FINALLY. A guy who actually knows what he's talking about

To me, it felt like waking up from the Matrix. The more I learned, the more I saw it everywhere. LA, I realized, is full of contradictions. We have density, but more often than not, it’s placed right along loud, dangerous, car-dominated corridors like Venice, La Brea, and Pico. We build apartments facing six-lane boulevards with no trees, no safe crossings, and nowhere to walk to. Meanwhile, the quiet, leafy streets just behind those corridors are protected, reserved almost exclusively for single-family homes and mansions. In LA, comfort and quiet are privatized. Everyone else gets noise and fumes.

I grew angry. Not just at the noise and fumes. But the systems that allowed this to be normalized. At a government that underfunds transit but widens highways. At a culture that treats cars as a birthright and housing as a commodity. At the way we’ve built a society that quietly inflicts violence on the most vulnerable people. Kids growing up with asthma, unhoused neighbors driven mad by all the traffic noise, families forced to trade safety and health for an affordable place to live.

I started to see the street not just as a place, but as a symptom. Of deeper choices. Of political cowardice. Of whose comfort we protect, and whose we sacrifice. And I can never unsee it. I didn’t just want to complain, I wanted to understand how we got here, and how we could get out of this.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/32814777

The dildo of consequences rarely arrives lubed.

I'm really not a fan of the cops arguing that the cyclist was partly to blame, though, and a €1000 fine is pretty damn low for breaking someone's leg and wrecking a good six months of their life.

cross-posted from: https://thelemmy.club/post/30633694

Traffic levels have been the same for 60 years showing induced demand in action. No matter how many car lanes you start with, or how many you add later, they will always be full.

His crime? He listens to scientists

https://www.ucdavis.edu/magazine/does-widening-highways-ease-traffic-congestion

Angry car brains are now trying to fire Mike Swire

At 5 p.m. on Thursday, July 10 (today!) in San Carlos (at Samtrans HQ or Zoom), the San Mateo County Transportation Authority (SMCTA) will vote on removing Mike Swire, one of its most vocal critics.

You can sign this letter here:

https://actionnetwork.org/letters/stop-smcta-board-from-silencing-critics?source=direct_link&link_id=1&can_id=25b80f35b8285f3fa952daafb4dfd0b4&email_referrer=email_2807548&email_subject=urgent-stop-smcta-from-silencing-highway-widening-advocates

You can also attend the meeting on Zoom or physically.

Thank you so much🙏🙏🙏

https://fox5sandiego.com/news/local-news/rancho-penasquitos-bike-lane/

You don't use a car? You are not a citizen anymore.

https://www.hometownlife.com/story/news/2025/07/10/northville-court-ruling-reopen-downtown-streets/84528250007/

The street in question. There is plenty of parking behind these businesses & only a handful of street parking spots as it is. Ridiculous.

Low-traffic neighbourhoods cut road injuries and deaths by more than a third within their boundaries with no apparent negative safety effect on nearby roads, a study has shown.

Based on comparisons of more than a decade of road casualty statistics between 113 London LTNs and other roads that did not have them, the report’s authors found that LTNs were associated with a 35% reduction in all injuries, rising to 37% for deaths and serious injuries.

In absolute terms, the study concluded, this meant that creating the LTNs prevented more than 600 road injuries that would have otherwise taken place, including 100 involving death or serious injury.

On boundary roads, those just outside the LTNs, there was no observable change in the number of casualties.

From cycling cartoonist Dave Walker
https://davewalker.com/

I think this might be one of the most arrogant and carbrained things I've ever seen. These people launch (working!) cars off of a cliff into what should've been a pristine riverbank, complete with leaking oil and fuel and fluids, for...fun? And they cut down over a thousand trees to do it?

What about cleanup? They claim they "meticulously" clean everything up afterwards but...how? How do they retrieve every single piece of debris, every shard of metal and plastic and glass, every single square millimeter of contaminated soil after this?

This study from MIT used geo data collected from cars in Milan, Italy, to check the effectiveness of 30 km/h zones in reducing speed.

The first conclusion is that the signs don't work: 85 percentile speeds are all over the place in 30 km/h zones in Milan, as shown in the figure below:

The second step was finding correlations between speeds and street features extracted from openstreetmap. Results are as expected: narrow, short, curvy sections correlate with lower speeds, as do 1 lane vs more, one way vs 2 ways:

The final step is also interesting: the authors made a model to predict the compliance of 30 km/h speed limit on streets that are 50 km/h at the moment. Useful for urban planning to understand if charging an area to 30 km/h would need structural interventions (like bumps, narrowing of the street...) or not:

There is so much more in the article, I suggest to read it fully.

crossposted from: https://mastodon.uno/users/rivoluzioneurbanamobilita/statuses/114827312307353297

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/32730049

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/48656672

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/48656671

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/48656669

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/24480213

Context

And what the scientists say