I live in a quiet part of my city on a street with plenty of parking. Many of the houses have one or even two car driveways/garages so there is enough parking that I don’t need to park far, but the spot directly in front of my house has been occupied for WEEKS. There is nothing that makes that spot mine except that everyone sort of has their assigned spots like seats in the cafeteria. This person has a resident pass (though improperly affixed) so nothing is illegal but I’m sorta beginning to wonder if the car is abandoned.

There is absolutely nothing I can do about it except to hope that they move for street cleaning in another two weeks but it’s annoying and I wanted to vent. Anyone else experience this frustration?

AND, they are parked like shit and it feels like salt on the wound.

Edit: fixed a typo

I know it sounds hypocritical but hear me out. My city's suburban streets were mostly built in the 1900s and 1910s, before cars were ubiquitous and before streets were built to accommodate them. So like 90% of the streets in the immediate suburbs (I'm talking 1 - 5 minutes from downtown) are either way too skinny to drive on or they don't have driveways. In a select few streets it's even both. And so you end up with streets that are littered with parked cars, and a lot of streets are two lane but end up functioning like one-ways. There have been moments where I drive on these streets because GPS told me to, and then I question my sanity because it really feels like a 1-way and yet there's signs facing me. I mention this because I'm a pizza delivery driver and so I have to navigate these streets at least a few times a day, usually dozens of times if we're offering coupons in those areas. And every time it becomes far more of a hassle than it has to be just because of how there are so many cars and so many people driving on them. I hate how we've built this city that had a downtown where people would walk to and shop around in, but now everybody drives to the superstores on the outskirts and uses the freeway to go to work. It's like we've ruined the act of driving simply by forcing everybody to drive more.

I actually lived in Japan for a period, and while I wasn't old enough to drive there, I noticed that people seemed to have a far better time driving on their ultra-narrow suburban streets, and I'm willing to hedge a bet that's because not everything there was car-focused. Obviously once you got out into the rural regions more people drove, but in Tokyo especially people seemed to walk or take the train most of the time.

I wonder if maybe in an alternate universe where we didn't place superstores and supermarkets and home depots a 1-hours walk away from the old suburbs, and where we didn't develop this culture that everybody needed a car, would it be a much less irritating and frustrating experience driving around? Hell in that universe I might even be able to get my store's drive times down a couple minutes.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ca/post/788654

> Source: https://vancouversun.com/news/local-news/exclusive-bc-rental-crisis-puts-100000-households-at-risk-homeless. > This is an automatic repost from Reddit by a bot created by @eugene@lemmy.ca

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=REni8Oi1QJQ

www.politico.eu/article/europe…

cross-posted from: https://beehaw.org/post/631577

> A great read+great magazine. > > AI Generated TL;DR (tldrthis.com): > > Cycling is the most sustainable form of transportation, but the bicycle is becoming increasingly damaging to the environment. > Before the 1980s, most bicycle components were interchangeable between frames of different brands and generations. > An academic study on circularity in the bike manufacturing industry observes a significant increase in defective components compared to unassisted bicycles and concludes that “the great dynamics of the market due to regular innovations, product renewals, and the lack of spare parts for older models make the long-term use by customers much more difficult than for conventional bicycles.” > However, a recent study calculated the lifecycle emissions of a carbon fiber electric cargo cycle to be 80 gCO2 per kilometer – only half those of an electric van (158 gCO2/km). > The decreasing sustainability of bikes is not a technological problem, and it’s not unique to bicycles. > However, shared bicycles are unlikely to become more sustainable than private bicycles because they always require rebalancing and a high-tech infrastructure to make the service work. > >

Crosspost from !urbanplanning@lemmy.ml - I found this very interesting that traffic wasn't really adversely affected!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N-wsFZFcC-o

> Traffic sucks... the solution might not be what you think though.

and table of contents:

> 00:00 Intro > > 02:12 It Takes Too Long > > 05:37 Travel Is Too Unpredictable > > 07:43 The Experience Of Traffic is Terrible > > 09:30 Watershed Analogy > > 10:13 What Do We Do?

Interesting story about urban shade. Early in the article are some interesting history tidbits like

You might imagine that transit planners call the shots — strategically placing shelters outside grocery stores and doctors’ offices on high-frequency routes, according to community need — but Los Angeles, like many cities, has outsourced the job. The first thousand shelters were installed in the 1980s by billboard companies in exchange for the right to sell ad space, and they tended to show up in wealthy areas where ad revenue surpassed maintenance costs. 2

Game changer just dropped!