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Kitchen Table Kibitzing February 19, 2023 [1]

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Date: 2023-02-19  

Kitchen Table Kibitzing

Pave Paradise, put up a Parking Lot

Crowd Control

During my lifetime the world’s population has gone from 2 billion to 8 billion. It has been a gradual process, and we were all aware of it on some level. Not as evident for me personally, living in an overwhelmingly rural country and county, living on a farm and working nights. Now living in the heart of a city, it is evident every day. Jammed freeways, traffic at a standstill, crowded venues of all kinds. Sonoma County has been losing population; folks fleeing the state for places with much lower real estate prices and less regulations, such as building codes. From Wiki: “The fact that degrading Earth’s essential services is obviously possible, and happening in some cases, suggests that 8 billion people may be above Earth’s human carrying capacity.”

The lead story on this morning’s N Y Times concerns falling populations.

Asia faces a problem: Its population is aging faster than any other continent’s. A growing percentage of people in Japan, South Korea and China are over 65, and those countries’ economies are suffering because of a lack of available workers. Governments are struggling to find the money to support retirees. Population growth in the U.S. is at extremely low levels.

So we lose with more population, degrading the earth and causing extinction, and we lose with less population…….it’s the economy.

I write this because of parking. Here we are building affordable housing, that’s good, but buildable sites were often parking lots. Planners claim residents will use public transportation. Not really; here we have near-empty busses, an underutilized “Fast Train”, and RVs on many city streets.

At our Condo we have some garages and some covered assigned spots. All other open spots are for guests and service trucks. With increased numbers of people in each unit, for economic reasons, and many with one or more cars…….there’s no parking!

Well, now y’all understand what set off this rant. I’m not as unhinged as I seem, not all the time, anyway. How’s the parking where you live?

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/2/19/2153886/-Kitchen-Table-Kibitzing-February-19-2023

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