https://lemmy.world/modlog/3902

Considering how cynical you were about the DNC under its previous leadership, it’s remarkable how optimistic you are about it now. I hope you’re right.

If it weren’t so hard, you’d notice how short it was.

Which youtuber is that?

Well, and Constitutional legitimacy to exist for more than two years at a time, but who’s counting?

That implies too much legitimacy and potential for growth.

Also, there are some in states you wouldn’t think there would be any.

Every state has a significant percentage of non-fascists in it. The notion of “red states” vs. “blue states” is nothing but a lie / artifact of voting district boundaries; the real dichotomy is red rural areas vs. blue cities.

It’s not (just) that; it’s that engineers incorrectly apply forgiving design and breakaway design principles for the benefit of drivers by default without really stopping to appreciate that a bike lane isn’t a valid space space for cars and needs to be unforgiving instead.

Also, flimsy plastic posts are way cheaper than proper bollards or curbs.

Half of them have extended cabs and shortened beds,

Somebody correct me if I’m wrong, but I think it’s literally all of them at this point. Aside maybe from fleet sales and other special cases like that, I don’t think there are any pickup truck models in the US that are actually available with a regular cab anymore.

(The Slate truck is supposedly going to be regular cab, but it doesn’t count because it’s not out yet.)

There may be folks with some types of disabilities who benefit from using a drive thru, but there are also folks with other types of disabilities who can’t use a drive thru because they can’t drive and who are materially harmed by the lack of walkability drive-thrus cause.

In fact, considering that there’s nothing in the Americans with Disabilities Act that requires restaurants to have drive-thrus, and moreover that lawsuits regarding drive-thrus and people with disabilities tend to be almost universally about people who can’t use the drive-thru being forced to use it rather than the other way around, I’m very confident that my position isn’t ableist.

(And that’s considering your argument at face value, which is pretty charitable considering how often it’s made in bad faith.)

Well, smaller cars are less of an issue on every metric. They take away less space…

Unless they’re kei cars in an area with special zoning laws mandating half-size parking spaces for them, all cars take up the same amount of space at rest: one parking space each.

In motion, the space cars take up is dominated by following distance, not the length of the vehicle itself, so small cars don’t meaningfully increase the capacity of the road either.

In other words, from an urban design/engineering perspective, all cars are effectively the same size. The only things that get considered separately are the really big vehicles, like firetrucks, buses, and 18-wheelers.

As for the other aspects: yes, small cars are better, but it’s a marginal gain rather than a transformational one. In this space, of all places, I prefer to focus on those transformational gains rather than preemptively compromising. Remember, a radical flank is always necessary in order to make the moderate position look moderate. You can’t shift the Overton window without demanding more than you expect to get.

I don’t know if he used it correctly before the edit, but FYI it can be either.

This is already the “taking a mile” phase.

To me, it feels like some ICE thug trying to meet his quota while doing the minimum amount of work.

It’s kinda like Homer Simpson and the creepy shopkeeper:

“He ‘deported’ a guy for no valid reason, probably because it was easy and he’s a lazy amoral fuck who knows the fascists in charge are just looking at AI summaries and don’t really give a shit who gets deported or how”

“That’s bad”

“But the guy was leaving anyway and avoided a deportation order that would cause him problems later, and ICE spending its time on this might’ve meant one less ‘real’ deportation instead”

“That’s good”

“But the media coverage of deporting a famous person arbitrarily with impunity helps sow fear of the regime, which is what it wants”

“That’s bad.”

If it costs almost nothing for a competent city and your city is spending $150M/year on it, well then the obvious conclusion is that your city isn’t competent! 🤓

But seriously, though, it’s funny 'cause it’s true: almost every city in the English-speaking world is incompetent at building bike infrastructure. The correct way to do it would be routinely as part of the standard operating procedure of maintaining the street. When you break it out as a separate retrofit project and then hold a big public input process about it, of course it’s going to massively inflate the cost.

(Also, I’m pretty sure @regul was talking about the costs only for upgrading bike lanes from unprotected to protected, not the total cost of bike infrastructure in general.)

I would expect it to be the opposite: that the returns would accelerate as the bike infrastructure network becomes more and more complete, until cyclist mode share approaches Dutch levels.

Come to think of it, why do our letters have a standard order, and if they have to, why that one?

Because some Phoenician jerk picked it arbitrarily about ten thousand years or so ago and it stuck.

Considering that this article is about the UK/Europe, that causation is pretty indirect.