Because 20 people can and do fit into the same space that a single SUV occupied by one person takes up trawling for a fare through Midtown, yet 70+ percent of the streetscape is allocated to accommodate that SUV.
Also keep in mind pedestrians have to share space with sidewalk planters, outdoor seating, trash bags, and many times, cars parked partially on the sidewalk, making the usable walking space less than 10% of the size of the total street space, yet still allowing exponentially more people to move faster than the cars the street was designed for.
Parking, whether on street or off-street doesn't relate to congestion pricing. Congestion pricing charges for the luxury of driving into one of the most densely populated and well-served areas of transit in the country.
Charging people to offset a negative externality they are entirely responsible for should not be conflated with penalization.
Funnily enough, the area around Penn station allocates nearly 80% of the space there to cars, which carry only a tiny fraction of the people traveling through daily. For anyone not familiar with the Penn area, check out this Streetfilms video to get an idea of how lopsided the street allocation is: https://vimeo.com/268616894.
High-capacity / High-speed rail is a non-starter over low-capacity planes with a bunch of low-capacity airfields littering the country? Density is the future and a bunch of small electric planes will not come anywhere close to meeting the demands necessary.
Newspapers may have a big carbon footprint, but printed news is important in local communities for many people who don't have easy access to smart phones or computers. There's plenty other things that I think can be dropped before the paper.
The deaths and injuries caused from allowing any average person to drive a vehicle with a 6’ high hood with massive blind spots on crowded public roads.
“ 75 percent of truck owners use their truck for towing one time a year or less (meaning, never). Nearly 70 percent of truck owners go off-road one time a year or less. And a full 35 percent of truck owners use their truck for hauling—putting something in the bed, its ostensible raison d’être—once a year or less.”
You’re asking for a citation on the impact SUVs and trucks have on injuring and killing people in the US? A few simple google searches on ‘traffic crashes USA’, ‘SUV blind spots’, ‘pickup truck blind spots’, etc... will take you 5 seconds and give you all the information you need.
No, I don't know the exact dimensions of your truck and I am not picturing you in an 18-wheeler. It's well known that the F150, as well as many other SUVs and light trucks have massive blind spots that prevent kids, disabled people, and just generally anyone shorter than 5' from being seen and ultimately have been responsible for many unnecessary deaths and injuries in the US.
Aren’t you assuming that users are only navigating to HTTPS sites and entering information? That’s unfortunately not the case. That also ignores the fact that having information about general activity can in itself be a privacy concern, whether or not that information is readable.
The Rails community attempted to do something like this with the introduction of Webpacker in Rails 5. They backtracked after a few months. Most likely after realizing how many thousands of npm packages make tightly coupled assumptions to the location of things like ‘package.json’ and the amount of patches it would require.
The app doesn’t publish any personal information and complies with every Twitter rule. It was suspended soon after someone used the app to get information on a van that was used to abduct a protester[1]
It’s only a missed opportunity if you think you’d get approval to improve the screens! I’ve indirectly worked with American on their screens, and I’m not so sure improving UX is their top priority.
I gave away my TV a little over a year ago now, with absolutely no regrets.
But if I still had one, I’d definitely be looking into rooting it specifically so I could uninstall all the bloat they now come with and ensure it doesn’t try and connect to the internet, or break itself while trying.
I’m not sure where you are, but I can’t imagine anywhere where sidewalks don’t make sense. Upkeep is orders of magnitudes cheaper than maintaining a street, and provides incentives for people to leave their cars behind, especially for shorter trips, further reducing wear and tear on roads.
Keeping roads in shape for multi-ton vehicles to barrel down them is expensive. Keeping them in shape for humans, not so much.
The thought process of your post forms a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Of course if you build with only a single mode of transport in mind, the majority of people will opt towards that mode of transportation. Unfortunately, many suburbs and small cities have made that mistake and also chose the most expensive mode, hence the article.
Maybe it depends on your bank? I’ve had to do a couple chargebacks on Chase CC’s in the $200-300 range and I just had to click a button in their web portal.
