[HN Gopher] Renting a car will be a pain until at least 2022
___________________________________________________________________
Renting a car will be a pain until at least 2022
Author : prostoalex
Score : 136 points
Date : 2021-09-17 16:37 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.latimes.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.latimes.com)
| conductr wrote:
| They left off the part where rental companies sold off a bunch of
| inventory in 2020 because low demand and fixed lease payments.
| They thought they could flex up inventory when travel resumed. It
| was a reasonable assumption at the time as I don't believe anyone
| was talking about chip shortages back then and new cars were
| being heavily discounted as well.
|
| FWIW - I rented a car in May and paid about $2000 for 4/5 days. I
| forget the specifics but the midsized economy class was only
| about 10% cheaper than a luxury SUV, so I upgraded. It was in
| Boston.
| brailsafe wrote:
| Did you personally pay that!? What made it worth it? I paid
| about $400 for a new Rav4 recently in Canada after seeing crazy
| prices like yours, which still seemed high.
| twelve40 wrote:
| That whole industry is so weird. This year, I've seen Hertz
| locations with people waiting for multiple hours (!) to fill out
| a bunch of papers forms, at least half an hour per rental of just
| waiting on a human to write up your super-generic contract. Other
| locations may demand weird shit like a must-have return flight
| ticket. On the other hand, there is Turo where (once you
| registered) the whole "typing up the contract and signing it in
| your blood for 30 minutes" is non-existent: you just find your
| car and open it, no humans involved, no stupid rental branches
| with multi-hour lines. Turo is definitely not for everybody, but
| I think they need to start to learn from each other - it is
| possible to make the booking and pick-up process instant and save
| a ton of time (and money).
| jzymbaluk wrote:
| I keep hearing that car rentals are expensive and terrible, but
| it's not at all matched my experience. I just rented a car for
| last weekend 9/10 - 9/12, and it cost me 95 dollars including
| taxes and fees for the whole weekend. This seems like an
| incredible deal, when car rentals are apparently so strained?
| ryanianian wrote:
| Perhaps you rented at a location that wasn't extremely popular
| (major airports)? TFA mentions it's a pretty local problem.
| jzymbaluk wrote:
| I picked up and returned at Dulles International Airport
| outside Washington DC, which was pretty busy. My theory was
| that maybe the airport had an excess of rental car inventory
| on that weekend (being the weekend after Labor Day weekend)
| and that they were happy to get some inventory off the lot
| even though I was picking up and returning at the same
| weekend
| TameAntelope wrote:
| I've rented in DC, PA, and now VA and have not experienced
| much, if any, problems so far.
| mattm wrote:
| It also depends on which company. The budget rental companies,
| which I assume Dollar Rent a Car would fall under, are
| notorious for doing stuff like this pre-pandemic as well.
| banana_giraffe wrote:
| It depends on the location. Orlando has plenty of reasonable
| rates. If you want to pick up a car at Portland, however, not
| only does a quick search suggest you're 7 or 8 weeks from any
| availability at all, but it's twice as expensive as a last-
| minute rental in Orlando.
|
| A colleague that had to visit Seattle recently ended up renting
| a U-Haul truck out of desperation.
| jgalt212 wrote:
| > "The area where the compact cars were was empty," he said,
| adding that he has demanded a full refund.
|
| > As a result, car rental prices jumped to an average high of
| $120 a day this summer, compared with about $45 at the beginning
| of the year, according to a study by the travel booking site
| Hopper.com.
|
| Maybe they need to be even higher?
| AlbertCory wrote:
| Neighbor took a vacation to Hawaii a couple months ago. The cars
| available to rent were $250/day and up. He passed.
|
| Fortunately, there's a car equivalent of AirBNB, and he was able
| to rent an individual's car for around $80/day (I can't remember
| the name of the service, unfortunately).
|
| I guess when you're on an island, cars aren't all that fungible.
| jrochkind1 wrote:
| Does it seem to anyone else that the global economy was a lot
| more fragile than we thought?
| josephcsible wrote:
| You wouldn't call a building fragile just because it got
| destroyed by a thermonuclear bomb. I wouldn't call the global
| economy fragile just because it falls apart when every
| government at once imposes draconian lockdowns for months to
| years.
| inetknght wrote:
| > _You wouldn 't call a building fragile just because it got
| destroyed by a thermonuclear bomb._
|
| Some very few buildings are designed to withstand (all but a
| direct hit by) a nuclear bomb. A failure of such a building
| would certainly exacerbate problems that arise from the
| nuclear war.
|
| Likewise, the U.S. government (and many other first-world
| nations' governments) was _supposed_ to have been on the ball
| for a pandemic. Unfortunately it, uhhhh, failed. And it
| certainly exacerbated the problems that arose from the
| pandemic.
| Someone1234 wrote:
| Aside from maybe chips and PPE, I don't really believe so. The
| media just focuses on problematic areas, but if you consider
| how little goods disruption there was _overall_ we fared fairly
| well.
|
| Rental companies sold off stock when demand decreased to stay
| afloat which was rational from their perspective (and something
| they've done before). Problem was that when they went to re-
| purchase inventory, there was a car manufacturing bottleneck
| caused by a chip shortage (both supply chain disruption, and
| vehicle manufacturers voluntarily giving up their limited fab
| slots to consumer electronics companies because they predicted
| incorrectly a decrease in demand).
|
| PS - And some seeming supply chain disruption was actually
| caused by panic buying instead e.g. toilet paper, water
| bottles, generators, etc.
| asdff wrote:
| Chips, PPE, skilled construction labor, resources for
| construction, trucking, freight rail, shipping, the list goes
| on. If you think its just chips and PPE and occasional runs
| on toilet paper, you aren't seeing the entire picture of just
| how jammed up the supply chain is currently and how uncertain
| the paths forward are as critical pieces have only so much
| slack left to stretch.
| Someone1234 wrote:
| > trucking, freight rail, shipping
|
| When demand exceeds 100% of normal capacity it reflects a
| lack of elasticity in the system rather than _fragility_.
|
| I'll acknowledge the wood shortage though due to beetles
| eating the supply and saw mills ramping down right as
| demand was shooting up.
|
| More broadly, no, I am not seeing this "critical pieces
| have only so much slack left to stretch." Seems like
| hyperbole without substance. What are these critical pieces
| that are just about to fail?
| ishjoh wrote:
| Also worth noting that meat processing plants in the US
| were temporarily shutting [1] down as well due to Covid,
| which was causing famers to start euthanizing live stock
| [2]. The Trump administration took action [3] to compel
| those plants to open under the Defense Production Act,
| although it's unclear if the executive order would have
| withstood a legal challenge [4], it did have the desired
| effect and farming and food processing resumed. Had the
| government not interfered in the operation of meat
| processing we might have much higher meat prices as well
| not to mention we would have likely had the same issues
| with food supply chains for raising live stock.
|
| [1] - https://www.ers.usda.gov/covid-19/rural-
| america/meatpacking-... [2] -
| https://www.cnbc.com/2020/05/02/coronavirus-devastates-
| agric... [3] -
| https://www.cnn.com/2020/04/28/politics/defense-
| production-a... [4] -
| https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2020/05/04/trump-
| meat...
| drstewart wrote:
| Rental car prices being slightly higher due to supply shortages
| doesn't make the economy seem fragile. In fact, if that's one
| of the worst after effects of a global pandemic, I'd call it
| extremely robust.
| skybrian wrote:
| It's not the worst shortage. It's a fairly high-profile
| example, but there are a wide variety of shortages.
|
| I think it's fair to say that a lot of consumers aren't much
| affected by them. Many businesses are scrambling, though.
| spookthesunset wrote:
| > I think it's fair to say that a lot of consumers aren't
| much affected by them.
|
| Not directly but indirectly through higher prices on just
| about everything. Plus ever had your dishwasher break? Good
| luck getting parts... that stuff is in super short supply
| right now and that is just one instance. Think about
| elevators, MRI machines, you name it...
|
| The supply chain runs deep.
| skybrian wrote:
| Yes, it's all hiding just under the surface. If your
| dishwasher didn't break, you don't notice.
|
| Similarly, most of the time, most people don't need a
| rental car, but the price of car rentals suddenly becomes
| more relevant if your car is in the shop for repairs.
| spookthesunset wrote:
| I mean we deliberately took a wrecking ball to our supply chain
| (destroying folks livelihood along the way) for a year and a
| half. You can't just pay people to stay home... those people
| were doing something "essential" to somebody and they were all
| forced to close or dramatically alter their business. All the
| people not producing things no longer doing so is gonna have a
| huge impact on literally everything.
|
| Dunno how anybody could be surprised at the outcome; people
| warned of exactly this happening back in March of 2020 but they
| were harassed, mocked, shamed and yelled at.
|
| The second and third order effects from the last year and a
| half will no doubt have more of a negative public health impact
| than covid ever did.
| jrochkind1 wrote:
| Is "we" the USA? I don't think those chips are made in the
| USA, do you think USA work restrictions resulted in the chip
| shortage somehow anyhow?
|
| I don't totally understand why foreign chip production
| couldn't ramp up quicker. But I don't think it's related to
| USA "lockdown"... but maybe I'm missing it?
| mrtranscendence wrote:
| But neither the automobile shortage nor the chip shortage
| that caused it were themselves caused by lockdown
| restrictions. This would have happened anyway.
|
| > The second and third order effects from the last year and a
| half will no doubt have more of a negative public health
| impact than covid ever did.
|
| Really? COVID killed millions and made millions more very
| sick. Meanwhile industrial economies are doing overall quite
| well despite lockdowns and some labor shortages.
| josephcsible wrote:
| > But neither the automobile shortage nor the chip shortage
| that caused it were themselves caused by lockdown
| restrictions. This would have happened anyway.
|
| What would have caused them other than the lockdowns?
| foxfluff wrote:
| Crazy GPU prices aside, I haven't really noticed any problems.
| So maybe the global economy is fine, or the local economy here
| isn't nearly as affected by the global economy as one would
| think.
| micromacrofoot wrote:
| Inconveniences aside the economy seems to be doing rather well
| despite 4.5 million people dying over the course of 18 months
| due to a new disease.
|
| I do think it has exaggerated some long-time inequities and we
| have an opportunity to make improvements (for example, look at
| who's net worth increased the most during the pandemic, and by
| how much).
| switch007 wrote:
| My local Hertz in the UK has sky high prices and plenty of new
| cars. They have no high mileage cars. They're just profiteering.
|
| Enterprise raised their already high prices even higher. Their
| fleet looks about the same as pre pandemic too.
|
| Edit: and hertz aren't content with their high prices, they also
| recently added a fake 15 minute offer expiry countdown on the
| booking page. Absolute scumbags.
| cryptoz wrote:
| > getting denied the vehicle they reserved
|
| Why do car rental companies have such a problem with this? I
| haven't rented a car in 5 years, but I rented a bunch in the 5
| years before that. I don't think even once I was actually able to
| get the car I reserved, they are _always_ out. There 's even a
| joke from the '90s in Seinfeld about this.
|
| Why are car rentals so much worse than other industries with
| reservations? Rarely would this happen at a restaurant or a
| hotel. Only cars seem to have this problem.
| supernova87a wrote:
| Maybe someone can explain in kindergarten terms for me --
|
| A root cause of this problem is that the rental car companies
| sold off a lot of their fleets thinking that the pandemic would
| absolutely crater demand for >1 year.
|
| Am I misunderstanding? Those cars went somewhere -- they didn't
| go into the dump. Wherever those cars went, why are they not
| causing some cushion / surplus in a different place that relieves
| some shortage? They got locked up in a warehouse and are
| inaccessible? Sold off and can't be bought back?
|
| Reporters in their simplistic descriptions make it sound like
| those cars just evaporated.
| gregwebs wrote:
| The car companies did the same, but what they did was cancel
| their slots for chip production while having little chip
| inventory.
|
| So yeah, the root is back to the car companies. The rental car
| companies probably would have been dealing with a much smaller
| problem from the overall car demand increase from their sell-
| off if the car companies had maintained their production
| capacities of their supply chains.
| pandaman wrote:
| From my understanding, a used rental is just a couple of
| notches above the bottom of the market so people who bought
| those replaced their beaters and sent those to the junk yard.
| So they are not stored anywhere but are being used in place of
| the cars that went out of the market.
| rajup wrote:
| From the article, rental companies would not keep cars beyond
| 40-50k miles, hardly a couple of notches above bottom.
| davchana wrote:
| Most of the rental cars come in as brand new; & usually gets
| sold between 3 years or 36000 miles. Any car at that stage is
| certainly not a beater. A beater (with regular usage) will be
| something like 10+ years old and or 200,000 miles or over.
|
| See the cars at enterprisecarsales.com , where most of the
| cars are Enterprise Rentals.
| flavius29663 wrote:
| I don't get it. If the article is true, then we shouldn't
| see any cars for sale by enterprise or hertz. What am I
| missing?
| davchana wrote:
| I have not read the article, but enterprisecarsales.com
| has about 7000 cars for sale; no filter, nationwide.
| Doesn't look like a big number; but car rental companies
| sold a ton of their fleet on the onset of covid too.
|
| The cars with extensive damage or accidents, any bad mark
| on carfax goes to wholesale auctions. These are just the
| ones near end of mileage or age warranty.
|
| The news, the hype, & the reality too contributed to the
| car sales. I am not in market, but still I see now the
| 2/3 year used car prices almost very near to their new
| counterpart, even on enterprise, compared to dealer
| websites for new cars.
| thomaslord wrote:
| Some people may not consider it a beater, but rental cars
| get treated like absolute crap (regular gas even if they
| should get premium, traditional oil vs synthetic, renters
| beat them up because they don't care). If I were choosing
| between a rental car at 36,000 miles or a non-rental at
| 46,000 miles, I'd assume the non-rental would give me fewer
| problems in the short term and probably make it to a higher
| mileage in the end.
|
| Still better than the proverbial $500 Civic with 250,000
| miles, 7 owners, and 3 accidents, but not great vehicles to
| own by any stretch of the imagination.
