Car-free Manhattan is just the 78% of households without cars winning out over the 22% with and the daily invaders from out of town. Those percentages are way beyond pro-weed vs. anti-weed and weed has won in a lot of places even without overthrowing capitalism. It’s long overdue there and even the late mayor Koch considered it before I was born.
Stop lines farther back from the intersection.
People don’t stop for the stop lines, nor the crosswalk, nor the red light. We haven’t even solved stop-on-red. Solutions that will only be implemented in the occasional rich neighborhood are a joke. The problem is that we never had a proper conversation of whether the general public can be trusted to operate heavy machinery. Some dickheads got rich selling the heavy machinery and that was enough to quash any discussion about people being squashed. We need car-free places where people can truly live their lives not only without cars, but without other people zipping by on their cars. Not just 14th Street but all of Manhattan. Make that the go-to move for rich parents who prioritize their childrens’ safety above all else. Make other cities get jealous of the money flowing into car-free Manhattan and implement their own car-free zones.
Tinkering around the edges is Vision Maybe-Marginally-Less.
Oh wow, I got an Eve V years ago because it could do that and thought it was a budget Surface, so I always figured the Surface could do that, too. Now Eve’s out of the game and I’m looking to replace mine. Does anyone do that anymore?
Does the keyboard work while detached? When I travel, I like to plug the laptop into the TV and control it from across the room with a wireless keyboard and mouse. It would be nice not to have to pack a separate keyboard.
If you see the pole with the white Metro 16 sign on the right, that’s what tells you it’s a bus stop and what bus will stop there. This was supposed to be something more than that, now it’s basically a very expensive and redundant piece of crap.
Johnny Depp looking ridiculous in Black Mass because of all 3 people who were grading that film on his likeness to Whitey Bulger.
The bus is really infrequent and LA gets a lot of the-sun-is-trying-to-kill-you days. The lack of benches is an attack on the homeless. This thing yielding practically no shade is an attack on bus riders. It’s not so much that they made things worse – I’ve stood at stops there with no shade whatsoever. That these things were just recently installed makes installing something actually good a non-starter for years, if not decades, and that’s the problem. It’s sort of a flip side to the good-is-not-the-enemy-of-the-perfect cliche. I don’t oppose this because it’s good and I want perfect – I oppose it because it’s crap and I want at least good, but we’re locked into crap for now. See also: VTA light rail.
Fucking paint cans!
Thank you, started with Arca and “Reverie” is amazing.
Is there something that can help old folks like me update their musical tastes? I want to hear Homework by Daft Punk but at the same time, there have to be so many artists who make catchy electronic music that’s dumb as hell but brilliant at the same time and are still active. Who are they? Same for the Chemical Brothers, who are still active but disappoint me every time I listen to their recent stuff. Who’s taken up the mantle?
There were basically 3 channels for a while – ABC, NBC, CBS. But yeah, their brand has really diminished.
‘drivers’ do not dictate where the roads go
Drivers as a whole, no. If you’re a poor driver, you have no say. I’m not saying that all drivers have a say, I’m saying that everyone who has a say is a driver.
Could you share your reasoning on real estate necessarily being on the side of cars? A car-free zone in Manhattan where the residents aren’t subject to incessant honking would be the most attractive place there and everyone who owns land there could make bank.
It’s an analogy. I’ll make it explicit with ordered pairs where the first argument pertains to economics in general and the second is transit-specific.
Cars being allowed is like capitalism in that the amenities available to one group of people (the working class, non-drivers) are controlled by another (the bourgeoisie, drivers). That can turn out horribly (the US, Columbus’ not having a subway) or somewhat OK for now (Scandinavian model, SF BART). The problem with shooting for “somewhat OK for now” is that when things get tight, the class that calls the shots can and will yoink the nice things away – (austerity measures in Sweden, BART almost shutting down weekend services).
The solution is to upend the class dynamic itself via (revolution, car ban).
abolish the need to own the automobile
This has proven insufficient to keep places free of car bullshit. Take Manhattan. You don’t need a car. It’s still full of cars polluting and honking and occasionally crushing a person to death.
I think abolition of the private automobile, once it has a foothold, will prove an easier sell than cities where you don’t need a car but can still drive one.
In car-allowed cities outside of NYC, everyone with two nickels to rub together will have a car. The people with any pull in city design will definitely keep them. As such, the bar for a functioning transit system is that it can deliver the working class to their workplaces to work a 9-5. There’s no political pressure to make it comfortable, to reduce the number of transfers per commute or to run late so people without cars can enjoy nightlife outside of their immediate neighborhoods. The transit remains shitty because the people who suffer from its shittiness are poor and thus don’t count. All US cities outside of NYC: you are here. Nobody outside of your city cares about your city’s new bike lane because nobody’s getting out of that rut by building a bike lane every 5 years.
Conversely, in a truly car-free city, the richest dickheads in town will complain loudly when the transit sucks, as it will personally inconvenience them. The transit gets better quickly because they get what they want and they’ll end up with quiet, dense neighborhoods with great transit. Everyone will want to move there or mimic it in their own cities. It would be a dictatorship of the bourgeois pedestrian, which is obviously far short of where we want to be overall, but it sure beats a dictatorship of the bourgeois SUV driver.
So the saving sentence is how far below where your average executive stopped reading?