PedestrianError :vbus: :nblvt:

@UltraMagnus @frizzo Particularly for 2+ car households, a family could trade one of their midsized sedans or SUVs for a kei car and use the bigger one when they go on a weekend road trip or one of them travels out of town on business.

@UltraMagnus @frizzo One thing we need to do is allow cities to ban personal vehicles over a certain size within their dense urban cores to cut down on crash danger, property damage, and congestion and other nuisances due to oversized vehicles parked where they don’t fit. That way someone who lives an urban lifestyle could choose a minimalist car with less concern about mixing it up with monster trucks on their daily errands.

@andrewrgross @HiddenLayer555 Also that urban planners don’t actually plan cities in the US, traffic engineers do. Planners only decide what to do with the land that’s left after people who know nothing about cities have made plans for everyone to speed around in a private car and how much of that space has to be mandatorily devoted to parking the cars.

@Fabrik872 @Sine_Fine_Belli Though we’re not the majority, there are plenty of USians who don’t live in sprawl hell and there’s probably some correlation between going to public downtown events and living and/or working near downtown. Suburbanites who commute to a downtown office are likely to be somewhat more familiar with transit options than their neighbors who never leave suburbia.

@technocrit Using taxpayer money that they’re granted due to the outsourcing of government functions like NASA and communications to bail out their incompetent boss’s other failing business which was initially built on tax credits supposedly created to address climate change. None of Musk’s companies are profitable, they’re just good at stealing from the mooks who run governments.

@vsg @technocrit This has all gotten much worse over the last few decades as state governments have systematically defunded public higher education and tried to “run it like a business” instead of an essential public service at the same time as degrees were becoming more essential to earning a living wage.

@vsg @technocrit Most don’t have enough for all their students and they’re expensive to live in if they are available. A lot of larger schools are surrounded by outrageously expensive private for-profit student housing complexes built on the ability to overcharge teenagers living off student loans for crappy accommodations without them understanding how badly they’re being ripped off. Meanwhile homeowners near universities lobby to ban affordable rentals to protect their property values.

@phed @lgsp If you’re driving and the environment including the presence of other road users is making you feel uncomfortable, slowing down should help.

Also, you do know that at a crossing without a light, you have to stop for pedestrians, right? They stand on the edge of the curb to let you know they want to cross. If they stand back out of the way, they might never get to cross until a really kind driver comes along and there aren’t many of those these days.

@CompactFlax @lechekaflan Much of what I hear from New Yorkers lately is complaints that Transportation Alternatives has become too centrist during his time there.

@brbposting @Taldan Reading a paper map and looking up directions before you drive and then remembering them are critical skills that should be on driving tests.

@vanes What a tragic irony considering her work to try to fix our murderous transportation system.

@Jollyllama That’s important and needed grassroots work, but it would be made a lot easier if universities reformed their civil engineering curriculum to reflect scientific understanding of the harms caused by promoting cars and trucks as the primary modes of transportation so that advocates didn’t have to start by providing basic education to alleged professional experts who have been granted a degree that gives them power to rearrange communities.

@limer @Fredthefishlord But many of those arseholes aren’t driving, they’re sitting in offices designing dangerous streets or vehicles.

@canihasaccount I hope all the other faculty at NC State gang up on the civil engineering department to demand changes in what and how they teach. NCDOT is a terrible, deeply anti-pedestrian state DOT that does everything it can to prevent meaningful safety improvements and the bulk of their workforce comes from NC State.

@setsneedtofeed @Vaya Your chances of getting punched, groped, or pickpocketed on public transit are still far lower than your chances of suffering bodily injury or property damage from a non-fatal traffic crash.

@Vaya So if we’re going to deploy the military domestically in the name of public safety, the best use of their resources would be to park their tanks on highways and stroads to block off excess lanes and prevent the extreme speeding that’s so rampant on US roads.

@BanMe @AA5B Cameras do nothing for people who are hit with the vehicle because the driver is operating it negligently or to reduce the environmental impact (in fact they increase it by using more energy & rare earth minerals). Cameras are a very expensive harm reduction strategy, not a full solution to the problem of oversized vehicles.

@FlashMobOfOne @jjjalljs I take transit more than I drive because I care about the environment. I’ve had a few uncomfortable encounters with unwell or overentitled people on transit. I’ve had many more encounters where my life was actually endangered by reckless drivers while driving (and that’s not even counting all the drivers who’ve almost killed me while I was walking or biking).

@Pyr_Pressure Are you talking about a curb or a wall between the street & the sidewalk? Regardless, people don’t cross exclusively at crosswalks, people who park along the street need to get onto the sidewalk, etc. Turning sidewalks into fortresses would be highly inefficient and have a lot of unintended consequences. We need more limits on where and how fast cars can go and safety features like automatic braking to prevent crashes, not to rearrange the whole built environment for cars again.

@Pyr_Pressure @rocky1138 That would lead to a lot more broken ankles and other more serious injuries for people walking, not to mention making it a lot more challenging to make sidewalks ADA accessible.