Reform UK party. Same far right party as brexit.

I wouldn’t expect them to listen to reason.

Oh, you’ll have fun with this rabbit hole! They’re neat and used all around the world. The air train at SFO uses them, as does Mexico City.

I’m all for rail, but using rubber can be useful in all sorts of situations. It’s simple and works well. And even with the disadvantages over steel wheels, like rolling resistance, they’re not wildly expensive to run and maintain.

BRT lines are especially neat because a BRT allows a city to upgrade their bus system to light rail capacity without huge investment. E.g. San Francisco upgraded their Van Ness bus line to a BRT with wild success.

Corrected headline: “Some Asshole Was Texting or Going Too Fast and Ran Over Phil Ken in His Fucking Car”

Any ticket that is a flat cost is a regressive tax. I think we both know that income based tickets would never fly in the US.

Income based tickets can fly in the US, but it hasn’t been normalized everywhere yet. CA AB 645 doesn’t slide upwards, even though it should, but it does slide downward. The law even requires analysis of the local population before authorizing a speed camera installation.

“a designated jurisdiction shall reduce the applicable fines and penalties by 80 percent for indigent persons, and by 50 percent for individuals up to 250 percent above the federal poverty level.”

“A speed enforcement program developed pursuant to paragraph (1) shall place the speed safety systems in locations that are geographically and socioeconomically diverse. The designated jurisdiction shall describe how it has complied with this provision in the Speed Safety System Impact Report described in subdivision (h)”

“A racial and economic equity impact analysis, developed in collaboration with local racial justice and economic equity stakeholder groups. The analysis shall include the number of notices of violations issued to indigent individuals, the number of notices of violations issued to individuals of up to 250 percent above the poverty line, and the number of violations issued to each ZIP Code.”

The issues you raise are real, but they’re not because of speed cameras. They’re issues of selective speeding enforcement and flat-rate tickets being regressive in a car dependent society. Police officers regularly issue speeding tickets against the impoverished and minority populations without checks and balance. At least speeding cameras won’t lie about where it sits or inspect the color of the driver before writing a ticket.

Illinois, do better with your speeding tickets.

Speeding tickets don’t have to be a regressive tax, as others have pointed out. Many countries slide speeding tickets based on income.

Revenue generator… for whom? Policy matters. E.g. California’s AB 645 authorization for speeding cameras only allows for recovery of program costs and “any excess revenue shall be used for traffic-calming measures within three years of the end of the fiscal year in which the excess revenue was received.” California’s speeding cameras reduce speeding by improving road infrastructure and active transportation.

Citation needed, otherwise you’re just spreading carbrained misinformation.

900 dump trucks of garbage a year, all by bicycle. A good vibe to start the weekend with. :)

Disappointing but not surprising. Most Democrats are not in favor of building housing. It’s too often politically suicidal at the local level to support development.

I got curious and looked around for more info, thinking that usually it takes at least a few months for traffic patterns to settle in like this. Nope. This overpass opened yesterday.

But wait, there are even more familiar issues! Housing? Yep, lots of people were displaced. Which was also ignored during planning, so the project landed late (22 years in the making) and way over budget.

Furthermore, it’s not like the civil planning experts in Mumbai didn’t know any better.

Transport expert Ashok Datar voiced skepticism about long-term benefits. “There is a saying that instead of trying to cover the world with leather, one should wear leather shoes. SCLR’s extension is an attempt to cover the world in leather. All that is being done is that a congestion point is being pushed further ahead of the road. How many extensions will you do while ignoring easier and cheaper solutions like having dedicated bus corridors on Mumbai’s roads? That is a far cheaper option than building such roads,” Datar said.

Mumbai’s East–West road link realised after 2 decades with SCLR extension

File this one under fuck around. We’ll refile under find out later.

I’m not sure a diesel generator is much better. In the US, petrol power generation is 2.46 pounds CO2/kwh and coal is 2.31 pounds/kwh. Maybe coal is less efficient in Germany, but I doubt it’s significantly worse than petrol.

And there are other negative emissions with oil, like forced methane production (burn, bottle, or release). Though coal has similar issues too (e.g. more radioactive release than nuclear power).

