Read this braille with your fingers .:
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@Ronald said:
In Canada they also have self-service bike rentals; it's almost free if you use the bike less than an hour (it's designed for commute not riding), however sometimes you can't find a free slate in the rack once you get to the destination and that's annoying, it's like driving around for parking when you have a car.
This is somewhat common in Europe, too - we got such bike rentals a few years ago. 3€ per year, and you can use the bike for up to an hour before returning it to a rack (then you have to wait 5 minutes before you can again get a bike for a free hour).
The software that's used in my city is written by the French, and when I tried to register, the webpage gave me a popup saying "Les caractères suivants sont interdits : ?;:%#&!~|`^*+[](){}$" (and no, I don't live anywhere French-speaking). I've also seen random French appear on the terminals when you go to rent a bike.
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Re: Read this braille with your fingers ⠴
@ender said:
3€ per year, and you can use the bike for up to an hour before returning it to a rack (then you have to wait 5 minutes before you can again get a bike for a free hour).
That's really cheap. Over here it costs 50€/year and they are talking about doubling the prices because they are losing too much money (since the real cost is a lot higher). And you only get 30 minutes for free.
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@Ronald said:
Fool. Kitchen table is for Harley parts.
Didn't say they got it right; idiocy is widespread amongst the lesser races of mankind.
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@dkf said:
I've had people look at me strange in the US for wanting to walk a mile to and from work.
Once in a while - no problem.
Every day? Fuck that. Bike.
Car? That's just nuts.
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@ender said:
is
Your headline tag is like slapping people in the face with your just-came-back-from-peeing dick every time you speak.
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@dkf said:
I've had people look at me strange in the US for wanting to walk a mile to and from work. Now, the walking did take longer than driving, but not as much as all that (couldn't go straight when driving due to the junction layout) and the walk was very good for encouraging thinking; its much harder think about anything other than the immediate when driving. (Other people may think doing various things, but I find walking is the best thought-encourager for me.)
A long time ago I used to walk about a mile to work because the red light district was right between my house and my office. It was a long walk, especially on the way back.
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@dkf said:
@Ronald said:
Walking up??? How barbaric. Even driving all the way to the drive-thru window is too much work. That's why Sonic is the best. Who wants to get their foot tired because of all the pedal-pumping while idling in the drive-thru line? At Sonic you just park, yell something at the speaker and wait for the food to be delivered to your car.
Do they drive up to your car to deliver the food?(Shit, land must be so incredibly cheap round where you are for that to be cost effective. You'd never get something like that round here because it would always be more cost-effective to put several stores on the same site.)
They don't put Sonics smack-dab in the middle of the city, where you would expect walking traffic. It uses no more land than a regular restaurant-- in fact, they might use a little less, since the "dining room" is also the "parking lot", save for a handful of outdoor tables.
BTW, this is not a new concept in the USA. There were drive-up fast food places (some were chains, like Stewarts', of which a few dozen still exist) in the 1920s.
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@operagost said:
They don't put Sonics smack-dab in the middle of the city, where you would expect walking traffic. It uses no more land than a regular restaurant-- in fact, they might use a little less, since the "dining room" is also the "parking lot", save for a handful of outdoor tables.
My point was that you really wouldn't see that sort of thing round here. Land is hugely more expensive, and parking (above a very minimal level) requires its own zoning permission, so anyone who wants to turn a profit doesn't mess around with restaurants when they can put up a shopping mall in that space instead.BTW, this is not a new concept in the USA. There were drive-up fast food places (some were chains, like Stewarts', of which a few dozen still exist) in the 1920s.
But we have less of a problem with urban sprawl.
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@dkf said:
@operagost said:
They don't put Sonics smack-dab in the middle of the city, where you would expect walking traffic. It uses no more land than a regular restaurant-- in fact, they might use a little less, since the "dining room" is also the "parking lot", save for a handful of outdoor tables.
My point was that you really wouldn't see that sort of thing round here. Land is hugely more expensive, and parking (above a very minimal level) requires its own zoning permission, so anyone who wants to turn a profit doesn't mess around with restaurants when they can put up a shopping mall in that space instead.BTW, this is not a new concept in the USA. There were drive-up fast food places (some were chains, like Stewarts', of which a few dozen still exist) in the 1920s.
But we have less of a problem with urban sprawl.
People who bitch about urban sprawl are like Apple fanbois who bitch about the screen size of Samsung smartphones. Pathetic.
