Here’s a convenient list of affordable cities in the US.

https://youtu.be/IKxR06isoLU

I completely agree. Public access to transport can be such a joke that it forces disabled people who shouldn’t be driving to be driving, like the case here with Corsiglia. They didn’t have a choice so they committed murder in order to find existence beyond being jailed in their own home. A real-life Shakespearean tragedy.

Continuing to push for disabled parking at places where parking in the first place doesn’t make sense encourages driving and discourages public transport. It’s actually harmful to ask for disabled parking because it takes away from the greater disabled group and places the general public at risk.

All that said, there are situations where it’s OK to demand disabled parking. When a public project clearly is going to include a parking structure, demand disabled parking in high quantities. Demand at-grade and wide zones at these spaces. Demand escalators and elevators. Fight for equal access. I would be there on your side.

PS: Thanks for engaging and listening. This is a topic that often doesn’t get the attention it deserves and typically devolves into some kind of public virtue signalling. The devil is in the details.

You cannot dive and yet in the very first picture of the station in the OP’s article is a passenger loading and unloading zone at the gates. How could this train station’s design prioritization unduly harm your own disability since they picked a design where you could be dropped off at the entrance? I’m actually curious here because I can drive and I would be harmed (no parking for me) yet I’m willing to let it go in favor of things like front-gate drop-off zones for public and private loading.

You’re absolutely right that different people do have different needs but priority must be given on every project. Not including disabled parking is a choice that does not unduly harm disabled people. Including disabled parking can harm disabled people. Let me explain.

Prioritizing private car infrastructure necessarily means de-prioritizing non-car infrastructure, like these loading zones. Maybe they can shrink the loading zone a bit and get a parking spot or two in, but would that be enough for those who can drive? Maybe they can put the parking in the back, but that’s not every disabled friendly either. A parking structure could address some of that, but where’s that money coming from? Remember, there’s a limited budget and limited land availability. What’s being taken away for that disabled parking?

Prioritization of parking appears harmless on the surface but manifests in unusual ways, which is precisely why I chose “San Bruno Man With Seizure Disorder Found Guilty In Double Fatal Car Crash” as a case-in-point. The disabled man in question, Rodney Corsiglia, felt forced to drive despite multiple doctor interventions and the DMV revoking his license.

Dr. Austin told Corsiglia he should not be driving because his seizures were not controlled and he did not have full awareness of them. Corsiglia had difficulty accepting the recommendation and wanted to drive because he lived alone, felt he needed a car for transportation, and had a new truck even though he did not have a driver’s license.

– People v. Corsiglia, A145944 (Cal. Ct. App. Mar. 7, 2017)

Being a local in the area, I fully understand Corsiglia’s argument and he has a point. There are no protected bike lanes, the sidewalks are a mess, there’s exactly one bus every hour that’s daytime only to the train station across the street from where the collision occurred. There’s no way he can reasonably function without a car, which is good because the train station where he murdered two people does have disabled parking. And that’s the issue: San Bruno prioritizes disabled drivers while excluding every other disabled member. It’s a decision the city, county, and state can and often makes. It’s also a decision that killed.

Pushing the “what about the disabled people” is exactly how cars get prioritized above people’s needs, disabled and abled alike. It’s counter-intuitive but pushing disabled parking and induces parking demand which, even in totally unreasonable circumstances, pushes disabled people to drive even when they shouldn’t need to.

Like blind people? Or those who cannot afford a mobility van because a 10 year old used one is priced at $35k? Perhaps you mean those who suffer from seizures?

Let’s focus our limited budget into personal vehicle infrastructure that certainly wouldn’t force these suffering people to drive. It works, bro. Trust me.

This is a good, and quite common, question regarding congestion pricing. The fact of the matter is those with less means often cannot afford a car. It’s usually not their car if they’re driving into a city (e.g. a work truck).

But let’s say we have low-income people who do have a car and need to drive for whatever reason. There’s programs for that. Two of them.

• If you’re a low-income car owner, you get reduced congestion pricing. It’s 50% off the normal fare. They can drive in and pay less than affluent drivers.
• If you’re low-income, you would qualify for the Fair Fares program. It too is 50% off for subways and busses. That prices trips to well below the cost of fueling a car into NYC.

Congestion pricing is also funneling money into metro services, meaning the affluent drivers are actually making low-income access to transportation cheaper while also improving reliability and service levels to those riding transit.

