It’s tragic that this man was killed, but the problem isn’t that he was forced to ride a bike as punishment for speeding on base, but that we tolerate unsafe drivers on public roads like the one who killed him.
This is a picture from about a week ago of a soldier riding his bike to work at Fort Liberty/Bragg. It got some laughs on social media, especially since he’s a captain who’s wearing elbow and knee pads, but no big deal.
Yesterday, local news reported that “Fayetteville police
San Francisco currently has around 800k people spread out over 46.9 square miles. It would have a population of:
1.5 million at the density of Geneva
1.9 million at the density of Barcelona
2 million ad the density of Seoul
2.4 million at the density of Paris
It is amazing to me that 73.6% of Americans are overweight (including the obese) and 41.9% are obese. We’re less than 5 years from the majority of Americans being obese.
If the Bay Area wants to save BART the easiest way to do so would be increasing the Bay Bridge toll to the point where there is no congestion on the bridge (probably $15 or so). This would make BART cheaper than the marginal cost of driving and would get a lot of folks to shift.
California needs a “$1000/square foot rule” that says if housing in a neighborhood is selling for over $1000/square foot all height, FAR, parking and lot coverage rules are suspended until prices fall.
I will observe that Amtrak is making it over the Sierra just fine and that if we were to invest more in trains we could have better reliability for our transportation system in winter.
Working non stop.
@CaltransDist3
trying to get I-80 reopened. Highway 50 to South Lake Tahoe is now open, but is at full capacity. Caltrans advising people to just stay home and not visit, because it would be a long and treacherous drive.
@nbcbayarea
I’ve never understood the fetish that planners have for green space in apartment complexes. It’s NEVER useful space and is just pure waste that makes everyone’s life worse and costs a lot to maintain.
Holy crap: factory built homes were the majority of homes built in the US during the 1960s and they were mostly regulated out of existence to protect the home building industry!
This whole thing has been deeply disingenuous. The state has spent $11b total and gotten 120 miles of ROW prepared as well as improvements in the Bay Area and LA. The project has been too slow and too expensive but this story is mostly bullshit
@WoeisJesus
@OrwellNGoode
I’m guessing the grandchild is her husband’s offspring’s from a prior relationship. Looking at how old he seems his eldest daughter may be older than she is.
I know I'm just some Twitter rando, but California should really take like $2B of the EV subsidies and invest it in good (protected) bike infrastructure. An ebike uses like 1/50th the energy of an electric car and there is lots of latent demand.
Our current model of providing free/cheap roads and then trying to convince people not to use them by subsidizing transit seems pretty inefficient to me.
Why California should buy Union Pacific:
1. They own all the best transportation ROWs in the state, many of which the state wants to buy anyway.
2. They have a TON of railroad building expertise
3. Electrifying UP in CA would significantly cut pollution
Also, they make a profit
Ended up listening to an NPR podcast about a school “diversity” project that fell apart. Because of who’s making it, it’s told from the POV of the bureaucracy.
This before and after video from Vienna, Austria could be any American city. Safe bike infrastructure isn’t hard or especially expensive. It just takes the will to reallocate street space to build it.
Auch Wien 🇦🇹 baut Fahrspuren und Parkplätze zu Radwegen um! Das muss keine Jahrzehnte dauern, alles eine Frage des politischen Willens!
#MehrPlatzF
ürsRad
San Francisco would need 114 of these towers in the next 7 years to meet its housing obligation under state law. Can you imagine how awesome a giant neighborhood of these towers would be?
"Visual impact through catenary."
"High reliance on utilities." Unlike energy sucking electrolysis?
"Protests to stop electrification may occur." How about we protest to stop gadgetbahn hydrogen?
The real issue here is clear: they don't see a path to capital funding.
There is exactly one good trend going on in terms of reducing car dependence in the US right now and that is that ebikes are selling well. We need to build a ton of bike infrastructure to support this trend and switch as many trips to bike as we can.
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👀 TikTok, when opening any website in their app, injects tracking code that can monitor all keystrokes, including passwords, and all taps.
Cheap gas is coming. It would be a good time to hike gas taxes to prevent the vehicle fleet from getting less efficient and raise money for infrastructure.
@AChillGhost
As a very young child I had difficulty differentiating between characters in the Bible and the Founding Fathers and distinctly remember realizing they were completely different people in different times.
I don't understand why some poor Bay Area suburb (except maybe Emeryville) hasn't gone rogue in a similar way. Like East Palo Alto is perfectly positioned to legalize skyscrapers everywhere and it would massively benefit existing property owners.
The Squamish Nation owns many parcels around Vancouver exempt from local zoning. With 87% of the nation voting in favor, they're going to build 6,000 homes at Hong Kong-density, 90% less parking than required by law and beside single-family neighborhoods who cannot stop Senakw.
