You're walking home late at night from the bar because you've had 11 shots of tequila but you still made the conscious decision not to drive for the safety of others. You're crossing a stroad. Someone "in a hurry" decide to run the red light and hits you at 70 km/h (because of course they were speeding, why wouldn't they?), doesn't see you because you're hunched over while you're walking and it's really dark and the person is driving a giant SUV with shit visibility.

Cars are one of the largest source of fatal pedestrian accidents in a major city. How much more likely are you to get into an accident if you're drunk and is less able to pay attention to cars breaking the rules and putting you in danger? Walking safely in most cities is a task you need to be sober for because you have to walk super defensively.

Walking my grandkid to/from school, it absolutely floors me how many dangerous drivers there are around kids.

In a matter of maybe 10 minutes, I've witnessed:

• at least a dozen cars illegal parked. It's not the parking that bothers me, but the fact that these cars are often parked on turns or just before intersections, making it impossible for other drivers to see small kids.
• Several people not stopping at stop signs, including at the exit of the school parking lot.
• One car, who completely blew through a stop sign at the front of the school, made a left turn and nearly hit a guy walking his kid. The driver didn't even slow down.
• Super fucking huge pickup trucks parked in the school parking lot, but their long ass hangs well over the sidewalk near the kindergarden area, leaving very little space to use the sidewalk.
• Speeding. Obviously, you have to have speeding in school zones, right?

This happens every day, during drop off and pick up. I was told that bylaw were “cracking down”, but no, they aren't. If they were, our municipality would generate $5000 in fines each and every day at every school.

The other day, I rode my bike past another school as kids were getting out. Not only was their massive parking lot completely full, but they had blocked the bike trail (WITH PYLONS) to make space for more cars. Then as I entered onto the road, cars were illegally parked along the road and on a bridge for a like 100m. Making it extremely difficult and dangerous to cross because they blocked visibility for me and other drivers on the road.

I asked the cross guard if these students all lived out of town, requiring every parent to drive them home; he obviously didn't get my joke.

Seriously, fuck cars. All of them!

Washington State Department of Transportation is starting to realize that we cannot afford to maintain the sheer volume of roads we build. The maintenance debt that we have built up is bankrupting our governments and it's only going to get worse year by year.

Civilization itself cannot afford to have so many car oriented roads long term.

https://www.thecentersquare.com/washington/article_e69a80be-75f1-11ef-8b50-3babe18f06e9.html

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/19601342

Speed record of a velomobile: 144 km/h https://www.aerovelo.com/eta-speedbike

We don't need any knew infrastructure, we just need to get cars out of the way

An economic perspective of free public transit!

The more car trips taken, regardless of how safe you try to make things, or how much you try to educate drivers, or how many 'be careful' street signs you put up, will always increase the chances of a crash.

...

Over a 15-year period, 6,253 cars crashed into 7-Eleven storefronts in the U.S. – an average of 1.14 per day.

7-Eleven apparently fought in court to withhold that data from the public.

"They have not been producing that information for many, many years," Rogers said, "and that's what's important about this case - getting this information out about how frequently this happens."

Rob Reiter is co-founder of the Storefront Safety Council. He was retained as an expert by Carl's attorneys in this case.

"If you install bollards, you pretty much solve that problem," he said of the danger.

Reiter advocates for safety bollards or protective barriers being placed in front of storefronts – especially those with parking lots that face the front door.

...

>UB: To start with, we tried to argue with our book against a very dynamic treatment dealing with ecological crisis: what we call green capitalism, or the green economy, or ecological modernization of capitalism. Which is: we have a problem with the combustion engine so it should be the electric engine. This will not be sufficient, we know, because the resources have to come from the South and there is still the space problem.

>We prepare our argument of solidary mode of living against a strong expectation of the green side of the government in Germany and Austria that we don’t have to question our imperial mode of living: we green it a bit. There’s a greening ecological modernization, if you like. I’m sure in Canada you have similar debates. Even many movements believed it; not the radical movements, but many NGOs and so on.