| HeyLaughingBoy wrote:
| Why would the renter be changing the oil?
| davchana wrote:
| This, rental car is a car driven roughly, in mud, in
| rocks, with rash driving, rarely serviced or poorly
| serviced, poorly driven, in potholes, or quick
| acceleration or quick braking can not be further than
| truth
|
| How many times one rents a car for personal use v/s on
| official use or business use? Business use is way higher
| than personal use. Most of the people who rent it for
| business use, are reporting to their boss or some kind of
| supervisor; & if they thrash car, car company
| reports/charges damages, it will come back to the person
| who drove it. So, no, a majority of renters don't beat
| cars because they still will be on hook for damages.
|
| How many regular rentals need premium? None. Only exotic
| rentals might. Most of the rentals are run of the mill
| Toyota,Hyundai, Mitsubishi, mid size or mid range; the
| cars which are most of the time good for everyone. None
| of them needs premium. Although, this fuel thing exists.
| When I used to rent, I used to buy the cheapest fuel at
| any cheapest station. Now in own car,I go by only Shell
| Regular.
|
| Rental are new, & new cars are covered bumper to bumper
| for about 36000, transmission till 60,000.
|
| Yes, rental gets different drivers, but so do to some
| degree of non rental (family, friends, not common but
| still not zero).
|
| So, as stated above,a 36,000 miles in a rental is not
| much different than same in a non rental.
|
| In my opinion; there is a similar set of drivers who dont
| care for their own car, & almost most of them will not
| care for rental or friendly loaned too. People race their
| own cars, people floor their own cars.
|
| My personal experience; my used car came with all shop
| visit records; verifiable, from Ford's system. Yes, it
| had about 4000 miles more than projected 7 years 150,000
| miles on projected line, but that gap is getting less
| everyday with my moderate use (1000miles a month).
|
| Rentals are beaten is a personal opinion. Any car can
| come out beaten. People who beat cars don't care if they
| rent it or own it. But beating a rental car might bite
| back quickly instead of beating one's own car.
| pandaman wrote:
| I think you read "beaten" literally. Nobody is saying
| people bounce off other cars and grind railings in the
| rentals. It's just rentals get more abuse: no break-in,
| often loaded with multiple people and luggage, door
| slammed, left under sun, small issues are not taken care
| off and develop etc. Not to mention they are already the
| special trims with all kinds of price cutting done from
| the factory.
| HeyLaughingBoy wrote:
| Other than the "no break-in" all of that is perfectly
| normal car usage.
| pandaman wrote:
| Exactly, you won't be changed for any damage doing this
| to a rental (nor you will be changed for not following
| the break in procedure).
| davchana wrote:
| Respectfully, this was in original comment:
|
| > renters beat them up because they don't care
|
| &
|
| > beaters and sent those to the junk yard.
|
| Still, all of the above also gets applied to owned cars
| too. People use cars for multiple people; people slam
| doors, majority of personal cars have no garage, small
| issues and negligence.
|
| Newer cars (rentals or not) have factory warranty, where
| service center takes care of minor issues without even
| asking.
|
| I respect your opinion that rentals are bad than owned
| cars, other things like mileage same; but my opinion &
| experience is, people will be bad drivers, be it their
| own car or rental; & even bad drivers will be a bit more
| careful with a rental because chances of them paying for
| it immediately financially is more than paying for
| damages to their own car.
| pandaman wrote:
| You quoted my comment that people replaced beaters they
| had with the rentals they bought, I figure you read it as
| the rentals are also beaters? That was not my meaning, if
| I thought it's an ambiguous statement I'd try to phrase
| it differently.
| davchana wrote:
| :-) oh ok. In the I would add my personal experience
| (might not be the majority of people who buy rental), I
| bought a rental from Enterprise because of no haggle
| price, factory warranty, low age, highest possible trim &
| about 10% cheaper than used car dealerships where I had
| to play & dance the negotiation dance; all this just pre
| covid.
|
| I was an Enterprise rental customer for about 7 years
| before that, renting a car about 2-3 times, not
| preplanned; & decision based on rental cost &
| availability, flexible dates.
| pandaman wrote:
| What do you mean by "highest possible trim"? You know
| that rentals are special low cost trim and it's possible
| to get a much better trim when buying a car made for
| retail sales, right?
| mynameishere wrote:
| _rental cars get treated like absolute crap_
|
| This is the conventional wisdom, but is it actually true?
| Anytime I've rented a car, I've handled it like a virgin
| princess because I know any scuff is coming out of my
| hide. My own car, hell, rub it up against the concrete
| barrier for all I care. That is a vehicle I would not
| want to buy on the used market.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| Hardly "just a couple of notches above the bottom of the
| market". They tend to be rather new, high mileage for their
| age but not high mileage in the grand scheme of things, and
| maintained by professionals. They're just a couple of notches
| below brand new.
| chucksta wrote:
| For desirability they are definitely near the bottom of the
| market. Even if they have a meticulous maintenance
| schedule, it was almost certainly driven harder.
|
| And a in 1:1 private to rental car sale, the rental would
| be cheaper almost always.
|
| >A former rental may cost less money up front, but it will
| also return less money down the road. Getting maximum
| resale value for a used rental car is difficult, because
| many shoppers are wary of buying former rental vehicles, so
| much so that some states have passed laws allowing car
| dealerships to call rental cars "program cars" in hopes of
| avoiding the stigma. https://www.cargurus.com/Cars/articles
| /the_pros_and_cons_of_...
| bityard wrote:
| I can see there being one or two downsides to buying a
| rental car, but "driven harder" is a weird one to me.
|
| First, almost all renters avoid abusing a rental car
| because they don't want to get charged for any damage.
| (Maybe the exception would be a sports car.)
|
| Second, I mean, unless they took it out to the track and
| spent a day going laps with it, cars these days are
| basically built to easily handle any kind of driving
| behavior you can get away with on public roads.
|
| What really kills cars are accidents and lack of
| maintenance. Neither are hard for a trained mechanic to
| detect.
| josephcsible wrote:
| > First, almost all renters avoid abusing a rental car
| because they don't want to get charged for any damage.
|
| What about constantly redlining the engine? That will put
| a disproportionate amount of wear on the engine for the
| miles driven, but won't cause any immediately-visible
| damage.
| davchana wrote:
| Redlining while in Drive in automatic transmission means
| driver is driving over the speed limit or doing rash
| driving; which millions of car owners too do that.
| Although in both cases it never near red line in
| automatic transmission cars.
|
| Redlining while parked or neutral is absurd. Who will
| rent car just to rev it up. & For how much time? Few
| minutes? Hours? People will be looking at this person who
| is redlining a car since last few hours.
| [deleted]
| HeyLaughingBoy wrote:
| I've never known a single person to do this. I hear it
| mentioned a lot, but no one ever knows anyone directly
| who's done it. Always "my cousin's ex's brother in law
| did it once."
| Hallucinaut wrote:
| Guys in our area of London every summer would routinely
| rent reasonably upmarket cars, new BMWs, Mercs, etc. for
| a few weeks and not just use them to accelerate hard
| around the roads (though they did) but sit there, out of
| gear and just floor it for dozens of seconds at a time.
|
| I personally do drive rentals to the max safe performance
| they will give me, which is more like what the
| description was about, in any case.
| pandaman wrote:
| Might be my luck then as all rentals I have rented did not
| look like they had been maintained at all, least by
| professionals (in car maintenance).
| asdff wrote:
| They sold them at a steep discount on the open market and
| presumably consumers desperate for a car at a good deal scooped
| them up.
|
| https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/cars/2020/06/19/hertz-e...
| zdragnar wrote:
| Supply of cars, both new and used, is severely constrained, and
| the sell off from rental companies didn't make a dent in that.
|
| Right now, I know of dealerships that are selling new cars for
| ABOVE MSRP. I have gotten a half dozen offers from my local
| dealership to buy back the used truck they sold me for more
| than they had sold it to me for.
| dawnerd wrote:
| I made money on my model 3 from just a year ownership. It's
| wild.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| Wild indeed, and unsustainable. There's going to be a
| correction.
|
| What will the correction look like? It almost has to look
| like the price of cars crashing, doesn't it? It will start
| with new cars being overproduced, dropping in price, then
| used cars dropping.
|
| 2023 might be a good time to buy a car, if you can hold on
| until then...
| dawnerd wrote:
| Same with the housing market. I cashed in this last month
| on my house and just going to wait out a correction.
| Totally not sustainable.
| HWR_14 wrote:
| > Am I misunderstanding?
|
| Cars disappear over time (they age, get in accidents, etc.) Due
| to production issues, the replacement construction of cars has
| dropped dramatically. The rental companies decided to get rid
| of their buffer with the expectation they would not be used
| during the pandemic. (Plus, rental companies age out cars
| naturally)
|
| However, given the limited new cars, they have not rebuilt
| their fleet as fast as possible.
| ChuckMcM wrote:
| As a systems guy, I find this situation quite interesting in the
| way in which it exposed interlocks in the car rental pipeline
| that were previously not visible.
|
| What I hadn't appreciated was that Car Rental companies had
| constructed a model where they bought new cars, rented them for a
| couple of years, and then resold them. The car would depreciate
| of course but as a bulk car buyer they got the cars at a discount
| on dealer cost because, well they bought more than the average
| dealer did. So when they depreciated they didn't lose as much
| value as you and I might experience if we bought a car, held it
| for two years, and resold it to a dealer (worst case) or another
| buyer (best case).
|
| So the rental agency simply tracked how much the car would "lose"
| in value over its working lifetime, plus the cost of needed
| maintenance (generally relatively low), and offset that with
| income of renting it out. So the math was something like (making
| up numbers here) $5,000 of depreciation loss against say 400
| rental days at $50/day or $20,000 of rental income. Say $1000 for
| maintenance during those 2 years and you've got $14,000 of "gross
| income" into the company, per car to pay employees and operating
| costs etc.
|
| Now this makes sense and it is a fine business model, but an
| interesting quirk is that revenue is directly proportional to the
| number of 'working' cars you have out there bringing in the
| bucks. More cars, more income. And if you buy the car on _credit_
| there is an interest expense sure but you don 't use up working
| capital to bulk up your fleet and boost your income.
|
| As a result, car rental companies were carrying a _HUGE_ amount
| of debt pre-pandemic which was all in car investments.
|
| Then BOOM, the black swan of a pandemic hit and air travel
| _stopped_ for all intents and purposes and now rental car
| companies are sitting on fleets of cars where they have to make
| the monthly payment on the debt but those cars aren 't earning
| any income. This burns money in a hurry! So they did the only
| thing they could do, and _sold off their fleets_ for the most
| part so that they could retire all that debt. Some, like Hertz,
| were already in Chapter 11 bankruptcy when they did that. Late
| 2020 was an _excellent_ time to buy a car from one of the rental
| companies because they were really motivated to get them off
| their balance sheets.
|
| And this then is the fun part. So the pandemic also put a huge
| blip in the supply chain. And since _every single_ car company
| had switched to "just in time" manufacturing where they don't
| stock parts to make cars, they expect a smooth flow of those
| parts from the supply chain to feed their assembly lines, had to
| stop making cars. They had no parts. What is more, the humans in
| the pipeline like truck drivers, container crane operators,
| container ship crews, freight forwarding staff, Etc. were
| quarantining or not working because of the pandemic risk and
| those are jobs you cannot do "remotely" no matter how much you
| might want to. So the supply of new cars dried up, and won't
| untwist until the entire chain is back up and running at capacity
| again.
|
| So now the pandemic is "less scary" because smart people have
| vaccinated themselves and they start traveling again. And those
| people want to rent cars. Which is great for rental car
| companies, except _they cannot rebuild their fleets because there
| aren 't any cars to buy._
|
| And this adds the second fun twist, if you bought a car new in
| 2019 (as I did), and it is the kind of car rental companies might
| rent (which mine is), you get letters from the dealer in 2021
| offering to buy it back from you for more than you paid for it!
|
| What is more, when you see all those cars that are going to be
| 'totalled' by the insurance company because they were under water
| in the southern part of the US or on the east coast, those cars
| used to be sold for pennies on the dollar in "salvage sales" in
| which salvage dealers would recover parts and/or do enough
| repairs to resell them with a salvage title. The bidding for
| those cars is _much more intense_ given the demand by rental car
| companies for stock, any stock, to boost their fleets.
|
| It is a remarkable example of a system where the parts are
| interconnected in non-obvious ways that has a non-intuitive
| response to shocks to the system. As with most "emergent" systems
| like this one though, sending a shock through it does two things;
| it illuminates these previously unseen inter dependencies, and it
| tends to kill off weak players.
| sremani wrote:
| >> Then BOOM, the black swan of a pandemic hit
|
| A pandemic is not a black swan. Just like Earth quakes are not
| black swans. There is a Center for Disease Control for fighting
| pandemics.
|
| We built fragile but efficient (for profit optimization)
| systems that had a good run. People plan for and about
| pandemics or at least pretended to, when needed grants.
|
| edit: Black Swans are very very low probable events. Pandemics
| have been around in human history enough times.
|
| edit2: Here is Taleb on cnbc...pandemic and blackswan.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tb2pXXUSzmI
| tito wrote:
| An interesting thing here from a biological standpoint is the
| assumption that a global pandemic is akin to a "100 year
| flood". Our understanding of climate suggests 100 year floods
| will be more commonplace -- will 100 year pandemics be as
| well?
| Ekaros wrote:
| I actually surprised we haven't had any big ones other than
| this in lets say past 50 years. It's clear that world is
| much more interconnected than ever before so pandemics
| should also be more common. But I wouldn't really even
| consider this one so big. Multiple percentage of global
| population hasn't died...
| ajford wrote:
| I think the black swan event is less of the pandemic itself
| and more of how it played out. If actions were taken and the
| pandemic was halted early, there would be less impact. At
| least speaking of the US.
|
| The pandemic has gone on for far longer than it really needed
| to due to the politicization of safety measures. Several
| countries were able to nearly beat back the pandemic rather
| early, but the US is currently sitting in a third or fourth
| wave due to asinine behaviors of a few state governments.
