It looks like the bike lane ends where the engineer started WTFing and starts up again after the confusing spot. It’s above his paygrade to figure out how to move the bikes safely from the left of the merging lane to the right of it, I guess.
Until people develop a workable alternative, all this narrative does is annoy people who have no choice but to use cars.
When electric buses start making round trips from every main city to every suburb on a set reliable and convenience schedule, then you can start shaming people for having to drive a car.
I have to drive a car because my city is barely traversable otherwise. I hate it. So, I’ve been working with the city council and other committees to start building a modern transit system. It can be done, but it takes motivated people to make it happen.
I’m very curious about this. Did you go into this with some allies or were you able to drum up support by sharing stats and other city/country success stories? Was the council already amenable to the idea? Any resources you could share?
This could be an entire post on its own if you can spare some time to write about it and your experiences.
I’ve used a combination of coalition building, finding allies on the city council, and reaching out to neighborhood leaders.
Much of it has been reaching out to government officials, having conversations, and identifying where decision making is done within the various transit agencies.
So far, most of the resistance to actual progress is just kind of weird noise (complaints & general “I can’t see how having transit would help”) from misc citizens and realtors who don’t want to have changes to their development plans in the city, even if adding in the transit would make regions around it boom. The city council members are surprisingly responsive to even a small number of vocal people. I don’t think they hear from many coherent arguments in any given year. Showing up with data, an even reasonable idea of what can be done, and evidence that you’ve got a coalition of interested groups seems to get traction.
It also helps that we recently voted out a ton of conservative assholes and replaced them with a younger progressive city council. Yes, I worked on campaigns to help make that happen.
We’ve also been getting allies on various transit advisory committees, mostly citizen advisory committees. Then making sure there’s a similar message along with data that supports our goals.
We do also gather up other cities’ long term transit plan documents because they often have some great ideas and examples of what a city can build out given some interest in the public’s success.
I know that I’m also on track to be tapped to help write up materials for federal level proposals in the future. Grant writing isn’t much fun, but it’s how you get the money for a $100 mil project.
Yeah, I’m sure there’s plenty of material for a whole posting in its own right! This isn’t a simple problem to solve. It’s a combination of government systems, managing individual’s needs, reaching out to lots of groups, and a real vision to get people dedicated to. You’ve got to have something people really want to have the buy in for years of work to make it happen.
I mean antagonistic shaming can be awful, obviously. But getting people to care is important, and meeting people where they are sometimes requires making sure they know they should care.
Caring doesn’t mean feeling bad and guilty though. This is part of the toxicity that personal responsibility has created. Not everyone can be equally responsible for their individual contributions. But we can all be much more equal in how much we care about issues.
Something like the bus you describe won’t just appear out of no where. People have to want it, commit to it, consult in its design and then use it.
When electric buses start making round trips from every main city to every suburb on a set reliable and convenience schedule,
How fucked up is your city that this doesn’t already exist? That’s not a pipe dream, it’s the bare minimum. Your local government has failed, please go riot in the streets.
The alternative will not appear out of thin air. More people need to have a sense of the long-reaching consequences of car-dependent urban planning and that’s what propels them to vote for better planning in their cities.
Nothing is going to change without a shift in political leanings, and that’s what this sort of advocacy is doing.
Yea, the people who fear 15 minute cities are absolutely bizarre. Running across one of these is a clear sign that the person has steeped themselves in all sorts of bullshit.
Shit I wasn’t even going to spoof a car logo, just make a tiny wheat paste sticker with a penis drawing and the words “small utility vehicle” - but your idea is beautiful as well.
I got slightly taken off track when I was too lazy to draw the tiny penis myself and typed “tiny penis” into my search bar.
If anyone would like an A4 sheet of tiny penises to print and glue on SUVs, let me know I’ll finish it. Shaming these motherfucking SUV-owners out of existence maybe works.
I’ve always thought it would be fun to print out a bunch of stickers with sayings like, “I suck a driving,” and slap them on shitty drivers cars. The main opportunity I see for this is when you are trying to cross the street and a car is pulled up in the sidewalk, forcing you to have to walk behind their car. As you are passing you could slap a sticker on their trunk. I think it would be a funny thought of them to find that later and realize they have been driving around all day or week with that thing.
I was just thinking about this today downstairs in the food court at the bottom of the office building I work in. Hundreds of people come through there for the lunch rush to dozens of fast food restaurants (sushi, buritoes, Thai etc), all in the space of less than 30x30m including seating. I was thinking: there’s no way you could do this with a drive through.
Places that use private cars as public transport are just doing a super inefficient version of a bus. This service should be only used in rural areas due to there not being enough people for buses fdue to demand, but even still there won’t be enough people in rural areas to support them, there is where the right tool of owning a car would work due to the lack of transportation infrastructure. Currently we are trying too hard to use cars as a tool for every situation, there’s different jobs and different tools to do the jobs more efficiently.
@Adori@ray Agree. But most Euro cities that have excellent metro and bus services built their infrastructure decades ago.
Other than US cities like NY, Chicago, Boston, SFO and Wash DC, metro systems would cost a fortune and be built at a snail’s pace…look up Seattle light rail … an excellent system but has taken a long time to evolve, fund and build
@Adori@ray Even in many rural areas, this is not the best option.
First, in many towns, there often aren't any Uber drivers nearby, or the nearest driver is in another town and you're left to wait upwards of an hour for your ride to arrive.
Second, pairs of major cities and large metropolitan areas that are relatively close together should be connected by a railway line. Along with express services, these railways should have reasonably frequent all-stations services that serve the smaller towns along the way.
Third, there should be regular bus or coach services connecting multiple towns, and where available, feeding into these all-stations train services.
So if there's a train station in town A, there should be a feeder bus to nearby towns B, C, and D. This benefits rail passengers, who have more towns they can visit by public transport, and connects those towns to the rail network.
These inter-town bus services can make multiple stops in each town (for example at the local school, the local shops, and the local hospital),, providing both cross-town and inter-town services.
Fourth, with public transport, one service or route won't cover every pair of destinations—but a network can.
So say you have an east-west bus route connecting towns A, B, C, and D. You might have a second route that connects with that bus service at town C, and then runs north-south to connect it with towns E, F, G, and H.
The number of people travelling from town H to town D might be vanishingly small—zero on most days, no more than one or two on others. Certainly not enough to run a dedicated service from town D to town H.
Yet that trip can be provided for by the network, which draws its ridership from passengers who want to travel from any stop on either the north-south or east-west service, to any other stop on either service.
Fourth, with larger towns over 1000 people, an on-demand bus service that travels around town to designated stops is probably a better option. Again, this should feed into any railway stations of inter-town bus routes.
And finally, once your city reaches a population of around 10,000 or so, it should just have a regular bus service, and it should integrate with the broader bus and train network.
I don’t get it either. The chicken sandwich is OK at best. A solid 7/10 just for consistency. Everything else is meh. People seem to like their fry sauce, which is probably required to eat their flat tasting waffles fries.
Americans like sauces and dressings on things. Ranch on everything, unless it comes with their own sauce.
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