I’m not from Winnipeg, but this never works. Obviously, these people have not looked into the legal ramifications. A bicycle is unlicensed. This means there is no requirement to have qualified vision, testing, competency, there is no established form of measurement of speed, and no standardization of devices. Places have tried to license bikes for the last 150 years and all have failed. This has an extremely long history of being useless nonsense.
Absolutely every issue involving bikes is extremely simple to solve. All it takes is a designated right if way. Right of way applies to everyone all the time. Foot traffic needs to be reminded of this constantly. A right of way means one person in one lane. It is not a sidewalk, or optional. If you are in North America, and you are not on the right side as far to the right as practicable, you are on the wrong side. Every single problem happens because of stupid people that do not follow the right of way.
Sharing the roadway in the same direction is foolish. When a cycle must share the road, safest to be on the opposite side, to more clearly see oncoming traffic.
I was responding not to the article, but to the comment above me, which was stating that a cyclist in North America must be to the right as far as possible.
I grew up cycling on automobile roads, and was taught to ride on the left, so that I could be more aware and prepared for oncoming traffic. Riding on the right is trusting the drivers to avoid you, while riding on the left allows vision of the drivers as they approach.
This was overturned practice all the way back in the 1970’s IIRC. It creates higher speed collisions, panick situations, it is impossible for the faster approaching vehicle to gauge the speed of intersection, and it steals the ability to slow down to mitigate potential conflict and collision. It is wrong and it is based on terrible logic. I have commuted full time by bike for many years. I have been hit by 7 cars. Riding backwards is illegal and absolutely will get you killed. A car hitting you from behind is rare but is not even close to the biggest cause of crashes. The biggest issue is illegal u-turns and driveways entering and exiting the road. A driver in never going to look for backwards traffic before exiting a driveway. Drivers are licensed if a driver is incompetent, they should not have a license. This is the key legal issue that should be addressed but isn’t. There is a western culture stupidity about unqualified drivers allowed behind the wheel. This is incompatible with a completely inadequate public transit system and so there is no practical low bar for terrible drivers. The result of this lack of effective public transit is that we pay in blood and deaths instead of funded public infrastructure. Riding backwards as a policy only makes the problems worse; this has been proven legally and is the law everywhere.
You’re making huge changes to avoid one of the smaller risks of riding on the road, while introducing entirely new ones. Statistically, you are extremely unlikely to be hit from behind by an automobile while you are driving down the middle of the lane. You are less likely to be hit in the middle of the lane than at the far right. Yes, both do happen, but compared to other forms of car/cyclist collisions, they are not worth making a priority. You should be concentrating on entirely different issues to maximize your safety on the road.
The middle of what lane? Here in Michigan, bicycles are not considered at all during road planning. The most we get is a painted gutter called a ‘cycle lane’, which gets blocked by parked automobiles if it even exists. Recently a pedestrian was killed in a hit and run, and it didn’t sound as though the driver is even facing charges. Anyone not in an automobile is unofficially considered at-fault for such type of incidents.
If you ride 20 mph on a road with 35 mph traffic, going the opposite direction is a 55 mph closing speed. With traffic is only a 15 mph difference.
Not to mention people typically only scan for what they expect to see. My city has some bike lanes that go in both directions on one way streets. No way I use the bike lane going in the opposite direction because few people will be looking in the oncoming direction when at intersections.
Walking in the opposite direction makes sense because there is minimal difference in the closing speeds and a person can step sideways off the road to avoid danger.
Thumbtacks won’t pierce the walls. Two inch nails with rubber bands wrapped around the bottom creating a base might do something like that, but that’d be wrong and illegal and a silly idea that’ll get you some unwanted attention
I’m trying to picture this contraption you describe (for educational, completely non-practical reasons of course), where does the cotton and rubber bands go?
Cities don’t tax only based on the potential for what land could be doing, but instead include taxes on improvements to the land as well. As a result, there’s incentive to sprawl rather than pressure to densify.
Yes that’s part of it. Another part is encouraging more permissive, inclusive, mixed use zoning to better reflect the potential optimal use of the land, and switching from property taxes to land value taxes to apply pressure to reach that ideal.
The way to achieve this is with a land value tax. Undeveloped land and developed land are taxed the same, so the owner is incentivised to maximize the development to make as much money as possible to offset the LVT.
Public transit has been lacking in my city even before the pandemic. They are still paying off for a light rail system from a decade ago that they are not maintaining. Also all the ticket machines smell like piss, which should not be a surprised considering for years there’s been some guy who has been urinating at almost all the station.
This is one if the reasons I think car-dependent suburban sprawl is so much environmentally worse than so many people think it is. I’ve encountered far too many people who think sprawling suburbs are full of nature just because they have trees and grass lawns – usually to contrast with “concrete jungles”. Like yes, dense areas could often use more greenery, but car-dependent sprawl is nowhere near being a healthy ecosystem. Cars, suburbs, roads, and all our malarkey are inherently disruptive to nature, so we should do our best to minimize our impact.
It’s sustainable, you just don’t understand the manufacturing process well enough. Seeds of old trucks are planted in the ground which generate the next truck crop for harvest in the fall.
The correct answer actually should -and could- be 0 gallons if they simply cycle to work. Granted, that requires them to have the right infrastructure available, but if (once) that existed, the vast majority of the work force could cycle to work happily. Most people don’t live 20 miles or more from where they work
It could also be 0 gallons if the busses are electrified, or if the rail system is expanded, or if we stop pushing office workers to commute every day.
