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Swimmable Cities

swimmablecities.org

121–130 of 197 posts

Re: Swimmable Cities

#121
post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You must be new around here The commenter you respond to joined HN 4 years before you, with 10 times more karma points.

I was very obviously only making a joke. But ironically your reply perfectly embodies the petty, joyless and argumentative side of HN commenting I was alluding to.

> I was very obviously only making a joke.

I know; it was a tentative to make the thread more serious than these snarky, unconstructive comments.

Re: Swimmable Cities

#122
post #42

Swiss river swimming is one of the highlights of my year.

My wife and I are going to summer vacation to Swiss towns that are on the river Aare for this exact reason. To me, floating in blue, transparent, super clean water on a hot day is heaven. Swiss are also individualist folk, so there is always many almost individual options to enter and leave the water or stay by it. It is depressing to come back to Berlin’s Spree and Havel that are both filled with cyanoalgae and Spree is also used for waste water when there is too much rain. It is lovely to see this initiative, perhaps there is hope for a clean swim in Berlin too.

Re: Swimmable Cities

#123
post #15

Fucking mad, but I love it. Of course, you need to work into the culture swimming as a foundational cultural thing. (Not so in the US!) I can see us getting there in some decades. It tracks with other aspirational goals which are in progress.

The US is a big place. If you live anywhere within a 2 hour drive to the beach, then its common to have weekend trips where you spend some time swimming in the ocean.

Re: Swimmable Cities

#124
post #42

Swiss river swimming is one of the highlights of my year.

My wife and I are going to summer vacation to Swiss towns that are on the river Aare for this exact reason. To me, floating in blue, transparent, super clean water on a hot day is heaven. Swiss are also individualist folk, so there is always many almost individual options to enter and leave the water or stay by it. It is depressing to come back to Berlin’s Spree and Havel that are both filled with cyanoalgae and Spre…

Although for now, even switching the touring boats to electric engines, which should be easy enough (why do the private companies benefit from public space selling 25€/seat tours in the city center while spewing huge clouds of exhaust into the air and dumping oil and dirt into the river? – they should at least switch to clean engines and for a limited km range tours this would be sensible) is not done in Berlin. Even the ferries that the transport company operates are not all electric (cause they actually rent some of them from the private boat touring companies), although there they could even be tethered and not require a battery at all. Anyway, all of this is just optimistic hippie talk, I will rather just move to Switzerland than wait for Germany to clean up.

Re: Swimmable Cities

#125

This has to be a joke seeing how much of a fuckup "swimming in the Seine" for the Olympics has been, but I gather this writer hasn't kept up to date with people commenting on L'Equipe's related posts on social media. Maybe they just can't read French.

> This has to be a joke seeing how much of a fuckup "swimming in the Seine" for the Olympics has been, but I gather this writer hasn't kept up to date with people commenting on L'Equipe's related posts on social media. Maybe they just can't read French.

The Olympics and having the Seine swimmable for everybody are different things; the criteria for athletes and for the general population are not the same. The objective of having the Seine open to swimming again still stands and should be achieved by Summer 2025, as expected.

That being said the "swimming in the Seine" during the Olympics and Paralympics has been complicated but I wouldn’t call it a "fuckup"; triathlon athletes are used to these conditions (think about Rio, which had much higher contamination levels, or Sydney which had (risk of) sharks and bacterias), and nobody has been sick after the competitions.

Re: Swimmable Cities

#126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve come across a video where Swiss people were commuting from work by diving into the river yesterday and it blew my mind! It looks so delightful. I’ve never thought about going to Switzerland for holiday but now it’s all I’m thinking about.

Have you got a link to the video?

https://youtu.be/IYaPfuTkWGU?si=Bdqp6pbCzbGMmQhk

https://youtu.be/iA2cLQ_p6V0?si=FDH_JhD5TBcPxHfP

Here you go!

Re: Swimmable Cities

#127
This is something I want to share but its platform includes nakedly racist framing:

Urban swimmers are stewards responsible for protecting the health of their local waterways, working alongside Mother Earth’s closest carers, such as Indigenous peoples...

Re: Swimmable Cities

#128
Thanks to the Clean Water Act, lots of the US is swimmable and clean. But we have a much bigger problem preventing it: lawyers. Lakes in State Parks will likely have swimming banned because people will not be self responsible.

Re: Swimmable Cities

#130
post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why you can't swim after the rain? Does the water get dirty, or else?

Since all other replies are a bit too concise, I'll try and dive deeper (ha ha). 1) Naturally, rains wash out street grime and small pieces of rubbish which may easily bypass the sewage system altogether and end up in the river. 2) Cities have systems in place to treat wastewaters before releasing them into the rivers. However, these systems need to store yet-untreated water in reservoirs, and heavy rain may fill the…

> only solution

Other than "don't put sewage in the rain collector".

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