What is it going to take to get through to elected officials and progressive transportation planners, that they're working with a machine that's been designed to build freeways through poor neighborhoods and coerce anyone who could afford it into cars? A machine made of #trafficEngineers and #police which then accreted a century of CYA, cultural, legal, and bureaucratic armor against change? Giving the DOT more money for safety won't ever get us out of #carSupremacy. It's designed to not.
The whole ten-year cycle of planning and public outreach and design and legislature allocating funding, to do some cast-in-place concrete curb-protected sidewalk with bike stencils on it, that isn't wide enough to carry as much bike traffic as there are cars on the street, with no design-speed consideration, sharp corners and blind spots at intersections... It was conceived & designed as a way to get people on bikes out of the way of motorists, who are the important road users with places to go.
Let's just imagine that we took the #ClimateAction or #VisionZero plans seriously, with the urgency to quit killing people for not driving (& killing plenty of drivers too), and some actual wish to survive as a species. NONE of the current plans are within 10x of doing it. You need a different strategy. Stop building for cars and just put the actual #StuffInTheStreet that you would 🚧 if you took the lack of network seriously & opened a city-wide project to fix it this year. #TacticalUrbanism
Elected officials can say, "look, you can have input to the project, but the issue is that speeding cars are making it unsafe for people to walk or bike here, and clogging up the transit schedules, so we can't afford so many lanes for speeding cars right now". As soon as everyone actually has the option to bike, bus, or walk to everywhere with dignity, much of the traffic will evaporate, and the politics about how much to spend building what kind of infrastructure will completely change.
@bananamangodog no, I fully understand why the high-dollar ranked choice lobby attacked the STAR voting campaign in Eugene with a flood of blatant lies on shiny mailers, I just still have hope for democracy if we ever manage to implement it. Portland will probably still biff itself in the fall, since the rcv people played that trick here too. The thing is you just need a willing city govt and maybe a bit of pull at the state level, it's not a question of money, just space that's already paved.
The market has had like fifty years to solve climate change and traffic congestion without you having to ride a bike or bus, and they've come up with two options: stalling or lies.
I'm not sure whether to celebrate the Portland gas tax renewal passing when it is still only a $0.10/gal, and basically means PBOT will keep doing what they've been doing, which is totally failing to act on #GlobalWarming or #VisionZero in any meaningful way while spending "safety money" on flashing lights that drivers ignore.
Here he is, three minutes later, it turns out cars aren't very fast even if you think you're important enough that everyone around you should wait for you while you operate your big stupid vehicle. #SeeYouAtTheNextLight
edit: already sold! The legendary Surly Cross Check, yours for a good price and a good cause. #pdxBikes (with delivery by cargo bike via @robgalanakis) 54cm
I have a theory about why every social media post about either cyclist or biker safety immediately gets swamped by really angry car drivers who want to kill us, and it comes down to ignorance.
Most cyclists and bikers are also car drivers, so we can see both points of view.
Most car drivers are only car drivers, which makes it harder to understand the different points of view. Learning to drive a car should include some time on 2 wheels. #BikeTooter#motorcycle#CarBrain#roadsafety
DIY $15k shed on a $20 foundation, "wanted to turn it into an AirBNB but the city wouldn't let us" LMAO, helluva youtube genre I've stepped in there. Is this the crap they trained the AI on?
Why spend so much on roof structure + decking + surface and then punch holes in it to add solar panels? I'm thinking of a solar porch/deck roof that's mostly just panels on structure, with gutters underneath. But what if you had insulation + waterproof membrane / house wrap on the roof and a similar system on the house? Thermal bridging vs structure through the foam, and gutters full of slime under the panels are a couple reasons why not, maybe the panels need airflow below?
I guess your decking is adding some shear strength to the framing assembly, but for $30-50/sheet of anything these days, you could afford a bit of triangulated tension strapping.
@carraway I think there might be lower hanging fruit, like the awning and porch covering, where there's air circulation below, easier to clean/adjust / maintain, and less critical concern about water or leaks.
@lkanies the question is whether you can now acquire shoes that fit. My feet are 12in long and seem roughly foot shaped, but shoes that long typically aren't.
hey petromasculinity dudes, RIP your sperm counts, LoL, PVC
"Microplastics found in every human testicle in study
Scientists say discovery may be linked to decades-long decline in sperm counts in men around the world"
Does brand loyalty really mean anything when all brands are owned by some multinational corporation or holding company, and driving profits up to please shareholders is their primary goal, usually at the expense of quality? :/
I only lurk on #Reddit without an account - anybody want to tell this person the right address to contact? It's actually MassDOT, so they need to email MassDOTMaffaMystic@dot.state.ma.us as this traffic change was part of the Mystic /Maffa bridge project.
@inliuofjoan the 311 should generally be able to figure that out, and I think e-mailing the mayor should be the next option if a city's 311 system doesn't work right. Governors and state DOTs are of course a whole other level of buck-passing that shouldn't be necessary or tolerated, IMO. As for turning left with a car, well, I hope the reply is don't.