|
| Yes, a pandemic itself isn't black swan, but just how badly
| this was fumbled sure seems like it is (at least I damn well
| hope the next one isn't so badly managed).
| josephcsible wrote:
| Are there any countries that don't have any COVID
| restrictions other than international travel? Did every
| country in the world fumble it?
| dundarious wrote:
| After initial severe restrictions, yes. No.
| josephcsible wrote:
| Which countries are those?
| dundarious wrote:
| New Zealand is an example. Auckland has an outbreak right
| now and has relatively severe restrictions again, but the
| rest of the country has very few restrictions beyond mask
| use. My life would have been impacted far less had I been
| in Auckland instead of a big city in the US.
| josephcsible wrote:
| You made my point for me. Even New Zealand, the one
| country everyone likes to point to as having beat COVID,
| has lockdowns today.
| dundarious wrote:
| Sure and in my opinion it's a better system for me
| personally and if I had an in-person business my balance
| sheet would prefer it too. All to obscure an incredibly
| important point that their death toll has been minimal,
| under 50 as far as I can see. USA is nearing 700,000.
| ajford wrote:
| I think New Zealand is rather famous for it's COVID
| response and recovery. Denmark and Finland also had great
| responses.
|
| That said, I'm in the US and not well equipped to speak
| to their responses, having not experienced them first
| hand.
| alibarber wrote:
| Finland's was quite light touch, apart from the start
| where bars had to shut along with schools and WFH,
| 'lockdown' here was not in the same league as say the UK
| or France. There never were and are not now enforceable
| mask mandates and the more empty parts of the country
| have been restriction free for most of the year.
|
| Maybe it was luck, a sparse population or of course the
| often repeated 'everyone always does what they're told'
| (hmmm). Also it started off well but things have become
| quite fragmented recently (different agencies issuing
| rules about different things at different times, in
| different regions, much to the dismay of anyone trying to
| plan anything). In short, whilst interesting, there's not
| really any useful comparison that you can make between
| the US and Finland in my opinion.
| desmosxxx wrote:
| > at least I damn well hope the next one isn't so badly
| managed
|
| It will be, and that not being obvious is exactly the
| problem we have today with our policies.
|
| The pandemic is a worldwide phenomenon, to think it could
| have gone any other way is incredibly naive.
|
| To say the pandemic was extended by politics around safety
| measures is missing several larger reasons covid became
| endemic.
|
| e.g. local politics is largely irrelevant when the us never
| instituted forced quarantine for international travel.
| ajford wrote:
| The pandemic was definitely extended in the US due to
| politics.
|
| Every attempt at curtailing the spread was rolled back or
| defeated specifically due to politics at the highest
| levels of the US Gov't, from not implementing travel bans
| as appropriate to blocking masking mandates, to state
| level gov'ts re-opening economies and lifting lockdowns
| during surges. The current hot-spots in the US are almost
| perfectly aligned on US political boundaries.
|
| Even now it continues as masking and vaccination
| continues to be politicized with one side spreading
| obviously unfounded FUD around the vaccine and
| inflammatory messaging that masking children is "child
| abuse".
| lazide wrote:
| Being 'extended' 1) assumes we know when it will be over
| (we don't yet!), and 2) we can calculate when/if we are
| through it, and when/if we would have been through it.
|
| It would have required massive, and likely unsuccessful
| mobilization to lock down travel (both foreign and
| domestic) enough to actually control Covid aka New
| Zealand. Considering the land borders and smuggling
| problems there alone, I think it would have been
| ultimately futile.
|
| Considering how politically fragmented the country was
| and still is even before the pandemic, trying it somewhat
| successfully may also have kicked off a Civil war - not
| that anyone would have tried that hard.
|
| Vaccination rollouts could definitely have gone smoother,
| and better programs to manage the rollouts would have
| also been really nice - but given the situation above, it
| would only have been a (short) while before Delta or
| something like it got going anyway and started spreading.
|
| Fewer would have died from COVID probably, but overall
| deaths may have been similar (more violence during riots?
| More shooting and civil unrest), and the fear and other
| issues (socio political strife for instance) would still
| have happened, just looked different probably. These
| types of situations are brutally hard.
|
| Overall, I'd give the US a solid 'C' grade. Not great,
| not terrible.
| b9a2cab5 wrote:
| Hmm, you say that, but that's what China, Australia, and a
| lot of other Asia-Pacific nations did. They aren't exactly
| in better economical shape now.
| sremani wrote:
| Which Pandemic got resolved in span of 18 months, I would
| like to know. The medieval ones took decades to burn
| through the planet and the spanish flu took 50 million+ and
| last more than 2 years.
|
| Systems built without taking the Pandemic risk into account
| are the issue here, Pandemic itself we know it was coming..
| we also have movies about them.
| spookthesunset wrote:
| We also had pandemic plans that got completely tossed out
| the window. Interestingly if you read them most say to
| _not_ do any of what we did, including masks.
|
| Also, what pandemics had multiple vaccines delivered in
| record time? Ones that worked better than was ever hoped
| for. Even with that, which was the end goal, society
| seems unable to move on.
| laurent92 wrote:
| This is why everyone is afraid of major sudden changes. We know
| that our industrial and commerce systems are nicely oiled to
| deliver constant outputs, and people like me are afraid that
| changing any part of it may trigger a cascade of bankruptcies
| of companies of a certain type, which in turn could provoke a
| famine somewhere else.
|
| Imagine if all those grains stayed on their fields, it would
| trigger both parasites to develop where those fields are,
| corrupting entire valleys for years, while not either being
| able to feed the people they were aimed for. Which is the food
| equivalent of your car example.
|
| If anything, the Covid proved to me that the world is much less
| oiled and tuned for some constant economic circuits than I
| feared. It is in fact quite reliable, if we don't mention the
| debt we've put our children in.
| philwelch wrote:
| Early in the pandemic there was a massive potato surplus.
| Potato farms in my state were literally giving away potatoes.
|
| Unfortunately, I didn't find out about it until too late.
| Which is unfortunate; that could have been the perfect
| opportunity to create a baked potato delivery startup. I
| would have called it "Tuber".
| el_benhameen wrote:
| Really fascinating analysis, thanks! Any reading or authors
| you'd recommend for more of this kind of thing?
| ChuckMcM wrote:
| Systems analysis or business models? For the latter I always
| find Matt Levine's column over at Bloomberg entertaining.
| Sadly I don't have a good set of recommendations for systems
| analysis.
| wil421 wrote:
| Second vote for Matt Levine. You can get his articles sent
| to your email and not worry about Bloomberg's monthly
| article limit.
|
| His articles overlap heavily with top posts on HN. This
| week he wrote about App Annie.
| intrasight wrote:
| I just sold today a Toyota Camry which I bought in 2017, and
| got back, after consignment costs, the same amount that I had
| paid back then.
| joe_the_user wrote:
| Wow,
|
| _What is more, when you see all those cars that are going to
| be 'totalled' by the insurance company because they were under
| water in the southern part of the US or on the east coast,
| those cars used to be sold for pennies on the dollar in
| "salvage sales" in which salvage dealers would recover parts
| and/or do enough repairs to resell them with a salvage title.
| The bidding for those cars is much more intense given the
| demand by rental car companies for stock, any stock, to boost
| their fleets._
|
| Well, the thing about flood-cars is they can look and drive
| fine but really merit being called _totalled_ - having been
| submerged makes corrosion inevitable in a much quicker time
| frame. All of the electrical parts will go bad in X time frame.
|
| Maybe these can be kept going long enough to bring value to
| companies but it seems like you'll have a lot more car renters
| on the side of the road than normal.
|
| "Water can ruin electronics, lubricants, and mechanical
| systems. It may take months or years, but corrosion can find
| its way to the car's vital electronics, including airbag
| controllers."
|
| https://www.consumerreports.org/buying-a-car/beware-the-floo...
| bityard wrote:
| I exclusively buy newer used cars and keep them forever
| because 1) I want to suffer the pain of buying a car as
| rarely as possible 2) I want to let someone else take the big
| up-front depreciation hit that comes with that intoxicating
| new car smell.
|
| Every car from a dealership these days comes with a CarFax
| and these have become mostly useless as a buying tool ever
| since they became a car sales tool. However, they do often
| give you some insight into where a car has been via
| registration and title changes.
|
| I keep a record of recent hurricanes and where reports of
| flooding happened. If I'm looking at a car, the first thing I
| want to look at is the CarFax to see if it's ever been out of
| state so that I can cross-reference it to my
| hurricane/flooding list. If there is any indication that the
| car might have been in the same state at the time that a
| flood happened, it's an immediate hard pass. Doesn't matter
| if there's no visible evidence of being a flood car, doesn't
| matter if the title is green. Some outfits are very good at
| cleaning up flood cars to look close enough to normal that
| the average joe can't tell the difference. All flood cars are
| supposed to get a salvage title but a lot of them slip
| through the cracks. It doesn't take a lot of searching to
| find anecdotes from burned buyers online.
|
| I have passed on several cars that looked like great deals
| but came from flood zones and possibly passed through the
| hands of a few unscrupulous auctions, mechanics, and dealers
| on their way to my region.
| llampx wrote:
| It's been a hot minute since I last saw a "barely used" car
| going for an appreciable discount over a brand new one.
| Even today you may be able to find a better deal on a new
| car where the dealership isn't adding a scalping fee.
|
| For the reliable cars like Honda Civics and in-demand ones
| the 1st year depreciation wasn't actually all that much
| compared to buying it new with a good dealer discount,
| urban legends notwithstanding.
| ry4nolson wrote:
| If GP is like me, it's related to buying used higher end
| and/or "luxury" brand vehicles. In my experience, my
| previous 2 vehicles were 2 and 3 years old respectively
| and cost roughly ~60% of sticker price.
| Rebelgecko wrote:
| I imagine this is a big motivator for car companies to
| start moving towards a CaaS model
| timgebrally wrote:
| Yeah for me when we were buying our next minivan Honda it
| was more important that we didn't end up buying the first
| cars in a generation refresh. The first year of a
| generation tends to have more bugs than others. New vs
| like-new doesn't matter for the big reliable mass
| produced cars.
|
| https://www.autolist.com/honda-odyssey/honda-odyssey-
| generat...
| hahajk wrote:
| I haven't looked at carfax in a while, how granular is the
| location data? I thought it just reported state, in which
| case you simply never buy a car that has been on the south
| or east coasts?
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| > 1) I want to suffer the pain of buying a car as rarely as
| possible
|
| It is not that bad as of 5 years ago. You can email various
| dealerships and ask them to contact you if they are willing
| to sell at $x. If you are more desperate, you can ask them
| to email you their best offer. I was in and out in about 2
| hours, just filled out forms based on what was discussed in
| the email and browsed on my phone in the meantime.
|
| You can even see the inventory online at the car brands'
| websites. Although that may have changed in the last 18
| months due to extreme imbalance in supply and demand.
| [deleted]
| throaway46546 wrote:
| It is possible to "wash a title" by moving it through
| different states with different salvage title
| requirements/systems.
| lazide wrote:
| If they can keep them going a year or even two it might be
| worth it for them in the current supply crunch - food for
| thought. These won't be sitting in someone's garage 90% of
| the time, they'll be on the road.
|
| That said, not looking forward to having to rent a car and
| dealing with mold or more frequent breakdowns on the side of
| the road!
| Mountain_Skies wrote:
| >because smart people have vaccinated themselves
|
| This is casual bigotry and you should refrain from it if you
| want your opinion to be respected. If you want to see society
| decline into violence, keep at dehumanizing and demonizing
| people who don't have the same lived experience as you. Your
| comment was little more that a poorly disguised shot at
| communities of color who have good reason for vaccine
| hesitancy. It added absolutely nothing to your post but took
| away from societal cohesion for no benefit other than perhaps a
| bit of bigoted smugness.
| COGlory wrote:
| Very nice analysis, thank you for posting it.
| foobarian wrote:
| This (and other supply chain examples) remind me of how TCP
| flow control works. When going full blast it can transfer vast
| amounts of data in a giant window, but time out one thing and
| you get to start from zero, slowly ramping back up over several
| seconds.
| thujlife wrote:
| implying the antivax are not smart, really?
| joezydeco wrote:
| _if you bought a car new in 2019 (as I did), and it is the kind
| of car rental companies might rent (which mine is), you get
| letters from the dealer in 2021 offering to buy it back from
| you for more than you paid for it!_
|
| I'm in this situation and it's getting strange if your car is
| leased. Carvana and the like were offering me thousands more
| than the buyout amount. Like $5,000 at one point.
|
| But now the automakers and their banks are shutting off 3rd
| party purchases, meaning the only parties that can buy the car
| off the lease are you and the dealer. And the dealer has no car
| on-hand to replace the one you plan to sell back, or if they do
| they want thousands over MSRP because that's what the market is
| bearing. So it's a wash.
| jayess wrote:
| Interesting. I just sold my off-lease car to Carmax for $6k
| more than the buyout. When I was at Carmax, they had me call
| BMW financial services on speakerphone because they wouldn't
| give carmax the final payoff/lienholder information. That
| must have been what was happening.
| joezydeco wrote:
| There are a lot of interesting anecdotes on /r/askcarsales
| about this.
|
| One consensus is that Carvana/Vroom/Shift are buying cars
| at a loss to try and capture market share. Carmax has more
| of a track record so they might be getting a better shake
| like your experience. It could also be you calling
| personally that unlocked the lien, where the other
| companies don't work that way.
|
| Some manufacturers like Volvo aren't letting you out of the
| lease early unless you're leasing another Volvo.
| bityard wrote:
| > One consensus is that Carvana/Vroom/Shift are buying
| cars at a loss to try and capture market share.
|
| They absolutely are. Where I live, these companies are
| (and have been before COVID) paying well above market
| rates for newer used cars from private sellers. On the
| flip side, all of your typical auto sales rags and sites
| that used to have listings from private sellers and used
| car dealerships are now mainly carvana listings.
