/s is not actually entirely accurate in this case. Here’s an article on how US residents are trying to live in their cars by finding “safe parking lots” to reside in: theguardian.com/…/safe-overnight-parking-lot-slee…
So in the richest nation on Earth, cars do double as housing.
The /s was for the “Checkmate” bit 😂 Technically, of course you can use your car as a dwelling. But it’s certainly not an answer (or at least, not a serious one) to a lack of housing supply, I think we’ll all agree.
Parks with all the other people? Locked in a room in a 300 sq ft apartment with your family/roommates outside?
The interchange allows you to live far enough away from the overcrowded city that you can own a bigger piece of land where you’re not packed in with your neighbors like sardines so you can actually go outside and sit and be alone without hearing 15 other families doing shit. It also allows you to have enough space to have a workshop space for hobbies or a garden or whatever else you want to do.
You understand that Italy has areas that are not as densely populated as the city center. In fact some places are down right rural. And the US has some very densely populated square milage.
This is such a wild, wild take on the US’s cat centric build.
I agree with the premise of this sub. The way car first places such as the US does things is a problem. The cars themselves and the underlying infrastructure, such as that exchange.
But I also don’t want to live in cramped multidweller unit housing. I’ve done so most of my life and I hated it.
I don’t know what or even if there’s a good solution that accomodates both, but I hope so.
And if you’re someone that wants to live somewhere actually remote, having dense urban areas instead of suburban sprawl will leave more space for rural areas and nature.
I am no expert, but if we are allowed to design everything from ground up, I believe personal electric vehicle (e-bike etc, abbreviated as PEV) for suburb, transit/bike/walk in city, and high speed rail between cities are probably the way to go.
City should be mostly car free, people can transit to suburb via transit, and to other city via rail. People move within city using walk/bike/tram. Vehicle besides delivery and commercial vehicle should be discouraged from entering the city, by removing in-city parking and setup no-go zones for private vehicles.
Even in the U.S. most people in suburb live rather close to a town center (less than 15 mins with PEV or bike). Thus efficient transit from town center to city can be a good idea. People will be discouraged from driving to city due to the lack of road and parking within cities.
For long form travel, people should move via high speed rail. Then take local travel options once arrived. High speed rail provide a faster and more comfortable travel alternative to driving.
Finally, I believe for people living in rural areas (an hour to any town center on PEV), cars and electric cars are their only option. If they want to enter city or suburb, they can drive to the nearest town center and take transit.
Most country, urbanist or not, do have wilderness, where you can live and die without people know.
You don’t need to live in the city if you dont want to. You can live off grid, and burn your own feces for heat if that is the life of your choosing. What people here are fighting for is to keep this living style is outside of cities.
Basically, city is not the place for giant emotional support vehicles. And outside traffic should not disrupt the normal form of transportation in cities, which should be dominated by public transport, walking, and efficient personal vehicles (like bike, scooters, wheelchairs, etc).
Interestingly, with this type of town, it’s easier and quicker to go out of the town than in American car centric towns.
Public transports are more efficient. You don’t need cars. You have parcs and actual green space. The energy consumption is also reduced.
It’s no magic that they built these type of towns in the past. They couldn’t afford our type of energy consumption and land use. And, it was more practical for the daily life.
anyone who’s terrified of driving should not drive. keep those people off the road. They are the ones who drive badly because they’re scared, And they make the roads dangerous for everybody else.
I’ve driven across the United States five times with no problem. You just have to follow all the traffic laws and keep a safe following distance and use your turn signals, stay 100% focused on the road at all times, easy peasy. people who can’t do those things should stay off the roads. It’s better for them and better for everyone else.
They are arrogant narcissists and they should not have driver’s licenses either. It was terrifying for me to be in the passenger seat of my ex-boyfriend. He was the definition of this kind of driver and he was always intoxicated too. I learned a lot about the mindset of shitty drivers on the road when I was in his passenger seat. Surprised I survived and surprised he is still alive.
