Hot take:
No matter how good or crap you think the traffic laws are in your place are, the best bet is to follow them because if you don’t you will likely have to pay a lot of money that you probably don’t have to just throw away. Speed limits are limits, meaning maximums, merging should go like a zipper, yielding to traffic already up to speed is safest, driving without substances impairing your body is safest.
Its quite simple but a lot of people think they should be allowed to rebel against the laws and get away with doing whatever they want because the rules shouldn’t apply to them specifically.Be. The. Sunshine.
Be the honest dark cloud fogging up the narrative.
Just here checking in on the narrative.
It’s dark and foggy. But you’ll have to bear with it.
I know posts like that don’t actually help, but the people on the road can’t hear me when I yell at them for doing shit wrong and I need to get it out of my system.
Hot tip: if your bumper to bumper during congestion or construction periods. You need to have at least 2-3 (minimum 1) car spaces between you and the car/truck in front of you. This way you’ll maintain a steady speed (maybe btwn 2-9 mph) rather than coming to complete halt every stretch.
Yep. Tailgating causes fullstops.
Even hotter tip: on a highway, if the line on your right is free, switch to it. Left line(s) is only for overtaking.
Once drivers learn this simple rule, speed limits can be lifted on certain highway parts so whoever wants to go faster now can fulfill their desire.
But but but but
(Continuing on the meta where slowbros and campers took aim at a bumper sticker that said “keep right” with strawmen)
If we didn’t have to drive everywhere, we could eliminate these arguments 🤷♂️
increasing FB type paranoia
Um comparing this to my thread. Your off by two community posts…
This post was sending me, none of yal know how to drive like a standard human.
What discussion? Zipper merge is a well defined technique.
More like half the people know how to zipper merge and the other half try to justify merging a mile early and getting angry when people pass them and zipper merge properly.
Let pedestrians and cyclists go first. Scramble walk is okay and sjould be encouraged
I hate scramble walks that act like you can’t still walk while traffic is going. The light is green just turn the walk sign on.
50/50 about it. My premise was for stop signs and or yield signs in general. But for traffic lights I’d rather it red light all around and pedestrians go where the heck they need. Like in Chicago there is busy intersections in a densely populated neighborhood that has foot traffic of bars/restaurants etc. but pedestrians have to abide by traffic’s patterns?? Like that one-five driver decides to make a right turn and bam either you hit someone or someone rear ends or block the bus or just make long queue for the cars who go past the cross walk…
I like how I stumbled into your
sjouldright after you made me imagine the scramble-walk. Somehow my brain crossed circuits and when I readsjould, my imagined scramble-walker slipped on wet pavement and half fell (and then recovered, by hitting the word “encouraged”, lol).Brains are weird.
I support this wholeheartedly. Cars should be banned.
Sorry bud, you’re the party that doesn’t understand zipper merging.
Literally the first 2 posts as I opened the app
These ‘zipper merge’ vs ‘early merge’ arguments are really the worst. At the same time, the lack of consensus fully explains why merge zones like that are such a mess.
I remember driving through OK, and the state law is “early merge.” I thought it was all bullshit, buuut they have studies 1 year after they implemented it that it actually cut down on traffic somehow. I still believe the late zipper merge is better. Use the whole road until you can’t!
Its funny that 102 comments will lead to meta reaction posts here in the fediverse
GO AS FAST AS POSSIBLE DON’T STOP DON’T YIELD ONLY THE STRONG SURVIVE
If there’s heavy traffic in your city and private cars are still preferable to public transport, your infrastructure is shit and you should go pester your politicians about it
I’m in an odd situation where there’s heavy traffic but we have very good bike lanes and bike trails. Yet I am afraid to use the bike lanes most of the time because the drivers are so insane. And half the people who do ride bikes end up doing it wrong because they feel unsafe: they ride in the bike lane against traffic or just ride on the sidewalks where they become the threat: to pedestrians.
Public transport would still alleviate the issue by moving a portion of the drivers off the roads. Which, in turn, will make bike lanes safer.
How could having my own personal space that operates on my schedule ever not be preferable to being crammed into a smelly tube with a bunch of other people?
Maybe if you gave even a fraction of care that you give your car to the people around you, it wouldn’t be smelly and crammed.
What am I supposed to do about either of those issues?
Refer to my original comment
Pester politicians? To do what? Tell people to shower and lose weight?
To build more public transport instead of parking lots and highways lanes. Then you’ll have enough space to travel comfortably.
What do I do if the public transit is pretty good and the city is walkable, but all the jobs are in office parks 40 minutes out of town?
Pester your politicians that they forgot a part of the walkable city. Either a walkable workplace or work from home.
Hello, yes. I work in construction. I carry 50+lbs (23+kg) of tools and/or material to work (which constantly changes locations as buildings and projects finished being built).
How do I fit into the walkable city plan?
I never claimed everyone could work from home. But I think you’ll agree, that your commute would probably become quicker and less stressful, if the majority of office workers could stay at home.
