Yeah I’m in Germany so my context is somewhere in between and here the projects that improve my life the most is when cars don’t get to/need to travel on the streets as much, this can either be through modal filters, removing car lanes or just banning cars (with the usual delivery window in the morning and such). And they are starting to get to the kind of streets where you could go 100km/h (in terms of size) that are in practice 50km/h, and are now getting them down to 30 (taking 1 of 2 car lanes and giving it to bikes as well as adding obstacles to indicate slower speeds). So it’s doable and of course it takes time, but with a bit of luck it might be faster than some Americans imagine it could be.

So of course bike lanes along mayor roads (corridors) make sense, and it can be a good starting point to get a skeleton network in place, which then can Kickstart intersection redesigns and traffic calming, wherever it’s reasonable around it. To me the best bike paths don’t go along roads though, they are the “recreational” paths that still connect things. Cutting through a patch of Forrest or a park, going along the waterfront, parallel to a tramway or rail corridor or just along/through the fields. These are probably also politically cheaper than some other measures, but you run the risk of building a thing that just connects nothing because there is no real infrastructure on either end.

I feel like Americans think they are 60+ years behind when they are probably only 30-40, if the attitude turns somewhat sharply, either just in your local area or more generally, maybe just 15-25.

A lot of this stuff is monetarily very cheap, depending on how desperately you wanted change the actual infrastructure you’d need, would boil down to planters, bollards, cones, maybe hay bails or large stones/concrete pieces. The problem with that stuff is that it’s only possible with the right opportunity politically, otherwise your traffic calming might get bulldozed by police or something.

I sorta agree and sorta don’t, all streets should be 30km/h or less and shared traffic, everything else should be with bike lanes. Streets meaning a piece of infrastructure that provides access to places lining it, not a piece of infrastructure for longer distance travel.

The Netherlands is good not because there is a bike lane on every street but because all the streets with destinations (private homes, business, schools)are connected by bike lanes as well as roads, often more and more direct bike lanes.

There are a lot of areas where cars bikes and sometimes pedestrians share the same space both in inner cities and in residential neighborhoods, it’s just that they aren’t through roads for cars or at least very very slow ones, while they are often through roads for bikes and peds.

What you’re trying to describe is named public transit not robottaxi, especially the argument that driverless cars will reduce transportation costs doesn’t make any sense. It adds complexity to an already incredibly inefficient mode of transport. For road train like trucking on highways maybe it makes sense, for personal transportation on arbitrary streets it just doesn’t make any sense.

There is no technology to help aging gracefully, it’s in the respect and help of our peers and in our interactions with them, in the structure of our communities… Entering the sterile empty self driving car isn’t actually more dignified than being picked up by a real human being. And sitting down in a tram or metro isn’t less dignified than being shuttled around by a driverless vehicle.

It’s not fuck Progress, it’s fuck Cars, just because asbestos or coal power were progress at some point doesn’t mean we should embrace them forever, the same goes for cars and self driving changes nothing about that. If cars still rule the world in 100 years we’ll be dying even more than we already are.

Bike for sure, as I was still at school I did 100+km /week. I guess it stuck. Second is probably kayaking although it is seldomly actually useful transport. Then walking, and after that all manner of trains, then cars, then busses, and last planes. But honestly I just like being in transport to some extend so unless I’m dreading my destination I like them all.

From my perspective it's sorta crazy. How does one even have the space for several weeks of perishable groceries, or move them effectively from the store home. It all seems like so much wasted space.

Also how does one plan buying all you potential cravings for two weeks. I sorta don't get it, emotionally I don't.

I encourage you to try living a <10min walk from a grocery store if you ever get the chance. Right now I'm at< 3min to walking to the grocery store. It's the best. Especially if it's open till midnight or god forbid 24/7.

But only for the 4 weeks a year you spend in unusually cold weather, the other 48 it’s more efficient.

It’s not like truly arctic places are a reasonable application but the overwhelming majority of our population lives south of Quebec and north of Wellington. So it’s not a relevant point, everyone in the Arctic can just use resistive heating or burn fuel, and if we get everything else on heat pumps we reduce our enegy use by a factor of 2-3 regardles.

This is very interesting to me and I’ve played with this kinda idea a few weeks ago, the Activity Pub proposal you linked seems very sensible for communicating between actors but doesn’t really offer much of a path to create a platform. In my view creating a platforms is the reason this should exist, because current platforms (Amazon,Ebay,Uber, AirBnB,DoorDash,Lieferheld) are mostly just engaging in rent seeking from buyers/sellers on their platforms. Rentier Capitalism

I don’t believe a protocol can sufficiently challenge the current players without an underpinning organizational structure that ensures fairness and transparency to both sellers and buyers, when it comes to moderation, indexing, and categorization. Especially moderation but also hosting will have costs, and the consequences for bad moderation are likely much larger with commerce than with social media. So I would like a Coop with significant control from both sellers and buyers to provide the public facing platform which then federates with the Stores which can be self hosted by sellers (potentially as an extension to existing eCommerce Software).

Or alternatively two Coops if it’s not reasonable for the sellers to host their own Stores e.g.: Uber and AirBnB, here the sellers should outright own the one providing the Stores, and own the minority in the one providing the Coop. Obviously middle grounds could also exist where e.g.: a Platform for Delivery food federates with seller servers that are hosted on a local level by Coops comprising of restaurants of a region.

I very deeply believe something like this could make our commerce much better and fairer, and while getting it of the ground might be hard, I think because the sellers make money on these Platforms it should give real incentive to develop both the tech and the legal orgs as well as advertise for them, and for the sellers to invest real money into it, or maybe agree to kick 1-2% of a purchase back to the coop.

Generally internet culture In the Dach region is very active and forward looking, and potentially ideologically aligned with the idea of Fediverse and generally FOSS software and privacy. E.g. for Wikipedia language share German got overtaken by Spanish only within the last 5 years slipping from 2nd to 3rd suggesting some early adopter and internet participation higher than the norm.

Subjectively a lot of people here have uneasiness with big tech, and are relatively informed about alternatives.DACH on Reddit was also very big, and very ideologically opposed to API changes and general Reddit corpo behaviour. Subjectively again Dach and ich_iel felt like home when I joined, essentially like the Reddit culture I was used to, just with a little more progressive views across the board.

Also I suspect that German language speakers are fairly active within the English speaking parts of the internet in general, while Spanish and French as well as other non Germanic languages seem to have more disdain for English language content and sites, Germans and Dutch as well as Nordics are very comfortable with English as a common language.

No he’s talking about Systems being terrible, not only because of their current leadership but by their design. Not everyone is terrible but we all get pushed to be terrible by a system that is terrible for all but the most fortunate.

You have to at least be able to imagine a utopia to begin creating one, just being unhappy about our collective distopia isn’t gonna help anyone. Systems created and made up of people can be destroyed by people, it’s very difficult but it can be done, and if we think we’re in a dystopia there’s good reason to destroy some systems.