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Posts categorised ‘Transport’

A carnival of terrible driving down at my local shops today 😒 From the guy who did a right-turn IMMEDIATELY in front of a garbage truck, to the poor schlub who’s clearly too broke to repair his Ferrari, and has been forced to drive it with a faulty speedometer and an engine making the most ear-splittingly obnoxious noise imaginable, tailgating speed-limit adherers all the way…

When I am benevolent dictator, none of these people will have drivers licences. Also, the shopping strip will have extreme amounts of traffic calming and zebra crossings everywhere, so it will literally not be possible to drive fast there anyway. We live in a community, folks.

The PTV journey planner is really overcautious. Had an 11:30 appointment, so I asked it how to get there by 11:20. It gave me a plan that’d get me there at 10:59… I thought that was TOO early, so I asked it for a trip with an arrival time of 11:30 instead. This time, it gave me a trip with an arrival time of 11:19. However, when I looked at the details, actually it’d get me to the railway station across the road from my destination at 11:13?? So it’s like, over-padded in imagining that it takes six minutes to cross the road, and over-padded AGAIN in imagining that a 11:19 arrival time is not before 11:20?

Missed yesterday, but here’s my entry for day 6 of the Micro.blog photo challenge 😅 This infamous engineering project, Skyrail, runs close to my parents’ house. It enabled the removal of the level crossing that held up car traffic. Still waiting for the promised improvements to train service.

photo taken from street level, showing two large viaducts passing over a suburban shopping strip, casting a big shadow on the ground. the photo is taken facing in the same direction as the viaducts, so you can see the land underneath the viaducts has some benches and recently-planted trees

Link: “Jessica Hart’s 5-year-old was killed by a car while riding her bike in DC. Now Hart is fighting for safer streets.

Original post found at: https://www.vox.com/23462548/allison-hart-pedestrian-deaths-suvs-deadliest-roads

I fuckin’ hate these huge SUVs and I get genuinely angry when I see them on our streets. The people who drive these cars kill people at much higher rates than drivers of normal sedan-type cars. When a driver in a sedan rams their car into a pedestrian, usually the car hits the pedestrian’s legs, and the pedestrian goes up and over the car’s bonnet. When the driver of an SUV rams into a pedestrian, the pedestrian is hit in the chest and much more likely dragged under the car, killing them. On top of this, visibility out of SUVs is terrible, especially down low enough to see children. People who wantonly choose to buy and drive such disgusting killing machines should have that taken as an aggravating factor in any case against them where they’ve killed somebody. But of course, that would require society to take it seriously when people kill other people using cars in the first place: As the truism goes, “If you want to murder someone and get away with it, just hit them with a car.”

I have to temper my rage here with the knowledge that the prison-industrial complex doesn’t help anybody. Revenge doesn’t bring victims of vehicular violence, like this woman’s 5-year-old daughter, back to life. Really, people should be prevented from being able to kill people with their cars in the first place. It should not be possible for ordinary consumers to buy these kinds of murder machines. Street design must force motorists to drive at low speeds, very carefully, through any environment where people walk (like residential or commercial streets). For the US specifically, “right turn on red” is a gross insult to public safety that should be immediately abolished. Public transport and cycling and walking infrastructure must be good enough that a normal, rational person would find it a better option than driving. Perhaps that would be enough to stop motorists killing children 🤷🏻‍♀️

Link: “Electric vehicle shift alone will not solve urban transport woes, says Portuguese minister

Original post found at: https://www.euractiv.com/section/electric-cars/news/shift-to-electric-vehicles-will-not-solve-urban-transport-woes-says-portuguese-minister/

Minister Pedro Nuno Santos dismissed the argument that the rapid uptake of electric vehicles is a panacea for urban transport, asserting that EVs will not solve the fundamental problems of cars.

“If we simply replace all combustion cars with electric cars, we will end up with the same kind of congestion, the same huge amount of lost time in traffic, the same unsustainable levels of road accidents, and the same struggle for public space,” he said.

The PTV app really makes it inordinately difficult to just go, “Hey. This stop where I’m standing right now? When is the next tram from here?” Do the devs of this app ever use public transport 🤔

Link: “Norway Wants People to Park Their EVs and Ride the Bus

Original post found at: https://www.thedrive.com/news/norway-wants-people-to-park-their-evs-and-ride-the-bus

In efficiency terms, for C02 and emissions in general, it is always going to be better to use mass transit than individual cars, no matter how green they are. Norway’s problem is that it gave such great incentives to buy EVs, going way back, that now people are choosing to drive their cars, powered from the cheap electricity off Norway’s clean grid, rather than get on a bus or train.

Link: “Rewilding Cities” by Clive Thompson

Original post found at: https://clivethompson.medium.com/rewilding-cities-b654e8abf7fb

Talks about the need to reverse car-centric planning, starting with the example of Utrecht (which buried at least one canal under a motorway, then later changed it back into an attractive canal around which people can socialise). It adds:

In the same way that monocropping corn creates weaker, less resilient land, monocropping our streets with cars creates cities that aren’t as vibrant as they ought to be. We often don’t notice it, because we’ve trained ourselves to think of streets as “almost exclusively for cars”. But if you think of all the things you could do with streets, you realize how weird it is that we have, for decades now, used them mostly only for vehicles.

I totally agree! Cars should not be able to drive easily or efficiently through residential areas, or commercial areas, or pretty much any area where people are. They should have to go slow, to play second fiddle to pedestrian and cycle traffic, to duck and weave around pop-up parks and outdoor dining and extensive traffic calming. And most of all, there should be high-quality public transport options, so people go, “Ugh, who the hell would want to drive there? I’m going some other way.” In that way we can actually make cities, towns and suburbs desirable places to be.

a cartoony avatar of Jessica Smith is a socialist and a feminist who loves animals, books, gaming, and cooking; she’s also interested in linguistics, history, technology and society.