Yesterday my wife was on the way to taking our daughter to school via our electric cargo bike, as usual, and a classmate's father taking the classmate to school in a car pulled up beside them and offered to take our kid the rest of the way. As if the only reason we'd be biking is because of economic necessity. My wife replied "No thanks, we LIKE biking"... Now I'm wondering if maybe I should make a flag or sign for the bike that says "we're not poor, we just like bikes"... or "we just hate cars"? Or "we just believe in climate change and live by our beliefs"? #climatechange#bikes#bicycles#carsRuinCities
Public space is the most valuable resource of #cities, and they squander it on cars. Not "but I need to drive" or "economic activity and essential mobility blah blah blah", we could have all of that with a fraction of the asphalt. Not even "driver convenience". No, it's just stupid extra lanes for the worst drivers to pass law-abiding ones and go wait at a red light sooner, and empty free parking. Wasted. #InducedDemand#CarsRuinCities#Urbanism
"Street parking was already scarce in Hoboken, New Jersey, when the death of an elderly pedestrian spurred city leaders to remove even more spaces in a bid to end traffic fatalities."
I'm in a machine learning workshop and we're talking about image recognition and computer vision. I asked the facilitators, "Do you think self-driving cars will ever work?"
Them: "No, because of the sticker on your laptop."
I step out of my office, and a woman operating an SUV with her phone directly in her front of her face drives down the bus lane and through a solid red light. And people still ask why pedestrian fatalities are increasing.
"You can't solve congestion, we solved congestion during COVID when nobody was travelling — the question is, whether you have people on high-capacity public transport, on footpaths, on e-scooters...That's the question about what congestion you want, not can you solve it."
"If you ask people what streets are for, they say cars. That's opposite of what they said one hundred years ago...Streets—venues of myriad public activities as late as 1920—were redefined as exclusive transport ways."
Every single 'issue' with increased density, mixed zoning, and more middle housing is due to cars. Traffic congestion, parking, noise. It's almost like #carsruincities.