Absolutely insane. We have serious dysfunction in our civilization that great concepts like this 15min city is being poisoned by social media with the help of algorithms trying to optimize for profit. This is the real conspiracy, that our systems of power are utterly rudderless and irrational.
You know how Belgium does this? Designate the entire length of the road as “bike priority street”, which means 30km/h max and no passing the bikes. Doesn’t require a scrap of extra planning, construction or what have you.
Sure, you put the bikers at the mercy of the drivers, but hey, gotta know what to sacrifice.
The Netherlands also does this. They create ‘Bicycle streets’ or ‘fietsstraten’ where drivers have to give priority to and aren’t allowed to pass cyclists. Way better than this and doesn’t require too much construction in principle.
I think a major reason for these models is that the more that the car becomes a computing device, the more that it’ll require regular patches and optimizations. Being connected to the servers and using services that route through it lets them gather usage data, offer some extra features that can functiom from anywhere, and update security and functionality (which would possibly involve full time developers I suppose).
It does seem greedy (way overpriced), but this isn’t the same as disabling hardware that you need to sub to activate (a la seat warmers). Plus it’s all still pretty cutting edge tech atm and I usually tell people that means you’re choosing to fund its early development (and being a beta tester) over using more standard and tested products.
Outside of self driving cars there isn’t a reason cars should become a computing device though.
If you want to end a car centric infrastructure in favor of bikes or velomobiles you would still want self driving cars that you only use for special tasks. Robotaxies or robo busses. Then it makes sense to not own a car.
When a certain popular president and congress passed the bail-out of the domestic vehicle industry, written by the same in 2008 that allowed such vehicles to be more profitable then a smaller cars, he was awarded a noble prize and reelected in a landslide.
Gotta have more real estate for factory lights… Starting to see trucks with eight lights on the front going down down the road.
The ironic part is that the high beams usually disable all the aux lights, so if you see a newer truck with only two lights, it’s probably got the high beams on, and if they turn it back to low beams to be “courteous”, it turns on all the others and ends up being worse than if they’d just left the fucking high beams on.
I don’t really give a shit about the penile compensation aspect of “muh bigguh truck”, but fuck your wall of lights…
Man, I drive a truck, 500 a month, will be paid off in less than 2 years, I get a lot of utility out of it and I got it from my brother who put some nice tires on it
But I also hate it because it’s so fuckin big, and I hate that people might think I’m a truck freak, but it’s just my only good option right now
I got a little jeep renegade that runs me like 350 a month…
First time I put gas in it and realized it had a 12 gallon tank, I was all like “OMG, why?!?”. Then I drove 300 miles before the light came on and It made perfect sense :)
Full tank doesn’t even get halfway to the $100 mark where you gotta reset the pump to fill it the rest of the way, ya know?
500 a month could treat you a lot better at the gas pump.
A couple of people that drive massive vehicles they don’t need like Escalades have told me (former practicing psychologist) over the years that they know they are bad drivers, but they want to drive a tank so they can walk away from whatever accidents they know they’ll cause.
Because practicing and improving their driving skills is apparently not on the table. The lack of empathy is unsettling. They don’t care who they kill, they just don’t want to be inconvenienced.
I think this shows some of the bigger issues in car centric design. Even if you don’t like driving, aren’t good at it, or aren’t comfortable with it, you often have to do it anyway beceause there are no viable alternatives.
If this isn’t a lease then it will never hold up in any state court, John Deere and Apple already tried something similar to this over right to repair and lost miserably in every state it was tried in. I’m actually surprised they tried this after the epic payout John Deere had to make after the class action lawsuit against them.
“All Chicagoans have the right to public transit.” Sane and doable. Not done, not currently, as any map of the city will show you, but both possible and desirable.
“All Illinoisans have a right to public transit.” I’d love to see it, even if it’s just once-a-day trains to Springfield, to St. Louis, to the Region, to Milwaukee, to Rockford, to Peoria, to Chambana. But that’s a lot more train lines than we have now, and that means land for stations and RoWs, it means manpower and materials for maintenance, it means working out the logistics of scheduling and fare pricing for the communities being served. And it still won’t cover everyone unless augmented with bus lines, which also need logistics, manpower, and maintenance. Still desirable; not very efficient, especially for a perpetually cash-strapped state like Illinois.
“All Americans have a right to public transit.” At that point it’d be empty words, doing more harm than good.
“All humans have a right to public transit.” At this point, purely aspirational rather than descriptive.
In Switzerland, minimum frequency standards for public transport are enshrined in law – meaning each citizen can expect regular provision of bus and train services, even in rural areas. It is administrated at local level, with each of the country’s ‘cantons’ setting out a framework for delivery.
In the Zurich canton, for instance, which is roughly comparable with South Yorkshire, England, and includes both urban and rural areas, villages of 300 people or more are guaranteed a bus service at least every hour. In the Bern canton, which is less densely populated than Devon, small villages get at least four and up to 15 return bus services each day.
In both places, schedules are aligned with railway timetables to ensure citizens can travel short or long distances with ease. Accessibility for disabled passengers is also a legal requirement.
The article is speaking from a British perspective, so that isn’t really a problem. I do think that such a limit on density or some other metric. It should be more that every town and village has a public transport connection, rather than every rural farmhouse.
The “we” would be everyone who is not the “37 per cent of urban areas globally, and just 52 per cent of the urban population, [who] have convenient access to public transport.”
I think a lot of this conversation boils down to someone needing to make an ESP32 device that sits in your OBD port and can be addressed directly for those who have a car that can connect to your home WiFi. I feel like one of those already exists…
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