Less traffic if you have to drive, less crowded public transport. As a side effect life in the city might also become less stressful, as the noise from traffic reduces.
So the city isn’t walkable, then
Define walkable.
I can walk to literally everything I need in my daily life except my job, and the share of residents lucky enough to work in the city can walk or bike to those too. My city scores incredibly high in both walk and bike scores; this drives real estate prices up, which drives employers to the suburbs, and—wouldn’t you know it!—the cheapest places to build office parks are situated away from the commuter transit.
Walkable: jobs, homes, and basic essentials shopping coexist near enough to each other.
It’s not walkable if you only have 2 out of 3.
except my job
That’s not walkable. The definition is not that difficult
The definition is not that difficult
Idk if you’re trolling or just obstinate, but if you don’t explain the exact definition you are using, it is impossible to determine what meets it and what does not.
For example:
Walkability is a measure of how accessible services and amenities are by foot or transit. A city is walkable if a broad range of these are thusly available.
They’re not being obstinate. You are working very hard not to understand that your job has to be walkable too.
Sure, your definition works. Your place of work is obviously included into the list of location that needs to be accessible, since it’s somewhere you commute to almost every day.
Fair enough, but I would contend “a broad range” is compatible with “all but one”
Let me just walk my 315lb welder to work each morning. Can I borrow your kids radio flyer after you walked them to school?
If your job makes you take a welder home with you at night, you need a new job.
If only the only people that use cars on a daily basis were the ones that actually need to, maybe you wouldn’t be so bitter and angry about it.
these days, it involves yelling
It’s strange, my coworker said the roads were really crazy last night. First light i tunred at, left turn by the way, with green arow, dude ran the red and almost hit me. Is it something in the water?
This is every day where I live. It’s madness. Otherwise, the place is paradise. Beautiful area. People are great here. Until you get them into a car. Then they are inattentive, pushy, and unsafe. People die every single year. Kids on bikes get plowed over. It’s insane.
At a 4-way intersection, if I stop around the same time as a car to my right I always yield to them according to the “right hand rule” of right-of-way. But everyone else wants to go only by “who reached the line first” and they want to time it down to the millisecond. And guess what: they always, always determine that they arrived first.
Funny how that works. They’ve changed the rule from “right of way goes to whoever arrived first, defer to car on your right when in doubt” to “it’s always my turn.”
I think it’s a barometer for the overall mental health climate. We’re any combination of overworked, broke, tired, we got news organizations trying to keep us mad at each other all the time…and then we get on the road where it’s easy to pretend those other metal boxes aren’t filled with human beings.
I’m not above it. I’ve participated in my fair share of road rage parties. And I don’t have any solutions, just observations and memes. That’s all I got.
It’s deeper than that.
People have been doing this since cars became fast. There’s something in our brains that automatically turns driving into a battle.
Nah, it’s not just driving cars - I’ve seen the same happen with shopping carts in the grocery store.
I don’t know. I have never seen a shopping cart dispute half as bad as the aggressive/asshole drivers I see every damn day. I think it’s the anonymity…
Have you been to Costco?
This is a really good observation.
And there aren’t any traffic laws for shopping carts. Of course they are also less deadly.
but a whole lot more dangerous when you have 4 turning wheels instead of 2
I mean, you roll up on anyone in an aggressive/adversarial manner, regardless of the situation, you’re more likely to encourage pushback than agreement/compliance. Even if it’s just the perception of aggression, our primate brains are wired to stand our ground. Doesn’t matter who’s wrong or right, it’s about locking horns. It’s why online arguments are the way they are.
So… Aggressivity always escalates if people interact at random without a cooling period?
That’s quite a hypothesis. Seems realistic. I wonder if anybody tested it.
I’ve got a solution. It’s called a train.
Works really well when the nearest station is over a dozen miles away from your home, and you’ve got a full load of shopping bags with you.
It boggles the mind that Americans cannot figure out any other way to buy groceries than by using a car.
I cover all of our shopping needs comfortably with a bike along with walking to the closest store.
The problem is that you’ve fundamentally fucked up your built environment, and trying to paper over your failure with car apologia is just not going to cut it
I’ve got a solution for that one too. It’s called a train station. We need to build more of them.
Who needs the actual railways, amirite?
What about a bus?
Buses are awesome too!
But I think any bus route that runs for more than 5 years should just be replaced with a tram at that point, because trams are even better. Buses are great for temporary changes to routes, but they can’t beat trams for efficiency or convenience.
Take that Centralizationist attitude back to Reddit.
I think you deserve more freedoms. Right now you’ve got a car as your option, and if you’re lucky you can walk or bike to work. I want you to have your choice of bus, train, or tram to get to work. I want all three to be available to get you there in a reasonable time. The train goes faster, but you have to walk a bit farther to the station, so it’s good for exercise. The tram is slower, but you get to see the city as you go along and it’s very disability friendly thanks to level boarding. The bus goes along the lower traffic routes, it’s more direct but comes less often. I want you to have all three of those options, plus what you already have. And then you don’t have to risk your life or road rage. You can play Mario on your Nintendo while the train takes you home from work.
