A portion of our much lamented property taxes should be designated as an assessment for parking — that is, how much of the property is devoted to garage or driveway or straight-up surface lot.
Then that portion should have its rate jacked up for all non-residential property, and cities should be encouraged to eliminate non-ADA parking minimums from their zoning rules.
The proceeds from the increase, born by non-residential property owners, would go entirely to public transit. Any owner, residential or otherwise, wanting to decrease their property taxes would have the option of demolishing unwanted parking and asking to be re-assessed. Residential owners would see a net decrease from this; others would limit their increase.
Owners of other than primary residence detached housing would have the option of passing some or all of the increase to their tenants / employees / customers by charging for parking.
Wider streets should be narrowed by having one lane each way reserved, with barriers, for buses only. Speed limits should be designated as only applying to private vehicles, and lowered.
Any person living, working, or enrolled as a student anywhere in the county should be issued a pass good for more-or-less unlimited rides between their home and place of employ or schooling. Programs should be instituted making it simple for businesses to offer similar passes to their customers, at whatever price made business sense. Likewise to include similar passes as a benefit of medical insurance, for non-emergency rides to in-network providers.
Property taxes on private vehicles should be raised in ways that more closely track vehicle weight per passenger seat. The size above which driving requires a commercial license should be decreased.
Heat maps should be created showing where the greatest and least built density exists. Any new construction, or private utility placement, maintenance or expansion should receive special assessments based on distance from existing centers of greatest density. Public utilities should, and private utilities should be able, to use the same maps to set higher rates with distance from the same centers. Public utilities should embark on programs of gracefully decommissioning lines the farther they are from the same centers.
In short, it should be made more and more expensive and otherwise onerous to build and go about one’s life in ways that involve owning and parking private vehicles, the moreso as they involve longer distance travel in such vehicles. It should be made free to get to work or school via public transit — at least until the other policies have shortened the typical distances involved to the point that it becomes unusual for people to need the assistance.
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I Need a Protocol Droid on Aisle 12
Unless I were in a hurry, I would never choose to turn to GPT to analyze or synthesize text. I have little trouble getting myself to do that, and well, often with pleasure.
Where I’ve begun to choose to turn to it is for research, basically to find me answers to questions; to assemble relevant texts which were otherwise scattered or inaccessible. That it tends to perform unwelcome synthesis in the process is something I hadn’t thought through: I could ask it not to.
But it highlights a gap between what the tool is and what I need. It’s a search engine with a natural language interface (which means the right series of queries produces results that look conversational).
What I need is a protocol droid. GPT isn’t enough. It needs a layer in its index which tags everything from the sentence up in terms of its truth (by context) and then at the very least a gatekeeper: some logic that checks query results for consistency and reports contradictions.
There are gestures toward this, now, but it seems to be just repeating what some source or preponderance of sources seems (to it) to agree, which is part of why it is so confidently wrong when it’s wrong, and then immediately concedes (with equal confidence) when contradicted. I get better responses if I express doubt, but even those are squishy underneath.
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Kansas City Fragment
There are no skies like these skies, where the rivers meet and the wide wood’s west edge waves in the south wind on the shore of the great grass sea.