Low-income residents stand to win the most with congestion pricing. Personally, I would focus more on how to better help businesses with legitimate car needs, like dog groomers, mobile mechanics, delivery workers, etc. For example, zero fare for businesses licenses at nighttime periods (to encourage shifting delivery schedules). Programs like that could help small business, which in turn helps boost the income of low-income employees.

You’re not off the mark. Honestly not a bad overview to squeeze into a few sentences. Here’s some extra detail for those who remain more curious.

The circuit complexity reduction happens by changing the math behind the radio signal. Much like how you can describe a vector in cartesian coordinates (a point in x, y) or in polar coordinates (a point in angle and length), choosing how to represent the radio math allows for different techniques to arrive in the same answer. That’s what the author did: he picked a polar modulating scheme over a quadrature modulation scheme. (Note, there are even more mathy ways to modulate a radio signal, but those are what the author is presenting to us.)

The author’s choice avoids generating unwanted frequencies that must be filtered out before amplifying. That’s components on the board that don’t need to be designed nor exist. A solid win.

The drawback? Polar modulation is non-linear in frequency space. What that means is certain frequencies are over-represented and others are under-represented. Imagine playing notes on a piano where some keys are very loud and others you could hardly hear them. That’s the unwanted non-linearity.

Herein lies the trick: what’s bad can be turned into good. Power amplifiers typically need to be linear. Imagine a piano that works fine but the auditorium’s loud speakers make it sound terrible. Those loud speakers would be a non-linear amplifier. The trick is that it’s possible to match the modulator’s non-linear behavior with a power amplifier’s non-linear behavior to end up with a clean signal! A non-linear piano and a non-linear loud-speaker can produce beautiful music! This engineering trick unlocks all kinds of non-linear power amplifier architectures (that’s the “C/E/F” described in the article) which are drastically more energy efficient than linear ones (linear designs max out around 65% efficient).

Vietnam is a counter-example with quite effective bicycle troops. Their army and insurgency was supplied with bicycles on the Ho Chi Minh trail.

I don’t believe the machine gun is intended to be fired while on the move. You’d have to be grabbing that grip at your crotch, aiming without the sights, all the while peddling and steering. That’s quite the tall order. Even under ambush conditions you’d want to get out of the area ASAP, something a bicycle would do better at than on foot.

My presumption is this is intended to be a fast and light machine gun placement. Speedy deployment and movement of machine gun nets without needing to carry all that weight, let along carrying a machine gun’s diet of ammunition, on your back is quite an advantage. Dismounting to get behind the gun isn’t a high bar nor particularly slow. I’m sure a soldier could be sending lead downrange in a matter of seconds. Essentially the same role as light infantry support vehicles today.

The recoil wouldn’t be that bad. Apparently the M1895 was loaded with 6mm Lee Navy at around 2,200J muzzle velocity and a cyclic fire of 450/min. That’s quite manageable. In comparison, the M249 is a shoulder mounted gun of 1,800J, 850/min. That’s 50% more recoil to manage without a bicycle frame to support the firearm.

Since you brought it up, let’s dive into the numbers as presented[1]. The top all-cause is heat disease. A disease that’s preventable by moderate exercise (e.g. walking, biking, playing baseball, anything really) and avoiding common legal drugs (tobacco and alcohol being most implicated, but also most available).

Next up, cancer. Also a general class of disease that has many causes, but has also been shown that moderate exercise reduces cancer risk.

COVID and respiratory disease? Preventive measures like vaccines and, again, moderate exercise also reduce this risk. Oh, and cars are a factor in this category (long-term inhaling tailpipe emissions will make your lungs unhealthy).

Opioid overdose (1:55)? Suicide (1:87)? That’s somewhat self explanatory to fix, but good medical care and moderate exercise again helps.

Guns? That’s all cases of guns. Homicide (1:219) and suicide (1:159) by guns must be rolled up to get to the 1:89 figure. Homicide is a big issue to untangle, like suicide. That said, homicide has been linked to car infrastructure depressing local economies and as a tool in segregating black communities into unfit areas away from economically viable white ones.

Then we’re finally down to falls (1:92) and cars (1:93).

What can we take away from this? If you’re trying to reduce risk, go for a walk or ride a bike regularly. It’ll help you avoid heart disease, improve odds against respiratory diseases, and is a good tool for upping your mental health game. No need to trust me. I’m a dog with a keyboard. Talk to your doctor about it. You may be surprised how effective reducing drinking, stopping smoking, and going out for a walk every day can do.

