donjoe

I just see a huge parking lot. What do you see?

Why don't more people ask for better train connections?

Trains would allow kids, elderly, people without a driver's license or the financial means to afford a car to participate in society as well.

Well, this is exactly the opposite to an urban environment - this is urban sprawl.

Is it better to construct and maintain 75 miles of roads (and all the other infrastructure) for a couple of hundred folks?

I highly recommend this video on the finances around urban sprawl and their long term consequences:

https://youtu.be/XfQUOHlAocY

I guess we have to ask ourselves a different question if we truly want to create a sustainable urban environment:

Why can grandparents only visit by car? Why are there no (better) alternatives?

Sewing is great fun.

I started sewing last year while planning a bike packing trip where I wanted to finally switch from tent to hammock. Finding proper underquilts for hammocks in Europe is... a mess.

In the end, I decided to borrow my sister's sewing machine and give it a try.

I ended up sewing not just the underquilt but also ultra light bike bags, an ultra light hammock, a tarp and a bunch of smaller bags for storage.

I never thought the technical side of sewing would be so much fun - I spent hours researching fabrics and composites for a project in order to fulfill 'your' specific needs.

My sister never got her sewing machine back.

... and lots of developers forget that singletons are global state.

Especially with node where you do not have a dedicated sandbox per user request, programming needs to be request-agnostic. This is especially painful with mixing server-side and non-server-side code where you do have a dedicated 'sandbox' on the client side (aka browser).

For everyone interested, there is an interesting study to be found researching EV vs gas driven car fires [1].

"Nevertheless, existing test results have revealed that the heat release rate of EV fire is comparable to that of the fossil-fuelled vehicle fire, while EV fire may release more toxic gasses like HF from burning Li-ion batteries."

[1] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/338542510_A_Review_...

Well, u can always transform: rotate(X°) in the end ;-)

> The lack of systems thinking

We managed to make factories safe but kill 1.3 M people/year in traffic instead [1]

I wonder: will we ever manage to apply systems thinking in traffic as well?

[1] https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/road-traffi...

Would you have seen congestions if infrastructure built for cars (hint: traffic lights) wouldn't have existed?

... Buses on the other hand are used about 60-80% of the day whereas a privately owned car is used 3-5% of the day.

Cars do not just take up space driving. They also take up a huge amount of space when not in use.

> without the need to destroy large patches of land.

As long as you do not have uranium mines in your own back yard.

Did u try using typescript with esbuild? React + esbuild + typescript is a perfect combination for me. I had the chance to kick off a new project a few months ago and started with this stack. It needed roughly 50 lines of code to get a decent server side rendering development experience set up. Compile time is still below 200ms.

The only issues I had in the beginning was esbuild's compilation of typescript enums: the import order was off from time to time. Besides that, no issues. I am also super glad I do not need to configure webpack any longer.

How can it be 'complete wilderness' if reachable by car? Isn't there some sort of infrastructure necessary in order to reach it by car which ultimately destroys nature?

Haha, this sounds almost exactly like my Delphi story - just I didn't target the mouse.

Instead, I did target each keyboard's keys which - when being pressed - would play a sound using internal speakers. Deployed it on all devices in the room and once class started, we had a lovely concert going on.

Got kicked out of the room immediately.

Ah, and netsend was fun also :D

As you already mentioned: roads and gas is heavily subsidized. Politicians focus on building roads rather than public transport systems. The true costs of road infrastructure including parking, bridges, land use, public space usage, health system costs, economic losses due to wasting time while driving and more is just something no one dares to discuss. Once u start looking at all costs car traffic truly is responsible for, you'd have to immediately switch to another system such as... public transport.

Consider living in the early 2000s and replace 'digital camera' vs 'analog camera' with 'dinosaur burning vehicles' vs 'electric vehicles'.

Same discussion, different technology. We all know how it ended ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

That's interesting. Reducing overall traffic speed would render most traffic lights obsolete. Traffic lights are only necessary in order to allow heavy machinery going >30mph in dense areas.

I think we will have to ask ourselves the question in the future: do we want heavy machinery at high speed in populated areas including red lights for all other means of transportation - or do we want populated areas with no/almost no traffic lights and faster traffic for foot/cycling traffic?

Isn't Australia enforcing helmets since the 90s which led to a decrease in overall bicycle use?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bicycle_helmets_in_Australia

A couple of years ago, I met a startup in Munich which did exactly the same and had a working prototype. Their product landing page is still online [0], I never heard of them since.

[0]: https://www.nova-audio.com/

Social aspects in the sense of that we nowadays use them for cars only. Back in the days people traded on streets, had cafes and social interactions. Kids could play football and learn how to cycle. That's all used up by cars with all the externalities that comes with it such as dirt, noise, wasted space, deaths by accidents and air pollution.