It was more difficult for me to get reimbursed when I tried depositing $300 in a Chase ATM and then it crashed halfway through. But that just involved a 2 minute phone call to resolve
> Mortgages and renting just bring despair and trigger apocalyptic emotions in humans, which is why the Bronx looks like the Bronx, and Bellevue looks like Bellevue.
I’m assuming you’re referring specifically to the South Bronx with your comment. An area that is in the state it’s in primarily because of decades of racist redlining that prevented any sort of leveraged investment in properties and services.
There’s a few ‘Stop: Full stop’ signs in my neighborhood in NYC where cars have to cross over a sidewalk because they realize people’s idea of ‘stop’ is normally ‘drive across sidewalk with blind spots on either end at 10 mph with face in phone’
Japan is a different country, with different cultures, values and history. Answering ‘whataboutism’ type of questions almost always leads to an endless loop of accomplishing nothing.
What about Russia? What about China? Etc... There is no value in these questions when they have no relation to the original statement being made.
It’s a balancing act between a short-term gain and a long-term loss.
For a while, you may notice Amazon has slightly better prices on things. One day you may need some advice on a project, so you go to the local hardware store. Except the store was eventually run out of business by not being able to leverage the same economies of scale as an e-giant.
I think of it less as investing in your local hardware, and more of investing in your community
It seems like the obvious solution is lower speed limits and less deadly cars. Not more pollution in case the person texting on their phone at 30+mph looks up from their phone a split second before they notice a kid playing in or crossing the street.
I wasn’t being snarky, and I’m well aware of real world scenarios. I’ve biked in NYC for over a decade, I’ve worked in transportation and volunteer my time for building safer streets. The majority of drivers I see on the street at looking at phones on their laps, or dashboards where their phone is hanging.
The obstacles you named(visual obstructions) are all also things that should not exist as much as they do in their current forms. Daylighting intersections to improve sight lines, smaller cars to prevent crushing kids and also improve sight lines, narrower streets to reduce speeds are not idealized abstract scenarios. Plenty of countries outside of the USA have this as a reality and a few have achieved 0 traffic deaths, and that is owed almost entirely to street design, not bigger car tires.
‘Shit Happens’, yes. But there are significantly better ways to make ‘shit happen’ less, and make it less deadly for the people outside of a car.
Planes also promise fast travel times, but if a plane crashes, we heavily investigate the cause and figure out a solution so it doesn’t occur again. The USA experiences the equivalent of over 100 Boeing 747 plane crashes a year(and rising), counting only deaths due to traffic crashes.
The number spikes significantly higher when you factor in people with severe injuries who will never fully recover(think: losing arms, legs, brain damage,etc..).
Assuming speed limits stay the same, but deaths and injuries continue to rise, at what point would you say we have a ‘bad balance’ and should adjust? What is your ‘balance’ based on? Is there some ratio of VMT(vehicle miles traveled) to occurrences of deaths and dismemberment that you keep in mind?
My initial comment said that, but was edited 30 minutes prior to your reply to include ‘as much as they do in their current forms’ to make my point clearer. I’m not sure if you had the old message cached, but I’d recommend re-reading the point I was making. I don’t believe we disagree with each other. Stopping distance does matter, but there are solutions that exist that are cheaper, more effective, and less destructive. It unfortunately feels like you’re the one being snarky though by comparing street-level solutions like daylighting intersections to idealistic daydreaming and something only fit for an ‘Emperor of the world’ to take on. In reality, those changes typically come up during community meetings and DOT planning sessions. Hardly emperor-level discussions, and input is typically open to the public.
I’m not sure why you put “continue” in quotes when my comment never included the word continue. You are correct that deaths for motor vehicle occupants are going down due to safety features specifically designed to keep the occupants safe. But car related deaths for people outside of cars is trending up and is getting grimly close to double what it was just a little over 10 years ago[0][1]
Of course speed is not the only issue but it is definitely a contributing factor. One need only look at crashmapper.org to see how often ‘unsafe speed’ is a contributing factor in the couple hundred thousand reported crashes that happen annually in NYC alone.
Driver knowledge(and vision, and reaction time) is extremely important, and I completely agree that the USA is too lax in regards to licensing — One need only look at Georgia, where they ‘paused’ the need to pass a road test to be licensed[0].