Urban sprawl is *not* a problem. Go to Seoul or Hongkong and walk around those packed suburbs filled with identical housing skyscapers, where kids have no room to play and people get trampled in subway rush hour... then come visit us (not me specifically) in the US southwest, drive on those beautiful 6-lane roads in suburbs that extend for miles and miles because the land is cheap and nobody wants people to live above their head. And tell us again what is the problem. You have to see cities like Summerlin in Nevada. This is the good life and nobody who ever lived there would consider moving to a high-density sewer like Manchester.
Next you'll tell us that at least in the UK you don't have the problem of having attractive women or people with decent teeth.
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@Ronald said:
People who bitch about urban sprawl are like Apple fanbois who bitch about the screen size of Samsung smartphones. Pathetic.Urban sprawl is *not* a problem. Go to Seoul or Hongkong and walk around those packed suburbs filled with identical housing skyscapers, where kids have no room to play and people get trampled in subway rush hour... then come visit us (not me specifically) in the US southwest, drive on those beautiful 6-lane roads in suburbs that extend for miles and miles because the land is cheap and nobody wants people to live above their head.
This. I love urban sprawl. I've lived and worked in urban areas, and I hate the lack of parking and the tiny roads.
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@boomzilla said:
@Ronald said:
People who bitch about urban sprawl are like Apple fanbois who bitch about the screen size of Samsung smartphones. Pathetic.
Urban sprawl is *not* a problem. Go to Seoul or Hongkong and walk around those packed suburbs filled with identical housing skyscapers, where kids have no room to play and people get trampled in subway rush hour... then come visit us (not me specifically) in the US southwest, drive on those beautiful 6-lane roads in suburbs that extend for miles and miles because the land is cheap and nobody wants people to live above their head.
This. I love urban sprawl. I've lived and worked in urban areas, and I hate the lack of parking and the tiny roads.
While I agree with you about the awesome of suburbs, I don't think you really understand what people are talking about when they talk about "urban sprawl."
They don't mean some medium sized city in the Southwest that's spread out. They mean having to live 2 hours away from where you work in LA and suffering ungodly traffic just to get to work. Or living in Plano (for the schools) while working on south Dallas or something. That shit sucks.
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@Snooder said:
While I agree with you about the awesome of suburbs, I don't think you really understand what people are talking about when they talk about "urban sprawl."
They don't mean some medium sized city in the Southwest that's spread out. They mean having to live 2 hours away from where you work in LA and suffering ungodly traffic just to get to work. Or living in Plano (for the schools) while working on south Dallas or something. That shit sucks.Yes, that all sucks, but that's not exactly urban sprawl's fault. I'm not a fan of living in an exurb and commuting to the urban area, and I've never had nor chosen to do that. Still, I'd probably rather do that than be stuck in a tiny apartment with a thousand other people and rely on public transportation.
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@boomzilla said:
@Snooder said:
While I agree with you about the awesome of suburbs, I don't think you really understand what people are talking about when they talk about "urban sprawl."
They don't mean some medium sized city in the Southwest that's spread out. They mean having to live 2 hours away from where you work in LA and suffering ungodly traffic just to get to work. Or living in Plano (for the schools) while working on south Dallas or something. That shit sucks.Yes, that all sucks, but that's not exactly urban sprawl's fault. I'm not a fan of living in an exurb and commuting to the urban area, and I've never had nor chosen to do that. Still, I'd probably rather do that than be stuck in a tiny apartment with a thousand other people and rely on public transportation.
Yeah, it's basically a lose-lose situation. Either you suffer through a horrible commute, or you live in a tiny apartment with no car.
The thing is, for young people without a family the tiny apartment/no car situation isn't that bad. Hence why you see a lot of East Coast liberal types sneering at the plebs and their urban sprawl. They just aren't in a lifestyle where the detriments of inner city living have a consequence to them.
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@Snooder said:
Yeah, it's basically a lose-lose situation. Either you suffer through a horrible commute, or you live in a tiny apartment with no car.
Or you fucking move closer to work. Even if you have a long commute, it's not necessarily much shorter than an urban commute. And even if it is, it's probably more pleasant since you avoid public transportation.
@Snooder said:
The thing is, for young people without a family the tiny apartment/no car situation isn't that bad.
I enjoyed it as a college student. Like many things I enjoyed back then, I've out grown it.
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@Snooder said:
Or living in Plano (for the schools) while working on south Dallas or something. That shit sucks.
Yup. When I worked at everybody-knows-where-now, I commuted an hour and a half each way, every damn day.
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@boomzilla said:
@Snooder said:
I thought that's what Snooder said...Yeah, it's basically a lose-lose situation. Either you suffer through a horrible commute, or you live in a tiny apartment with no car.