This isn’t a great argument. There is so much open undeveloped space in the US that could be used to house people. This interchange isn’t taking space away from anyone. There are lots of good reasons to reduce cars, but this isn’t one of them.
That’s not really true here though. This is in the middle of an urban area, not in some big open empty space that’s unoccupied, like Montana, or North Dakota. This is in the middle of Houston, Texas, a very populous city.
Calling anywhere in Greater Houston “the middle of an urban area” is just incorrect. It’s the 4th most populated city in the US and the 150th most densely populated. There are a lot of people in Houston but also just a fucking Tom of Houston around. But, as is the norm in this magazine, you are all free to ignore facts and data so you can raise a furor in your tiny anti-car cult.
Houston is so big because the city has absorbed all the communities around it. It’s incredibly sprawled so the density is much lower than cities of comparable population. This creates all sorts of other issues, like the problem of paving over hundreds of square miles of wetland.
Why do you think it’s so sparsely populated? What’s keeping people so far from each other? Is it just Houstonians are their own species and can’t stand to be in areas over a certain population density?
Because humans enjoy having lots of space to live in. Personally I would never go back to living in an apartment since I can afford a house and land. I’ve lived in small apartments, big apartments, a single-wide trailer, large houses, small houses, and medium houses. Medium house with acreage of land is the best living situation of all for me.
I concur bro. These bullshitters are high on their own farts and apparently can’t see the truth that they are never going to change the vast landscape of America into their imaginary Soviet-style shithole idea of a “utopia” where people don’t drive and live in tiny boxes in human hives.
Soviet Union was bad for multiple reasons but in major cities the housing was not really any worse than anywhere else in the world. I guess you just enjoy spending 3 hours a day in your car.
I don’t commute to work often, but when I do it’s only about a 20 minute drive in light traffic. I certainly wouldn’t spend 3 hours a day in a car to commute to work when there are plenty of jobs within that 20 minute commute from my house.
The point was that in total you probably spend more time in your car than any sane average European would, because you lack options. And because you lack options it’s a hellscape for anyone who can’t drive a car. The point wasn’t your commute, because your commute probably doesn’t represent the median. Also good for you. My commute is also irrelevant, but it’s five minutes walk to a train, ten minutes by train and five minutes walk from the train to the office, all that in an environment where I don’t fear for my life, the noise level permits me to whisper to other people without them having difficulties hearing me.
According to wikipedia, 8.4/10k for italy vs 17.5/10k for the US. So while the US is the richest country in the world they have twice as many homeless people per capita :/
(US Here) Even my more progressive friends won’t go downtown because every business doesn’t have free dedicated parking. Street parking is free for the first hour and when I still drove I had lunch with no problems that way 1000 times, but nope unless where they’re going has it’s own dedicated parking lot, they aren’t going.
I don’t understand how someone can graduate elementary (or primary in England, I think?) school and still believe the 15 minute city conspiracies. They have to be some of the stupidest that I’ve ever heard. Like if you know how to put your shoes on and you don’t keep forgetting to breathe, you should be smart enough to know better.
The tofu eating wokerati want to trap us on our homes! They want us to wear ankle trackers that ensure we don’t travel more then 15 minutes from the house!
They’re trying to ensure all the most important amenities are within walking distance so they can lock us down forever and control how we breed and what we think!
Then they’ll slowly replace us with the foreigners they’re shipping in on their small boats, and before you know it we’ll all be French! It’s an invasion from within!
It’s incredible. I went to a consultation forum regarding intruding 20mph speed limits and all these conspiracy nuts just came out of the crowd like some zombie apocalypse.
I live in Sweden but my girlfriend is from Seattle so I have visited there a couple of times. There are a few cultural differences that I think play a major part in why pedestrian deaths have gone up in America but not elsewhere.
As already mentioned in this thread Americans tend to be more relaxed about using their phones when driving. It didn’t seem like a big deal to read a text message or anything.
