This sad story has everything. Unsafe roads. An already inherently unsafe vehicle that shouldn’t be street legal in its stock configuration modified to pollute the earth more than normal. Toxic masculinity. Teenagers driving. A headline that says the pickup truck as the assailant as if it had a mind of its own. The correct headline should be “teenage driver attempts to murder cyclists…” And of course, the driver has not been arrested. If you want to kill someone and get away with it, use a car. The car will take all the blame!
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Do this, only to the entire world.
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That’s an amazing thread.
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That thread epitomizes why I’m game to make big changes to public spaces despite opposition, because I readily assume that before long the new spaces will be seen as normal and the old ways forgotten entirely.
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People will complain for a short time, then move on.
If nothing happens, most of those same people will still complain, and they won’t have anything to move on from.
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https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-10-12/the-dangerous-promise-of-the-self-driving-car
The money quote right at the end.
The accommodation of car dependency is the perpetuation of car dependency.
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Genius level tweet.
Absolutely enormous news. Flix bought ALL of Greyhound. What they choose to change will have enormous consequences in the US. Here’s hoping they make improvements.
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This one is really making the rounds, might as well put it here.
The fact the so many buildings were demolished to make space for cars, shows how much space that isn’t needed for human use.
It’s like a temporary landfill. At different points of the day it’s either filled or emptied by cars.
Eliminating cars, that same area could be trees.
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That space was needed for human use. What changed is where the humans lived, what the humans were doing, and how the humans used the space. Many many things contributed, here are some I can think of.
People were living AND working in the downtown area. Because of the car their house moved to the suburbs, which used to be trees. That parking lot replaced where their downtown home used to be.
Buildings got taller, taking up less horizontal space than the multiple buildings that were replaced.
People weren’t walking around the downtown so much anymore, so a lot of those shops moved to the suburbs near where the homes are. That also means less sidewalks in both places.
The jobs themselves got moved or were eliminated. Either to foreign laborers, remote workers, or entire industries going away. Jobs that remained were performed by fewer people thanks to automation. Fewer people, less commercial real estate square footage, more room for parking lot.
Office style work changes its usage of real estate from everyone getting offices to instead using cubicles and open plans. More people squeezed into a smaller office, but all those people still need to park their cars since they don’t live across the street.
One more comment. I think the orientation of the photo is off. You can tell by the tower. It’s the most prominent structure that is present in both photos. In the old photo the tower has roads touching it on the top and left. In the new photo it has roads touching it on the top and right. I think the top photo needs to be rotated 90 degrees clockwise to line up.
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Barcelona, notably also the home of superblocks.
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Oh, here’s some cool updates of possible things my city is doing
Firstly, idk how common this is, but changing the language of shared roads to emphasise to cars that they’re the ones who should be taking efforts to share the space rather then pedestrians and bycyclists seems cool
Also, they’re working on lowering the speed limit by default from 25 to 20 mph.
That also means less sidewalks in both places.
Sidewalks suck in denver :(. There’s a lot of denver where you don’t have sidewalks or you suddenly lose your sidewalk. And even if you do, half the time it’s not wide enough, or has a random pole sticking out of it, or has a tree growing into it heavily obstructing the lane. IIRC, part of the problem is that the property owners are responsible for there being a sidewalk. Once you get your sidewalk in, you have to continue to maintain it, but before then you can get away with never building one until you have to apply for a permit for something. There’s some efforts to get this up to date and working, but it’s been slow.
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Howdy! I thought i’d post real quick(lol @ real quick, been trying to synthesize a post for at least an hour) about practice? Maybe some of you are interested? Maybe you have ideas of how I could improve? Maybe it’ll encourage other’s to do more too?
So All these cool theory videos and posts and infographics are cool, but I get a feeling they’re often largely shared within a largely already pro-urbanist communities. What I’ve been interested in lately is how to spread these ideas and understandings outside our “pro-urbanist”(is there a better term? pro-bike, pro-pub transit, pro-equality/“social justice”, “pro density”) communities? And what communities are largely full of angry “car zealots”? Yes, that’s right, Nextdoor. I’ve been trying to perform bicycle(and generally pro-urbanist advocacy) on nextdoor.
It’s been generally a weird and interesting expirience.
here’s some things I’ve struggled with:
- I still largely feel on my own. Even when I see anyone else trying to do simular things, I feel like I’m disconnected from people in terms of advicacy, in terms of recieving criticism and stratagizing, in terms of effecting outcomes in general
- I sometimes can get too salty. I think this is easy for a variety of reasons, and I am of course only human. I can’t help but wonder if better connectedness to community would help. This maybe doesn’t just hurt my advicacy maybe, but I think deeply hurts my own mental state in a lot of ways.
- I sometimes don’t know how to best interact at all.
One of the things that rattles me is how people will seem to come in with a “the status quo is good and I hate cyclists perspective” and how often it’s generally accepted for people like them to literally threaten people with death. It’s one thing for a cyclist to talk about how scary cars are and how we can make roads safer, it’s another for someone to lead in with “I’m angry cause I have to slow down for cyclists” and then end with a point like “well in a fight, I’d crush you”. It’s obvious and clear agression, but it’s hard to make anyone who’s not been de-indoctrinated see that. (see: the history of jaywalking).
One of the things that I find encouraging is sometimes people will come in with clear misunderstandings, but also ask hernestly questions like “Why don’t bikes go on the sidewalk?”, and when you respond with something like “Well, it’s actually pretty dangerous for bikes to go on the sidwalk, for everyone, for bikes, and also for pedestrians. Also, it’s illegal. Here’s a link to read more”, and they respond back “wow, thanks for the info”.
Idk maybe I’m rambling so I’ll end this here, there’s a bunch of other ways I could have structured this(and I could have used anonomized examples of convos, but it feels a bit tacky maybe? sketch in some ways?).
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