Or you fucking move closer to work.
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@boomzilla said:
avoid public transportation
Well, you do have especially sucky public transportation in the US.
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@PJH said:
@boomzilla said:
@Snooder said:
I thought that's what Snooder said...Yeah, it's basically a lose-lose situation. Either you suffer through a horrible commute, or you live in a tiny apartment with no car.
Or you fucking move closer to work.I guess that's true if you work in a downtown area or something. But that misses the point of urban sprawl, which is that there are places to work other than downtown areas.
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@dkf said:
@boomzilla said:
avoid public transportation
Well, you do have especially sucky public transportation in the US.Maybe. Definitely if you include non-urban areas. But that's like saying that the quality of the shit that you have available to eat in other countries is better than the shit available to eat in the US. I just don't want to eat shit.
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@boomzilla said:
@PJH said:
@boomzilla said:
@Snooder said:
I thought that's what Snooder said...Yeah, it's basically a lose-lose situation. Either you suffer through a horrible commute, or you live in a tiny apartment with no car.
Or you fucking move closer to work.I guess that's true if you work in a downtown area or something. But that misses the point of urban sprawl, which is that there are places to work other than downtown areas.
Again, I think you are working under a different definition of urban sprawl. My conception is of downtown areas where most of the jobs are, surrounded by a ring of commercial/industrial areas with more jobs, then surrounded by the shitty low income neighborhoods, and finally with the good places to live several miles away. Given the nature of zoning, you end up clustering the houses in one location and all the workplaces in another. Which creates the problem of having everyone who lives in said houses all on the road at the same time to get to their workplaces. So sure, if you happen to work in a strip mall or in McDonalds or something, you can get away with having your workplace pretty close to your house, but for everyone else who works in a typical large office building, they don't have that luxury.
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@Snooder said:
Again, I think you are working under a different definition of urban sprawl. My conception is of downtown areas where most of the jobs are, surrounded by a ring of commercial/industrial areas with more jobs, then surrounded by the shitty low income neighborhoods, and finally with the good places to live several miles away. Given the nature of zoning, you end up clustering the houses in one location and all the workplaces in another.
Yes, this is very different. The one actual example was Plano, TX, which doesn't seem to fit this description. It's basically a suburb of Dallas, which IIRC has a rather lax approach to zoning (though not so much as Houston, I think). Every place is different, though I've lived in one of the most sprawling places, namely the Los Angeles area. Lots of people live in the exurbs, where they can get bigger houses and more land, but there are plenty of places available to live closer in that are compromises.
@Snooder said:
So sure, if you happen to work in a strip mall or in McDonalds or something, you can get away with having your workplace pretty close to your house, but for everyone else who works in a typical large office building, they don't have that luxury.
Again, I'll buy this if you work in a downtown of a large city, but this is still the exception. Of course, as you move to denser areas, prices generally go up, so you have to decide what sort of trade off is worth it to you. But I wouldn't consider the downtown skyscraper to be the typical office building.
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@boomzilla said:
But that's like saying that the quality of the shit that you have available to eat in other countries is better than the shit available to eat in the US. I just don't want to eat shit.
I think you underestimate how much better public transportation is elsewhere. Still, the suitability of public transport is governed by whether there's something going in a direction that's useful to you.
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@dkf said:
@boomzilla said:
But that's like saying that the quality of the shit that you have available to eat in other countries is better than the shit available to eat in the US. I just don't want to eat shit.
I think you underestimate how much better public transportation is elsewhere. Still, the suitability of public transport is governed by whether there's something going in a direction that's useful to you.Oh. So in these meccas of public transportation, you don't have to wait for it to arrive? You can always find a seat? It's easy to transport more than you can physically carry? You can easily change your destination? It goes right to and from your front door? I can control the temperature? How did you guys solve that stuff?
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@dkf said:
Still, the suitability of public transport is governed by whether there's something going in a direction that's useful to you.
ObSortaOT: http://notalwaysright.com/putting-the-dire-into-directions-part-2/31145
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My journey to and work is a 10 minute walk, followed by 30 minutes on the train, followed by another 10 minute walk.
@boomzilla said:
Oh. So in these meccas of public transportation,
you don't have to wait for it to arrive?
Well, not usually, as I time my walk so that I arrive on the platform around 5 minutes before it departs. It usually turns up 5 minutes before it departs.@boomzilla said:
You can always find a seat?
Yes. Usually I get two seats next to each other, so I can put my bag on the other one and glare at other passengers in case they want to sit next to me.*@boomzilla said:
It's easy to transport more than you can physically carry?