| llampx wrote:
| Sounds like anecdotes about Zillow where they're working
| hard to buy up all the inventory they can.
| bonestamp2 wrote:
| Even if you don't want to buy out your lease, buy it out
| anyway and then sell the car to your dealer (or another
| dealer). Check the numbers first of course, but you'll likely
| pocket several thousand dollars.
| joezydeco wrote:
| In certain states you will owe the sales tax on the entire
| residual amount. This tax is skipped when you let the
| dealer assume the buyout. But in the past 6-12 months some
| banks are adding massive amounts to the buyout price when
| the owner isn't the one making the purchase.
|
| When you read the fine print, the residual value only
| applies to the owner. The bank can charge whatever it wants
| to everyone else, or deny the purchase altogether.
| WalterBright wrote:
| A company I am familiar with that build electronic equipment
| went with just-in-time inventory for it. When they had some
| unexpected sales, they ran out of resistors, and had to quote
| months of delay to the customer. Naturally, this cost them a
| lot of sales as customers went elsewhere.
|
| It got so bad that one of the engineers on his own dime stocked
| his desk with resistors and other small parts.
|
| Madness.
| ChuckMcM wrote:
| Okay, that is pretty crazy. I mean resistors aren't that big
| after all :-). Of course when the great resistor/capacitor
| shortage hit I looked into building a manufacturing plant in
| the US. It would have been surprisingly affordable however I
| was warned off by all of the environmental hate that would
| come my way if I tried.
| WalterBright wrote:
| Yeah, stopping your assembly line due to having ordered 312
| resistors and you needed 313 is just - plain - madness. But
| that's what they did, and took a big hit to the bottom line
| because of it.
|
| Part of the problem stemmed from rating employees on how
| successful they were at JIT inventory. You get what you
| rank for, not what makes sense.
| mhh__ wrote:
| Resistors!? Unless they were particularly specialized ones,
| the first THT resistor I picked on digikey had about 1.5
| million in stock (and Digikey is profoundly not a
| particularly big-boy market)
|
| The lead times are absolutely horrific though. And I do worry
| that fast PC parts (specifically GPUs) may be this price for
| a while.
| jollybean wrote:
| This is the same reason airlines are always going bankrupt, and
| why many pieces of the economy are quite fragile: over
| optimization.
|
| In the short run, a lot of leverage makes sense, it helps you
| get a leg up, but if there's a Black Swan, then you're out.
|
| It's a tricky thing because when a business fundamentally
| depends on those factors and it's hard to differentiate
| otherwise, well, it's just not fun. You're playing with fate
| instead of 'going things better'.
|
| I wish they would innovate harder and make things more
| streamlined and easier. Renting a car is still a bit of a pain,
| the Car2Go model was nice, but they left my county sadly.
| quacked wrote:
| I can't help but notice how weakened this entire process is as
| a result of revolving around money. In terms of manpower and
| expertise, none of these changes really need to happen, but
| since everyone is chasing a buck as a matter of survival, a
| bunch of stupid stuff occurs.
|
| I don't have any brilliant solutions to bring about the
| Roddenbury-style economy, but it is infuriating to look at a
| scale problem you describe and trace the major causes back to
| the money. Are the cars going to vanish if the debts aren't
| paid for a year? Are the physical Hertz buildings going to
| crumble if the banks aren't satisfied? No, currency changing
| hands has nothing do with reality passively changing shape! And
| here we are, watching people sell off rental car fleets because
| assets will be seized unless the money changes hands in the
| right way.
| cjfd wrote:
| I don't know man.... it actually seem rather smart to me....
| Like the smartness of an organism trying to cope as well as
| it can with disruptions in the environment. What would you
| like to do it better without causing huge waste of resources?
| I am not sure there is much I can think of....
| imtringued wrote:
| The problem you are talking about is rigidity. Contracts are
| just promises and predictions. Reality is always different.
| This is why we let people go bankrupt and write off their
| debt, to add the necessary amount of flexibility to account
| for the real world being unpredictable.
|
| Following pieces of paper down to their very letter will make
| people abandon perfectly fine businesses. A lot of profitable
| businesses would have to shut down if they had to pay
| extortionate interest rates.
|
| Positive interest rates simply reward short term thinking.
| Let's imagine a hypothetical scenario where interest rates
| are 5% (don't confuse this with the federal funds rate)
| across the board but it's only the rental car companies that
| have been hit by covid. A bean counter would see that
| shutting down the rental car company and using the capital
| for something else would be a better idea than to keep the
| rental car company. Next year everyone wants rental cars and
| the returns increase above 5%.
|
| The point is that we make decisions in the present yet most
| of the money is going to be earned in the future. What we
| need is patience and patience means low interest rates, as
| close to zero as possible and maybe negative if we want 0%
| inflation.
| sideshowb wrote:
| Money is not really the root cause though, any more than
| tcp/ip is meaningful interpersonal communication. It's just a
| signal.
|
| They sold their fleets because other people (the buyers)
| wanted them more, in the short term. Now they want to buy
| because they want a fleet again. It's a time horizon problem,
| or perhaps an uncertainty problem - how were they supposed to
| know how long the pandemic would last? Or perhaps a premature
| optimization problem because the business was predicated on a
| pandemic not happening. But I don't see it as a money
| problem, any more than a tcp/ip problem.
| twistedpair wrote:
| Isn't is more of an existential issue?
|
| If you're a rental company, looking at ~$0 income for the
| next year, and the need to pay for, maintain, and garage
| their car fleets, then you're top priority is to shore up
| the balance sheet and keep your corp afloat. What the car
| buyer's market will be in 18mo is a more distant concern.
| admax88qqq wrote:
| To a point though.
|
| Selling your only operating assets just because they're
| not operating at the moment seems pretty short sighted.
|
| Creditors may have forced their hand a degree, but to me
| it feels like a factory selling their machinery because
| demand is down this year.
|
| If you're going to sell all your cars as a rental
| company, might as well liquidate your whole company and
| close up shop.
| gary_0 wrote:
| > It's just a signal.
|
| I think quacked's point was that sometimes it's not a very
| _good_ signaling system. Neither is TCP /IP in some cases,
| and sometimes neither are cytokines (to use a biology
| example). These are all evolved systems, to some degree;
| maybe they're the best we can hope for, but we should still
| keep an eye out for "version 2.0".
| quacked wrote:
| It's not even that I think it's realistic to expect
| version 2.0, although I would really like that. It's more
| that it's impossible to get many people to even admit
| that the current system is flawed in a way that is
| technically controllable.
|
| It is insane to me that we all have to shrug and admit
| that "well, we can't fix X problem because the money's
| not there" over and over again, when we have all of the
| labor hours and intellectual capital to do whatever we
| want as a collective species organism. With the right
| coordination, we could make every city look like a
| Miyazaki lake town. Or Disneyland. Or an exact copy of
| ancient Rome. We could scan every person alive every year
| and see whether or not they've got cancer. We could clean
| every river and every lake. We could send everyone a
| Nintendo Switch. That whole "bullshit jobs" memo gets
| circulated on HN all the time; how much of us could do
| actually cool shit if we didn't have to worry about
| paying for other people to help maintain society for us?
| I don't know, but it sure is frustrating watching Hertz
| sell off their fleet because their board is more worried
| about its share price than it is about whether or not
| Hertz, a car rental company, can rent out cars. (And I'm
| not blaming them for it- they're deadlocked in the same
| standoff everyone else is.)
| WalterBright wrote:
| > it sure is frustrating watching Hertz sell off their
| fleet because their board is more worried about its share
| price than it is about whether or not Hertz
|
| More like worried about bankruptcy and going out of
| business.
| sideshowb wrote:
| (Gp here) I for one certainly admit flaws in the system!
| ...maybe we're splitting hairs over whether that system
| is called money or something bigger.
|
| One of my research interests is trying to make a
| contribution to what you call version 2.0, through better
| measures of subjective wellbeing.
| lordnacho wrote:
| I don't know, if you look at "money" as the wider financial
| system, then maybe it is a root cause.
|
| Another commentator downthread mentions the fragility vs
| efficiency tradeoff, and that's certainly something
| encouraged by financializing the economy. By making it
| possible to easily switch between stocks and flows
| (capital/income in this case pay in full / pay debt) and
| encouraging whatever makes firms look good in the short
| term, the financial system helps cause this kind of thing.
|
| We get towers built higher but not necessarily safer.
| lazide wrote:
| The financial system is very efficient, and allows tuning
| and scaling to an extent never before possible. That
| allows folks to squeeze pennies or build leveraged
| business models that previously would have not been
| possible.
|
| Which is great, when things fit the model (the stocks or
| bonds involved pay retirees longer, make people
| wealthier, etc), but also allow people to build much
| higher castles of cards than they previously could have
| before something toppled them over.
|
| Panics, crashes, defaulting on debt, etc. have been
| around as long (and probably longer) than we have
| historical records, but wow does the modern system take
| the cake for scale!
| [deleted]
| sideshowb wrote:
| Sure, I agree having a financial system predicated on
| growth causes a whole lotta problems. I guess I define
| "money" more narrowly as we could use it as a component
| in a very different system.
| imtringued wrote:
| It's a whole system of problems but it's not a hugely
| complicated system, at least not compared to all the
| bandaids that are necessary if you do not address the
| problems at their root.
|
| https://youtu.be/ZFRVfXeIaek
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xkQn56Dtslk
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j5l_Oeg6kMo
|
| https://youtu.be/mhr4JGbozTA
| exporectomy wrote:
| Isn't the reason the shortages persits due to the chip
| shortage caused by a few non-financial disruptions to the
| highly concentrated chip makers, like a fire? How would
| barter or communism or whatever isn't money fix that? By
| being more wasteful all of the time?
|
| Keep in mind this isn't really a serious problem. Cars still
| exist, and can even still be rented, they just smell a bit.
| That's it. Smelly cars. First world problems!
| Invictus0 wrote:
| It's not money, it's efficiency. Too much efficiency results
| in a lack of resiliency.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > I can't help but notice how weakened this entire process is
| as a result of revolving around money. In terms of manpower
| and expertise, none of these changes really need to happen,
| but since everyone is chasing a buck as a matter of survival,
| a bunch of stupid stuff occurs.
|
| Resiliency against interruptions costs _a lot_ of money:
| warehouses to store parts, logistics to rotate these parts,
| paying suppliers for these parts earlier than the parts are
| needed, waiting until you have enough cash to buy stuff
| outright...
|
| The core point is: governments, businesses and individuals
| have historically always had these costs - but at least the
| Western world has been enjoying a couple decades without
| major interruptions like war on the home territory, oil
| crises or the looming threat of the Cold War getting hot (and
| causing interruptions as a result), which means everyone got
| _incredibly_ complacent. After all, when there are no
| interruptions to expect in the near term, why spend cash in
| the near term to guard against them?
|
| And so, when Corona hit, _everyone_ got hit.
|
| > Are the physical Hertz buildings going to crumble if the
| banks aren't satisfied? No, currency changing hands has
| nothing do with reality passively changing shape!
|
| The _existing_ buildings may not go crumbling, but _planned
| /under-construction_ buildings are getting put on hold when
| the banks' income stream vanishes and as a result of that, in
| turn, the workers can't work, ... <insert recursive ripple
| effects here>.
| quacked wrote:
| Right, I certainly don't disagree with your analysis, but
| your recursive ripple effects all aren't caused by physical
| laws, they're caused by people refusing to work because
| they can't guarantee that other people in turn will work
| for them, which is all that money is- a representation of a
| guarantee in exchanged goods or services.
|
| In a theoretical closed-loop 3-person model, the farmer
| grows, the doctor treats, and the builder builds. The
| farmer can feed the other two, the doctor can treat the
| other two, and the builder can build for the other two, and
| in a micro-community they don't really need to pay each
| other. As we increase the number of people participating,
| the likelihood that each person would choose to work
| without being paid drops. That's why we see such
| degradation in economically affected areas; everyone
| _could_ just work all day cleaning up, patching up
| buildings, etc. but they don 't, because no one's paying
| them to do so.
|
| I am not naive enough to believe that any amount of
| propaganda or state control could fix the money problem,
| but I am frustrated to be willing to participate in such a
| theoretical economy with no outlet for it besides helping
| people in whatever free time I have.
| b9a2cab5 wrote:
| > are the cars going to vanish if the debts aren't paid for a
| year?
|
| No, but the retirees who depend on the income from bonds
| packaged from those debts will be screwed. Also, cars might
| not vanish but they do depreciate regardless of whether money
| exists. That's still a cost incurred by the rental company
| even though _no money changes hands_ when it happens.
|
| Ultimately the car companies were overleveraged and were
| forced to exit before their "positions" in cars became
| profitable. There's nothing short of the state propping you
| up that can solve that.
|
| Even the Soviet Union had money and had to deal with
| economical realities. One of the reasons they collapsed was
| because of increasing grain production deficits causing an
| imbalance of trade. You can't legislate your way out of the
| market because the market's invisible hand will always show
| eventually, even if you can stave it off via state control of
| everything.
| quacked wrote:
| Yeah, but the retirees depending on the income is just a
| second-order effect that's _also_ screwed up due to money.
| Retirees don 't depend on money changing hands, they depend
| on crops getting grown, shelter being refurbished (or
| built), and defense under the law. The only reason people
| agree to do all of those actions for the retirees is that
| money changes hands.
|
| I'm not necessarily saying that I think money is a bug. It
| might be a feature. But the "market's invisible hand"
| relies on people being more motivated by their wealth stash
| than their behavior. If everyone chose to keep doing the
| same physical actions they're doing today except we stopped
| swapping money, nothing observable in reality would change;
| people would die at the same rate, food would be stored at
| the same rate, etc.
|
| "The economy" is in reality a giant standoff where every
| member of the standoff would just stop maintaining society
| unless they get paid for it. The grocer _could
| theoretically choose to_ continue to man the store 12 hours
| per day, and then the doctor _could theoretically choose
| to_ treat the grocer when he gets sick, and the truck
| driver _could theoretically choose to_ ship the medication
| from the plant to the hospital, and the floor worker _could
| theoretically choose to..._
| WalterBright wrote:
| > But the "market's invisible hand" relies on people
| being more motivated by their wealth stash than their
| behavior.
