azimir

It's also California: the weather is usually really good. Maybe this "Becker" should add an amendment that requires bike roads to be built instead of parking spots.

I assume he's against being proactive in problem solving, though.

The research is in (it has been for decades now): our roads are designed to be dangerous because we focus on speed of cars, not balancing safety in our considerations:

https://www.cnu.org/publicsquare/2024/06/05/exposing-pseudoscience-traffic-engineering

https://islandpress.org/books/killed-traffic-engineer

It's almost hard to read the whole book. Each section is only a few pages, but they just keep hitting you with data about how badly our traffic systems are designed. The mixture of bad policy, bad modeling, bad engineer training, and bad community perceptions about solutions makes it very hard to get change done quickly, but at this point all new roads and any rebuilds should follow drastically different approaches than we used 80 years ago. To do otherwise is just open negligence on the part of the road designers.

Our roads are also designed incredibly poorly. They encourage speeding by being too wide, straight, and flat. They don't have intersections that require people to pay attention (like roundabouts do). They have high quantities of conflict points among people turning, crossing roads, walking, and riding bikes. Add in vehicles that have terrible lines of sight because they're oversized and it's a recipe for failure, regardless of the training provided.

Just another TACO Tuesday.

TACO style fascism rules the day.

The reason the mayor is pushing this through over the Councils is that Councils don't want to upset car owners while the mayor needs some actual change to happen so the city can recover from all the damage done by car drivers.

I loved the classic complaints. "What about grannies, parents, and people with heavy shopping!?!?". I dunno, maybe we use some of the solutions other places have affected in the last decades for them? There's other forms of mobility other than driving your car and walking. Do what England does best: go overseas and steal stuff to use at home. You'll be fine. People survived before cars and can do so again.

Being a developed nation is a moving target. Both the requirements change as new technologies are discovered and the scale of infrastructure goes up as your country grows.

The US stopped seriously investing in itself over 40 years ago. We've been coasting on prior infrastructure making tiny improvements here and there. What we haven't been doing is keeping up with the other developed, or even many developing, nations of the world.

New transit infrastructure, updating the grid, building new schools, updating our systems of government, overhauling healthcare, and generally adding modern approaches to community support have never truly happened. The coasting on old wins is finally dragging to a halt. The US is rapidly losing on the education front, the healthcare front, civil rights, transit, community support, overall skills, and even military resources. We pay a lot in some areas and essentially none in others, but across the board it's not working to make us competitive on the world stage. Instead, our wealth is going to a handful of billionaires.

Every dollar shifted to a top 1%-er's bank account i many dollars lost in money that should be spent many times making out communities better. It should be routed through a company to build a school, whose salaries get spent, which then gets used to do more things, again and again. That dollar should move around to help us build the infrastructure back into a developed nation. As it stands, it instead is denied to us, and our children are faced with an empire collapsing to a lost class war where greed overcame a nation.

Chicago's flag is a masterwork.

My city did a redesign about five years ago. Our flag was in a D to F tier flag ranking. After the redesign it's much better, but still feels like a logo more then a flag. At least they got rid of the written slogan, though!

Props to Chicago. Put that flag on everything.

I'm hoping Milwaukee adopts of the People's flag of Milwaukee soon. That's a serious banger too.

Yeah, the US has reached an incredibly low standard of literacy for what is supposed to be a developed nation. The numbers on reading level are scary. Also look at how much people read as adults. We just don't learn how and then we don't practice during our lives. It's a nation of partial literacy being kept together my hyper nationalism and smart phones to distract us with 6 second videos.

Using a capitalist/economic solution to solve a resource scarcity problem?!? We can't have that (says the hard-line capitalists).

Congestion pricing works and should be the rule in every notable city. We need fewer card and car trips as part of the transformation of humanity's civilization to adapt to a limited world. The line cannot go up forever.

And he needs money! He just can't handle it so he needs more.

-- Abbreviated George Carlin

Fascist dictators don't have loyalty, soldier. That's a key element to them.