Earlier quoted context omitted.
If the union strike is so inconvenient, management should agree on a deal promptly.
[flagged]
Definition of straw man argument.
Pontevedra, Spain declares its entire urban area a "reduced traffic zone"
101–110 of 994 posts
Re: Pontevedra, Spain declares its entire urban area a "reduced traffic zone"
#102[flagged]
Taipei moves on scooters. It also rains a lot. Every office has hangers in the stairwells for rain ponchos. Adapting to rain seems very doable.
Re: Pontevedra, Spain declares its entire urban area a "reduced traffic zone"
#103North Americans visiting Europe often grapple with why they enjoy European cities more than North American ones. It's often perceived as an architecture issue ("Europe has historical buildings that we don't have") but very few notice that the main difference is the urban scale and the resulting walkability. The Netherlands has plenty of modernist and even brutalist architecture yet every city there is a pretty nice p…
Important to note is how most cities have two (or more) zones; the old inner city for leisure, tourism, shopping and going out, the suburban areas around it where most people live, and industrial / office building estates where most people work. Amsterdam is a great example [0] and well-known for a lot of tourists, with the city center being the tourism hub, the zones around it for living, west/northwest for industry…
I spent two weeks in Amsterdam South where I rented an apartment. Commuting to the centre on a tram or even cycling there was no problem. Even though the centre is where most tourists hang out, the surrounding neighbourhoods are just as walkable and bikeable as the inner city.
Re: Pontevedra, Spain declares its entire urban area a "reduced traffic zone"
#104[flagged]
Those darn Leftists! Imagine the paradise if we made protesting illegal and just let corporations and government have full control over our lives.
Yeah man, damn Europe is limiting businesspeople to do business! If they just let go of all these stupid laws that protect the population, a few people might get really rich! Why wouldn't they want that?
Re: Pontevedra, Spain declares its entire urban area a "reduced traffic zone"
#105I think the thing that really struck a chord with me about car-centric development, as someone who lives in a city with fairly poor public transport (by certain standards, it would actually be quite good if it were in the US) and where driving is the norm for getting around - Prioritising cars actually makes things worse for drivers. We spend many tens of billions of dollars a year on roads in my state and traffic in…
The Power Broker by Robert Caro, a biography of Robert Moses that's particularly focused on his long career in the government of New York, is, quite aside from a fascinating psychological portrait and a parable about how bad it is when someone has untrammeled power in a bureaucracy, an absolutely fantastic case study in how building more roads makes traffic worse. And it was published in 1974! For anyone that cares t…
Seconded - I'm currently listening to the audiobook of this book and I find it utterly fascinating.
Re: Pontevedra, Spain declares its entire urban area a "reduced traffic zone"
#106Re: Pontevedra, Spain declares its entire urban area a "reduced traffic zone"
#107Re: Pontevedra, Spain declares its entire urban area a "reduced traffic zone"
#108I think the thing that really struck a chord with me about car-centric development, as someone who lives in a city with fairly poor public transport (by certain standards, it would actually be quite good if it were in the US) and where driving is the norm for getting around - Prioritising cars actually makes things worse for drivers. We spend many tens of billions of dollars a year on roads in my state and traffic in…
Public transit needs a lot of money and time so I'm not sure it's even doable for many NA cities. One middle point I think might be more reachable is to build good transit for the busiest part of the city (downtown) and build large parking lots around the terminals, so people can still drive to the terminal and then switch to bus. I live in a suburb on the Montreal island and this is the model the city is trying to b…
If you look at pictures of cities from the early 1900s, one of things you realize is that even small towns of only ~20k people managed to fairly reliably have a streetcar line or two in them. (Actually, a lot of these systems still exist, the streetcars have just been replaced with buses.)
What happened to most NA cities is that they fully embraced the car by tearing down the city to make room for parking lots; there's a few cities where every other block in the city center is a surface parking lot. Combine this with systematic underinvestment in public transit (because it's seen as for people who are too poor to own a car), and you can see how we ended up where we did.
The main obstacle to fixing this isn't really money, it's in getting people to accept public transit as something that could be a viable mode of transit for them. There are far too many people who think that public transit is inherently unsafe and that by riding it they are at extreme risk of getting shanked (which includes the current Secretary of Transportation).
Re: Pontevedra, Spain declares its entire urban area a "reduced traffic zone"
#109Earlier quoted context omitted.
Train oriented people always forget that trains don't transport people from the origin to the destination. You still need to get to and from a train station. With all your groceries, gear, children's things, etc. Oh and you might be odor sensitive, but there's a lady next to you on the train that covered herself in perfume.
I have 4 supermarkets in a 10 min walk radius, to reach one of them I don't even need to cross a single public street. Same for schools, I know of 3 in my street, there are probably more but as I don't have kids I wouldn't know. I think you missed the entire point, it's a design choice, if you design everything around cars of course going grocery shopping will require a car... my supermarkets don't even have parking…
> it's a design choice
Yes. Americans chose big houses and yards.
Re: Pontevedra, Spain declares its entire urban area a "reduced traffic zone"
#110Earlier quoted context omitted.
If the union strike is so inconvenient, management should agree on a deal promptly.
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The unions want negotiations towards better pay and conditions, sometimes these demands are pretty transparent grift or make things unsafe, but usually they're just "Give us more money" and like, yeah, give them more money.
An example of making things unsafe: One of the railway unions took strike action to preserve 12 hour shifts for signallers. That might seem counter-intuitive, who wants 12 hour shifts? Well, you work 3 x 12 hour shifts, that's your week = 4 days per week off. Whereas if the safety reform demands max hour 8 shifts that's only 2-3 days off, so of course affected signallers hated that.
Why was it unsafe? Well humans can't really work 12 hours. We get bored & our minds wander, if it's dark and warm we fall asleep or stumble around dazed. And a signaller's job is normally pretty calm, you could do it half asleep and it'd be OK. "Ding ding" that's the last city express, pull 18, wait a beat, press buzzer, pull 19 and 25. But, sometimes it gets very exciting very fast, and that's why it's a job for a skilled human. "Ding ding" - the express, pull 18, it sticks, uh, what? Pull harder, still sticks. Er... now you should be wide awake, that express at 100mph is about to reach a Danger signal, is it because there's really danger? What should you do? But you are tired, it's been a long day, release 16 and that'll fix it right? Now 18 moves. But wait there's a loud noise and this needle is deflected, what did I do? And now the phone is ringing. We've just de-railed the back half of the slow coal train that was still crossing right in front of the express we've just given a green light. Hope nobody dies.
But this is the exception not the rule.