburban setting. I used to take BART to work but quit that pretty early as Covid-19 developed. Whenever things get back to (more) normal and I stop working from home I will certainly think long and hard before I resume taking BART.
”
For an informed discussion of how density is mostly irrrelevant
”
Do not mix up that there are things to mitigate the spread with the reality that the more people who have touching and breathing the same things or in the same spaces, the more it spreads.
How do I get the NY Times article…citation please…I am dreaming of a new slogan for a t-shirt when I go before my Milwaukie City Council and its pack’m-in-and-up Comp Plan…soon as government re-opens to public meetings. My slogan: “Density Kills”
It’s almost not worth responding since I know everyone will deliberately or accidentally confuse themselves in order to not have to make honest arguments, but I’m bored so let’s give this a go.
First msetty, the website linked by your name runs a cryptominer, an insiduous, if antiquated, piece of malware. If this is on purpose, shame on you, if not, get your house straight.
msetty, here you are complaining about idealogues with agendas, yet the Lindeke article you link oozes with social justice, and is, sadly but not-surprisingly, bereft of any solid arguments supporting the article’s title, “It’s Not Density That’s Driving the American Pandemic”. Obviously there are many factors that affect the spread of Corona virus, but to argue that human to human proximity does not change the rate of airborne viral nanoparticle exchange is blatantly dishonest. The author already expounds on how cultural practices in Asian cities like Seoul and Tokyo likely minimized the worse spread of the Wuhan Virus, so let’s dive into more culturally homogenous cities … like the American cities that our dear Antiplanner wrote his article about.
The prize piece of data Lindeke waves around is the bar graph showing “population density by city”, with LA at 2400 people/km2, and NYC at 1800, with the conclusion you’re supposed to make is that density has zero correlation with the pandemic in the US … except of course that the data is wrong, and worse, it’s not even on the website he links. That’s gonna be an ouch and a yikes from me, dawg. Of course, we can argue about what we should consider as the relevant boundaries and population when discussing an urban area, but let’s just differ to the wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_by_population_density. As your gut assumed, NYC by pretty much every metric is more dense than LA. S-sorry, bro.
Again, not arguing correlation and causation, but Lindeke is arguing the opposite, and we just proved he did not disprove the hypothesis. Moving on.
msetty’s ideological agenda and bias shows itself with the flippant statemt, “The pathetic state of our public institutions and health systems count a lot more than urban density per se.” Why do you want this statement to be true? Does it have any predictive value? Something tells me that quality of US health systems, which are of course world renown, have little to do with the spread of a virus outside of their vicinity. Absolutely Freudian.
Sketter, maybe the article you linked has been updated since you posted it, but it is now saying that the Staten Island infection rate is on par with other boroughs. That said, its density is still much lower than the other boroughs … and we circle back to Antiplanner’s argument about public transport and communal living. True, Staten is not directly connected to the NYC subway, but an island necessarily has chokepoints for entrance and Egress, and it has it’s own MTA line. Right now we are in the fog of war, I will boldly make the prediction that when this is all said and done, and the testing in other boroughs has caught up to Staten’s, we will see what the true infection rate mirrors the density to a more satisfying degree.
Bob Clark, the blue letters of Antiplanner’s words “dense population” indicates it is a hyperlink that takes you to another website. Here it is explicitly: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/23/nyregion/coronavirus-nyc-crowds-density.html
@KomradKurwaMARCH , you hit the nail on the head. Lindeke [sic] isn’t asking questions. He had a belief – density is good – and set out to write something that would reinforce his believe.
Science is a method of inquiry. Without inquiry, you can’t have science. Lindeke [sic] is a zealot, eschewing a scientific approach for blasting the world with his empty ideology.
KomradKurwa. Another noxious ideologue who hates cities, as shown by three inane posts, and someone who has zero understanding of urban economics and land markets.
Didn’t you understand ANYTHING about: SEOUL, HONG KONG, TOKYO and every other Japanese city over 250,000, SINGAPORE. In all these cases, spread of the CV was quickly controlled by quick action of governments and the public. The Japanese situation was also helped immensely by the well-established culture of wearing medical face masks there.
I hoped some sense would come across on this blog for once, but that was a fleeting thought it turns out. Yet another ideologue replaces idiots like Metrosucks.
BTW, understanding how urban economics and land markets work outside situations where the U.S. highly subsidizes auto travel and suburbia is NOT an ideology. Just a critical, scientific approach to the reality of the human environment. If fact, Tokyo is an excellent example of land markets in action; limited regulation, an environment where land owners have an unfettered legal right to build, and generally unsubsidized highways, e.g., tolls average $0.25 or more per mile.
As I predicted, msetty has deliberately confused himself in order to avoid having an honest discussion. I will attempt to make succinct points, but I do not expect any to be directly addressed.
But first, of course, I must defend my defamed character. The ad hominem that I am a “noxious ideologue” attempts to dismiss my argument purely by association. I would call this a case of the kettle calling the pot black, except in this analogy I am closer to one of the myriad shades of grey known to contemporary times. Please, msetty, cite one ideologically driven statement in my response to you. Just quote it. We all eagerly await.
We must further ask ourselves why does msetty want so desperately for his ‘opponents’ (if even we are that, again, msetty just confuses the point to foster discord) to be ideologues or idiots. What does it say about his ability to articulate his thoughts and argue a position?
At the risk of being too reductionary, let us break down the discussion:
The Antiplanner’s point is that the benefits touted by urban planners bout big city life, specifically the density and the connectivity of public transport, are liabilities in the spread of infectious disease. He cites an epidemiologist quoted in the NY Times to boost his claim. We can forgive our gracious host his smug tone, for he has had much worse hurled at him in the past.
msetty condescendingly tells the Antiplanner he is wrong about density and public transport being a liability in NYC … since other cities and countries that are not NYC have found ways to cope. This is a non sequitor. Your ideology comes through in the statement “The pathetic state of our public institutions and health systems count a lot more than urban density per se.” No need to be vague, to be handwavy, be explicit about which public institution’s pathetic state contributed to the spread of the virus. Go on, give us the names.
My point is that in any sufficiently complex system (which includes the spread of a contagion through a population), multiple variables necessarily determine the state variables (outcome). To argue that since in some cases the effect of variable y is greater than that of variable x means that variable x does not matter at all, is logically incorrect. This is what the article you linked was arguing, and by extension your sentence “density is mostly irrelevant to the spread of CV”, it is your argument as well. Not only did I just show that the fallacy in the logic, I also previously debunked the article point as it relates to the topic as well.
“The MTA is losing $125 million per week amid the coronavirus pandemic — and a $3.8 billion federal bailout won’t be enough to keep the struggling transit system above water alone, officials said Wednesday.”
https://nypost.com/2020/03/25/mta-is-losing-125m-per-week-as-coronavirus-cripples-ridership-and-revenue/
I guess the MTA has very high fixed costs. Although it is interesting that the $3.8 billion number has popped up before … way back in 2000.
“Ad Campaign Seeks Votes For $3.8 Billion In Transit Aid”
https://www.nytimes.com/2000/10/27/nyregion/ad-campaign-seeks-votes-for-3.8-billion-in-transit-aid.html
Maybe they’re saving money by recycling their old PR materials.