I’m just sayjt that we need to change the way we live. Like you said, people should not be required to work in offices anymore. If they physically need to be at locations, let them walk for short distances, cycle for medium distances and use public transportation for large distances.
Most cities in the world have been redesigned over the past 80 years for cars. It’s insane and it left most cities awful places to live in. Almost all Dutch cities have been redesigned for people. So people walk and cycle because they can, and the cities look and feel amazing and beautiful.
I was being facetious; ambulance fuel use is a silly comparison :)
Listening to all y’all winter cyclists I lament that I live in a city where the bike lanes are where the city piles up the snow it plows off the car lanes on the streets. RIP me. It gives me hope and happiness to know that there are cities that don’t do this!
If they can make an apartment where I cant hear my neighbors, cant smell them burning food, and 100% will not be damaged from other units flood/fire then I am all for it.
I live in one of these. They’re amazing, and totally changed my mind on apartments. I just wish I had an extra room and a lower floor. I can get a garage for $100/m which is not bad at all.
Anything cheap is going to be bad. We need to raise the standards to a minimum. The unfortunate thing I need to move to a house to be closer to my new job, otherwise an apartment like this would be fine.
That’s 10 million x 1 million square meters (10^13 )
There will soon be (source: people like sex) 10 billion people on earth (10^10 )
This would give you 10^13 / 10^10 = 10^3 square meters (10700 square feet) of land for everyone on earth to live on. EVERY SINGLE PERSON. Not families, individual fucking people.
All of them contained within the US.
10700 square feet to build a house, have a small garden etc. Okay, not a lot. But that’s one country that could house everyone. An extreme example of course - you’re not gonna be able to use all that land, some of it is uninhabitable (red states lol). But just imagine it for a second, everyone living in one country would still be comfortable. And look how much is left of the rest of the world.
1000 square meters isn’t enough space? Make your house have 4 stories, who gives a shit, make your own wizard tower. In a relationship? That’s 21400 square feet for the couple. Have a couple of kids? 42800 square feet. That’s a decent enough house+yard for 4 people, especially if you add one or two floors.
The problem is not that there isn’t enough space. The problem is that some motherfuckers want and get more than their share of square feet. And then they charge you money to live in their share of land without owning it.
Your premise is wrong. You need to start with total buildable area, not the boundary size. And when you evaluate for buildable area take into account critical areas such as wetlands, flood zones etc.
Cope and seethe all you want, but a house is a house is a house is a home. An apartment is a box in the sky, really just a big room. And you don’t get to pick your housemates. So you bought a great apartment and everything is lovely and then some asshole rents the unit next to you and starts having parties, getting his junkie friends visiting all the time. Sure you call the police but they have more important stuff to do.
A house is a house. Everyone should have a house. The left should abandon minimalist loser politics. Everyone gets a house!
‘yes it’s true’ except it’s objectively not, there’s about two and a half trillion acres in the United States and only 330 million people, there’s over a billion acres of actively productive arable land alone.
And no you don’t need to bulldozer nature, learn to live as part of it and be a positive impact on the worlds ecosystems. Low impact living and permaculture gardens with local sustainable food networks are far better than cities on every metric
There are many chunks of that they are unliveable. Also who said this discusion only involved the US? Do you think erasing farms from existence would some how be a good idea? Or are you in favor of people returning to agrocultural serfdom?
The numbers are the same for the rest of the world, it’s a huge planet.
And yes monoculture industrial farms are awfull for the planet and bad by every other metric. Community produce exchanges and permaculture gardens is the best solution, automated tools for home growing should be a key focus of government r&d budgets.
Your source says even just land currently used for grazing livestock is more than enough to house everyone, that’s without considering all the land already used for habitation and etc.
It really is a very big planet, I don’t know if you hate people and want them to suffer or what your deal is but you’re welcome to live in the smallest box you can find, don’t try and force the rest of us to though.
An apartment is a box in the sky, really just a big room.
You realize that not every apartment is a studio in a skyscraper, right?
and then some asshole rents the unit next to you and starts having parties, getting his junkie friends visiting all the time
How is this different from an asshole moving into the house next door?
A house is a house. Everyone should have a house.
Houses are fine. The big problem with them is that most are in a boring sprawling soulless suburbia. The most important thing about where you live isn’t the physical structure itself but location, location, location.
Houses offer more sound insulation because of all the air that’s between the two houses. In an apartment, even a big one, if someone is doing renovations you’ll hear it because sound travel faster and better through solid matter.
As for sprawling suburbia, I am very against that. I’m for a more european village-like layout.
The other big problem is most places in the US and Canada make it literally illegal to build anything but a detached, single-family house. If houses are really what people want, why are the alternatives literally illegal in most places?
How is this different from an asshole moving into the house next door?
What a silly question. You don’t share walls, hallways, mailboxes, front doors, laundry machines, and parking lots with your neighbors when you live in a house. Honestly, have you ever even lived in an apartment?
I’ve literally never had a problem sharing hallways, mailboxes, front doors, laundry machines and parking lots with people.
The only problem you tend to have with neighbors is noise. And you can easily get that in suburbia as well, particularly if they’re throwing noisy late night parties.
It’s funny how every time we come up with a funny insult to describe you people, you just take that same exact phrase and use it against us without understanding what the hell it means.
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