That’s a lot of infrastructure. Seems like it would require an exorbitant population density to support all that.
Why are we stacking everyone on top of each other? Every person, urban or rural, needs 2 acres of cropland to sustainably provide their food. That’s 320 people per square mile of agricultural land.
Why are we cramming 25,000 people into a square mile of urban blight? Why not spread out enough that we aren’t all huffing each other’s farts?
When you spread people out, you have to build more water and gas pipes, more internet cables, more roads, deliver things farther, send the garbage trucks farther, the post, the news… It all adds up to a LOT of money. Strong Towns is a financial consultancy organisation that helps cities get out of debt, and they keep finding the same pattern, very consistently, in American cities: The urban core generates tons of revenue for the city, and then the suburbs spend it all. The suburbs are making American cities broke, because they just cost way more to maintain than the residents are paying in taxes. The city is subsidising the suburbs.
America’s “welfare queens” are the people living in detached single family homes in cul-de-sacs and making 100,000 a year. If cities charged those welfare queens a fair amount of taxes, they’d all be broke and try to move into the urban core, and the housing problems would get even worse for poor people. So cities are stuck propping up a failed economic housing model while trying to figure a way out of the crisis.
The answer that Strong Towns keeps finding is to invest more money in medium density mixed use neighbourhoods. The kind of place where you can live down the road from your office and walk there on a nice day, or take a leisurely stroll to the tram station for a day trip into the city. Those wonderful neighbourhoods full of trees, which are quiet because there are less cars, where kids can ride their bikes to school in safety, are economic powerhouses. Those neighbourhoods make more tax dollars than they spend. And I think you deserve to live somewhere like that.
The urban core generates tons of revenue for the city,
The urban core is consuming the resources produced in the rural surroundings. Again, two acres of agricultural land per urban dweller. The population density of land used by/for humans is 320 per square mile.
and then the suburbs spend it all.
Agreed, the suburbs are terrible. More specifically, lawns are terrible. Replacing all those lawns with gardens and orchards would completely reverse that problem..
But again: every 320 people need a square mile of agricultural land, regardless of how densely you decide to pack those people. There is no replacement for that land area. Whether we cram ourselves in high-rise apartment buildings, or spread ourselves out among our crops, we’re using two acres of ag land per person.
We still need the rural roads, the rural water. Vegetation needs irrigation. We still need rural wires to convey solar and wind power from those agricultural areas back to the grid at large. Internet Cabling is a little less important: lower rural population density means substantially less interference for wireless.
The answer that Strong Towns keeps finding is to invest more money in medium density mixed use neighbourhoods. … And I think you deserve to live somewhere like that.
Please don’t wish that on me. That sounds like the worst of all worlds. None of the benefits of rurality; none of the benefits of urbanity. Not dense enough to actually justify public transit, but still packed in like sardines. Needing to leave home and go into the city for any sort of entertainment. Needing transportation, because you don’t have enough room to simply be comfortable where you live. Medium-Density mixed-use areas are the easiest for City Hall to tax, and the easiest for City Hall to neglect.
It seems that “Strong Towns” is primarily interested in maximizing tax revenue. I’ve got nothing against taxes, but the purpose of taxes is to serve the people. Cramming us into maximally-neglectable units isn’t serving us. It’s exploitation.
If you think that’s a lot of infrastructure, wait until you learn how huge roads are.
You’d have a point if you were getting rid of the roads. But you’re not. You’re leaving them underutilized, out in the boondocks, where they are needed and used to service farms and mines and everything else your urban centers require. Those same roads serving population densities of <10 people per square mile are readily capable of serving population densities of 320 people per square mile. So, again, why not spread out? Why cram ourselves in like sardines, where we need buses and trains and trams and subways and rentable scooters littered everywhere?
Better than nothing
Has it started getting hot out where you are recently? There is always a spike in bad driving when the weather gets nice.
“in these hot days is the mad blood stirring” -Romeo and Juliet
Yeah, they put a drug in the water known as DHMO. It drasticly affects your brain and motor functionality.
😳 are you telling me they put water, in the water?
Yo dawg I heard you like DHMO…
An important game maybe? Being Brazilian, I’ve always refrained from driving before big soccer games started, like World Cup or championship finals. People were crazy trying to get home.
There’s cocaine in the water so maybe
The clear solution is to park on the tracks inside a light rail station.
Edit: post context
I assume it shouldn’t be one at street level. Do you recommend an elevated station or an underground one?
https://maps.app.goo.gl/GC4RDV68mTKNzDyx5?g_st=ic
I have you tagged as “Seattle” already, so this is our city! She turned onto it south of here where it’s at grade, but this is the Mount Baker station where it is elevated.
lol elevated for sure https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/69951707
Get creative with it. Imagine you’re earning style points like in GTA.
This was an elevated station
God damnit , now I gotta go watch police academy 1-765 now
Who holds back the electric car?
Who makes Steve Guttenberg a star?
