Driving and the automobile are a blight on American society

[MarSolo]

14 hours ago, Scott said:

I rode my first ebike last week. Total game changer. It was incredible. If I lived in a city that had any discernible bicycling infrastructure I would immediately buy an ebike and use that to get around. Yes, I could ride a regular bicycle, but I can't show up disgustingly sweaty to work. Also, I am separated from work by 10 miles of 2 lane country highway. I would be killed the first day I tried to ride. Wish more cities would put in dedicated bike lanes (and bike highways linking nearby cities).

 

I’m sorry, what are ebikes?

[Guest]

1 hour ago, MarSolo said:

 

I’m sorry, what are ebikes?

 

Electric motor assisted bikes. You still pedal, but a built in motor assists in propelling you.

[Keyser_Soze]

9 minutes ago, sblfilms said:

 

Electric motor assisted bikes. You still pedal, but a built in motor assists in propelling you.

 

So like a moped?

[Jason]

1 minute ago, Keyser_Soze said:

 

So like a moped?

 

No, because there's no throttle, the motor only kicks in when you pedal.

[thewhyteboar]

As the mayor notes in this interview with newspaper Le Parisien, traffic on Paris’s roads has been reducing at a rate of 5 percent every year during her term, a reduction that is not always apparent on the roads because car lane space has also been reduced. With the number of cars steadily falling, Hidalgo has suggested steadily removing parking spaces and replacing each one with mini-gardens, a process that is due to start already this year on Avenue Daumesnil, an axial thoroughfare bisecting the city’s southeast.

 

This is what cities should be doing 

[Remarkableriots]

https://www.staradvertiser.com/2019/07/05/breaking-news/best-way-to-fight-climate-change-plant-a-trillion-trees/

Quote

The most effective way to fight global warming is to plant lots of trees, a study says. A trillion of them, maybe more.

And there’s enough room, Swiss scientists say. Even with existing cities and farmland, there’s enough space for new trees to cover 3.5 million square miles (9 million square kilometers), they reported in Thursday’s journal Science. That area is roughly the size of the United States.

The study calculated that over the decades, those new trees could suck up nearly 830 billion tons (750 billion metric tons) of heat-trapping carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. That’s about as much carbon pollution as humans have spewed in the past 25 years.

Much of that benefit will come quickly because trees remove more carbon from the air when they are younger, the study authors said. The potential for removing the most carbon is in the tropics.

 

[Keyser_Soze]

55 minutes ago, thewhyteboar said:

This is what cities should be doing 

 

But they won’t because they’re nyeons. Am I right @thewhyteboar?

[johnny]

I one day hope to live close enough to work that I can walk or have a short bike ride 

[thewhyteboar]

2 hours ago, Keyser_Soze said:

 

But they won’t because they’re nyeons. Am I right @thewhyteboar?

Hey Seoul has a decent amount of greenspace. Or at least, near where I live.

[Remarkableriots]

34 minutes ago, johnny said:

I one day hope to live close enough to work that I can walk or have a short bike ride 

My apartment building is next door to my job location. If i cover a shift at one of the other locations they're all within a 10 minute walk from my apartment.

[Keyser_Soze]

1 hour ago, thewhyteboar said:

Hey Seoul has a decent amount of greenspace. Or at least, near where I live.

 

If it wasn’t for that pesky air pollution you could probably sit outside and enjoy that greenspace  

[Commodore D]

It's nice to not have to drive, I've only put a little over 1000 miles on my cars in the past three years. I take public transportation almost everyday. Even reduced the house hold number of cars from four to two in the last couple months. 

[Commodore D]

On ‎7‎/‎9‎/‎2019 at 3:46 PM, b_m_b_m_b_m said:

And specifically to the advantage of rich white folks at the expense of poor people of all colors (but mostly black people of any level of wealth)

 

Take Richmond VA as an example. I-95 went right through the 'Harlem of the South' in Jackson Ward in the 50's for the Richmond-Petersburg turnpike. Then, with these people not really being compensated sufficiently for their losses, public housing was build en masse to give them a place to sleep, giving you one of the largest concentration of public housing on the east coast, which to this day continues to plague the city with crime. (In addition to other 'slum clearing' projects such as razing the Fulton Hill neighborhood) In the 70's they blasted through the working class white neighborhood of Oregon Hill for the downtown expressway, but did not continue to build through wealthy Windsor Farms, even though the highway master plan had this happening.

 

This thread/topic I could go on for a long time so I'll stop now. But like all things in (especially) midcentury US after Jim Crow, it was done to help rich white people at the expense of blacks.

When ODOT tried to run a freeway through my city years ago, the people in the city pooled their money together, got man made lakes and the parks surrounding designated as nature preservation areas. Worked like a charm (obviously most communities can't do this). 

 

What you are speaking of is currently happening to support the Cleveland Clinic and its doctors that reside on the West side of Cleveland. They are calling the new route Opportunity Corridor. Runs right through an area that the current and past two Cleveland mayors removed the police and house inspector presence, leading to a heavily dilapidated area, that was then taken for pennies on the dollar through tax liens and nuisance laws   (somewhat kicking myself for not buying a bunch of foreclosure in that area when I had the thoughts around 2009).