|
| Nobody has found a better way, though they often try.
|
| > "The economy" is in reality a giant standoff where
| every member of the standoff would just stop maintaining
| society unless they get paid for it.
|
| That's an immutable fact of human nature. Even cradle to
| grave propaganda doesn't change it. It's much better to
| swim with that current than against it.
| imtringued wrote:
| Better ways have been found a long time ago in ancient
| egypt:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demurrage_%28currency%29
| quacked wrote:
| > Nobody has found a better way, though they often try.
|
| This I agree with.
|
| > That's an immutable fact of human nature. Even cradle
| to grave propaganda doesn't change it.
|
| This I disagree with. Past societies saw far more social
| cohesion at points than our modern one. Especially on
| certain smaller scales, people were more willing to
| assist one another in the act of remaining alive without
| being compensated financially.
|
| For instance- many people now think it would be
| unreasonable to help a friend move without some form of
| reward (money, food, etc.) This sort of value exchange
| for reward would be considered disrespectful in many past
| cultures and even some present cultures. Unwillingness to
| work without immediate reward not an immutable fact of
| human nature.
| WalterBright wrote:
| Helping out your friends and locals now and then is also
| normal human behavior. But it does not extend to running
| a society that way, and never has. It is rooted in
| building a network of mutual obligation, a common trait
| in small communities. It's not really considered a
| "reward" or payment.
|
| > Unwillingness to work without immediate reward not an
| immutable fact of human nature.
|
| Yeah, it is, as no society has managed to make that work
| as an organizing principle. Even the Israeli kibbutzen
| have failed. Altruism rarely extends beyond family and
| close friends, and even then, it isn't reliable.
| bzbarsky wrote:
| On the one hand, yes of course the economy is all about
| specialization and then exchanging the fruits of
| specialized production between people. This last can
| happen via money, or barter, or a dictator (benevolent or
| not) confiscating everything and redistributing it, or
| some mix of the above, and maybe other methods.
|
| One of the hard problems here is what to specialize in
| and to what extent. This is a hard problem to solve even
| in a static economy, and even harder if circumstances
| keep changing...
|
| The "standoff" description seems to assume a static
| economy. If circumstances change, maybe we as a society
| need a grocer for only 4 hours a day but could use an
| extra half-shift truck driver. But how to discover that?
| quacked wrote:
| I have absolutely no idea how or even if that could be
| discovered, which is why my original comment was more
| about expressing frustration than offering a solution.
|
| I do know that several things going on currently will
| make it more impossible to discover: increased
| financialization of commodities, outsourcing, destruction
| of culture via removal of differentiating markers, etc.
| If any society is going to discover the half-shift truck
| driver economy, they're going to be one that is almost
| entirely self-sustaining and committed to perpetuation of
| itself, not one that is leveraged up to the eyeballs,
| suffers from a total lack of manufacturing expertise
| within its component citizens, and relies on cheap
| foreign labor to make everything.
| imtringued wrote:
| Money itself isn't the bug. It's the ability to abuse
| money to disconnect yourself from the real economy. How
| easy it is to abuse money depends on how it is designed.
| When people save money perishable goods like food are
| sitting on the shelves waiting to be bought, then money
| will outstay its welcome. The food is gone but the money
| is still there.
|
| "Only money that goes out of date like a newspaper, rots
| like potatoes, rusts like iron, evaporates like ether, is
| capable of standing the test as an instrument for the
| exchange of potatoes, newspapers, iron and ether. For
| such money is not preferred to goods either by the
| purchaser or the seller. We then part with our goods for
| money only because we need the money as a means of
| exchange, not because we expect an advantage from
| possession of the money. So we must make money worse as a
| commodity if we wish to make it better as a medium of
| exchange." -- Silvio Gesell, "The Natural Economic Order"
| saltcured wrote:
| It seems like you're focusing on a loss of money as a
| "stick" (punishment) and saying we could ignore that and
| just keep operating as usual. But it's also the "carrot"
| (motivation) signalling the demand and value placed on
| the activity by others.
|
| In the end, aren't all the money and ledgers are just a
| way to simplify the ridiculously complex trades required
| to make modern society work? We don't want to have to
| exchange sacks of rice and live chickens when we see the
| doctor and he doesn't want to have to get those chickens
| converted into barley or whatever it is the medical
| supply company owner wants this week.
|
| If you remove this signal, you don't just remove a threat
| of stagnation. You also remove efficiency signals to
| curtail under-valued work. Just as easily, the
| participants could do other absurd things instead. The
| grocer could keep performing shelf-stocking actions while
| the shelves and back storage area are empty. The doctor
| could decide they prefer to drive around in an empty
| delivery truck, while the truck driver decides to sit in
| the clinic and talk to patients about the weather. Etc.
| imtringued wrote:
| >No, but the retirees who depend on the income from bonds
| packaged from those debts will be screwed.
|
| I agree that retirees are wholly dependent on others to
| work for them and therefore I recognize their right to save
| for retirement. However, if your investment/savings turn
| out to be worthless then that is on you. It's better to
| signal these failures as soon as possible so that people
| are aware of the risk.
|
| Think about it this way. You acquire "healthcare coupons"
| during your working age and then all the businesses
| accepting "healthcare coupons" have shut down. The coupons
| are worthless. Yet when you replace "healthcare coupons"
| with money, people insist that even if there aren't enough
| workers to work in healthcare, that money must maintain its
| value and they should even be owed more than they saved
| even though there is nobody to provide those services. This
| is why inflation is a necessary evil. It tells you what's
| really going on in the world. People will present inflation
| as theft but the truth is that your money is losing its
| value because it should be losing its value.
|
| Just because e.g. gold is free of inflation doesn't mean
| that there will be healthcare services waiting at the start
| of your retirement to accept that gold. It's just pure
| speculation.
| hikerclimber1 wrote:
| everything is subjective. especially laws.
| flixic wrote:
| It's been a long, long time since I read an LATimes article. It
| looks like they finally allowed people from Europe to view their
| website, after years of blocking it completely due to not willing
| to deal with GDPR. Well done, and "finally".
| rco8786 wrote:
| I've rented 4 cars in the last year in 4 different states and
| have had literally no problems and did not notice any major price
| gouging. ~$150-200/day for a large SUV on all occasions, seemed
| like plenty of stock available across companies.
| dawnerd wrote:
| That's actually quite a lot. Last suv I rented right before
| pandemic was under 100/d.
| pokoleo wrote:
| For anyone looking to rent a car, I'd recommend using
| autoslash.com
|
| It's an aggregator that allows you to pick from the other
| aggregators, and you don't pay until you pick up.
|
| The prices are consistently within 10% of the lowest price that I
| can find online.
|
| You fill out a simple form (pickup/dropoff times/location, car
| preference), and it emails you quotes. They don't spam me, which
| is nice.
|
| I tend to request the same quote multiple times over the weeks
| before my trip. It'll frequently find you something for less than
| what you initially paid for.
|
| Ignore their janky UI, it's the real deal.
| ojagodzinski wrote:
| public.... transport! It is a thing outside US.
| neonate wrote:
| http://web.archive.org/web/20210917073652/https://www.latime...
|
| https://archive.is/RHW1J
| ghaff wrote:
| I have admittedly not actually picked up the keys to a rental car
| yet. Hopefully I will tomorrow.
|
| However, I locked in a reservation on a car quite a few months
| ago when the horror stories started circulating and the pricing
| was indeed pretty bad.
|
| But since then I switched that rental and made another rental and
| the pricing strikes me as fairly normal. Not cheap and with the
| usual outrageous taxes and fees but these are with major non-
| discount rental car companies (albeit with a good corporate
| discount) but not out of the realm of what I consider "normal."
| vecinu wrote:
| I had a terrible experience renting from Klass Wagen in Romania
| this week. I think they're scamming their customers as much as
| they can before going bankrupt.
|
| I booked a SUV with my Sapphire Preferred card that has primary
| car insurance on it but when I went to pick the car up, I had the
| sleaziest sales experience of my life.
|
| The agent tried to sell me their insurance for $70/day but I told
| him, no I'm covered. He said due to COVID they have a new policy
| that any scratch, dent or chip, no matter how small, will be
| fixed and the cost deducted from my $1700 deposit.
|
| I was ready to decline until he showed me the car I booked. It
| had so many scratches, dents and damage, including coffee stains
| on the headliner, that I gave in and took their insurance because
| I needed to leave that day. As we were taking pictures and
| documenting the myriad of damage, I realized I was going to be on
| the hook for something when I returned the car. He said they cash
| in 90% of deposits... I think that was a lie as well.
|
| Lo and behold, once I took the insurance, I got "upgraded" to a
| nicer and cleaner car.
|
| After seeing other reviews, a bunch of people fell for the same
| scam. They must be hemoraging money and have resorted to such
| scummy practices, it was really off putting.
|
| I'm going to try and do a charge back for the insurance part, I
| felt really bad after the experience.
| fy20 wrote:
| I rented a car last month in Spain, it was a less than year old
| Seat Ibiza. I booked a couple of weeks in advance, but prices
| seemed no different than before the pandemic.
|
| Is this just a US issue, if so, why is the US being hit so much
| harder than elsewhere? Surely it should be the opposite, as the
| lockdowns in the US were often much less strict than Europe.
| dboreham wrote:
| Supposedly the US rental companies assumed their business would
| tank due to lockdowns so sold off much of their vehicle
| inventory. Then when people turned out to travel anyway through
| the pandemic, they tried to buy more vehicles and found they
| were hard to get due to supply chain issues.
|
| I think it depend on the specific location. Here in Bozeman the
| airlines are complaining they can't fill planes because
| travelers can't rent cars here so they travel somewhere else or
| stay home. But for example LAX seems to have cars, albeit
| higher price than before.
| josh_today wrote:
| I just booked a car in the US this week. Same prices and
| availability as before covid
| yardie wrote:
| City-dweller here. I was on the public transport bandwagon. Then
| summer 2020 came and I realized the buses were at limited
| capacity, Uber and Lyft drivers were practically non-existent,
| and the big 3 car rentals were liquidating their inventory. So I
| bought a used car, just in time too.
|
| I still hate car ownership: the parking fees, maintenance,
| shocking price of gas, insurance, etc. It's costing me $20/day to
| sit mostly in a garage. I was saving up for a BEV. But realized
| air travel is out of commission and a BEV might not be practical
| for road trip vacations, at least not right now.
| nonameiguess wrote:
| I'm not sure how much this generalizes. I'm a city dweller and
| just gave away my car in July after basically not using it for
| the past five years. I can still walk to all the same places,
| they're open, the trains are still running, and I haven't had
| any trouble getting a rideshare driver to pick me up when that
| is needed.
|
| I imagine the impact depends heavily on localized lockdown
| measures, and they apparently aren't nearly as strong in Dallas
| as wherever you live.
| throwaway123x2 wrote:
| I feel you. I was about to sell my car right as the pandemic
| started but now I'm glad I didn't. Uber/Lyft quickly went out
| of the range of using for ordinary everyday things post-
| pandemic.
| Diederich wrote:
| > BEV might not be practical for road trip vacations, at least
| not right now.
|
| Taking a BEV on a road trip vacation is more tricky and
| requires more planning, but it's very doable. We've taken our
| 2017 340 mile (when new, current max range is about 327 miles)
| Tesla on a number of moderately long road trips. It's a bit
| slower and there are some places we could not have gone, but it
| definitely works.
|
| Keep in mind that you can charge 3-5 miles per hour on nearly
| any standard 120 VAC outlet. With one of our trips to the
| mountains, we ran a 100 foot extension cord from our cabin and
| had little trouble keeping up with mileage demands.
|
| More concretely, last year we moved from California to
| Washington state, a little more than 800 miles. Since it was in
| the middle of C19, we didn't want to stop over anywhere, so we
| had to do the drive in one day.
|
| It took us about 16 hours to drive about 820 miles, an average
| of more than 50 miles per hour, including charge stops. 15-20
| years ago we'd do 800 mile days in about 13 hours, or an
| average of 61 miles per hour.
|
| The Tesla supercharger network is pretty extensive, extremely
| reliable and constantly growing. I don't have a sense of how
| widespread/reliable the other fast charging networks are,
| beyond various problematic stories I've come across.
|
| PS: I've seen youtube videos of people doing 12-15 amp 120 VAC
| charging (gaining 3-5 mile per hour) in Teslas using portable
| solar panels too.
| nostromo wrote:
| Folks that support American urbanism have been set back
| decades.
|
| Smaller apartments in dense, walkable neighborhoods have been
| pretty miserable places to live for over a year now.
|
| The bargain was that you don't need a house with a yard when
| you can have an apartment surrounded by parks, restaurants, and
| bars; that you don't need a car when you have transit; that you
| don't need a home office...
|
| Then all of that was taken away in a heartbeat with little
| regard to its effectiveness. Suddenly owning a house and a car
| were critically important again. It's going to take a long time
| for people to come back.
| brailsafe wrote:
| Meh, I disagree, except for that it would be nice to have
| better access to a car right now. I could buy one if I had an
| income, but I'd only do so reluctantly.
|
| Living in a rainforest-like climate in Vancouver, I couldn't
| be happier. Ya, I could use a little more space than my
| studio. Ya, it sucked so bad when the pandemic hit, but much
| much less so than in suburban areas. I still only walk 2 mins
| to a bar or where I buy groceries. Transit is the same.
| Mountains aren't far etc.. To say urbanites have been set
| back decades is ridiculous.
|
| That said, idk about living right downtown, but I've always
| hated it anyway because it's a boring landscape with boring
| people.
| jayess wrote:
| My husband and I bought a house precisely for this reason. We
| had lived in downtown apartments for the past 15 years but
| couldn't take being so cooped up anymore. I LOVE the extra
| space and my own yard. I miss being in a high-rise, but I
| love my house even more.
| yardie wrote:
| I don't think urbanism has been affected that much.
|
| In my neck of the woods (SE Florida) urbanism didn't lose a
| beat. Rental apartments in my neighborhood are leasing at
| above asking. There were a few months where the city felt
| abandoned, property values were down, and leases were
| offering signing bonuses.
|
| It's done a 180, or 360 now, city property values are
| climbing. New construction is way up, even with the high cost
| of labor and material, and shops and bars are working with
| the new normal. My city has taken advantage of decreased
| traffic to institute popular pedestrian projects that were
| unpopular to commuters.
| dv_dt wrote:
| The opposite happened in some Southern California areas.
| Some popular restaurant streets were closed to car traffic,
| and the restaurants added outdoor eating spaces. This
| happened in Santa Barbara and Ventura. It looks like the
| areas are at least considering keeping that change even
| post covid.
|
| Anyone living near those areas had an improved walkable
| neighborhood.
|
| Also I don't think anyone living near a park lost use of
| those parks.
| spookthesunset wrote:
| Yup. In a fit of hysteria and panic, we destroyed a decade of
| urbanization.
|
| Oh yeah, and we completely f'd over our kids. Like,
| shamefully so.
|
| History will harshly judge the people who pushed these public
| policies.
| yakz wrote:
| There may have been blunders with the policies, but if
| we're talking about history judging things harshly... I
| think it's far more likely that the massive disinformation
| campaigns, irrational and willful non-compliance with
| reasonable safety measures, and cowardice when faced with
| the need for vaccination that will get the brunt of it.
| spookthesunset wrote:
| So in your argument, even smart well intentioned people
| who disagree with these public policies are spreading
| misinformation? You are asserting that everybody who
| disagrees is wrong and harmful to society, correct?
|
| Because I don't think that such a thing promotes healthy,
| much needed dialog. The idea that any criticism or
| skepticism of the core tenants of the last year and a
| half of public policy is misinformed ramblings of crazy
| people...