Another thing is reflective clothing. Driving at night in Washington I saw nobody wearing anything reflective at all. Here in Sweden outside of city centers at night more often than not pedestrians will wear something reflective to actually be visible.
Lastly the drunk driving culture was very different. In Sweden people would hesitate to have a drink with lunch if they knew they had to drive later that day. In America we went to a brewery whilst waiting for the ferry.
Yeah… there’s certainly some progress in the works and the mayor in particular seems to get it. But I wouldn’t bet on Cleveland becoming Amsterdam either.
They wouldn’t make money if people managed to, you know, just follow the speed limit. If you can’t follow a basic rule of the road you shouldn’t be driving.
We live in material reality, not a fantasy in your head. Justifying bullshit that specifically fucks over the poor while not really affecting the rich (because fines are just fees you pay to break the law when you’re rich enough for them to be minor inconveniences) with what amounts to Cartman screaming RESPECT MAH AUTHORITAH is bullshit. You want people to actually slow down? Redesign the road.
This praxis does two things, it prevents the poor being fucked over if these are just there to make council money, or it causes them to give up on the camera and properly redesign the road when it’s actually about real safety concerns.
Given this has happened before and they only replaced the camera I’m siding with “it’s for council income not actual safety”. If they do it again I feel doubley vindicated in that opinion. If it’s actually about real safety concerns they’ll give up on the camera and add in pedestrian refuge islands to slow traffic instead. Love these badboys
You want people to actually slow down? Redesign the road.
I’ve posed this question elsewhere in this thread and: what until then? Like what do you do until a good, what, 50 - 90% of road depending on criteria, is redesigned?
The process and length of time it takes for either option are practically the same. It’s irrelevant. Not to mention a traffic island costs like £3k while a camera costs £85k (guess why they pick the camera despite the price).
Having been to court twice for online related stuff I will absolutely couch this shit.
I do not see how that question is doing anything but attempting some sort of gotcha or accusation that these people deserve to be fucked over instead of have real designs that don’t result in their lives being made harder.
Having been to court twice for online related stuff I will absolutely couch this shit.
Fair, I meant it more on “don’t do it on my accord”
I do not see how that question is doing anything but attempting some sort of gotcha or accusation that these people
Your these people just seems to have some very oddly drawn lines is the heart of it. It does include poor drivers, to whom speed cameras are a problem and not that much of a solution, it does not seem to include poor people not in a car, who profit from this. My FALGSOC doesn’t have speed cameras in it - who’s would - but it’s a long way from here to there.
deserve to be fucked over instead of have real designs that don’t result in their lives being made harder. It seems like spite to me.
This is running on the assumption that I think people deserve to be fucked over for speeding, and that’s the main motivation. Sure, some of them, but that’s not the kind of distinction a speed cam could make on account of how it works. I’d very much be open to them not issuing fines but other punishments - as appropiate - to not make them so classist. Loss of driving license, if you really, really fuck up in a sports car that gets impounded or such, but I’ll concede, even that is far out from today, but just to point it out,
My point here is that for every one it fucks over, it helps other people not being fucked over, because it does do something against speeding. My line of reasoning for speed cams is not that it fucks people over, it’s that it helps people. You wanna focus on the first part, I’m trying to get you to see the issue is more complex than that, at least if you include people outside of cars in your consideration. They’re not a good solution, by any means, again, I assume our optimal way of solving it is quite similar. For the meantime though, the fuck else do you do? Just abandon all traffic enforcement until all the roads get fixed? So what, 20 years of being vulnerable road users being even more endangered than now?
My point here is that for every one it fucks over, it helps other people not being fucked over, because it does do something against speeding. My line of reasoning for speed cams is not that it fucks people over, it’s that it helps people. You wanna focus on the first part, I’m trying to get you to see the issue is more complex than that, at least if you include people outside of cars in your consideration.
