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[Kalahari Inkantation]

Again, that's because they see voting for smaller "fringe" parties as harmful to their cause and helpful to their political opponents.

and then there's that

which is why i think the whole party system in general should be obliterated

[?????]

Again, that's because they see voting for smaller "fringe" parties as harmful to their cause and helpful to their political opponents.

What? Who is they?

[applesauce]

I would be interested hearing your reasoning

I'm too lazy to argue it out, so here's a paper I wrote in 10th grade. It's not the most well-written thing ever, but remember I was in 10th grade. It also skips over a lot of big points.


On Minneapolis, Decentralization, and My Grandfather

              Growing up, cars were a significant part of my grandfather's life. His father owned an auto shop on 28th and Lyndale, fronting right up against the Greenway, then one of the most active industrial corridors in the state. The entire reason he was even here to begin with was the Ford Center; his grandfather came to Minneapolis from Germany to work there. Cars were on the rise. They had already shaped my grandpa's life, and they were beginning to shape lives around the city and across the globe. Minneapolis was different back thenâ€" my grandpa could have hopped on any one of over twenty-five streetcar lines and gone anywhere he wanted to go in the city. There were no suburbs other than Saint Paul, St. Anthony, and Richfield, and those weren't really suburbs in the modern sense of the word. Suburbs simply hadn't been invented yet, and neither had highways. Everyone lived in dense, mixed-use urban neighborhoods. Climate change wasn’t an issue. Polluted runoff wasn’t an issue.  Peak oil wasn’t an issue. Cities were dense, centralized places that rapidly gave way to farmland on their outskirts.

      The modern Twin Cities is a decentralized atrocity ruled by cars. Highways criss-cross our region, wrapping it like a giant, tangled ribbon. New development is dominated by parking spotsâ€" a new apartment building will have 1.2 parking spaces per unit, meaning that even for a 400 square foot studio apartment, 240 square feet of parking space is required. And that’s just at the home. Stores and workplaces require parking space as well.

              As twenty-story office towers sprout like weeds along the metro's ever-widening highway systems and farm after farm becomes populated by cul-du-sac homes, citizens must ask themselves if this is where they want the Twin Cities to go. Many Minnesotans have chosen to have big homes with big yards, often making this choice without even considering the consequencesâ€" moving straight out to Maple Grove, afraid of city schools or "big city crime". It's easy to see that problems like crime and struggling schools are but tiny threats to the vitality of Minneapolis and the larger region when compared to that of suburbia, as our beautiful metro grows less and less like the Minneapolis my grandfather knew and loved.

For the last sixty years, the Twin Cities have grown outward rather than becoming more dense. Shady government subsidy and the ignorance of the populace has caroused many Minneapolitans out of the city and into suburbia, and technological advances and poor corporate leadership have begun to move commerce out of signature office towers to nameless locations. Beautiful mixed-use high density neighborhoods empty themselves or lie stagnate while rows of bland beige houses in Albertville and nondescript midrise towers along 494 grow like algae on a pond in an Eden Prairie office park.

              Suburbia comes with myriad far-reaching negative effects, ranging from wetland loss to expensive and inefficient transportation networks.  The main characteristic of suburbia that leads to the large majority of its problems is land use. Highly decentralized cities have layouts that do not make sense because they do not easily lend themselves to transportation systems that transport commuters to their respective destinations in an efficient, organized manner. The lack of a central business district makes creating effective and efficient transportation networks exponentially complex. The distance between destinations in a decentralized city has a similar effect, and also produces commutes of substantially further distance, and consequently, time. Destinations in a decentralized city are so far apart because of the massive lots suburbanites want for their beige or light blue boxes with out of place "architectural elements" and the low density at which suburban office, retail, and industry is built. The segregation of uses is also a significant contributor to the land use problems of modern suburbia. Some odd desire fosters within the typical Minnesotan (or perhaps just within the typical developer) to strictly segregate homes from apartments, apartments from stores, stores from offices, and to shove parks way out into the sticks beyond even most of the homes. Honestly, who really wants neighborhood coffee shops and corner stores every quarter mile when you can have massive shopping centers with acres of blacktop every four or five miles? This segregation increases the length of everyday trips which, in addition to adding to the total miles traveled per person, discourages the use of alternative transportation, which places additional stress on the automotive-based transportation system.

