Yeah, but what if you needed to haul a team of volunteers to do disaster relief with a 9,000 pound trailer filled with water and food and then use the empty bed to haul debris away while rescuing survivors from the flood waters?
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.
The bike lanes suck though. They are next to the street, instead of behind the parking and next to the sidewalk. As a result, on the main street in Hoboken (Washington street), there are always cars double parked in the bike lane during the day or drinking hours of the night, because parking in that city is horrendous. It’s common to see an entire block or two full of cars double parked in the bike lane, making it unusable. Also, they redid the bike lane with textured hexagonal bullshit so using any wheels smaller than e-scooter wheels (skateboard, roller skate) is just a super rough ride.
Great that he stopped pedestrian casualties, but he severely harmed personal non-car transit.
There’s no such thing as horrendous parking. There is only too many people showing up by car when they ought to be walking/biking/riding transit instead.
He still added bike lanes that weren’t there before no? How is that harming personal non-car transit? Maybe go to city council meetings and ask that double parking in bike lanes be enforced. I would certainly think the city wants to make money from fines.
Also how many people are riding around on rollerblades? The “hexagonal bullshit” makes the bike lanes distinct and noticeable increasing awareness and also gives tactile feedback if a driver starts driving on the bike lane. Yeah it sucks for skateboarders but the tradeoffs are worth it, especially because again, how many skateboarders are there really? Some municipalities don’t even allow skateboards in bike lanes because the drastic speed difference between them and bikes tends to cause issues.
Could the bike lanes be better? Absolutely, they could be actually protected bike lanes like you pointed out but don’t let perfect be the enemy of good, they don’t “suck”. And 0 pedestrian deaths over the span of a few years is very very good.
High speed rail. It’s phenomenal. Want to go somewhere far away? Without HSR you’re doing an exhausting drive, a day-long ride in slow trains, going through horrible airports and paying for taxis on both ends. With HSR you go directly between city centres stress free and arrive with plenty of spoons to walk around. It’s a game changer.
So I’m a bit torn on this one… your taxes pay for firefighters and police. However you have to have insurance in emergencies should your house burn down and you want to rebuild, or should something (like your car) get stolen. In all cases, you’re paying to support the infrastructure that provides you a safety net.
Without getting into the social economics of what in this world should actually be free, not paying for this seems to fall outside of that as the person refused to pay for the safety net until it was needed. That’s like trying to go to an insurance company after an accident to get coverage for that accident.
Yeah this is exactly like the time Verizon refused to connect the firefighters in the middle of a wildfire because they had “used too many minutes” or something stupid like that. Megacorps need to be held accountable for emergency situations that don’t fit their neat little T&Cs.
I feel like this is a brainworm capitalist take. The capability was there, were their profits actually more important than locating a kidnapped child?
It’s not like this was going to drain a risk pool of equity and put other people’s coverage at risk; literally ping the fucking car and find out where it is. The capabilities are already there. Save the baby.
Emergency response and recovery has always been a problem of the commonwealth, not of individuals. Private insurance is and has always been a scam.
The cost of lives lost became conspicuous during the prison boom of the 1980s in which the Reagan—George H. W. Bush tough on crime policies literally more than decimated neighborhood populations. When police busted someone for possession, or loitering or contempt of cop (or was gunned down in spite) it wasn’t just an alleged thug removed from society, but also typically an employee, a parent, a renter, a consumer who bought food and paid bills. (The You’re Wrong About pod, amusingly on Dan Quayle vs. Murphy Brown gets into the 80s era conservative policies of broken window policing and harsh sentences for nonviolent petty crime)
So whenever someone’s life is demolished by a natural disaster, an untreated health problem, a vehicle collision, a rampage killing, police on a bender, whatever, it hits like a bomb in the community. Almost everyone has others who depend on them, as family, as a friend, as a customer or laborer. And when something makes them disappear, collateral crises manifest like shrapnel.
Nevermind the fact it doesn’t snow enough for that to be a problem in most of earth. There are more methods of transportation other than those two and not every place needs to have the same transportation matrix.
Sure they can. I’ve been doing that for quite a few years until climate change warmed my city up so much that snow and ice don’t really happen anymore.
it’s under an hour long so I can watch more than one like this during my lunch break. It’s the long form content over an hour long that I have to avoid because it’s usually just vods which severely bore me.
The number of PSAs about not getting mowed down during Halloween was absurd. ‘Wear reflective vests’, ‘only cross the street in groups’ - and not a single ‘hey, it’s Halloween and there’s going to be excited kids everywhere - please avoid driving and if you have to, be super extra careful’.
My partner’s idea, which I thought was brilliant, was that the speed limit on all residential streets should be dropped to 20km/h for the day.
The speed limit on all residential streets should be at the very most 30km/h year round. Since I started active commuting every day, I’ve noticed how alarmingly scary it is going 50 when I do have to drive. Reaction times at that speed do not allow for the amount of braking distance required.
I live in Oslo, and that’s not true for here at least. Oslo probably has one of the best public transit systems in the world, at least relative to its population. I never use any form of car, personal or taxi, I don’t even own a driving license, and I can easily get anywhere I want to go. At least within the city.
As soon as you leave the city though, you’re having a problem. Bicycle infrastructure is basically non-existent, cars heavily impeding buses - at least where I live - which delays them all the time and centralised bus hubs, which means that you always have to go to the bus hub first, change bus lines and then go to your destination.
This is also my biggest problem with the metro in Oslo. If you live slightly outside of Oslo but still along the metro line, the only way to travel perpendicular to the metro lines is often to take the metro towards the city, change lines and go back almost the same direction you came from.
I think this is a failure of imagination on the part of the author. Norway is, on a whole, much more rural; a large portion of the population lives in small towns and villages in areas with difficult terrain (think fjords), where public transport beyond a bus is impractical due to population densities.
The public transport in Oslo and Bergen are fantastic - Norway’s only two large cities. Keeping in mind that over a quarter of the population of the entire country lives in these two, it’s not as bad as it sounds.
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