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| You are committing a logical fallacy. Claiming that there
| have been misinformation campaigns around Covid is not
| the same as claiming that all disagreement is
| misinformation. Your outrage is therefore completely off
| the mark.
| yakz wrote:
| I don't think that everyone who disagrees with the public
| policies are spreading misinformation. I also don't think
| that the people making the restrictive policies are
| acting in bad faith, or without reasonable advisement, or
| are just stupid or something like that.
| lloydgrossman wrote:
| >So in your argument, even smart well intentioned people
| who disagree with these public policies are spreading
| misinformation? You are asserting that everybody who
| disagrees is wrong and harmful to society, correct?
|
| Whereas you're asserting that it's impossible for smart
| people to spread disinformation?
| jerry1979 wrote:
| I find it fairly easy to find specific bad information
| campaigns promoted by smart people. For example, those
| two doctors in Bakersfield California created misleading
| arguments using bad math [0].
|
| [0] https://www.dailynews.com/2020/04/28/california-
| doctors-with...
| spookthesunset wrote:
| Meanwhile the media is full of anecdotes about kids dying
| and people saying "I regret not taking covid seriously"
| and stuff like that. Then you have that Dr. Ding guy on
| Twitter spreading fear and panic. Is that not dangerous
| misinformation?
| nonameiguess wrote:
| I guess you're talking more generally, but this specific
| problem of car shortages is due to chip shortages. It
| doesn't have anything to do with any public policy
| measures. Factories may shut down briefly overseas, but the
| enormous demand surge for other electronics is the biggest
| culprit.
| kevingadd wrote:
| What part of it is hysteria and panic? Over 600k people
| died in the US alone.
| spookthesunset wrote:
| That doesn't mean any of what we did helped. It could
| have made things much, much worse.
| r00fus wrote:
| [citation needed]
|
| You can see effectiveness of response based on various
| states and regions that responded differently.
| nostromo wrote:
| I don't know if I fully subscribe to this view, but a
| friend of mine pointed out that the age of our leadership
| (President, Senate, Congress, Governors...) are all very
| old. They are the ones most at risk, and that may have
| biased their response towards harsh restrictions for people
| at low risk.
|
| As a thought experiment, what if the pandemic mostly hurt
| 20-somethings? Would our old leaders stop everything to
| prevent transmission of that disease? Or would young people
| be told to suck it up? Or would they have asked
| 20-somethings to just stay home while everyone else went
| about their business? I'm not sure...
| chrismcb wrote:
| I would argue that our current response is what we did
| have done if the young were more at risk. What Sweden did
| was the more correct response to the current pandemic.
| But I wouldn't necessarily blame the older leaders. My
| company sent everyone home before the nation shut down,
| and it seemed mostly because people were worried about
| their kids
| ransom1538 wrote:
| "As a thought experiment, what if the pandemic mostly
| hurt 20-somethings?"
|
| This happened [1]. They told young people to go **
| themselves. People had school, people went to eat, people
| carried on with jobs, NO government checks sent out.
| Deaths: 50 million worldwide with about 675,000 occurring
| in the United States.
|
| "Mortality was high in people younger than 5 years old,
| 20-40 years old"
|
| https://www.cdc.gov/flu/pandemic-
| resources/1918-pandemic-h1n...
| dougmwne wrote:
| I am sure I know the answer. The old men would have asked
| the young to die. It has happened during every war since
| the beginning of history.
| jimt1234 wrote:
| Do you remember the initial response to AIDS? There's
| your answer.
|
| (AIDS was originally attributed to _only_ gays and
| sexually promiscuous people. Best case, leadership simply
| ignored it. Worst case, innocent victims were attacked
| [read the Wikipedia article for "Ryan Wayne White"].)
| Consultant32452 wrote:
| Fauci ran our response to AIDS too. He held back
| treatments for years expecting a vaccine. The Dallas
| Buyers Club is a good dramatization of what people were
| going through.
|
| There's also some clips of him warning people not to have
| casual contact with gays (he says people with AIDS).
| teakettle42 wrote:
| Should it come back? I feel like this succinctly demonstrated
| the innate flaws in urbanism, rather than being a novel,
| isolated failure mode for an otherwise robust ideal of how
| people should live.
| chrischen wrote:
| If it definitely failed then Japan definitely failed to
| demonstrate it, with their vastly lower number of virus
| numbers per capita (and deaths) and high urban density.
| teakettle42 wrote:
| I always struggle with Japan comparisons; it seems like
| the variables we often want to directly compare are not
| easily isolated from deep, fundamental differences in
| culture, institutions, politics, and even geography.
| yaomtc wrote:
| > innate flaws in urbanism
|
| Care to elaborate?
| kyleblarson wrote:
| Rampant crime, human waste on sidewalks, parks filled
| with homeless encampments, used needles everywhere,
| riots, looting?
| teakettle42 wrote:
| Essentially, flaws that are unique to and induced by
| scale and consolidation.
|
| Outside of the current pandemic, those problems range
| from the rent-seeking consolidation of housing ownership
| into very few hands, to the elimination of forms of self-
| reliance that create healthy community -- instead
| shifting those responsibilities to government and large
| institutions.
|
| Scale also requires more top-down centralized control and
| regulation in order to function at all.
| kfarr wrote:
| The issues you stated could be suburban or even rural
| issues, not just urban issues. In other words I think you
| might be conflating the difference between an agrarian
| economy with a modern economy with specialization, not
| urban vs rural.
| Nasrudith wrote:
| I saw a different explanation. Cities are inheriently
| high density and make things used enmasse as much as
| possible and inevitably leads to more contact among
| others. This is unfortunately also a good way for
| pandemics to travel. The isolation highlighted how little
| they owned spacewise.
|
| Now that is a spectrum and we are all dependent on others
| but they are at the high end. The low end is "compound in
| the middle of the wilderness which is dependent
| indirectly for there to be wilderness unused for them to
| DYI everything".
|
| The issue will hopefully wind up rare but there is no
| great certainty in these matters.
| pgwhalen wrote:
| In my opinion, the marginal reduction in transmission of
| infectious disease during a pandemic is not worth the cost
| moving away from urbanism. Humans are meant to congregate
| together, and city living and everything that comes with it
| are the most efficient ways to do so.
| teakettle42 wrote:
| Humans have historically always congregated together, but
| never at the scale of urbanism -- if historical precedent
| is the argument here, we've almost always operated at the
| much lower densities of rural environments.
|
| City urbanism might be the most resource-efficient in
| many ways, but animal well-being isn't measured solely in
| terms of how efficiently we can feed and house you.
|
| If it were, factory farms would be the ideal.
| laurent92 wrote:
| Humans are not humans in cities. "Who survives in NYC
| without amphetamines", I remember from a movie when I was
| a kid. Now I understand the sentence: With no connection
| to the earth, city dwellers invent an idea of ecology and
| relation to nature that is in total disconnect with
| people in farming.
|
| For my goddaughter, killing ants is the top of all evils.
| Ecology should be able protecting cute things. For me,
| terraforming kilometers of arable land to build her
| colonies on Earth, that was the real crime. Cities bring
| the illusion that humans are legitimate in unfathomable
| numbers. Cities hide away nature's constraints.
| [deleted]
| rco8786 wrote:
| > It's going to take a long time for people to come back.
|
| The numbers don't really bear this out. Rents are as high as
| ever and inventory is largely back to pre-covid in the major
| cities where the life you're describing exists.
| ls612 wrote:
| It depends on what people take away from this year. There
| seems to be little chance of any distancing restrictions
| returning in the US for covid so the market is being driven
| by how much people believe this has set a precedent which
| will be regularly repeated
| oops wrote:
| I spent the pandemic in a tiny apartment. Did laundry in the
| tub for a while (no w/d). Finding space to hang sheets to dry
| was a fun challenge. Quickly developed an appreciation for
| easy to wash and hard-to-stink-up items like singlets. Not
| going to lie, the laundry part sucked. But that is not
| inherent to urbanism. Most apartments can be updated to have
| a w/d. Many can be updated to have outdoor space. The parks
| are still there. From my perspective, the bargain you
| describe still exists and it was never critically important
| to own a house or car. Still in the city and not leaving any
| time soon. To each their own!
| odyssey7 wrote:
| I doubt it. Absence makes the heart grow fonder. Assuming the
| pandemic does end, we'll see greater appreciation for these
| things.
| fedreserved wrote:
| What doesn't break you makes you stronger. What if a larger
| chunk then normal gets broken by these experiences. The new
| wrinkle to this pandemic are the influx of the middle and
| upper classes to the broken segment at a larger percentage
| then normal. For those who have never faced true struggle
| or failure , it can be a larger impact on their psyche to
| those who have lived with and struggled through adversity
| coming out the other side
| SavantIdiot wrote:
| On the plus side, single-family zoning laws are being
| dismantled on the west coast. This will lead to people
| demanding more transit since there won't be any parking. Of
| course, the only transit available will be busses because
| most cities/burbs are so poorly thought out that there is no
| room for light rail. But i'd love to see more bus routes and
| frequent schedules where I live. The cost is crazy: $5 one
| way to go from my house to the city center, once per hour,
| and no times per hour at night. That's gotta change.
| valeness wrote:
| Nothing about the pandemic made my apartment a miserable
| place to live. It was alaways a miserable place to live.
|
| * There is no bike parking available, so 2 bikes occupy a
| large portion of my living space * The sidewalks outside my
| apartment are small and in a state of disrepair *
| Intersections are cyclist and pedestrian hostile making it
| hard to go anywhere without it being a stressful experience *
| The landlord refuses to fix my A/C when it's 118 degrees
| farenheit outside, meaning it is often 92F inside the
| apartment (And no, citing the municipal code that says this
| illegal does nothing and nobody has the energy to hire a
| lawyer right now) * The bus stop has been in disrepair to the
| point where it was recently just removed altogether meaning I
| have to walk a mile to get to the next one. * The next
| nearest bus stop has no shade or place to sit * I can't mount
| my TV to the wall or make any changes to make the small space
| more comfortable (like hanging shelves or mounting hooks)
|
| I want nothing more than effective urban living, but I have
| yet to see it. So from my perspective, I'm not sure what was
| really "lost" during the pandemic that wasn't already broken.
|
| Also, since I see some replies mentioning it, I would rather
| my parents ad grandparents be alive than have any of the
| above be fixed. So I'd be careful to judge too harshly and
| gain some perspective about "strict" measures to curb the
| spread of the pandemic.
| sizzle wrote:
| You can withhold rent and put it in an escrow account and
| get a hotel room until your landlord provides a habitable
| environment regarding the broken AC, at least that was the
| case for me in California. They can't evict you over this
| and will lose in court, of course look up your state laws
| as they vary by state.
| yarcob wrote:
| I don't know how people move into appartments where they
| aren't allowed to drill holes in the wall. This would make
| an appartement unusable for me.
|
| Unanchored furniture is extremely risky and kills infants
| every year.
|
| Yeah, there's a risk that you might drill into a pipe. In
| the last 20 years that happened to me once, and it was
| annoying, since it cost 200EUR to have the pipe fixed, but
| it's not really a big deal.
| vmception wrote:
| You can drill holes, you just have to fill them in when
| you leave and consider losing a portion of your deposit.
| Not really that big of a deal.
| vultour wrote:
| Shocking price of gas? I'm in Europe and have hoped for gas
| prices to climb at least 10x since I was in high school. We
| have a relatively good public transport system yet the last
| 5-10 years have seen insane car ownership growth and even the
| small town my parents live in is now jammed with cars every
| morning.
|
| Everyone should not own a car, it's unsustainable both for the
| planet and for the road system.
| ChinceParming wrote:
| Quite a mind-opening way to think of things. I was like wtf
| 10x gas prices, but then you followed it up thoughfully. You
| should be a politician. In lieu of mailing lists to subscribe
| to, I'll be mandated to insert this comment.
| choeger wrote:
| Did you ever consider _why_ the town is jammed with cars? Or
| _why_ big cities are filled with them? Cars are enormously
| expensive right now. Owning a decent-sized family car costs
| around 400EUR every month right now, a used one, mind you.