              In the Twin Cities, the current transportation network relies almost exclusively on limited or semi-limited access highways. The system was designed and built in the 1940s-60s and, much like other cities' highway systems, was intended to provide for a city that was sprawling alarmingly fast, but still relied on its central business district. My family reminisces of the days before 35W, back when Portland and Park were virtual freewaysâ€" four lanes each of wall to wall traffic. It was in those days that my uncle got hit on Park, ironically enough, on his way to go watch the construction of the new interstate. His extreme height has always been attributed to the fact that he spent nine months of his prime growth years in a hospital bed. The system was designed as a traditional hub and spoke system to shuttle commuters in and out of the central business district, while only providing minimal capacity for travel between suburban areas. The system has since been adapted to better serve the rapidly decentralizing area, with more 'crossways' being constructed in the 1980s through to the present day. The system, however, still functions best when used to ferry commuters in and out of a central business district. The Twin Cities has outgrown its transportation system much faster than the system can be expanded, resulting in longer commutes. In the city itself, it has now reached the point where it is entirely impractical to widen the highways due to new eminent domain laws. While the optimum system for an urban area is a simple hub-and-spoke with few circulatory routes, a decentralized metropolitan area requires a much more complex system of highways, with many, many circulatory routes, up to three times that of a highly centralized area, and thus the networks are much more expensive. This is the second area is which they are inferior. The low density land use of suburban areas necessitates suburbia's dependance on the automobile, as it manages to make the unfathomably efficient urban mass transit options useless due to the immense distances between destinations. This same effect also applies to other alternative transportation options, both cycling and walking. By removing all practical benefits from these activities, suburbs not only increase their auto dependance; they also increase their obesity rate.

              Large, inefficient transit networks would be all fine and dandy (or at least somewhat tolerable) if the users of said transit networks paid for the networks, however, this in not the case in modern Minnesota. Highways are paid for by county, state, and federal authorities. The money used comes from income and property tax coffers, and only a small percentage of it comes in the form of a user fee (gas tax, licensing fees, the rare toll road). This payment structure is very unfair. Case example: MN Hwy 77/Cedar Avenue (Cedar Avenue). Residents of growing suburbs south of the Minnesota River, Farmington in particular, have pushed for making the entirety of Cedar Avenue into a wide limited access highway. Currently Cedar Avenue is a semi limited access highway south of Apple Valley, and becomes limited access to the north. Cedar Avenue continues to be limited access until right after it intersects with MN Hwy 62 on the Minneapolis-Richfield border, after which it becomes a standard city street. The proposal made by south-of-the-river congressmen (and now under construction, due to open in 2010) calls for new high-occupancy vehicle and dedicated bus rapid transit (HOV/BRT) lanes on Cedar Avenue, along with HOV/BRT crossover ramps at the Hwy 62 interchange, to be paid for by the state and federal governments, together with Hennepin and Dakota counties. This project is for the benefit of south-of-the-river suburbanites; it does not benefit the residents of Hennepin County in any way! In fact, it doesn't really even benefit most residents and businesses in  Dakota County eitherâ€" the last time the limited-access portion of Cedar Avenue was extended, it brought about the collapse of an Apple Valley shopping mall, and eventually entire neighborhoods. Even without a malfunctioning payment structure, suburban transportation networks are inferior to urban ones.

              The massive highways required by decentralized metropolitan areas are not only expensive; they also take up a lot of space and have negative effects on the natural environment. The storm water runoff from highways has the same effect as that of suburban driveways, more water (which also happens to be more polluted) must be absorbed by less soil, causing unbalance in ecosystems. The second main environmental effect of large highways is emissions. The longer America's love affair with the car continues, the greater the negative effects on the environment.

              Other aspects of decentralization have many negative effects on local ecosystems as well. To make way for new suburban homes, not only farms must go, but woodlands and wetlands are razed/filled in to make way for the blacktop and swimming pools. The increase in paved area (from this, plus the previously mentioned parking lots due to usage segregation) also results in runoff issues, similar to those of highways, except on a much larger scale. Coupled with the demolition of habitats, polluted runoff from lawn fertilizer can decimate ecosystems.

              Many things contribute to cause decentralization, including technological advances and poor leadership decisions. As the internet grows in popularity, it enables business to be more easily conducted without face-to-face interaction. Because of this, it is less crippling to business for a corporation to relocate out of the central business district, which has caused the cheap land and large open spaces of suburban corporate campuses to appear more and more attractive to large corporations as of late.
Suburbia's existence is not entirely due to the stupidity and selfishness of the average Minnesotan (nor the average developer); it is, in large part, the fault of many poor decisions made by government leaders. Although one can place blame on Eisenhower and Cold War era Pentagon officials for the creation of the concept of suburbia through the Interstate Highway Act and succeeding similar legislation and mid-century urban mayors responsible for heavy-handed and widely destructive "urban renewal", it is undeniable that the continued success of suburbia is owed to anti-urban urban leaders. One major offender is Lisa Goodman, a fifth term councilwoman from Minneapolis' seventh ward. The seventh ward includes downtown, and as the council member representing the neighborhood, she holds veto power on everything downtown related. The following is but one example of Goodman's incompetence: In 1997, Target Corporation proposed a new massive expansion to their corporate headquarters in downtown Minneapolis. The new building, to stand over forty-five stories tall, was to be called Target Plaza South (TPS). The proposed site, however, was located one block outside of downtown's unlimited height "skyscraper zone", thus requiring variance approval by both the city council and the planning and zoning commission. The proposal, good for the economy as it was, was opposed by residents of Loring Park's many high-rise apartment towers as TPS would have blocked the skyline view from many of their units. Another reason that Lisa Goodman gave for her dissent to the plan is that it would have brought six thousand new workers to downtown. The council member representing the interests of downtown residents and businesses opposed a new skyscraper downtown because it would bring more jobs to the neighborhood. After much debate, Target was forced to build TPS at only thirty-two stories, not even enough room to contain all their downtown offices, much less provide room for growth. Frustrated, in 2005 Target relocated their headquarters to a new corporate campus in Brooklyn Park.