Not to forget: streets were used that way until ~80 years ago. We just can't remember them any different any more.

Alright, there are some options:

a) keep everything as is. Leave up to 80% of public space to cars (as in L.A. for example), destroy all social interactions which could otherwise happen in those places, increase commute time due to cities designed around long distances and destroy our environment.

b) buy a new bicycle and a good rain coat, use our feet, expand public transport, improve our wellbeing by doing some exercise, reduce obesity and diabetes, socialize in public space again and save tons of tax payer's money. Whilst saving the life of 1.2m people.

Which one sounds better to you?

This is not a problem of houses built that way since the were built pre-car times to allow max light into apartments. The streets back then were also a social aspect of life where we met people and could interact with each other.

Then came a time we handed over streets to parking spots and some folks driving at 50km/h and faster. Social aspects have been gone.

We should not build our apts for cars and align to them. If cars are loud and noisy and destroy our social life, we should focus on solving the car problem and not trying to build around cars.

> so what's the alternative

I think it's quite odd we nowadays think cars are the only possible form of transportation. We are not born with 4 wheels underneath our butt. The alternative is to build structures build for foot or bicycle traffic. Everything within 10k can easily be reached by either bicycle or foot traffic. By building infrastructure for cars, you create distances which are for cars only. They would otherwise not exist.

> enabling them to find houses and jobs in the most economical and convenient places

That's only possible due to the external costs of cars not being accounted for. Burning dinosaurs and destruction of nature is nowhere to be found in cars. If you would price cars accordingly, we would start planning differently.

> once public transit become monopolistic

We already have the same monopolistic issue just right now with cars as the only means of transportation. Without cars, you're not able to move in large parts of the U.S. This excludes about 50%+ of the U.S. population (children < 16yo, people who cannot afford cars or cannot drive themselves due to health reasons).

> private cars win over public transit because it's a better product

Why are cars a better product? Commute and travel time are a huge economical factor destroying time. They take up loads of space and require infrastructure and maintenance paid by society.

> dependency on public transit times.

That's a political issue which could be solved. Most of the money spent nowadays is spent on parking spots and car roads. If you would spend the same amount on public transport, you could probably run a train every 5 minutes.

> too bad, transit only gives peak service at peak hours. That's also how we design our roads. They need to accomodate peak traffic at peak hours. Otherwise they're an unused piece of asphalt.

> the car has been a great economical equalizer and still is

Again, not taking into account external costs. Road traffic kills ~ 1.2M people each year insuring even more which do have a massive impact on the health system.

> pollution is something to be solved

By solving pollution but still focusing on urban sprawl and keeping traffic as-is, we will do the wrong thing better. That's an achievement but not solving the issue.

Feel free to watch the interview mentioned before. It does clarify some of the points I just mentioned: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9_x5Hor2MP8

[edit: formatting]

Yah, bcs all new structures built post WW2 were built for cars and not for people people move at 3mph, not 60mph.

Rome could have invested in public transport instead of building highways. No one would be stuck in traffic. Instead, they used public space for cars. The old parts of the city though which are walkable work perfectly fine.

Venice does have great ferry service and traffic in the city is almost non-existent due to lack of cars.

Quite interestingly, the social aspects of urban sprawl was completely left out when designing post WW2 cities.

When people think about beautiful cities, they would mention Venice or Paris or Rome. All these cities were built for 'foot traffic' which still works perfectly fine nowadays. In those cities, the elderly and children do have an environment to move around by themselves and socialize freely.

When it comes to planning cities for people, it is worth checking out Prof. Jan Gehl: https://youtu.be/9_x5Hor2MP8

It seems like a couple of years ago, once you fucked up, you resigned out of respect to your office/job/position.

Looking at our current Minister of Transport 'Andi Scheuer', this does not seem to be the case any more. He is still in office after burning more than € 500M in the recent toll scandal [0].

[0]: https://www.dw.com/en/german-transport-minister-blasted-over...

I absolutely agree. Routing using a phone is loads of fun. I do have the paid version and I highly appreciate their open source-ish character.

Besides large response data and a slaggish planning interface @ komoot: try routing from northern Italy to Sicily: Komoot doesn't seem to know the ferry departing in Villa s. Giovanni to Messina. Komoot will always - no matter how may vias you place - route you back north and send you on a ferry in Salerno. Yes, I know, I could split my route and such. Yet, I love the idea of my planning tool to show me the complete route - including official transportation ;-)

Man thanks so much for your work! Been using it for some time now especially for planning long distance routes. That's where cycle.travel really shines (plus I really love the 3D altitude visualization ;-)).

I usually tend to export routes and navigate with komoot. Komoot for long distance planning is terribly slow as soon as you hit ~200km+.

cycle.travel does have a feature for mileage requests. It is not very much optimized for dirt routes though...