Well not exactly, but I only ever carry a light bag, and that's only so I have some way to carry my sweater in case I want to take it off.**@boomzilla said:
You can easily change your destination?
Well, no, but my office tends to be in the same place daily.@boomzilla said:
It goes right to and from your front door?
No, but there are some traffic jams outside my front door which stretch as far as the eye can see in both directions. I overtake most cars on my walk to the station.@boomzilla said:
I can control the temperature?
No, but its always nice and warm in winter, and nice and cool in summer.@boomzilla said:
How did you guys solve that stuff?
We get eviscerated on the price, which is bumped up every year, vastly in excess of inflation. It's still cheaper and quicker than the drive would be though.
- This is actually a lot more fun than it sounds.
**Then again, assuming I can find a way to get the stuff to the station, I daresay I could fit a lot more stuff on a train than in a car. Although I can imagine a serious level of intense tutting from other passengers were I to attempt such a thing. Incidentally, tutting is one of the many fun activities I can engage in on the train.
- This is actually a lot more fun than it sounds.
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@Snooder said:
@boomzilla said:
@Ronald said:
People who bitch about urban sprawl are like Apple fanbois who bitch about the screen size of Samsung smartphones. Pathetic.Urban sprawl is *not* a problem. Go to Seoul or Hongkong and walk around those packed suburbs filled with identical housing skyscapers, where kids have no room to play and people get trampled in subway rush hour... then come visit us (not me specifically) in the US southwest, drive on those beautiful 6-lane roads in suburbs that extend for miles and miles because the land is cheap and nobody wants people to live above their head.
This. I love urban sprawl. I've lived and worked in urban areas, and I hate the lack of parking and the tiny roads.
While I agree with you about the awesome of suburbs, I don't think you really understand what people are talking about when they talk about "urban sprawl."
They don't mean some medium sized city in the Southwest that's spread out. They mean having to live 2 hours away from where you work in LA and suffering ungodly traffic just to get to work. Or living in Plano (for the schools) while working on south Dallas or something. That shit sucks.What you describe is not "urban sprawl". It's "poor urban planning". Outside of LA, in the southwest there is a lot of master-planned communities, such as the Phoenix area. In the northeast, Detroit has now the opportunity to do it...
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@eViLegion said:
**Then again, assuming I can find a way to get the stuff to the station, I daresay I could fit a lot more stuff on a train than in a car. Although I can imagine a serious level of intense tutting from other passengers were I to attempt such a thing. Incidentally, tutting is one of the many fun activities I can engage in on the train.
I dare you to carry more stuff on your train than whatever can fit in the trunk of my Navigator. There is so much space in there, if I flip the last row of seats I could probably carry a MiniCooper as an escape pod.
And if you pretend that you can carry more stuff because the train is bigger, then you are like the guy in this joke:
Dude #1: I went to Vegas in my Ford Escort and two days later I left in a $400,000 vehicle. Dude #2: Wow, you really got lucky. Was that a Lamborghini? Dude #1: No, a Greyhound bus.
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@Ronald said:
Dude #1: I went to Vegas in my Ford Escort and two days later I left in a $400,000 vehicle.
Dude #2: Wow, you really got lucky. Was that a Lamborghini?
Dude #1: No, a Greyhound bus.Wow, you could not deliver that joke worse.
#JokeCritic
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Heh... I'm not gonna try that. The tutting would be unbearable.
When I say I can take more on the train, I mean on the basis of a fairly spurious technicality; there's absolutely no way I'm going to risk the ire of the train inspector dude; most of them are a bit like rhino's... big, short tempered, not too bright, and they'd like all the humans they see to be somewhere else far away.
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@blakeyrat said:
@Ronald said:
Dude #1: I went to Vegas in my Ford Escort and two days later I left in a $400,000 vehicle.
Dude #2: Wow, you really got lucky. Was that a Lamborghini?
Dude #1: No, a Greyhound bus.Wow, you could not deliver that joke worse.
#JokeCritic
It was beautiful and funny before Community Server got its dirty paws all over it. There was also a strong humanist subtext with subtle references to the affair between Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, I don't know what happened.
Also for the love of Jobs please stop with the hashtags, you remind me of Olympus has fallen.
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@eViLegion said:
there's absolutely no way I'm going to risk the ire of the train inspector dude; most of them are a bit like rhino's... big, short tempered, not too bright, and they'd like all the humans they see to be somewhere else far away.
Dealing on a daily basis with the kind of people who take the train will do that to anyone.