But again, that’s only one piece to the puzzle. What we need is simply a change in how much a driver should be responsible for, as it’s clear that we can’t expect drivers to react in time to prevent crashes, and the shortest stopping distance in the world still wouldn’t make much of a difference in most serious crashes.
In many cities in the Netherlands and Sweden for example, they’ve mostly addressed the ‘people problem’ by designing roads to minimize conflicts between different modes of transport by default. On the other hand, in places like NYC, The DOT designs bike lanes with ‘mixing zones’ as the defacto standard. It goes completely against the primary idea of ‘Vision Zero’, which is understanding that humans make mistakes, and designing infrastructure to reduce the likelihood that mistake kills or injures someone.
> The laws and road design are usually sufficient if the driver is doing their duties correctly and responsibly.
Here is where the problem lay! Expecting drivers to always be attentive, lest they kill someone(or multiple people) is not a sane way to reduce traffic fatalities and injuries. You stated it yourself that driver inattention / error is a contributing factor in most crashes. In NYC, driver inattention / distraction and 'Failure to yield right of way' are the two largest leading causes of pedestrian and cyclist injuries and fatalities[0].
Sure, better education can reduce the likelihood a crash happens, but it does not reduce the severity of a crash when it happens. Reducing the severity of crashes means designing infrastructure that keeps the most vulnerable road users safe.
> I believe fatal accidents are required by law to be extensively investigated
I can't speak for most places in the USA, but in NYC this is entirely false. There are many instances of NYPD showing up to fatal crashes, asking the driver(who just ran someone over) what happened, and then just taking their word for it. It usually takes a team of lawyers at the behest of the family of the deceased to actually gather evidence[1][2]. A councilmember in NYC recently proposed a bill to get NYPD out of crash investigations for this very reason[3]
Apologies! I gave a hypothetical scenario as part of a question, that also unfortunately happened to be true when accounting for occupants outside of vehicles. I didn’t mean for you(or the OP) to interpret the scenario as me stating it as a matter of fact and quote it in a rebuttal. I’ll try and make hypotheticals like that a bit clearer in the future to avoid confusing people.
$20 an hour on the east coast? Where? The only place I can imagine that is in a parking garage, not on the street. Even the most congested parts of Manhattan that actually charge for parking don’t cost nearly that much, and that’s when they do actually charge for street storage.
There’s an estimated 190,000 on-street parking spaces in Manhattan, with an estimated 3 million parking on street spaces in NYC total[0]. The primary issue is not a lack of parking. Cars don’t scale in dense urban environments.
There's no recent official counts, but the latest data I could find looks like it's about 82,000, citywide[0]. That number is 10 years old, so there is definitely a little room for error. But if the estimated total of on street parking spaces in NYC is at 3M, that puts metered parking at just 2-3% of the total on street spaces citywide.
If you were to double or triple that number(which is unlikely), that still means the vast majority of parking in NYC is absolutely free of charge. That 3M number also doesn't take into account all of the 'No standing', 'No parking', sidewalks or bike lanes which have been repurposed into parking by people with parking placards, PBA cards, or whatever other miscellaneous artifacts allow drivers to leave their cars wherever they want with impunity[1].
What I find amazing is that people have an expectation of being able to bring a several thousand pound object that is bigger than many NYer's kitchens, into one of the densest parts of the country that is served 24/7 by public transit and for-hire vehicles, and store it for free. Even tourists with tiny suitcases have to pay to store their suitcase somewhere.
Training and equipping peace officers to de-escalate situations is far cheaper and better for the general population than the hundreds of millions in excessive force and wrongful death lawsuits that are paid out of our taxes.
NYC alone has dropped over $300M on settling lawsuits due to their poor training over the last 5 years[0]
I know a couple current and former NYPD officers and the amount of times I’ve been told of how a routine mental health check up turned into 4+ cops beating the crap out of an unarmed person
in their own home would likely surprise most people who aren’t familiar with how brutal the police in the USA are.
Well, in the US, one benefit is being able to freely travel to many other countries without needing to go through a months long visa application process.