Well my line of reasoning is that there is an alternative that fucks no poor people over, and that taking action to achieve that end us a good thing. A negative in the short term leads to a longterm positive.
Also I see no other method of doing this. If you go to the council and say “I want to replace this highly profitable traffic camera making hundreds of thousands per year with a traffic island that will make no money at all” the decision that any team will make internally is obvious. That issue inevitably leads to destruction of these cameras as the only method of causing the alternative to occur.
A negative in the short term leads to a longterm positive.
I do not want to die a martyr to the fight against traffic cams.
Also I see no other method of doing this. If you go to the council and say “I want to replace this highly profitable traffic camera making hundreds of thousands per year with a traffic island that will make no money at all” the decision that any team will make internally is obvious.
That kind of poses the second question as to what, in the interim, will be cut as per budget, but that’s a sidenote. I guarantee you without change far reaching enough to societally gain a new understanding of public space and roads, when the last speed cam is dismantled you’ll find all the roads still suck ass and will not be redesigned. Once you have the change so far reaching that you can reunderstand basically every road, yeah, then you don’t need the traffic cams anymore and they can be dismantled.
I was ruder than I should’ve been, I thought you were the other person who has irritated me a bit.
I guarantee you without change far reaching enough to societally gain a new understanding of public space and roads
This is the weird fantasy part I was referring to. It’s like, just nonsense. It comes off like an american attitude being ported to the UK with absolutely no adaptation whatsoever to British conditions. Our conditions are nothing like america. Getting rid of cameras and getting traffic calming measures installed instead is not particularly difficult, it’s about the same. This idea of complete and widespread reinterpretation of public space? It doesn’t make sense here.
The particular road from the OP is a main road through rural space between major locations. By American standards it would be considered idyllic.
There’s no “reimagining” needed here. People don’t need to develop a new consciousness of public space. We do not live in a country that is utterly obsessed with cars like america. And we aren’t opposed to limiting them. There are zero political barriers to this, the only barrier is the profit/revenue barrier of the traffic camera obsessed crowd. I must stress, I am not just cherrypicking out rare projects that look good. This shit is bog standard, everywhere in the country already. In every town, in every village, in every city. Outisde every school. In every residential area. All over the country.
It is categorically not the same environment here and we do not share the same political barriers or problems.
This is the weird fantasy part I was referring to. It’s like, just nonsense. It comes off like an american attitude being ported to the UK with absolutely no adaptation whatsoever to British conditions. Our conditions are nothing like america. Getting rid of cameras and getting traffic calming measures installed instead is not particularly difficult, it’s about the same. This idea of complete and widespread reinterpretation of public space? It doesn’t make sense here.
I’m german tho.
By American standards it would be considered idyllic.
As such, I do not believe american standards as per roads are anything to go by
Parts of the road already have traffic calming measures.
That’s not really gonna stop anybody from speeding down the remaining lane(s) because they’re still very wide. It’s good for pedestrians, probably, don’t get me wrong, doesn’t really fight the speeding problem at all.
This is very easily expanded upon with the addition of chicanes, which are in wide use (hundreds of thousands) across the country.
These do
There’s no “reimagining” needed here. People don’t need to develop a new consciousness of public space.
Those are very much spotwork as per slowing down cars. They work for that spot, yes. It is however absolutely not hard to accelerate a car again. This is a good idea to slow people down before a busy or a school crossing or something, the third picture especially is just going to lead to slow down / wait -> mash gas pedal
We do not live in a country that is utterly obsessed with cars like america.
True, but also nigh about the lowest bar to clear right after like Saudi Arabia.
There are zero political barriers to this, the only barrier is the profit/revenue barrier of the traffic camera obsessed crowd.
And you accuse me of living in some fantasy reality?
In every town, in every village, in every city. Outisde every school. In every residential area. All over the country.
