251–260 of 443 posts
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You say this as if it's unusual for news articles to be solely written by various company's PR and marketing teams.
But there is a difference between promoting a product vs shifting blame, isn't it?
See uber's "but taxis are evil/medallions are a monopoly!"
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and? obviously I don't want heaps of chamber pot contents on the sidewalk either. The point I was making is that, yes all littering is bad, but why does the consumer shoulder the burden when a huge majority of packaging can be avoided?
Can be avoided, but there's a cost. Wrapping food in plastic makes it easier, and thus cheaper to distribute, and vastly lowers the risk of foodborn illness. If you get rid of plastic packaging, the consumer will bear that cost in other ways. I agree that companies often avoid the negative externalities of their activities, and support things like a carbon tax to fix that. But in the case of littering, whoever create…
On the other hand, if you get rid of plastic packaging, the consumer will bear the benefit in other ways. A lack of plastic in the environment means a healthier ecosystem, which affects their food as well as their quality of life.
But this is all a bit of a red herring because goods aren't packaged in so much plastic in order to reduce costs or improve quality. The single most important factor in consumer packaging is "Will this make the consumer want to buy it more".
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> What about people who genuinely love to drive cars & ride motorcycles? I suspect we can find a place for them outside of our most densely populated urban cores. The popularity of cars isn't in itself a scandal. The scandal is that cars still enjoy undue priority in places like Midtown Manhattan, it's that urban neighborhoods were destroyed and divided by interstate highways, it's that most cities no longer function…
> I suspect we can find a place for them outside of our most densely populated urban cores. That seems unconstitutional and a bit like North Korea where they restrict cars to specific areas and ban it in others.
There is no Constitutional right to bear cars.
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Not just kids - it's a perfect way to carjack someone.
carjacking vehicles with constant internet connections and GPS's doesn't strike me as an extremely profitable maneuver. the whole "car detects obstacle in an untrafficed area, stops, door is opened, passenger gets out, passenger gets back in, changes destination to a place not proximate to anywhere they've ever been before" process also sounds like the sort of thing that would justifiably raise a bit of a red flag. m…
99% Invisible did an episode on this a while back that’s a pretty good listen. https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/episode-76-the-modern...
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We could end up with roads dedicated to cars being separated from roads dedicated to pedestrians or cyclists. You could imagine if a city was designed from scratch the vehicles could move around almost in tunnel-like back-alleys, with periodic embarkation points into pedestrianized open plazas and boulevards. If Musk's reduction in cost of tunnelling is more than just a pipe-dream, then you might be able to retrofit…
> vehicles could move around almost in tunnel-like back-alleys, with periodic embarkation points into pedestrianized open plazas and boulevards. Sounds an awful lot like a subway or lite rail system to me. I've never understood the fascination with self-driving cars and what they imply for PT--how is such a system superior to a well designed and maintained train system?
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The concept of jaywalking is great for busy roads with high speed traffic. 30MPH+ (50KMPH+) roads should become much better and faster by reducing the amount of pedestrian crossing significantly. Slower roads (max 20MPH/30KMPH) should be bicycle and pedestrian-first. Cars there should be "guests" catering to the slower non-motorized traffic. This way we have the best of both worlds: nice & livable urban roads and fas…
That probably won't endear me to the general commentariat, but... Slower roads (max 20MPH/30KMPH) should be bicycle and pedestrian-first. Spot on! 100 points!
all roads, but even residential streets, in car-centric cities like LA seem to be built wide enough to accommodate 747's with ease.
my proposal: rather than 12-15 foot widths, make urban residential street lanes 9 feet wide (cars are typically 6-7 feet wide, delivery trucks, 8 feet wide). replace parking lanes with slightly grade-separated (3-4 inches) bike lanes, leaving existing walkways for pedestrians only.
and make sure these narrow lanes have shoulder lane markings.
Now is an opportunity, perhaps first in ~100 years, perhaps last, to recover the streets for unaugmented humans: slow down cars in urban areas, increase qualifications for humans to drive, eventually ban human drivers entirely, leaving only automated vehicles with enough sensors and going slowly enough to reduce auto-related deaths for pedestrians and passengers alike to zero.
That seems to be happening, at least in some European cities. Paris for instance is (very) slowly chasing cars outside of the city. London has the congestion tax. The problem of course is that you need the infrastructure to replace all the cars and public transportation in Paris is close to saturated. Still, it's probably a move in the right direction IMO.
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I think the answer to pedestrians versus cars is the same as for cars versus trains: grade separation. Turn the sidewalks into elevated walkways. Or use pedestrian tunnels underneath the road surface. Pedestrian crosswalks are a money-saving measure, ignoring one of the many externalities involved in automobile manufacture. Cars simply should not be driving on pedestrian walkways, and pedestrians should not be walkin…
put the cars underground, not the pedestrians. let the cars go fast and let the people stroll in the sunshine.
Elevated walkways would be vastly cheaper, but still infeasible on any current budget. You would end up having to rebuild the lobby of most buildings to be on the second floor, and probably turn the first floor into parking. It feels like one of those utopian ideals from the 50s or 60s that came out before people started thinking about the money.
Reporters could send in the basic details of a traffic accident and would get in return a complete article to print the next day. These articles, printed widely, shifted the blame for accidents to pedestrians To me, that is the craziest sentence in the article. Reporters were outsourcing writing to the auto industry? Of course they blamed the pedestrians! In what world is this ethical? What is next? Sending overdose…
News and Advertising have always been closely linked.