Dunkaccino

Just desperately wanting to imagine a horrific future so that they can smugly say they were right. Dead end thought

Joe is great and actually takes his right to be on the road seriously, unlike Philly drivers who violate just about every law & rule on the books

It's deeply imperfect, and the most likely equilibrium is that they're cheaper and better taxis for urban & semi-urban areas. But that, combined with the "dramatically safer than a human" aspect makes me cautiously hopeful that they could spur a sea change vs the private car status quo.

My take on it is that there is no near future where we ban cars and flip the dominant land use pattern in the US to walkable urbanism. With that premise, a car that:
- kills 99% fewer people
- is polite to pedestrians
- is not privately owned (ergo no driveway)
...is a great step forward.

Californication will come for us all; whether someone cares & fights (like in CA) or just gives up and let's the NIMBYs have their way with things will determine each state's fate over the next 50 years

Single story taupe-colored building in San Francisco's outer sunset neighborhood, in front of trolley tracks

Within the decade this will no longer look like a rendering of dystopia

Years of under-building has resulted in city livers in denial about where they live!!

SB 79 — our bill allowing more housing near public transportation — just received final approval by the Senate & IS ON ITS WAY TO THE GOVERNOR!

This bill is a huge step for housing, transit & climate action. Thank you colleagues!

And I just don't think that will work. The driving incentives are too strong, the patterns too baked in. To truly have good suburbs, you HAVE to fully sacrifice car access, even if it means that only an affluent few can access it- because you can build that core out more than you can retrofit it.

If you look at the classic streetcar suburbs, their success stems from a good transit link combined with small-scale urbanism.

New Urbanist developments try to recreate the form, while missing the function. I think the author misses that in favor of arguing incrementalism.

The fundamental tension in the suburbs is that of driveability vs walkability. To get one, you must sacrifice the other, and lots of the New Urbanist model relies upon trying to have your cake and eat it too. Planning for driving by building costly alleyways is still planning for driving.

Screenshot of the paragraph starting "It also means designing for evolution"

I think this misses the mark, badly. It recognizes issues with New Urbanism, but then recommends a treatment that is essentially the car-oriented status quo with an undefined hope of evolution into something good...eventually

No useless half-measures. Join us tonight!

The City of Philadelphia is expediting reversing the street direction of the 600 block of South LeCount Street. This may save lives. Immediate action is possible!

Comment from Andrea about apartments charging for parking

If cities listened to drivers, parking everywhere would be free, every building would be on top of a garage, and they'd be bankrupt cause no one would want to go there

A quick check in with the urban planners of the 1950s would suggest that their prognosis of "destroy the city so that the suburbanites can drive in".... didn't quite pan out

My most pro-zoning opinion is that drive throughs are a nuisance land use that should be illegal.

New tool launch! Make our streets and sidewalks safer and more accessible with LASER VISION: our new tool that makes it easy to report blocked sidewalks, crosswalks, and bike lanes to the Philadelphia Parking Authority. bikeaction.org/laser 📽️⬇️

Ahh, I'm actually very familiar with that one! If you take the regional rail from Media station, it's $6.50. If you take the D1 trolley to the L, it's $2.50 (due to free transfer).

Almost 3x the cost is absurd!

As is, it currently becomes approximately cost competitive to Uber once you hit 4 people. If you made that your threshold & offered reliable service, you could get a lot of riders you wouldn't normally have

SEPTA offers multi-tap on SEPTA keys, where one rider can tap multiple times for friends traveling with them. I'd love to see that expanded on with a decreasing cost for each additional rider & beyond a certain point additional fares are free. It would encourage more group riders!

Feels like single zone fares could be self-defeating? Obviously a transit agency is operating service regardless, but a 30+ mi service will de facto cost more to operate than a <10mi local, so wouldn't removing zones just mean more costly trips?

Got some free time on this beautiful Sunday? Come on out and join us at the Spruce bike lane cleanup at 21st & spruce!

Screenshot of a tweet with no text and a date of the beginning of the Unix epoch (January 1st, 1970, 00:00:00)

Just a great app, real shambling corpse energy

Elon breaks everything he touches- Twitter, the government, his marriages...

What are the odds this is funded by some slumlord?

cannot be overstated how much fascism is built around the conviction that you have a right to be lied to in a way that affirms your most hateful beliefs, and how determined modern fascists are to build a bubble of lies that never force them to confront the fact that the world is complicated

Much like any other cult, they will go down denying they've been had. The ego REALLY doesn't like the dissonance of realizing you've been a mark!

Freedom is annoying! To have freedom requires responsibility, and people want to be lazy, and dogmatic, and not have to contend with the consequences of their decisions. The Constitution has been a radical rejection of that impulse!

How Far do your tax dollars for Transit go?

After people complaining over and over that SEPTA was inefficient, I had to run the numbers of Ridership to Operating budgets and would you look at that.
Not only is SEPTA good with money, but they are literally the best in the US