Almost 20 years ago Clear Channel radio came under fire because a pair of their syndicated talk show hosts encouraged their listeners to go out and take a baseball bat to a bicyclist. I’m an avid cyclist and I’ve dealt with a fortunately small number of assholes that are susceptible to this kind of suggestion. One guy yelled “fuck Joe Biden”; another guy yelled “you’re gonna get somebody killed!” after another driver went slightly into the opposite lane to pass me.
I think it’s a tossup as to whether I’ll eventually be killed by one of these bike-hostile morons or by somebody looking at their phone while driving.
It really depends on where in the USA, but for the most part he’s right.
Any growing communities like small towns and cities have the chance to change this, but it usually sounds too high risk for them.
Plus they already have to deal with the insane red tape and overhead in the US like poorly cascaded federal and state laws, lowest bidder stupidity, maximum annual budget spending, scam zoning laws, and slow as hell development time.
Like I would definitely throw in effort to try in the plenty of towns that surround metro areas.
Dearborn for example, which is technically metro Detroit, surprisingly has some walkable neighborhoods because the smallest roads are thinner and businesses are very close to residential areas. It’s definitely not perfect because all the main roads (stroads) are still absolutely huge, but it’s nice to see that it’s not just typical suburbs with strict Zoning.
But after visiting Houston, I would just declare the entire state of Texas a lost cause.
They're trams in the city, so relatively slow. Live and maintained vegetation has too much water to burn: boiling away the water takes more energy than the fuel provides.
It's probably also got those pop-up sprinklers, so if a fire does happen, you just turn on the water.
Covering a city in tram lines and sprinkler systems so you can keep up a fairy tale aesthetic with more grass isn’t practical. Just do gravel like the train lines and accept that keeping it pretty would be an irresponsible use of water in our increasingly frequent droughts.
It completely depends on the region, though. The grassy tram pic is from Helsinki, which is a plenty moist region that I think is generally predicted to get more rain with climate change. Sustainable urban design should be tailored to the context.
Well if this helps instead, people park on their yards every day with hot exhausts and catalytic converters. And some of us with old gravel driveways have a little grass right where we’re actually supposed to park, lol.
But yeah you’re right that when they decided to make that route so nice and green, they signed up for regular maintenance!
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