TIRM
2mo ago
20mph is excessively slow. 12mph is comical.
I get I'm just voicing American opinions about this, but Europe sounds like it is in sorry state if they do this. Is around 20mph limits commonly implemented where you live, or is this very aspirational on your part? Are you some ultra-slow-driving contrarian going against the rest of society, or is this the norm where you live?
TIRM
2mo ago
I do like one-way lanes in urban cores. But thinking about this, we don't need two barriers and two bike lanes if it is a one-way street.
We could instead have building, sidewalk, parking or one-way car lane, a second one-way car lane, barrier, one-way bike lane, side walk, building. That just doubled car capacity or puts street parking everywhere for free.
And 20mph max speed is way too slow for virtually all roads. Even driving by an elementary school during pick up or drop off time is faster than that.
I really, really don't want to live in a dense urban region. The urban decay near me is ridiculous and completely intolerable. I need to do right by my kid and the city schools are jokes. At least most of them. I can easily shop around for a neighborhood with a great school district and send my kid to an even better private school in the suburbs. My suburban cup runs over on schooling and housing options in a way it doesn't within city limits.
So as a basic matter of self preservation I live far from the city. Well, an easy drive by car actually. But really quite far by public transportation; so my family is shielded from the worst of it. Comparatively few home and car break ins around here.
TIRM
2mo ago
just 1 more lane bro
"Why build infrastructure if people have a great desire to use it?" That's a popular anti-road-NIMBY argument. But it seems almost perfectly backwards to me.
Pedestrian death numbers look like a genocide is going on. WTF ?
Deaths per million scaling. Mostly in the single digits, spiking to the mid-10s for nighttime biking enthusiasts. I don't want to be callous, but the rhetoric is not matching the death rates here.
What I'm learning here is that Americans can ride bikes during the day with a collective 0.00000005% chance of dying (not clearly shown in the image but presumably per year). I'll take that deal. Yes please.
TIRM
2mo ago
Cycling does not require wearing helmet.
Cycling absolutely requires a helmet. Biking in a nice American suburban neighborhood as a child, I got flung off my bike and came down hard on the front of my head. I smashed the front of a helmet and blacked out for some indeterminate period of time. I regained consciousness with a firetruck and a few firemen around me.
No cars were involved in this crash. Just a kid getting some cloth wrapped up in his front wheel. That helmet saved my life. If you get catapulted over your front wheel, you'll be wearing a helmet, or you'll likely get your head smashed open.
Don't do it!
I biked practically everywhere ages 8 to early 20s. I got a driver's license age 16, but cars are expensive and I was working and saving, so I biked everywhere, not counting using parents' cars to do chores. I get biking is dangerous in some larger statistical sense, but if your local weather permits, it works great.
Later I got a motorcycle and that was even better. Wear your armor and go for it.
TIRM
2mo ago
I worked in Shanghai for a bit. They had something like this in parts of the city. Pedestrian sidewalk, full sized lane just for bikes and scooters, low concrete barrier, lanes for cars. If I had a complaint it would be that the bike and scooter lanes were much too wide. I once was on a company bus whose driver decided to drive down one for a bit in order to skip traffic. Which felt like an act of insanity to me, but I understand that is a very American sort of opinion. Needs, but sadly lacks, proper entry barriers only wide enough for a scooter.
But in American cities I don't see how they would make these. We already have building, sidewalk, lane, lane, sidewalk, building. No room for extra-wide bike lanes with barriers on each side. And for the streets with four lanes, they can't sacrifice two lanes for bikes without causing an extreme car traffic problem and two mostly-unused bike-only lanes. That would be great misallocation of scarce shared resources.
TIRM
3mo ago
My understanding is that private schools are commonly cheaper per student than public schools. And somehow have smaller classes. Public schools are wild profligates with our tax dollars.
TIRM
3mo ago
Mo Xiang Tong Xiu (MXTX) is a Chinese author well-known for her danmei (the Chinese equivalent of the Yaoi Genre) novels, and is one of the most successful authors of the genre.
I'll pass. I didn't realize horny gay erotica by and for women had infiltrated China and Russia.
TIRM
3mo ago
I want to raise my kids somewhere they'll have intelligent peers, an actually challenging primary school system, and no danger of state abduction if they say the wrong thing to a school therapist.
Yes to all. So my kid is in a carefully selected private school. In the suburbs of a major city. This is a service you could buy today.
TIRM
3mo ago
We're told that if a man acts out, it's because of what a woman wore, how she looked. Sure, men shouldn't rape, but did you see what she was wearing?
I have only ever seen this used to denounce hypothetical bad people who might think such an abhorrent thought. I have never seen someone actually state this.
TIRM
3mo ago
I very much doubt you could tell looking at me. But I don't wear sweat pants or track suits.
TIRM
3mo ago
As best I know an audit has nothing to do with sifting through your phone and email.
TIRM
3mo ago
I've lived in over 50 year old houses that are fine. Not as some ridiculous outlier like a million mile car, but in a neighborhood of perfectly suitable houses that just happen to be a few decades old.
Houses (the physical structures) depreciate very little over very long periods of time.
TIRM
3mo ago
What? It's no one's damned business if I'm wearing underwear or not. You can't tell by looking, so it "neither picks [your] pocket nor breaks [your] leg".
San Francisco famously maliciously designates random buildings historic in order to block development. You can't replace a dumpy laundromat with housing, it is "historic" you see. Multi-year legal battles trying to make some apartments. If the local government did nothing, then more housing would create itself all on its own. But instead they fight like cornered animals to prevent it.
Anyways, I bet that ""historic"" laundromat owner wishes that a freak tornado or lightning stike would have ruined that building so he could make an apartment complex out of it.
TIRM
3mo ago
If my house burned down, I could then sell the charred frame for over $1 million.
I bought the house and the land it is on for much less than $1 million. My wear and tear on the structure and the aging waterheater and whatnot are round off errors in the property value.
So long as tech jobs remain hyperconcentrated in a few areas, housing prices will have to increase within commuting distance of those jobs. Unless we start making Chinese style housing blocks and Chinese style hard restrictions on urban car ownership.
TIRM
3mo ago
As a modern sage once said: "If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. And if it stops moving, subsidize it."
Again, a libertarian quip. But it keeps happening. This one is all too accurate.
I buy software licenses for my team. A couple years ago a salesman for a major vendor of engineering software told me that their permanent licenses were being phased out and from now on only yearly subscriptions would be offered.
I got a few more permanent licenses using the excuse of available capital expense budget. The salesman told me they will never again allow that.
We've built such a fragile system. These license management tools are sensitive and prone to breaking under the very best of circumstances. No possibility these licenses are accessible on old hardware 10 years from now.
Something robust and important has been thrown away.
TIRM
3mo ago
I have a low effort quip I've used for years. Something alone the lines of:
Build more? Afraid we can't do that. Best we can offer is subsidizing demand.
It keeps exactly characterizing a significant portion of politicians, so I'm going to keep using it.
I just googled it and the law is 25mph in some places such as the places I've lived and 20mph in others. Google says some school districts can go as low as 15mph, but I've never seen that. I suppose I happen to be used to 25mph.
And no, I have not seen 40mph signs in front of elementary schools when children are present. And at my local schools lots of kids walk and bike to school. Not driving near masses of them at 40mph is sensible.
And also:
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