Only rich people get to drive now

This is a tired and unhelpful refrain. Only rich people fill their cars with gasoline without wincing at the price. Only rich people get to own 7 houses. Only rich people get to fill their pools in the middle of a drought.

There are a lot of things that “only rich people get to do”. Reducing the number of people who engage in destructive activities is a good thing, even if it means only rich people can still do it.

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Y-bar 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> An advanced city is not one where even the poor use cars, but rather one where even the rich use public transport.

- Enrique Peñalosa Londoño

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saltysalt 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Correct. Rich people can easily afford the congestion charges and higher parking fees. These policies impact working class people more.

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tonyedgecombe 2 days ago | parent [-]

Were the working class driving SUV's into Paris before the changes?

	▲	saltysalt 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		What has got to do with it? Some of them are driving vehicles even larger than SUVs, e.g. tradesmen driving vans, builders with pickups etc. The obsession with SUVs is classist.

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rossant 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I've lived in Paris for 20 years without even having the driver's license.

	▲	bombcar 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		But are you le riche?

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tantivy 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

How many working class people would be happier and less stressed if they had high-quality transit to replace their car bills?

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aidenn0 a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Any time you price in externalities that were formerly not priced in, you take something that everyone could afford to do and make it something only the rich can do.

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dopidopHN2 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

No. Rich people zoom in to work and take a stroll to the market on Saturday morning, and they enjoy tapas a the quaint Bistro on the bank of the seine.

Driving is for plebes

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dpark 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

I don’t know how you’re defining “rich” but the wealthiest folks I know all go to work physically. They get in their cars, or in one case on their bike, and commute to work like everyone else.

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rsynnott 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

Concentrating on the very wealthiest is perhaps unhelpful, as there are very few of them, so they’re kinda irrelevant for planning purposes. Most well-off people I know commute to work on the train or bus; the city center offices where well-off people tend to work in Dublin are not generally exactly well-provided with parking, if they have it at all, and the traffic is pretty horrible. The office of the tech multinational I work in has 700 people, and capacity for more, and, I think, about 30 parking spaces.

Being on the DART (a not-quite-metro; trains carrying a thousand people every ten minutes per direction) or Luas (a high-capacity tram system) lines tends to lead to homes being considerably more expensive than those which only have bus access.

Dublin used to have a synthetic ‘posh’ accent that was often referred to as DART-speak, because it was common in the upper-middle-class suburbs along the southern section of the DART line. Public transport can be posh, or at least seen as such.

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dopidopHN2 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

The wealthiest people I know are philanthropist that spend their day on zoon meetings to decide who get the grant. A couple of time a week someone arrange a visit for them to check on "things are going" on the trenches.

They also spend a lot of time on the phone strategizing with other folks like them. --

But that's not a contest!I'm sure your rich people are richer than my rich people. --

If we were looking at a formal definition, my naive approach would be to use the median income, add the revenue of assets, and add a 20% to that ?

I'm sure the field of sociology could help be more formal here. --

Here I was talking specifically about French folks, where access to remote work and living in the inner city are strongly correlated with higher income.

	▲	dpark 2 days ago \| parent \| next [-]
		I wasn’t really looking to argue about who knows the wealthiest people. I’m just curious who you are looking at. If you’re looking at billionaire philanthropists, I don’t know what they do but at that level of wealth it’s probably whatever they want.
	▲	alephnerd 2 days ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		There's a reason gilets jaunes tended to be what are derisively called "plebs". I honestly find it extremely interesting how both France and the US have similar fault lines due to the intersection of economic, social, and political culture wars, and an extremely similar manner of consolidated media ownership. What Paris does politically speaking matters less than what Marseille, Nice, and Toulon does - everyone overindexes on the 20% at the expense of the other 80%. This is what brought Trump to office in 2016, and I see similar mistakes being made across Western Europe as well. > where access to remote work and living in the inner city are strongly correlated with higher income People also underestimate the number of mega-commuters in France, and how depending on the distance commuting via Intercités+TGV and a car becomes a wash. Some people will derisively say "let's make owning a car more expensive to make them change", but that's similar to Marie Antoinette's retort "S'ils n'ont pas de pain? Qu'ils mangent de la brioche!", especially given how severe spatial inequality is in France.

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LaGrange 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

FYI this article and thread is about Paris, France, not Paris, Texas.

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throwawaytea 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

I go to Berkeley Ca often on weekends. As a kid we'd go to SF too because why not. But now it's another $8+ for the bridge, and even if you find street parking it's another $2 an hour anywhere you might want to jump out for a few minutes. Basically it's an extra $20 to get the opportunity to spend your money in SF. So now I haven't been to my favorite coffee shop or pizza place in years. Oh well.

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NoraCodes 2 days ago | parent [-]

Why not take the train...?

	▲	throwawaytea 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		Loud, dirty, and stuck in a confined space with people doing acrobatics, or panhandling, or angry. I wouldn't take BART if you paid ME $20 to go into SF.