              My grandfather would be deeply saddened by the city he grew up in and what has become of it. Downtown east is a vast wasteland of surface lots, the brownstones, markets, and railway depots of his childhood long gone to the wrecking ball in the city's desperate attempts to stem white flight in the 1950s. The grand gateway intersection of Hennepin and Lyndale has regressed into a series of tangled freeway ramps. Great swaths of the city, two blocks wide and stretching from one end to the other have been razed, bridged, paved, and lined, shuttling commuters in from such far off destinations as New Richmond, Minnetrista, and Lakeville. The only remaining streetcar line in the city is a pitiful two mile stretch between Lake Harriet and Lake Calhoun that only operates on weekends, a ghost of a bygone era.

              I think I would have really like my grandfather, had I known him when he was sane. We probably would have had a lot in common. I've heard my family joke that if he had known that he had lived out his final years in Richfield rather than within the city limits he would have killed himself and saved them a lot of money; I lament ceaselessly over both my sisters' good fortunes in having been delivered at Abbott, while I had the misfortune of being born at Fairview Southdale, the “Edinaâ€� on my birth certificate a shame I will never escape. After the Lake Street Kmart was built in the 70s, blocking Nicollet off between 28th and Lake, he (nor anyone in his family, if he heard about it) never shopped at a Kmart again in his life, even though he passed one every single day on the way home from work. He was a soldier for our city; a real role model.

[[hedy]Zidone]

What? Who is they?

Well, who are we?

I can't really speak for conservatives, but whenever I tell liberals to stop voting for the Centrist party I get "WELL THEN THE REPUBLICANS WIN."

[silvertone]

Just tell them that modern day republicans are liberals who don't like abortion or free healthcare.

[musica.cards]

that's not even the problem

we could have ten major parties and that still wouldn't solve anything

the problem is we like things to be easy so we vote democrat because we've always voted democrat or vote republican because we've always voted republican

Yes it is, and you just explained why the other parties don't get that many votes (as well as raising an irrelevant point ).

[Kalahari Inkantation]

It's so easy when things are black and white

and because of that we always end up voting for the lesser of two evils

brotip:
[spoiler]both parties are exactly the fucking same [/spoiler]

This country will continue to dig its own grave until people start voting intelligently and not treating politics like a popularity contest.

[spoiler]this is also why i think political campaigns should be illegal [/spoiler]

[[hedy]Zidone]

This country will continue to dig its own grave until people start voting intelligently and not treating politics like a popularity contest.

That's never going to happen, at least not in our lifetimes, especially with our public education system.

[Kalahari Inkantation]

Yes it is, and you just explained why the other parties don't get that many votes (as well as raising an irrelevant point ).

the problem is that the multi-party system in general is terribly unstable

whether there are two parties or ten, the same problem would arise: each would fight the other(s) for control and nothing would ever get done

[Kalahari Inkantation]

That's never going to happen, at least not in our lifetimes, especially with our public education system.

We're doomed.

[?????]

It seems like politics devolves into a power struggle where one party just wants to have the biggest penis.

[musica.cards]

the problem is that the multi-party system in general is terribly unstable

whether there are two parties or ten, the same problem would arise: each would fight the other(s) for control and nothing would ever get done

Is Freedom really such a controversial idea? The whole point of our government is to protect our rights. If such fighting were to take place, it would end up restricting each party's agenda, forcing them to look to our Constitution (and whatnot) to settle arguments among the parties and adhering to our country's principles just to get work done.

[Kalahari Inkantation]

It seems like politics devolves into a power struggle where one party just wants to have the biggest penis.

that's exactly my point

that's exactly why parties need to be eradicated

[?????]

Is Freedom really such a controversial idea? The whole point of our government is to protect our rights. If such fighting were to take place, it would end up restricting each party's agenda, forcing them to look to our Constitution (and whatnot) to settle arguments among the parties and adhering to our country's principles just to get work done.

Too bad documents can be interpreted in different ways.

that's exactly my point

that's exactly why parties need to be eradicated

That won't happen because of natural human behavior. People who like on candidate will tell others to vote for their candidate of choice because they believe their candidate will act in their best interests (because they have similar ideals).

[applesauce]

It seems like politics devolves into a power struggle where one party just wants to have the biggest penis.

[spoiler][/spoiler]


[spoiler][/spoiler]