That said, there’s a disconnect in our debate. Coal plants are an energy source. Cars and ebikes are an energy load. You can’t really say “coal is worse than cars” because you cannot replace coal plant emissions by adding more cars. Similarly, you’ll have cars even if you replaced coal with zero-emission renewables.

The argument becomes interesting when you add bikes into the picture. You can replace a large portion of petrol-car kilometers with coal-ebike kilometers and gain far more kilometers traveled per kilo of CO2. This argument can also be extended for emissions related to calories in acoustic bike kilometers.

The “per mile” in “ebikes produce less CO2 per mile” is critically important to the argument.

Dr Simon Clark put together a video in 2024 about CO2 and ebikes: How bad are electric bikes for the environment?

He lists 20 sources in the description, so go ham on reading up if you don’t want to watch his breakdown.

Oh, it’s even worse. Bikes and pedestrians are banned from the bridge. They claim there’ll be a bus, but it’ll be almost useless. It’s not planned to run 27/7 and zero promises on frequency.

I’ll bet $20 they’ll cite its emptyness as justification for terminating that service too.

Why? They wanted a breakdown lane.

The requirement is the problem. Why would you force someone who cannot use a parking spot to pay for one? It’s a waste of money and resources that could go into many other things, like buying a bigger condo!

Storage pods don’t make up for it, and it’s illegal for good reasons (fire and health hazard).

Instead of developing a car spot only to redevelop it for another use, just build what you want at the start.

So you’d rather force blind, epileptic, vertigo, mobility impaired and many other suffering people to pay more on essential living needs for utilities that they cannot ethically or legally use?

Don’t worry. Gas taxes have gone up, but it’s for cars. Gov. Newsom doesn’t want paths for walking and biking.

https://www.calbike.org/californias-transportation-spending-has-the-wrong-priorities/

Ray Delahanty has a slightly different take (“reductive” is what he calls the above). It’s worth a watch/listen if this topic intrigues you.

$200 to Escape Suburban Sprawl for a Day

I drop by Pike Place on a regular basis. Even before the current car ban, it was near impossible to drive through. Pedestrians would flow out onto the street because the sidewalks and inside of the market was packed. Sometimes even due to lines for some of the popular shops. And sometimes it was me blocking your drive because screw that noise, I’m walking here!

This summer with the car ban it has been even more popular and crowded, with fewer shoulders and elbows getting in the way. IMHO, this project has already been successful. Great job, Seattleites! :)

Also new in the area is the rebuild of Alaskan Way. It’s much nicer than ever before, plus the aquarium got a new building.

So long as you don’t die from that fistful of rat poison, correlating to a economy that survives to another day, then yes, you could eat that poison! It would be very bad idea and may leave you maimed, but it would be possible. Furthermore, it’s more poison than you are currently consuming (at least I hope you’re not eating rat poison). I’m not sure why one would but if someone paid you to eat some poison, you certainly could do that transaction and I could say there’s been an increase of rat-poison-eater supply.

Economics may be strange but it’s not a value judgement on what we do. It’s just a way of modeling and understanding how a society handles goods and services. Invoking economic arguments like the tragedy of the commons requires understanding consumption of public resources and what that does to the resources. Parking doesn’t fit the argument because the supply curve does not change over time due to the pressure of strong demand. Parking can be refurbished, unlike a common livestock pasture. Parking supply can be increased by building on infertile land, up, or down, where a common livestock pasture cannot. A common livestock pasture can be consumed to the point where it cannot supply anymore (becoming infertile). A parking spot does not get consumed beyond a point to where it no longer functions as a parking spot.

Parking is not subject to the tragedy of the commons.

In an economic sense, it’s not limited. Land is limited and there are oh so many negative externalities*, but we haven’t paved over everything, there’s more than enough bitumen and agate to level the world, and you can always dig or go up. We are nowhere near close to being unable to build one more parking spot. It’d be a hellscape, but it’d be one with plenty of parking.

• Some more unfun things when building parking: heat island effect, surface permeabilities, strip mining for agate, drilling for bitumen, carbon emissions in moving it all, unfair and unsafe construction practices in this country, and the list goes on.