I'm stuck on this rock with people like that. The worst part is they speak with such confidence and authority that their opinions will carry more weight than mine in the real world.
It amazes me that this country literally has state borders built around rail systems, a huge dependence on rail for shipping, but decided to just pave over trolley rails, and jack prices of train transit to thousands of dollars for just a few hundred miles. Then the government forces us to pay shittons of money into our vehicles in taxes, insurance, etc without regulating the private companies that we're forced to pay. Meanwhile other countries have super fast trains to travel, subsidized with tax money, and travel seems to be more efficient.
Fun fact: The faster a car travels, the bigger the spacing between the cars gets. That's necessary to leave enough distance for emergency stops.
While the speed increases linearly, the spacing increases with the square, meaning at double the speed, the spacing quadruples, which in turn means that throughput (number of cars per hour) halves.
This is the reason why many regions use electronic speed signs to drop the speedlimit lower when there's congestion. Because it increases throughput and thus reduces travel times.
The optimum speed for high throughput is 30km/h.
Counterintuitive as it might be, drivers should be all for 30km/h speed limit in cities, because it would make them get to work faster.
As a cyclist I've noticed a, harshness, recently. In Ontario our premier did a distraction campaign where he villanised bike lanes. Turns out he was talking about a couple of specific ones but all of the sudden, after biking in town for years. People nearly hit me. There is no Lee way any more. I've been swiped by mirrors and pickup trucks try to roll coal on me (pretty sure you little dicks need a diesel and your just fucking up your engines for nothing) because I like a bike ride on a sunny day. Or want to stay in shape. Or need to get to work. It really does feel like "get a haircut and drive an f150!!!" around here and that wasn't always the case.
A MAGA-before-there-was-MAGA family member of mine actually used to say "If we didn't have these big slow buses on the streets, and commuter trains blocking the rail crossings, we wouldn't have a traffic problem."
Higher speeds do the opposite for congestion than what you'd think. If everyone and their mum wants to drive on the same stretch of highway at 5pm sharp, there's not enough space - at speed.
Obviously, everyone fits when standing still. The amount of asphalt is immense.
Reducing the speed limit from 120kph to 80 will allow 50% more cars to fit on the same stretch of road, thereby reducing stop and go, and not really impacting your average speed; you'd be stopping and going during rush hour, anyway. But now traffic flows, which is safer and easier to follow.
Why? Because - let's assume safe driving - every car has two seconds of safety distance to the car in front. Those two seconds remain two seconds, but that means the distances you need are twice as large with 120kph than with 60kph. Your car length doesn't even really matter, two seconds at 120kph are ~67m. So the road will always transport 1 car every two seconds per lane, no matter the speed.
You can either rage in a congestion, not knowing if farther up someone has caused a crash and completely blocked everything, or drive slower but steadily. The throughput of the road is the same.
The Soviet Union is long gone. Communist should no longer be a derisive and should sound like a 20th century cliché in 2025.
I wonder (can't confirm) if the evergreen state of communist or socialist as derision is due to the far right propaganda industrial complex still pushing (hard) that anything that isn't capitalism is a moral wrong.
Reminds me of a quote "Every single drop of water felt it could not be to blame for causing the tidal wave/flood"
Me remembering it is a little rough, but the concept stays the same lol.
Congrats on winning the argument, anyone who gets told this. If their entire argument is "you're a commu-social-marxist" then they have no argument and they're delusionally living in the McCarthy age.
Who the fuck do you think you're talking to like this?
LMAO am I supposed to know who this guy is? Because this sounds like an "I'm so important you should have more respect and by respect I mean do what I say" but it could be a "you aren't fooling anyone" I suppose.
Who cars what science says, I love my penis-size-compensating huge truck, so I want more and faster lanes!
Well, mr dumbfuck, why don't you go to North Korea, they have 5 lane highways and only 3 cars a day driving them. Oh wait, true communists have no traffic jams? What?
Poorly implemented bike lanes do create a lot of congestion though.
My city just half assed bike lanes so one street has them and others do not, with bikes having to constantly enter and leave vehicle lanes as bike lanes appear and then disappear.
This just leads to less people using bikes and then the bike lanes that are installed go unused while taking up space from the road.
Either go all in on bike lanes or don't, stop half assing it city planners.
Just because you made a bike lane doesn't mean you are a green city, the lanes actually have to be used!
Cars create congestion, so they build more roads, so things are further away, so the can sell more cars (and gas), so they can get more tax revenue, but more cars on the road creates more congestion, so they build more roads ....
Y'all are both stupid. Society creates congestion in car-transportation and on-foot transportation. Mass transportation is just more efficient in certain societal configurations and needs. There will still be trucks and deliveries of all kinds and workers and shit that need to use cars for their jobs to be efficient.
A lot of people could use mass transportation or try to reduce the distance they need to travel, but all of this petty back and forth is fucking stupid and worthless if it remains petty and shallow, and continues to avoid the real topic, which is not cars, which are just tools that allow an individual a range of autonomy that is faster and further in certain societal configurations.
So, the issue should be societal configurations (and human values), not cars.
Using cars is such an unproductive wedge issue that just irritates everybody who can see the bigger issues. It's noble, but amounts to basically greenwash trolling to anybody outside of your community (fuckcars). It's a hyperfixation on a ultra specific, single-solution to an ultra broad collection of societal efficiency and random other related topics that feels like some of you are just misplacing personal childhood trauma, and really need therapy, or you just enjoy being irritating, thus my belief that some of this really is just greentrolling, which, if you really wanted to fix stuff, there are better ways of doing it.
To be absolutely transparent, I don't entirely dislike y'all's existence, in fact, I quite appreciate it in many ways. But, everytime I see one of your posts or memes, I just kinda.... Tsk. And it irritates me a little bit, I can't upvote it, and I think I've finally been able to put that irritation into words, and feel compelled to voice my opinion.
NYC is so fucking hostile that even if they did implement those things, absolutely no one would use them. Half of it wouldn't fit in the part of Manhattan that has congestion pricing anyway.
What actually causes congestion is a shit ton of cars trying to kill each other to get 5ft ahead of the next guy while competing with box trucks and ebikes for the only lane that isn't blocked by a double parked cop car.