TIL

Huh. If traffic is more likely to kill me than violent crime, it’s a dishonest emotional reaction to fear traffic more than violent crime?

Yes, if your city has more homicides than traffic deaths, the bigger problem is—drum roll please—homicides.

But if your city has more traffic deaths than homicides, then traffic is a bigger problem than homicides. Which is the whole point of this post.

I don’t think that that was the claim. We have car terrorism now, and since the 1980’s according to the Wikipedia list of incidents, and bollards can help protect potential victims. It’s not a new technology, they knew about them in 1931, so what’s our excuse for not installing them?

It feels like 5 years ago, but it was only back in January that a man used a truck to kill 14 people in a ramming attack on Bourbon Street in New Orleans, LA. The city had been warned, and knew of the need to have bollards installed, but cheaped out on temporary bollards, which were apparently malfunctioning at the time of the attack. There had been a vehicle-ramming attack at the Christmas market in Magdeburg in December, and an attack in Munich following in February.

I’d say that the title is right on. Car terrorism is a thing.

The right wing propaganda machine had been at work on Hillary since even before Bill was elected President in '92, so that could certainly explain it.

Dammit. At least I was able to maintain the comforting illusion until I got to work.

This has got to be rage-bait. Nobody is this fucking dumb, right? Please let me believe it’s rage-bait at least until after breakfast.

I’m saying that more people voted for Hillary Clinton than her male opponent, which flatly contradicts the claim that people wouldn’t vote for a woman. But let me ask the question: If the GOP nominated Kristi Noem as its candidate for president in 2028, would you rest assured that she couldn’t win because of misogyny?

The country did vote for a white woman the previous time: Hillary Clinton won the popular vote.

As Jason Slaughter (Not Just Bikes) says—and I agree—any city street with more than one car lane in each direction is an abject failure of urban planning. Multi-lane roundabouts should never exist in places where people are expected to walk.

If enough people are going the same direction at the same time that they need more than one lane for cars, then that’s the perfect route for transit.

Once, I arrived in Chicago by train, and had time to wander around before my bus departed for home. I walked around for a bit outside of Union Station, scanning the horizon and trying to locate the Sears Tower. (Yeah, I know it technically has a new name.) I couldn’t find it. Then, I realized that I had to look up.

That is, the train station is literally 1 block from the tallest building in the city. I so wish that the Borealis train came through here; it’d be just as fast, cheaper, and so much more relaxing to head down to The Loop for the weekend. As it is, I almost never visit Chicago because getting there is such an enormous pain in the ass. (Contrary to the popular imagination, it is a nice place. I’ve only been murdered there, like, three times, tops.)

My niece has been getting heavily into skincare. As long as we’re being honest, most of a typical “skincare routine” is placebo, and some of it is actively counter-productive. I know a few women who have a laissez-faire approach to skincare, and their results are almost as good. I believe that the routine is more about the ritual, and psychic need to try to gain some measure of control in a crazy society, than results.

That’s the leftist ideal. (Which, true, few people fully reach.)

It still floors me that there are parking minimums for bars.

Here’s the thing: “Family-hauler” is so dumb. In a sane society, that wouldn’t even be a thing. Those kids should have the freedom to get around on their own, but they can’t because of all the super-sized “family-haulers” that would kill them.

TIL a new acronym, but one doesn’t need to infer the purpose of the system from what it does. The designers of the system said out loud that segregation was a feature. They gave speeches and wrote memos about it.

I keep recommending The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America by Richard Rothstein. In the book, he documents how the modern suburb was created through zoning in order to keep Black people out by making living there too expensive, both through the land cost and the car needed to navigate it. It’s really crazy just how open and deliberate it was!

Often I feel that people believe that paved roads are naturally-occurring, geological formations. As evidence, I submit the people complaining about road construction and maintenance work as if it’s a ploy by the government to obstruct their travel, or the Lemming that I ran into a few weeks ago who was convinced that people in poor, developing countries have to drive cars, because it’s too expensive to build bicycle infrastructure.

This is why we call them “gender-affirming vehicles,” or “emotional support trucks.”