Whoops, my bad. Pedestrian “incidents” (ran over by car) is the next cause (1:468). Cycling isn’t too far behind (1:3,162). Maybe we should continue to drive overhead bad parts of town, inhale our neighbor’s car fumes, and enjoy our near-guaranteed death by heart attack and choking.

[1] In the OP’s data source. It’s a good source, but it is US biased and biased in NHTSA’s reporting (e.g. person in hospital from a car, but died >30 days later? That’s natural causes.).

Are they? I’ve seen plenty of well-liked memes of banning cars as well as guns. There are popular posts about banning cars entirely from various developments. Or outright hate and venting when another ghost bike gets installed.

IMHO, the urbanist movement is more focused on infrastructure than fuck cars. Fuck cars is more encompassing than just urbanism and civil engineering.

Not every member of the fuck cars community is about car infrastructure, even though I personally fall into the infrastructure camp.

Say you have the viewpoint that guns should be tightly controlled due to the number of people killed by them. Cars kill approximately the same number of people in the US every year (depending on if you count suicides and if intent is important). If guns are bad for deadly external behaviors, then so are cars. Just like how there are gun ranges or race tracks for responsible ownership, there can be gun related murder and car related murder. Ban guns and ban cars.

Case in point is this very article. It appears to be a hate related crime committed with a car. Germany tightly controls gun ownership, so why would we dismiss tight control of car ownership? Should we allow this person to drive again if he’s convicted? Why do we allow DUI drivers, who have killed others before, to continue to drive again? What do devices like ignition interlocks say about us?

The honking thing specifically is another skewed fact. The neighbors want the Waymos, they just had a hard time getting ahold of the right folks at Waymo. That includes Sophia Tung, the neighbor who set up the honking video stream that Jason used.

As a local in the area, I can say for certain that the majority of SF wants the cars there. There’s more resistance further down the peninsula, but it’s intermixed with anti-taxi messaging. It’s hard to tell if it’s about the cars or about “those kind of people” having access to their city.

San Francisco neighbors say repeated Waymo honking is keeping them up at night

Christopher Cherry who lives in the building next door said he was “really excited” to have Waymo in the neighborhood, thinking it would bring more security and quiet to the area.

The residents who spoke with NBC Bay Area said they are not opposed to having the Waymo cars nearby. But they say they want to see a more neighborly response from the new autonomous vehicle company on the block.

“We love having them there, we just would like for them to stop honking their horn at four in the morning repeatedly,” Cherry said.

San Francisco neighbors say Waymo honking continues, global audience follows along live

The incidents were captured on resident Sophia Tung’s YouTube live stream

Tung and many of her neighbors said that they are Waymo customers and actually like the Waymo technology. But what they don’t like is the repeated, overnight noise.

Well, formerly operating companies. The Uber and Cruise examples stopped both of them dead. Uber left the business entirely and Cruise had its license to operate revoked.

That’s just omitting info. There’s also straight up wrong stuff, like residents not wanting it. As crazy as it sounds, at least with SF, the residents’ reps wrote the regulation law and haven’t had a measure to reject self-driving cars (at least K passed). The majority want to see these cars. Also, Facebook dumped their move fast motto a decade ago because of how bad it was (self-harm problems).

It’s unfortunate too. I like Jason’s rants, but it’s too distracting when he gets a quick google level of facts wrong.

Mozilla invented Rust to rewrite the rendering engine. Read the history of Servo and bring a tissue to cry into.

Parking regulations don’t apply to public projects. Strong Towns well documents the problem with parking regulations as they are written and applied in practice. I highly recommend checking it out.

Underground spots are roughly 20 to 50 thousand dollars each. Surface lots are only a few thousand per spot.

Do you want to invest in my coffee shop idea? I need a few million dollars to build the required parking.

Bike lanes on roads are practically free. For example, when repainting the road after resurfacing maintenance. It doesn’t take more paint to mark out a bike lane than it does for car parking.

Bike infrastructure at its core is a political issue. If you follow cyclist money, you’ll soon find it spent on bicycle advocacy groups. It’s the best bang-for-buck and addresses all the other barriers, like shop owners complaining about the free public parking they’re not paying for.

Critical Mass was so successful in San Francisco that it almost doesn’t exist anymore. These days discussions of bike lanes is more about what kind of lane rather than if bikes should even be allowed on the road.

https://www.kqed.org/news/11941576/the-night-that-changed-san-francisco-cycling-forever

The article says part of the plan is to use fine money as a way to inject cash into the bus system. That seems like a good idea, but I’d like a local’s opinion! Is the bus system not working due to lack of routes? Long intervals? Something else?