|
| The fact that so many people pay that cost _and_ the
| inconveniences of maintenance and searching for parking space
| should motivate you to think about the utility of car
| ownership.
|
| Where I live, public transportation is great. I don't think
| it can get much better, practically. Yet, I have several
| modes of transportation where I cannot use it: Traveling
| _out_ of the big city or to orthogonally to the main public
| transportation routes, or with small kids, or with large
| luggage, with a week worth of shopping bags, or when I have
| to get rid of garbage...
|
| What a big city needs is threefold:
|
| * Slow, respectful, traffic (30kph should work) -except for
| some big roads- shared between all vehicles (bikes included)
|
| * Zero-emission vehicles
|
| * Enough parking spaces (that should cost money) for all
| vehicles.
|
| In order to get there, we will have to reduce the amount of
| apartments per sqkm and even more so the amount of office
| space and shops. This will work in two ways: It will
| naturally reduce traffic and free space for car parks.
| pertymcpert wrote:
| > In order to get there, we will have to reduce the amount
| of apartments per sqkm and even more so the amount of
| office space and shops. This will work in two ways: It will
| naturally reduce traffic and free space for car parks.
|
| This sounds like prioritizing cars over people. What's the
| point?
| choeger wrote:
| That's simply not true. There needs to be a balance, not
| a priority. If you build a city that is made for
| pedestrians, how do you leave it from the center? City
| design nowadays has this "we are only a 500m across
| plaza" vibe whereas in reality the cities sprawl over
| tens if not hundreds of km. You cannot make that walkable
| and you cannot design a transportation system that is as
| flexible as roads and individual vehicles. Also, people
| like to own stuff and have the freedom to use it
| whenever. So if you want to create a city for human
| beings you need to create a parking space that puts cars
| out of the way and create roads that are peaceful.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| If you take choeger's point seriously, that even with all
| the cost and problems people still find great utility in
| cars, then creating an urban environment that doesn't
| have adequate room for cars seems like creating an
| environment that is hostile to the way people want to
| live.
| criddell wrote:
| > This sounds like prioritizing cars over people.
|
| The cars are used by people. If you prioritize for cars,
| you are prioritizing for those people.
| lolpython wrote:
| > * Slow, respectful, traffic (30kph should work) -except
| for some big roads- shared between all vehicles (bikes
| included)
|
| I understand you plan to include bikes on the roads
| themselves. But making a city less dense and filling it
| with parking spaces for automobiles makes the city hostile
| to all except automobiles.
|
| > * Zero-emission vehicles
|
| Zero _tailpipe_ emissions. EVs still emit 1 /2 as much
| lifetime GHG as a combustion engine personal vehicle [0].
| Your plan would make your theoretical town less walkable
| and bikeable and force former cyclists and pedestrians to
| drive EVs. This results in net higher emissions since more
| motor vehicles would be on the road.
|
| > Traveling out of the big city or to orthogonally to the
| main public transportation routes, or with small kids, or
| with large luggage, with a week worth of shopping bags, or
| when I have to get rid of garbage...
|
| These are valid use cases but they do not justify
| increasing a town's emissions in the middle of a climate
| crisis.
|
| > In order to get there, we will have to reduce the amount
| of apartments per sqkm and even more so the amount of
| office space and shops. This will work in two ways: It will
| naturally reduce traffic and free space for car parks.
|
| This would make the city less economically productive per
| sq km. Compare the tax revenue from 10 parking spaces in a
| parking lot versus mixed use row houses & businesses in the
| same lot. Plus people can actually live in the latter. Is
| there a housing shortage in your city? There sure is one in
| mine. And it has tons of tax subsidized parking :)
|
| [0] point #4 in https://www.epa.gov/greenvehicles/electric-
| vehicle-myths
| NoGravitas wrote:
| > The fact that so many people pay that cost and the
| inconveniences of maintenance and searching for parking
| space should motivate you to think about the utility of car
| ownership.
|
| Car ownership has a Prisoners' Dilemma payoff structure to
| its utility. It's very useful to the car owners, very
| harmful to society at large. As more and more people have
| cars, the population of car owners and society at large
| overlap a lot, meaning everyone is paying the costs.
|
| Do you ever wonder why it's so hard to get around without a
| car? A lot of it is that the need for wide roads for cars,
| and the need for lots of parking force all of your built
| infrastructure to be physically spread out. Which means you
| no longer can get around without a car, which means you
| need more car infrastructure, which makes it harder to get
| around without a car...
| jjk166 wrote:
| It was hard to get around without cars before anyone had
| cars, hence why people got cars in the first place.
|
| Most things we take for granted like being able to get a
| week's worth of groceries home in one trip or going to
| enjoy a restaurant that specializes in a niche style, or
| buying cheap goods at a warehouse store, or being able to
| get to a hospital within half an hour all require
| automobile infrastructure. But once you have roads all
| over the place and parking lots at important
| destinations, and lots of people owning cars for these
| necessities, the damage is done, and car travel is the
| sensible mode for virtually all transportation.
|
| The fact is taking a leisurely stroll on a nice spring
| morning when you want to is very different from being
| forced to walk for miles through freezing rain in
| November after a long day of hard work. You want the
| option to drive. There are lots of good ideas about how
| to make towns and cities both drivable and walkable.
| Anyone telling you that the simple existence of car
| infrastructure is the problem has not thought through
| what elimination of that infrastructure really means.
| lolpython wrote:
| > Most things we take for granted like being able to get
| a week's worth of groceries home in one trip or going to
| enjoy a restaurant that specializes in a niche style, or
| buying cheap goods at a warehouse store, or being able to
| get to a hospital within half an hour all require
| automobile infrastructure
|
| It's possible to do these things without a car if your
| city has prioritized making that a reality. The exact
| mode depends on the city. Some examples:
|
| * In the Netherlands, cycling infrastructure is strong
| enough that you can bike to a big box store outside the
| city and load up your bike with what you need [0]. You
| can fit a week's worth of goods in a cargo bike [1] if
| that's your style. There is also an argument to be made
| that you don't need to buy groceries weekly if your city
| is dense and you have a store nearby.
|
| * In Pittsburgh, there are flyer (fast track) busses that
| will take you to malls in the northern car-oriented
| suburbs as well as light rail to the southern suburbs. So
| you can reach most niche stores in the metro area by
| bus/light rail. Although it's pedestrian hostile in the
| northern burbs. In the city proper, bus coverage is good
| enough to get basically anywhere including all the niche
| restaurants. Though light rail is more frequent and
| pleasant. Bus frequency and reliability is just OK, not
| great. Could be improved by changing priorities. My point
| here is that Pittsburgh's urban form is not great but
| they still came up with transit solutions that work for
| average people.
|
| * In Toronto, busses run every 10 minutes on an enormous
| number of routes. This reduces transfer times so much
| that travel time is nearly on parity with cars, even
| though the city is very car-oriented.
|
| I don't understand your note about hospitals because
| ambulances get the right of way and can travel in bus
| lanes.
|
| > The fact is taking a leisurely stroll on a nice spring
| morning when you want to is very different from being
| forced to walk for miles through freezing rain in
| November after a long day of hard work.
|
| I agree, but it's not so bad in a dense urban area with
| adequate bus shelters, sidewalk clearing and bus lines
| scattered everywhere.
|
| > Anyone telling you that the simple existence of car
| infrastructure is the problem has not thought through
| what elimination of that infrastructure really means.
|
| The simple existence of car infrastructure _is_ the
| problem because it causes sprawl and exacerbates our
| climate emergency. Cities have already come up with the
| solution and that is good transit, active transit
| included.
|
| [0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M8F5hXqS-Ac
|
| [1] https://www.bakfiets.nl/bestanden/afbeelding/2019/374
| -cargo-...
| simonklitj wrote:
| Don't you suppose public transportation costs would skyrocket
| with 10x the gas prices? Imagine 15 euros for a liter. Holy
| yikes. Of course, electric vehicles would be a part of a
| cheaper solution.
| isbvhodnvemrwvn wrote:
| Public transportation around me is one of the earliest
| adopters of EVs.
| namdnay wrote:
| public utilities don't usually pay taxes on gas
| s0rce wrote:
| If the price of gas increases are largely due to taxes
| which is sometimes the case it could be easy to simply
| offer rebates to public transit companies, just like you
| can buy diesel for farm equipment or heating without paying
| the road taxes.
| Nasrudith wrote:
| Aren't gas prices relatively negligible compared to driver
| salaries and other vehicle costs?
| yardie wrote:
| The price of gas primarily affect the poor way more than the
| rich. They both pay the same but while one is paying 15% of
| their wages for petrol, the other is paying <1%.
| Simultaneously, the poor are being pushed further from the
| urban core, and jobs, and are spending more, in time and
| money, to get to those jobs.
| vmception wrote:
| I also picked up a car this year, after 11 years of not owning
| one.
|
| Uber and Lyft still sucking so hard into this year was the
| catalyst.
|
| I wonder if shared rides through those apps will ever return.
| Cd00d wrote:
| BEV?
|
| I'm guessing the EV is electric vehicle, but what's the B?
| josephcsible wrote:
| "Battery". Some people include plug-in hybrids in their
| definition of "EV", so "BEV" was created to exclude those.
| TacticalCoder wrote:
| > Some people include plug-in hybrids in their definition
| of "EV", so "BEV" was created to exclude those.
|
| Which is really a poorly coined term because it's not as if
| plug-in hybrids, many of which can do people's daily
| commute back and forth without ever kicking the internal
| combustion engine on, where finding their energy from
| something else than an EV battery.
| yabones wrote:
| I've felt this as well. Before the pandemic, I lived in a small
| apartment in an up-and-coming part of my city. Downstairs was a
| very nice small grocery store, cafe, and central Asian food
| restaurant. I took the bus to work each day, and life was good.
|
| Now, post pandemic, the small grocery store downstairs closed,
| as did the cafe, and the restaurant is take-out only. The
| neighbourhood also suffered, with many lovely small businesses
| closing and crime becoming as rampant as it was a decade ago.
| The city also raised the bus fare ~20%. This was basically the
| perfect storm to drive me into a house rental, buy a cheap used
| car, and otherwise turn me into what I resented just a few
| years ago.
|
| I think this is going to be a trend for many late-twenty-
| somethings in north america, the regression of optimistic
| urbanists to begrudged suburbanites.
| NoGravitas wrote:
| The thing is -- the suburban-sprawl lifestyle cannot, and
| will not continue. If we don't put a halt to it in order to
| provide a soft landing, climate change will put a more-or-
| less abrupt end to it (not everywhere at once, and not always
| through the same means). The regression of optimistic
| urbanists to begrudged suburbanites just means more
| resistance to doing anything to solve our collective action
| problem around climate change, and a better chance of getting
| the worst-case scenarios.
| jayess wrote:
| My goodness, what a bleak, authoritarian point of view with
| so little imagination.
| Consultant32452 wrote:
| I don't want to argue with you or change your mind, but I
| also don't want to share a country with you.
| josh_today wrote:
| Just rented a car and it was as cheap and easy as it was pre
| covid.
|
| Use costcotravel.com
| [deleted]
| xyzzy21 wrote:
| Between flights canceled and this, you don't want to fly.
|
| I drove instead of flying recently instead - except for the long
| drive getting there, it was far better to be in your own car.
| bluGill wrote:
| I thought that this summer. This I found out hotels are
| charging double normal if they even have rooms open.
|
| Probably another local specific thing though.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| It is not a locale specific thing. Wages for hotel staff have
| gone up at least 20% in multiple cities around the country
| based on other people I have talked to, and costs for
| supplies have gone up even more.
|
| It makes me happy though because it just means that the
| people having to work evenings, nights, weekends, and
| holidays are finally gaining some negotiating power.
| busterarm wrote:
| The last time I rented a 16' truck for a 1k+ mile one-way move
| was 6 years ago. It was $400 traveling north along the US east
| coast. My previous move towards that direction 4 years prior was
| $1200.
|
| I'm renting another 16' truck for a move going south on the same
| route next week. The truck and insurance cost over $5000.
|
| I looked at purchasing a box truck as an alternative to reduce
| the hit to my wallet. Box trucks cost around 2.5x what they did
| two years ago. I'm finding 10+ year old beat up GMC trucks going
| for over $100k.
| sonicggg wrote:
| How can the chip shortage cause a car shortage in 1 year?
|
| Cars are not perishable items. The existing supply should prevent
| us from going into chaos for longer than that.
| Ekaros wrote:
| Easily, when the big guys decide we won't make cars in 1 year.
| And drop their orders for parts. Now they want to make them,
| but other industries have instead gotten their rights to buy
| parts. No parts, no goods...
| reidjs wrote:
| I realize this won't work in LA, but if you are traveling for
| fun/vacation, why not check out places with functional public
| transit so you don't need a car?
|
| San Francisco, Portland, New York, European Cities, etc.
| finfinfin wrote:
| Because you still need a car in those places if you want to
| experience them fully. Eg hiking in the East Bay is still
| pretty inaccessible by public transport from SF. So yes, you
| can enjoy the landmarks in the city, but if you want to visit
| adjacent cities and/or nature - you still need to spend a
| fortune on Uber or rent a car.
| Karrot_Kream wrote:
| If you're doing a day hike, that's what car shares are for.
| There's plenty in the East Bay and SF. I only started owning
| a car when a friend gave us their old beater, but before that
| and through the earlier portions of the pandemic I used car
| shares any time I wanted to go hiking.
| bityard wrote:
| Ooh, this reminds me of a story from my youth.
|
| Two friends and myself went to New York for the HOPE
| conference in Manhattan. We drove there but we're
| midwesterners so we didn't want to drive in the city proper.
| Our plan was to drive to New Jersey, leave our car at a
| friend-of-a-friend's place, and then catch the train into the
| city.
|
| All went well until we were on our way home. The friend-of-a-
| friend was supposed to pick us up from the train station and
| drive us 5 minutes to his house so we could get in our car
| and head west. But he wasn't answering his phone.
