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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 13th, 2023

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  • 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.




  • 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.”





  • The toilet is obviously designed to hold your weight, since its normal use involves sitting on it.

    The lid spans about a foot across the bowl rim and is typically made of wood or plastic about 1/2" thick. Those materials are plenty strong enough to hold the weight of a human across that size span.

    The only lids I would hesitate to sit on are the absolute bottom-dollar cheap plastic ones like this, where the lid has been hollowed out to save material.




  • The paper, titled “The link between low-stress bicycle facilities and bicycle commuting,” reports that protected bike lanes see about 1.8 times the number of bike commuters than standard bike lanes do and 4.3 times as many as blocks without bike lanes.

    So doing the math, even an unprotected bike lane is about a 2.4 times improvement over no bike lane at all.


    I find that to be an interesting contrast compared to a survey done in my city as part of a trails planning process, where planners asked respondents whether they “would recommend” use of bike infrastructure based on type. In that, only 8% of respondents would recommend using an unprotected bike lane and 14% were unsure, while 56% would recommend a bike lane with flex posts and 20% were unsure. In other words, respondents were between 3.5 and 7 times more likely to “recommend” use of a protected bike lane than an unprotected one.

    I had suspected that that disparity in perception was greatly inflated compared to the actual difference in amount of use, and I’m glad to now have actual science to point to to back up that hunch. Thanks!