A place to discuss problems of car centric infrastructure or how it hurts us all. Let's explore the bad world of Cars!
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i find it fascinating how Americans secretly love walkable towns.
Where do they vacation? Disneylands, Makinac island, NY, Chicago, or go to iconic walkable cities overseas like London, Paris...
but the idea of enjoying something line that throughout their entire life seems propostrotous. they gotta have their 2 ton trucks.
The average American doesn't vacation. In the past ten years, the only travel I've done was to attend two funerals and one wedding. Vacations are for the rich, and nice areas are only for the rich. We secretly love walkable towns like we secretly love Buckingham Palace, we like to dream that one day, we'll be able to afford it too.
The only reason my town is affordable is because it's shitty, and improving it would price me out of living here, so I don't want to improve it.
I would like to point out that the likes of walmart and amazon have, like the mosquitos they are, sucked dry the money that used to circulate around smaller towns, and that might otherwise be used for a swim center or something.
I say this because step number one to fixing these places is bringing the money back.
Step two might be price locking rent and/or just taking land out of the hands of landlords and housing firms.
I really like those stealth bike racks where they put a car shape on the road facing side so that the cars don't get upset that they lost a potential parking spot.
They'll never see through this clever ruse;. Most cars have pretty poor eyesight; the only way they'll figure it out is if they honk at it, and it doesn't respond convincingly.
Like a decoy to a duck, the problems only start when the car attempts to mate with it
No 1 rule of the concrete jungle, when they're in heat do not honk back even if it'd be *really * funny. And if they're randy enough to be seeping fluid out of the exhaust pipe , . . . I pray for you.
I would legitimately love a study on whether this makes drivers more or less likely to be angry, because anything other than complete neutrality would be hilarious.
the only way they’ll figure it out is if they honk at it, and it doesn’t respond convincingly.
Just needs a sound-activated arm showing the middle finger to pop out of the fake window.
I really wish there was a better way to secure bicycles. Most of the time I choose to take the car or motorcycle is because I got a nice bicycle after my old cheapo got stolen from what I thought was a safe location.
I'm not even talking about lack of bicycle racks in many parking lots, but the fact that a $50 angle grinder goes through just about any chain/u-lock in about 30 seconds.
I know this because I had to cut off my own U-lock after assholes tried to drill through the lock on mine and ruined it. Also, nobody even looked twice at a guy using an incredibly loud grinder generating a ton of sparks in the middle of a retail parking lot.
The solution is bike lockers. It’s an important piece of public infrastructure that often gets overlooked.
I think this is Japan I'm thinking of, but they have these amazing underground automated parking spaces for bicycles. You load your bike into this elevator-type thing and get back a ticket, and the elevator takes the bike underground and deposits it in a sort of cubbyhole. Completely safe and takes up no space above-ground except for the little kiosk. Not a fucking chance in hell that a US city would ever invest in something like that.
Locks will only ever be a minor deterrent imo. The problem is that police in most places don't even try to go after bicycle thefts and the would be criminals know that.
If governments took bicycle theft as seriously as they did horse theft in the 19th century, then few criminals would even attempt to steal a bicycle if it had some basic protection like a cheap lock + a camera pointed at the bicycle rack.
Bike cages are great, but the haters would rather spend on a 100-car parking lot than a 100-bike cage.
On a personal level, get theft insurance on your bike. Costs me like 150 €/y for a 2000 € ebike, although some insurance companies do not cover street parking in some cities.
On a societal level, there are things law enforcement could do to make fencing less lucrative. Giving a shit about theft reports for one. For two, my city pays to get everyone's frame engraved with their national registration number, which will get my bike back to me if the cops find it and it makes the bike a bit less valuable because most people aren't looking to buy a clearly stolen bike.
Not to mention how much dead space is needed in front and behind the parking spot for that SUV.
And in all likelihood, that is a single occupancy vehicle, so the amount of space needed is even more obscene.
Large SUV and giant truck drivers still bemoaning the tiny spaces used by cyclists