Tesla is only profitable because of government subsidies for electric cars. It is reasonable to ask if we could have gotten more CO2 reductions spending half a billion a quarter on better bike & pedestrian infrastructure.
Without policy credits, Tesla's $438m Q1 profit would have been a $80m Q1 loss. Tesla certainly has done a great job accelerating the electrification transition but forward-looking
#ClimatePolicy
also deserves credit.
"A child born with CF in the ’50s could expect to live until age 5. In the ’70s, age 10. In the early 2000s, age 35. With Trikafta... those who begin taking the drug in early adolescence, a recent study projected, can expect to survive to age 82.5"
It's time to regulate how truck hoods are designed. If you can't see a whole ass car in front of you without a camera the vehicle should require a special license class to drive.
Saving Caltrain would be a bit harder, but tolling 101 and 280 at like 25¢/mile plus whatever is needed for free flowing traffic would likely help a lot there too.
@scottlincicome
This whole story is just that coffee pods don’t have a lot of coffee in them so they’re better for the environment. You could just brew weaker coffee without a pod and get a better result.
The California Sierra Club once again shows that they care for aesthetic pastoralism more than the environment has come out against housing near transit
#sb827
Hey transit activists. If you want HSR to succeed demand minimalist stations. The smaller the station is the easier it is to get through and the less it costs.
San Mateo approved a moratorium on new housing development last night. Cities cannot be trusted to allow a reasonable amount of housing. We need SB 827.
Historic 100 Year Flood Zone Preservation District
In California we spend plenty of money on transit to have great transit. We don't have it because much of that money is wasted on oversized monuments to transit rather than things that actually make it work better.
@wandering_j
@drmansfeldt
People should also realize the vast majority of that energy is lost as waste heat in an internal combustion engine while most of the energy in the electricity actually makes it to the wheels.
Maybe starting with a consultant who sees herself as a “special kind of person” because she’s half black and half Japanese to do “pre-engagement” and manufacture a group of supporters before you tell the public what you are doing isn’t the best way to generate trust.
Back from COP26. Quick observations:
Not enough real action, but still some progress;
Large private sector attendance = mix of greenwashing w/ corporate buy-in;
Large companies see $ in investing in green transition, which is a good thing;
International cooperation is essential!
Clearance Line for Tunnels, the composite car envelope and the NFPA emergency walkway envelope (see ). It was reiterated in the meeting that overhead electrification of the trains is not planned for the corridor and space proofing of the tunnels should assume use of
Cars REALLY DO give you mobility that no other mode of transportation does, but some of that freedom is illusory because accommodating cars prevents you from traveling any other way because of the space they consume.
"one of the bad things about cars is they allow you to have more freedom in your life and go to places farther away from you" isn't really the argument people think it is
One thing that transportation advocates in California should be pushing hard for is electrifying the railroads. Not only are they huge sources of diesel exhaust, but their resistance to overhead wires means that we’re planning insane, low performance hydrogen powered trains.
"Bitcoin mining’s energy consumption eclipses that of major global tech companies providing entertainment and services, looking at annual electrical energy consumption values from various reports:” and ALL EV!
@Goodtweet_man
Also, Panama, the Balkan War, Haiti, Grenada, the Dominican Civil War, the Korean War, the Korean border crisis, the Lebanon war of 1958.
If SF builds 1m new homes and 2m new people move in then the average home in SF will be less crowded, there will be a lot more stores and cultural institutions, 2 million people will get to live somewhere they want to and those people will emit a lot less CO2
@mattdorsey
@Scott_Wiener
What if SF builds 1 million new homes, and then 2 million new people move in?
And we're back to square one, except now the city is far less livable?
NYC is far more dense. Did it become cheap?
This makes me totally re-evaluate the source of 1960s housing affordability. What if homebuilders sold homes cheaper because they had competition that they now lack?!
I'm sorry, you mean to tell me they just kinda built the SkyTrain footings in the parking zone? Like, you take out a parking spot every 25 feet and *boom* SkyTrain?
The big problem with housing like this is that it only makes sense in places where land is basically free. The places with housing shortages have expensive land. So you either have to spend a ton of money on transportation to make new accessible land or use less per house
The vast majority of Bay Area residents support building more housing in their neighborhood.
81% support more single family
73% more condos/townhomes
66% more high rises near transit
69% more apartments
69% more homeless housing
78% more subsidized housing
Just a reminder: VTA’s insane giant bore, super deep tunnel under San Jose will cost around $1.5 Billion/mile. An elevated line would cost around $500m/mile and offer much faster boarding and unloading and the ability to build more stations.
Moving 1 person from car to electric car cuts their carbon emissions in half. Moving that person to an ebike cuts their carbon emissions by 99%. This means that one person switched to ebike is worth two people switched to car.