>We argue: no, if we take the problem seriously: that we have to get rid of the capitalist growth imperative, that we have to get rid of the world resources market, this enormous flow from the South to the North. We need principles but also to take seriously experiences and then certain policies towards the solidary mode of living. This chapter is a first attempt. It’s very comprehensive and it was also criticized—which is why we’re writing another book.

>But you point at a distinction which to us seems crucial: the distinction between the subjective preconditions and the objective preconditions. We don’t accept an environmentalist discourse that says “it’s just behaviour, it’s just the consciousness.” But we also don’t say, “it’s just the policy framework.” We say that if we want a real mobility transition, but only from the combustion engine to the electric engine, we need an understanding via conflicts and via learning processes that the car is not only not necessary but it’s not attractive. It’s a struggle over subjectivities that what we call the “automobile imperial mode of living” or “imperial automobility” is not any longer possible.

>The objective conditions are the other infrastructures, the other production systems, which means also a loss of jobs. I work a lot with trade unions on this. A reduction of the car industry means to rethink how the production of mobility is organized and to take the power from the automotive industry and to produce much more the means for public transport. The argument from the automotive industry is always: “There is job loss.” And the unions are on their side. It’s necessarily to convince them to have good public transport—which does not mean planes but a good train and bus system—means also to create jobs. This is the subjective and objective.

>Then, we have some principles. One principle, since we come from critical theory, is that the care principle—a principle to organize society carefully: to have care for yourself, for others, for nature, for society—should overrule the profit principle of the large companies. At the large scale of the automotive industry and military, the profit motive turns into political power. We have to reduce certain production but we also have to change property relations.

>Another principle beside this care principle is to rebuild the public sector. Of course, we have many problems with the public sector. Corruption, inefficiency: we are aware of these things. But to guarantee basic provisioning, we need a strong public sector because this can be made responsible. When it comes to pensions, when it comes to health, when it comes to education, the private principle is “who has the money?” The public principle is that it’s a social right.

>Finally, we argue that we need strong social movements, which are usually the indicators of the need of radical change. We have this wonderful movement in Germany to leave the coal in the soil and the anti-nuclear movement that has decades of experiences and work. At the end, it’s political contestation: it needs to be armoured—to draw on Gramsci—with coercion and the finances of the state. It needs a macro perspective. It’s not enough to remain within a niche. But we defend that the radical innovation usually comes from the edges. For example, we don’t argue “we have to wait until the majority wants it.” We need these starting points of an emancipatory politics, which means criticizing domination in a manyfold sense.

Still in development, but certainly a step in the right direction. Seems a perfect runabout vehicle to get you to public transportation and to get groceries on the way home. Hopefully wider adoption can bring the price down. It would also function as a grid connected battery as mentioned in this "Living on Earth " segment. https://loe.org/shows/shows.html?programID=24-P13-00035

More Sydney Metro photos: Gadigal (Town Hall) station to Martin Place

\#train #trains #rail #railways #Sydney #Metro #Australia #urbanism @fuck\[email protected]

Street view from Google Maps:

!

Everyone I know, even more "progressive" people, treat me like a damn alien for not prioritizing getting a new car since mine died over covid.

Why does nobody blink an eye at this habit people have of just..... Sitting in their car in the driveway? Its not on, there's no music, they aren't leaving - they're just sitting there for an hour or more. I see it fairly often, but if I mention it being odd people look at me like I'm dumb. Are we really THAT car centric now that it's this normalized to be like "fuck my living room, fuck my TV, fuck my couch, I just wanna sit in my car all day?"

And the obligatory Not Just Bikes: https://youtu.be/Ra_0DgnJ1uQ

I was a bit pessimistic about this being possible, but to see that we did this in the 1984 Olympics without any light rail is pretty amazing to hear.

Hope this won't break Rule 4 >.>