I normally follow that pattern too — but Catalina was unbearably slow in comparison to Big Sur for me. My new 16” MBP with maxed cpu and RAM regularly took nearly 2 minutes to boot to my Home Screen on Catalina with no startup apps. Regular apps took over a second. Upgrading to Big Sur made my laptop feel fast again. The only downside right now is that it feels like I’m always charging this thing.
My 2014 MBP unfortunately still feels faster running on High Sierra though.
Cities feel like the last place that would be a good fit for airborne delivery, at least in the US.
Take NYC for example: Delivery people on e-bikes are still harassed incessantly by the NYPD and community boards by people being scared of the possibility of being hit by them.
Factor in our paranoia about terrorism and a single accidentally dropped package would likely result in counter terrorism and bomb squads being called in.
I couldn’t imagine any proposal for giant flying robots with multi-pound payloads hovering overhead be taken seriously by even the most progressive leaders.
In hard to reach / rural areas, I could see some benefits from drone technology though. Drone chainsaws, anyone?[0]
I just started working with Swift again after building a couple toy apps when Swift was brand new. I feel your pain with their documentation!
What bothers me most is how their documentation for anything is a massive scrollfest[0], followed by links everywhere, yet the actual documentation still feels sparse enough that I almost exclusively try to just read the source code and make guesses. Rails docs sure aren’t going to win any design awards, but at least I can access everything on a single page![1]
> Can we stop endlessly puting Apple's various authoritarians missteps under the spotlight?
I can't tell if you're being sarcastic or if you think the whole 'if you don't like something then shut-up and move' strategy is actually a logical solution.
Interesting, thanks for the history! I personally qualified for/lived in an affordable housing unit for a few years right after college. The income limit for a single person was 95k at the time
What I find interesting about many of these units is how the net effective rent is still typically 40x annual income for people in that bracket. If I hadn’t switched jobs and gotten some significant raises in the process, much of my salary would have still been going to housing in an ‘affordable’ unit.
Isn't this the problem? Companies like Slack set SLA's that they only meet by lying about their uptime. It's as good as having no SLA, except you're likely paying a premium based on the SLA they set.
I find it amazing that we can be about an hour and a half into a service being completely unusable(ie. Slack telling me it 'cannot connect'), yet it's still marked as an 'incident' instead of an 'outage' in their own status page
I spent a brief amount time working with smart city tech. You might be surprised just how many cameras and sensors already exist that are monitoring you at any moment as you walk down the street. The issue usually isn’t that there’s no evidence for crimes, it’s that investigating those mostly petty crimes, outside of secure areas is an extremely low priority for police departments. For example, I’ve had the police reject my video evidence of a hit and run where the driver admitted to it on camera, because they didn’t want to spend resources investigating something that didn’t result in a death.
I stopped working with smart city tech because I felt there’s only two realistic directions it can go: Excessive surveillance by the police, or excessive surveillance by people whose only interest is selling whatever data they can collect about you in public spaces to advertisers and other 3rd parties.
The first thing I do at companies I join is dig through common services and tag all resources in a consistent way(ie. app=web-frontend). Then you can create resource groups and breakdown billing at an ‘application level’ through cost explorer, instead of relying on their default, very general filters. Not perfect, but it gets you 90% of the way towards understanding where your costs are.
It’s not free, but I really recommend ‘Let’s Go!’ by Alex Edwards. He goes through building a web app and all the code is included, so for someone like me who learns better by tinkering with things, it was super helpful. He also blogs about some things which I still find myself referring back to.
I wouldn’t call Rails ‘easy to get started’. The learning curve is steep, but once you get over it, you can hop into nearly any Rails application and immediately be able to contribute. I prefer Rails for most things work related for that very reason.
Having worked a couple places where Python or Go microservices were hyped up, but every installation, DB schema, and folder structure seemed to be built with a different idea in mind, and or debated, I have a strong appreciation for right standards around convention. Especially when I don’t have to get into debates like whether DB table names should be plural or singular.
On the side I really do enjoy working with Go though, and wouldn’t hesitate to use it if it seemed like the right tool for the moment.
Also keep in mind pedestrians have to share space with sidewalk planters, outdoor seating, trash bags, and many times, cars parked partially on the sidewalk, making the usable walking space less than 10% of the size of the total street space, yet still allowing exponentially more people to move faster than the cars the street was designed for.