|
| While we sat there wondering what to do, I saw a pizza place
| across the street that said "free delivery" on the sign. I
| joked that we should order a pizza, give the address where
| our car was at, and then ask if the driver would deliver us
| as well. Without laughing, my one friend said, "let's give it
| a try" and strode off towards the restaurant. We explained
| our situation and a few minutes later the pizza guy was
| delivering the pizza, and us, to our car.
| sk5t wrote:
| If visiting New York City, must one also visit the
| Adirondacks and Montauk as well? How long a vacation are we
| talking about here?
| dragontamer wrote:
| You can visit Philadelphia by train from New York.
|
| I'm actually planning a trip with a friend through the
| Northeast Regional. You can start at the White House /
| Smithsonian (seeing all of the history there), hop on a train
| to Philadelphia to see the liberty bell + the original
| capital of the country, then hop on a train and continue to
| NYC / Broadway and watch Hamilton.
|
| No car (or airplane) needed. 100% trains / metros.
| ryukafalz wrote:
| As a Philly resident... yep. For those visiting, honestly
| if you plan to stay anywhere near Center City having a car
| is more of a hassle than not. Our transit system isn't
| perfect but it's easily the best way to get around the core
| parts of the city.
|
| And yeah whenever I visit NYC from here it's always by
| train.
| dragontamer wrote:
| What would be the sights to see in Philly?
|
| I was planning on mostly wandering around aimlessly
| (actually, I'll probably still do that :-) ). But I'm all
| ears for any "must see" locations.
|
| Liberty Bell + museums are the main thing I know about.
| checker wrote:
| Reading Terminal Market is cool, but I'm not sure how it
| will be during pandemic conditions (it's usually pretty
| crowded).
| thomaslord wrote:
| This isn't really a sight-seeing thing, but grab a cheese
| steak! Pat's/Gino's are the famous spots where everyone
| takes photos, but IMO they're mostly tourist traps at
| this point. Worst cheese steaks I've had within 100 miles
| of Philly. Jim's is a good spot, plus it's on South
| Street which is a good area to walk around in.
|
| The South Street area is also home to a bunch of mozaic
| murals by Isaiah Zagar, which are definitely worth
| checking out. There are official tours, but you can also
| just check out the neighborhood map here and explore some
| of them on your own:
| https://www.phillymagicgardens.org/about-us/mosaic-mural-
| map...
|
| If you like walks, check out the Schuylkill River Trail -
| it got caught up in the recent flooding so I'm not sure
| what kind of shape it's in right now, but I assume it'll
| get cleaned up pretty quick if it hasn't been already.
| The view of 30th Street Station and a nearby USPS
| building is pretty cool at night. I've heard it can get a
| little sketchy if you're down on the trail at night, but
| as a 6ft tall white guy I never ran into any issues on
| the route walked home from work for ~8 months. Your
| mileage may vary, but the worst thing I ever encountered
| was kids my age smoking weed down by the river.
| hammock wrote:
| Amtrak is the best way to get between those cities imo.
| Puts you in the center of the city and avoids a cab onto
| the island through traffic. Did it for work a bunch
| ryukafalz wrote:
| Agree that Amtrak is the best way if you can afford it.
| If you're on a budget you can also take SEPTA to Trenton
| and transfer to NJT into NYC. Puts you at the same place,
| just takes a bit longer.
| dragontamer wrote:
| If you're trying to save money, the bus system works.
| But... ugggh.
|
| Train is more expensive for good reason! Its a much
| better experience. If we're talking about the price of
| Uber-rides / Rental Cars from NYC to Adirondacks... I bet
| you that the Train to Philly or even Washington DC will
| be cheaper than a rental car + all those miles you put on
| it!
|
| So IMO, save your sanity and go with the train. But the
| busses exist if you really need to cut back on $$$ even
| more.
| checker wrote:
| Adding some other thoughts:
|
| - Trains get to skip traffic, but rental car _might_ be
| cheaper if you 're splitting it with friends.
|
| - Trains do break down or hit delays sometimes, but
| traffic is always a risk on I95.
|
| - Buses are the cheapest but have random people (dice
| roll) and traffic.
|
| - Parking a rental car might not be cheap in a city
| center but can be a wash depending on transit costs.
| Again, parking cost can be split with friends.
|
| So my decision is usually situational.
| ryukafalz wrote:
| Oh no, I do mean by train! Both the SEPTA route and the
| NJT route I was referring to are trains - they just don't
| go the whole way from Philly->NYC, so you need a
| transfer.
|
| Now, frequency on SEPTA's Regional Rail lines has tanked
| during the pandemic, so using it may not be as practical
| as it once was. Haven't checked recently. Hopefully they
| get service back to reasonable levels.
| dougmwne wrote:
| A car is usually pretty optional for most places in Europe.
| Some natural areas like the Alps have better public transit
| than most US city centers. Not everywhere is as allergic to
| public transit as most of the US.
|
| SF is also one of the better US cities in this regard. I
| spent several months in SF without a car and rented a car
| exactly one weekend to get to some further out hiking. There
| are actually plenty of transit accessible natural areas.
| mey wrote:
| Agreed, as a resident of Portland, when we have guests in
| town, we spend about half their time in the natural areas
| around Portland. Granted getting to wine country or beautiful
| waterfalls can be done with various public transit options,
| sorta, it isn't easy. And you certainly aren't going to get
| off the beaten path.
| clairity wrote:
| LA has more extensive public transit than either sf or
| portland. you can get around (to basically all of the tourist
| destinations) just fine by train, bus (gasp!), scooters and
| bikes, with the occasional lyft to fill the gaps.
| colinmhayes wrote:
| This just isn't true in a practical sense. LA is far too
| sprawling to effectively use the train without everything
| taking an hour longer than driving.
| asdff wrote:
| The train is actually the one form of transit that usually
| beats driving, at least the trains that are grade separated
| (red and purple). There is no faster way to get between
| downtown LA and hollywood than the redline for most of the
| day. The expo line is pretty slow since a lot of it runs at
| grade, but even then it can beat a day with terrible
| traffic on the 10 going into santa monica.
| wcarron wrote:
| Agreed. Over the past decade I've commuted by some
| combination of all of LA's train lines, and the orange
| line, too.
|
| Red and purple and the best. Although purple's lack of
| distance degrades the value. Green, yellow, and expo are
| decent, but Yellow running at-grade degrades the utility
| somewhat, as for the expo line, as you said. The Green
| line didn't freaking connect to LAX, completely negating
| it's potential utility.
|
| Blue line and orange line are by far the worst, being
| entirely at street level and interrupted constantly with
| cross traffic.
|
| Honestly, what really needs to happen is: 1) Purple line
| completes intended extension. 2) Submerge the blue line
| and install new station for connection w/ green. 3) The
| orange line needs to be submerged and absorbed by the red
| 4) New rail line from the I-5 that follows the 405 S. It
| would connect with the expo, LAX/green lines, and
| terminate with the blue line in LB. The red line would
| connect/intersect with it slightly north of the 101.
|
| Already, those are pipe-dreams due to... well, everything
| about building public infrastructure. But LA does have
| the bones for some decent public transit, even if they'll
| never really invest in it.
| 28567558 wrote:
| God bless you public transport boosters but the idea of
| stringing together 3-4 different types of transportation to
| get around doesn't seem like a very relaxing vacation to me.
| Renting a car is just so much easier...
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| As a visitor, driving in LA isn't exactly relaxing
| either...
| lastofthemojito wrote:
| Maybe it's gotten better? I did a summer at UCLA a bunch of
| years back and I remember it took me about 2 hours to get
| from LAX to UCLA via bus (and the bus dropped me on the far
| side of campus from where I wanted to be). At the end of the
| summer I knew someone with a car so I was able to get a ride
| from the dorm to LAX, door-to-door in something like 20
| minutes. I was shocked, I had no idea the airport was that
| close by.
|
| Over the summer I used the bus to get around and it worked
| well for some destinations (I spent a lot of time in Santa
| Monica because that was easy) but there were others that just
| seemed too much of a pain (I wanted to see what Malibu was
| about but never did).
|
| Now as an adult who can afford a rental car I don't think I
| would consider going car-free for a trip to LA, unless the
| trip had a narrow focus (e.g. convention at convention center
| all week).
| asdff wrote:
| The only useful way to get to the airport via transit in LA
| is to take the flyaway bus. They used to have a line
| servicing UCLA directly before the pandemic but they've
| since cut most of the routes after the pandemic.
| clairity wrote:
| as @asdff noted, the point-to-point flyaway bus to ucla was
| a great, cheaper alternative, but limited service really
| hampers its utility. it's no consolation to you, but ucla
| will be connected to the purple (D) line in a couple years,
| which will make getting around LA from ucla much easier by
| public transit.
|
| but even more frustrating was the decision not to extend
| the green (C) line train directly into LAX (due to lobbying
| by taxi interests and others). rather than even the
| flyaway, we should have a train line directly from LAX into
| downtown, a key regional business travel destination. there
| even was a historical train right-of-way for much (all?) of
| that route, but it's since been sold and parceled out.
| yupper32 wrote:
| San Francisco having a functional public transit system is news
| to me.
| codazoda wrote:
| SF seemed like a walkable city when I visited. I walked from
| my hotel to Fishermans Warf and back (back is a LOT of up
| hill). But I think at least parts of it are pretty walkable.
| asdff wrote:
| Locally walkable and being able to get somewhere within ten
| miles as the crow flies in a reasonable amount of time are
| two entirely different things
| lastofthemojito wrote:
| But at the same time San Francisco is indeed a nightmare to
| park in. I had the worst rental car luck of my life in San
| Francisco - and no, I didn't really want to have a car in SF,
| but I was taking a road trip up from LA, then San Luis
| Obispo, through Big Sur, to SF and then onwards to wine
| country.
|
| We stayed a couple of nights with a friend in SF, and on the
| first night I hunted for what felt like an hour to find a
| street parking space, and I FINALLY found an open spot that
| didn't have any signs for parking restrictions. The next day
| we went to get the car and it was gone. There was red paint
| and "NO PARKING" on the curb that I missed in the dark, so
| the car was towed to a city impound. In addition to a parking
| ticket, there was a nasty note on the windshield about how I
| was a bad person for parking in front of a physical therapy
| facility and infirm people rely on that spot to be dropped
| off, etc. Something like $500 later, I retrieved the rental
| car and got lucky this time with a legal spot right in front
| of my friend's house. Shortly thereafter, I heard a crash out
| front and thought "wouldn't it be funny if that was our
| car?". It was. An elderly gentleman plowed into it. But
| apparently not before parking enforcement had visited again -
| there was another ticket on the windshield, apparently this
| time I hadn't properly curbed my wheels on the gently sloped
| street.
|
| So yeah, in San Francisco I might take the flawed public
| transit, or Uber/Lyft, or scooters, or walking, or crawling
| or anything else over bringing a car into the city.
| yupper32 wrote:
| Can't really help you with parking in the red. That's on
| you, and something to look for parking anywhere in the
| country.
|
| Curbing your tires is definitely something an out of towner
| wouldn't know, so I feel you on that. It has a decent
| reasoning, at least.
|
| The real problem with public transit is that there are a
| bunch of routes that need multiple transfers and take 3x as
| long as by car (with none of the reliability). Most places
| will have parking within 2-3 blocks or garages, but yeah
| it's tough.
| Scoundreller wrote:
| Red is a poor choice for something that needs to be seen
| day or night. Pretty much the worst colour next to black
| (which is technically not a colour).
| vincentmarle wrote:
| San Francisco has great public transit if your trip starts near
| a BART station and ends near a BART station. Otherwise, not so
| much..
| duxup wrote:
| Man I prefer that.
|
| But I can think of all of one trip in the past 10 years in the
| US where I felt like I was someplace where I could rely on
| public transportation.
|
| It's just not viable for most trips in the US I think.
| bluGill wrote:
| Most of my vacations are combination with visits to
| friends/family. So until transport works where ever they choose
| to live I'm stuck needing a car.
| ryandrake wrote:
| Just for example: When I visit my family over holidays, they
| live 10 miles from the nearest bus station, 35 miles from the
| nearest Amtrak station, and 100 miles from the nearest
| international airport, nearly two states away. There are no
| local taxis, busses, light rail, nothing. I'm not sure how
| public transportation would ever work for this kind of trip.
| This is the case for the vast majority of small towns in the
| USA.
| bluGill wrote:
| Public transportation works for that type of trip in some
| places. Not in the US though. If the dense cities can't
| even make it work where it is easy there is no point in
| trying those places that you point out where it is hard.
| Consultant32452 wrote:
| Do you actually have to ask why people would not want to travel
| to San Francisco, Portland, and New York?
| silisili wrote:
| Good idea, but I'd definitely do a lot of reading before going
| that route. In some cities with a seemingly functional public
| transit...well, it's not one you'd want to use.
|
| NoVa/DC and SF are both good examples though of generally safe,
| effective public transport.(not speaking of Portland or NY as I
| haven't used theirs)
| [deleted]
| Lammy wrote:
| >functional public transit >San Francisco
|
| Citation needed:
| https://www.thetransportpolitic.com/2009/02/20/transit-overl...
| "San Francisco's example may be the worst in the United States"
| mysterydip wrote:
| A coworker finished up a trip a day early. Got hos flight
| changed, then they said "there's no rentals to take you from the
| airport home." He ended up taking an Uber to a nearby relative's
| house, as the airport was two hours from his house.
| speedgoose wrote:
| I don't miss the old fashioned car rental companies since I use
| my local non-profit car sharing organisation.
|
| I just use my phone and I get to drive a modern EV for a very
| affordable price without stress. No human contact needed.
| random314 wrote:
| Website?
| speedgoose wrote:
| The non profit one is https://bilkollektivet.no/
|
| You also have Vy which is owned by the Norwegian state :
| https://www.vy.no/alt-om-reisen/andre-transportmidler/vybil
|
| And then nabobil.no or hyre.no in the for profit side.
| cwmma wrote:
| nobody seems to be mentioning the car rental monopoly that
| currently exists:
|
| https://connorleech.info/blog/the-american-rental-car-cartel
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