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This, along with another user's posts about Pittsburgh (whose name I've accidentally rudely forgotten) is one of the best posts on the site. This kind of stuff is much more interesting and compelling than yet another post about abstract housing policies or culture war coconuts. I think there's a rich tradition waiting to be written about the characters and places of the country.
Has anything really changed in response to the Key bridge collapsing? I live in the next major city Southwest of you, and was actually driving home the night it collapsed and was supposed to take that route and took a different one to avoid city traffic.
It is a good post. But we've all read posts like it before, and have either internalized the message or don't want to. Abstract housing policy may not be gripping, but it is new!
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It's the kind of thing that makes a forum feel like a community.
Informative but has real heart. Visceral, but no shock value.
I feared that the original community has taken too many Ls. There were a lot of platform migrations and splinter groups. I still feel worry, but posts like these keep me optimistic.
Eh, the only other places that allow for open discussion of topics like these are places like the chans and Kiwi Farms. And as much as I enjoy wallowing in the mud with other anonson 4chan, and as much as I sometimes get annoyed by the overly intellectual approach of rationalists and others on here (that often can't see the forest for the trees), there's really nowhere else to go on the internet for interesting discussions like this.
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Traffic got a bit worse, but it seems to have mostly smoothed itself out now. It just takes a few more minutes to get anywhere on any given day, but it's not too horrible.
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I suspect rebuilding that will go about as well as maintaining the power grid goes in South Africa. Import the third world, become the third world.
One of the bizarre bits of Baltimore is how close it is to DC; there are pretty regular departures from the localized incompetence and corruption (if only by infusing massive floods of cash) just so people from DC aren't inconvenienced. I'd be willing to bet that the Key Bridge falls into that pile, just because otherwise people going to Aberdeen have to deal with Baltimore roads.
It's more than that. The Key bridge was how hazardous loads got around the east side of the city. They can't (legally) go through the tunnels to go through the city. Now, they're either illegally going through the tunnels, or all going around the west side of the city which adds considerable time to trucking loads up/down 95.
The lack of the Key bridge inconveniences those of us who live here, but it's a real problem for road-based freight. I think that's the primary reason the feds want to throw money at getting it fixed.
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