Maybe but I think it's very very very bad policy. For example: The War on Cars. Decent content but the framing alienates people and creates a wedge issue where none need exist. We need to get folks on the same page instead of dividing them. When you say you're anti-car folks who drive a car will say well I drive a car, you're anti-me!! And then we now have people who might otherwise be indifferent becoming hostile to transit.
We could even build these special purpose, heavy duty roads out of something stronger than asphalt, like metal. Then once we have these sturdy new metal roads for trucks, we can raise the weight limit to allow them to carry heavier loads. And since there’s no little cars getting in the way, we could even group together multiple trucks going in the same direction for better logistical efficiency.
My Gmail account is old enough that I needed a beta invite from a cooler friend. As a cool kid myself, I registered a name full of punctuation. For decades Google has treated the punctuated and unpunctuated addresses as one and the same. There is no distinct Google account that can be access via one username or the other.
Is it gonna be one of those things where increased safety encourages dumb people because "it is watertight you know" so now a lot more people drive into the floods, and even though it's a smaller proportion more people in total drown.
> It costs nothing to turn around and not drive through a flood.
Sometimes it may be the least bad option, floods can get pretty wild and extensive. Maybe someone travels around in deltas commonly and like the extra safety?
Yeah but Musk tweets that his cars "will briefly serve as a boat" and then all the clout chasers film themselves KO'ing their Cybertrucks in streams and salty beaches.
Public transit should be worth the (inexpensive) cost of a ticket. The money used to make fares free should instead be spent on improving the quality of service. Better service attracts more riders, bringing in more ticket revenue, enabling further service improvements, and so on. It produces a positive flywheel effect that benefits current passengers, new passengers, and even drivers!
Free transit is a downward cycle, where increased ridership just increases costs, creating a negative flywheel.
Counterexample: Public transport throughout Luxembourg (the entire country, not just the capital city) is free. As in beer. Clean, safe, and reliable, too.
The positive "flywheel effect" where transport connectivity enables network effects does exist, but it does not follow that free public transport leads to negative effects.
Behavior by cyclists certainly has a bias towards survivorship. Every other vehicle on the road represents a potentially lethal threat at any time.
Inadequate dedicated infrastructure for cyclists leads to behavior like "Idaho stops" that look counterintuitive to drivers, but improves safety for cyclists at intersections.
Horse-drawn busses predate private automobiles by almost a hundred years.[0] The movement to pave roads was started by bicyclists decades before the rise of the automobile.[1] Cars usurped preexisting infrastructure and drove out other road users, like trolleybusses and streetcars.
We have so thoroughly remade society in the service of cars that it can be difficult to recognize any possible alternative.
Paved roads have been
around for thousands of years longer than the bicycle.
> Horse-drawn busses predate private automobiles by almost a hundred years.
And they used roads that already existed for transit and transport. People have always built roads.
> Cars usurped preexisting infrastructure and drove out other road users, like trolleybusses and streetcars.
This is some significant historical revisionism. You’re making it sound like all the roads were built for buses and streetcars.
The good roads movement is certainly interesting history. But I don’t think it changes the reality that buses are only workable because they are mostly piggybacking on infrastructure buit for other vehicles.
Of course, that’s rather the point of roads, that they are infrastructure that benefits many forms of transit and transportation.
Unfortunately it sounds like this program is designed to maximize revenue for the private vendor, not make roads safer by changing driver behavior. The county is also using this surface-level fix as an excuse to avoid more fundamental road design changes that would actually improve safety for vulnerable road users.
Other automated enforcement mechanisms like average speed cameras and automated tolling are more effective at achieving their purported goals. Ultimately, enforcement will always be secondary to proper road design in both cost and effectiveness.
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