coto524 - Tumblr blog

[coto524]

The elite belief in Uberized, Muskized cities is at odds with fundamental, irrefutable facts of geometry

The appropriately named Jarrett Walker is the author of Human Transit, a seminal text on transportation and cities that draws on his decades of experience in urban planning; he has the distinction of being called “an idiot” by Elon Musk on Twitter, when he pointed out that Musk’s Boring Company tunnel proposals could not possibly work due to their low capacity.

Walker’s overarching thesis is that city transit is undermined by “elite projection,” where rich people pretend that the way they like getting around – in private vehicles that go from door to door – can possibly work at urban scale, despite the fact that simple geometry shows that this is a physical impossibility.

As in, “It doesn’t matter how tightly you pack self-driving Ubers together on our roads. If all the people who make your coffee and empty your wastebin are in private vehicles rather than on buses and trains, the roads will be at 5 or 10 times their physical capacity.”

This emphasis on private vehicles leads people to seize on technological fads to defend the indefensible – hence the vogue for describing the smartphone as the key technology for transportation, or self-driving cars, or data-driven custom shuttle routes that re-route themselves based on demand signals from riders’ phones.

These all share the geometric flaw: even the smallest cars, packed as tightly as possible, multiplied by all the people who rely on buses and trains, will overflow all the roads we have now and all the roads we could ever build.

There is another flaw: when you make it cheaper to ride private vehicles (rather than public transit), you siphon transit riders out of the buses and trains, and put them on the roads, increasing congestion: so adding “efficient rideshares” actually makes transit worse, not better

Walker tried to explain this to Elon Musk on Twitter, discussing how his proposed Boring Machine tunnels’ narrow bores meant that on the one hand, they couldn’t carry enough people to make an appreciable difference in traffic, and on the other, that his proposal for allowing private cars to run through the tunnels is nuts: “The amount of the city that you would have to level to create enough of those elevators to get everybody’s car into the tunnel at 5:30 in the evening, it’s preposterous; it cannot help being. Anything that is that inefficient has to be only for elites.”

Musk called him an idiot.

https://boingboing.net/2018/01/26/elite-focus.html

[coto524]

remember when you used to be able to play snake with the… hold on what’s it called

hmm. don’t think i’ll be calling it that. anyways i was gonna say remember when you could play snake with the buffering circle on youtube but. now i have other concerns

[coto524]

I need every public place to have detailed descriptions of the entire place + how to behave and what behavior is acceptable or not and i need it all as straightforward as humanly possible

[coto524]

i keep trying to reread wyrd sisters but i can't get further than this cause every time i see it i have to turn my phone off and close my eyes for twenty minutes.....this is SO funny. you just know there's a little recipe book in goodie maysherestinpeace whemper's old cottage with an entry that says RECIPE FOR HOT LEAD BONES: step one you get some lead step two you put it in their bones

[coto524]

Unmute !

[coto524]

[coto524]

When people get a little too gung-ho about-

wait. cancel post. gung-ho cannot be English. where did that phrase come from? China?

ok, yes. gōnghé, which is…an abbreviation for “industrial cooperative”? Like it was just a term for a worker-run organization? A specific U.S. marine stationed in China interpreted it as a motivational slogan about teamwork, and as a commander he got his whole battalion using it, and other U.S. marines found those guys so exhausting that it migrated into English slang with the meaning “overly enthusiastic”.

That’s…wild. What was I talking about?

[coto524]

English added by me :)

[coto524]

HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO THE MOST INFLUENTIAL ALBUM OF THE MODERN AGE

[coto524]

This counts as bullying right? A personal attack even?

[coto524]

this reminds me of a puzzle...

spent 2 months working on this and hoo boy 🥵 everything was modelled from scratch and texture painted by hand in blender before being put into unreal engine

[coto524]

love when i ask a customer a clarifying question and they just repeat themselves verbatim. "where's the small tubs of prawns?" "which kind?" "yknow, the small tubs" bestie i am asking because we have four different kinds of prawns and they're all in small tubs. please.

[coto524]

[coto524]

i still think about "aye moira am oan the protein" way too often

[coto524]

“GAY” spelt backwards almost looks Like “yay”

[coto524]

[coto524]

The key shortcut of "windows key" and "." held together has changed my life

like

emoji access? supremely powerful 🙂💖

But

Kaomoji ?

The year is 2013 and I am unstoppable ヾ(•ω•`)o o(*￣▽￣*)ブo(*°▽°*)o