jessta

jessta, 2 days ago

@timrichards Men are clearly too emotional to be put in-charge of any dangerous machinery.

jessta, 3 days ago

@augustusbrown It's the middle pedestrian/cyclist crossing across the tram tracks in the median when Punt Rd turns in Fitzroy St in St Kilda.

No interaction with turning traffic at all.

It's kind of pointless because it's just tram tracks, but it's also silly because it's always red even when the trams have a red and the cars have a green.

https://maps.app.goo.gl/Aompv3rQrMFVfbHR6

jessta, 3 days ago

@airwhale Most pedestrian crossings in Australia allow cars to make right or left turns across them while people have a green light.

The drivers are supposed to yield if they see people crossing, but there is nothing stopping them if they don't see the person crossing.

jessta, 3 days ago

@airwhale Right, so you have the same dangerous pedestrian crossings?
If a pedestrian starts crossing when a driver has started turning them the pedestrian is likely to get hit.

jessta, 3 days ago

@airwhale 30yrs of crossing roads in Melbourne and I don't trust drivers to yield. Most of the time it's fine, but at least once a week I'll have a driver approaching the turn across the pedestrian crossing at a speed where they're unable to yield and so I have to.

I would have definitely died a few times if I wasn't paying attention when crossing. I'd hate to be trying to cross while blind.

jessta, 4 days ago

@decryption it's so weird to me that someone without a place to park a car would get a car, park that car illegally and then complain about how they don't have a place to park that car.
The level of entitlement is astonishing.

jessta, 7 days ago

@timrichards I'm surprised the article doesn't mention the at least $100B we've wasted not building the airport rail over that time.

jessta, 8 days ago

Next red light at 5:16pm
Another 14 cyclists at the lights, only 6 cars
#melbourne #bicycles

jessta, 8 days ago

5:21pm.
16 cyclists, 12 cars.

jessta, 8 days ago

The most important take away is just how little space 16 cyclists take up while waiting at the lights. It's barely noticeable. It always seems like there are lots of cars, but when you count them there are actually very few.
You need really large numbers of cyclists before they're generally visible.

It's no wonder people say 'nobody uses the bike lanes' because if you're not actually counting it feels like nobody is.

jessta, 14 days ago

@luciedigitalni Wow! What the fuck? A very intentional calculated action. Racist fucks.

jessta, 21 days ago

@timrichards @NarrelleMHarris I feel like the truthful "Don't rush, if you miss this train you'll only be 15mins late" wouldn't work as well

jessta, 22 days ago

@timrichards it seems kind of obvious that investing in existing housing will produce a better return than investing in new build housing especially combined with the planning NIMBY nightmare we have.
Existing houses are in rare supply, in nice neighbourhoods with services.

New build housing is usually in a field in the middle of nowhere, near nothing and just down the freeway from other fields that will soon have exactly the same houses.

I know someone that brought a new house in Tarneit and could barely get what they originally paid for it 6yrs later.

jessta, 24 days ago

@PaulWermer @ajsadauskas @futurebird The problem is that it's always going to be an extra cost; increasing the price of apartments and increasing the risk to the developer. Highrise buildings are already green by simply being extremely land efficient, anything that makes it more difficult to build highrise is impacting on that massive environmental gain for minor additions.

jessta, 25 days ago

@decryption I took almost a year off recently. I did a lot of bike rides and spent a lot of time doing my favourite hobby of campaigning and complaining to various levels of government.

jessta, 27 days ago

@timrichards Aren't Taxies just Uber but the drivers get paid more?

jessta, 1 month ago

@davidho This follows the same nonsense argument that reducing traffic flow increases emissions. This leads to arguments like "we can't install this pedestrian crossing because it will increase emissions of cars idling at the lights".

jessta, 1 month ago

@joeinwynnewood @davidho If you only measure the tail pipe emissions from the individual idling cars, yes that's true. But that completely ignores the massive emissions reduction of the pedestrians crossing the road.

jessta, 1 month ago

@jay_chi @KawaTora
"as they age or their bodies start to fail, they might realize that cars are not all Satan-wagons"

The idea that bicycles or footpaths are intrinsically less accessible than cars is laughable. Driving requires quick reaction times, good day and night eye sight, a stable mind and the ability to pay close attention for long periods of time. Driving requires that you are well rested, sober, and fully alert. You need good spatial awareness so you can gauge your distance from things you can't see. You need to be able to remember and recall a complex and ever changing set of safety critical rules.
After all that you need a good income to afford the keep up on a car (surviving on the disability and age pension is hard enough without a car taking 30% of it)

You're much more likely to age in to being unable to drive than to be unable to bicycle or use a footpath.