Same, could find similar features here by looking out my old apartments window. Hell, do you one better than that, we have shit like this
Sorry for the grainy pictures, didn’t wanna spend that much time on google. Now that’s a road you can’t speed on, on account of many chicanes and other built up enviroments, not just the single one and then it’s open road before and after.
Doesn’t mean the rest of it isn’t incredibly car brained and hostile, and as such, transportation by foot or cycling sucks major ass.
If your vision of not being carbrained is “do better than the USA”, yeah, you’re there, but that shouldn’t be the end goal
The local community campaigned to get these speed cameras because people were speeding. Redesigning the road would be great, if the council had money to, but I doubt they do.
Poor people aren’t getting screwed over by this because poor people can’t afford to drive, they’re the ones that have to deal with the unsafe driving of the middle class dada on their German coupes that can’t bare to drive at less that 50mph.
The cost of physical redesign traffic calming measures is significantly cheaper to install than the cameras, whose cost is justified by councils because of the income they bring in thereafter.
The insistence on replacing it instead of doing something else is being justified internally because even with these attacks they consider it to be making more than it’s costing them.
Poor people aren’t getting screwed over by this because poor people can’t afford to drive,
Mate fuck right off. This statement just screams that you’ve never actually done any organising or volunteering with the poor in the UK. Please volunteer at a food bank for once in your fucking life and learn what kinds of people the 3million people in this country attending them are like. It will surprise you, expand your view of society a bit, and you’ll be doing an actually-good useful thing.
The poorest people own the fewest cars, and are the most affected by things like air pollution, and if they do have to own cars they’re the ones most at hurt by car dependency (which is perpetuated by road violence caused by things like speeding).
If you say utterly stupid ass things like poor people don’t own cars I will absolutely assume you don’t interact with the people struggling to survive in this country in any capacity. It’s a bloody stupid thing to say mate.
I mean what I said, go and volunteer and see for yourself.
I’m sorry I didn’t think I needed to spell it out that much to you. Obviously I don’t think all poor people don’t drive. But the poorest don’t, and statistically poorer people drive a lot less and are more impacted by things like this.
I don’t agree that speeding is ok if poor people do it, and I don’t think the removal of the speed cameras is a step to the better alternative, unless it’s part of removing cars from the road in question entirely.
Ok so what do you expect to happen when you rock up to the council and say “Hi, I want to replace this speed camera making tens of thousands in profit per year with this other solution that makes no money at all” ?
Please tell me what you think the pathway to the alternative better solution is.
I wouldn’t replace it. Some people will still speed even with traffic calming so the camera is still useful.
If you want to reduce the council’s income from speed cameras, the first thing would be to elect a central government that will properly fund local councils so they have the budget to make decisions like that.
You physically can’t speed with traffic calming, they will just crash and fuck up their vehicles.
This conversation is silly. Right from the start if you were committed to this fuck the poor nonsense you should have just been honest and admitted it so neither of our times would have been wasted on this ridiculous farce.
Not really that surprised, typical liberal bullshit. Gonna vote Starmer too yeah?
I’m not a lib, I’m not a fan of Keith, and I’m not saying “fuck the poor”. Poor people are the most impacted by car dependency which is perpetuated by dangerous driving. If you don’t want to have this conversation anymore you can stop replying.
Croydon council responded to FOI request stating it costs £2.5-£3.5k to install traffic islands. The cost of a speed camera installation on the other hand is £85,000 according to Bedford Council, with a £5000 annual upkeep cost.
Croydon cites average cost for roughly such an action at 2,5k - 3,5k in a denial of the FOI request which means there’s pretty much no way to know how much it actually costs depending on what they calculate the average on and if you have any idea about the cost of public works that number should strike you as very, very oddly low.
Wiltshire government here cites about 45.000k for a traffic island narrowing a road to one lane, all in all.
The source you cite for the cameras, however, puts those costs for 2 cameras, so 42,500 a pop / 2500 upkeep annual, albeit with returns via fines obviously.
fuck_cars
Newest
This magazine is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.