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#271
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Fla. 8-Year-Old Gets Traffic Ticket For Bike Mishap (irresponsibleidiot parents refuse to pay)
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#272
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Fla. 8-Year-Old Gets Traffic Ticket For Bike Mishap (irresponsible idiot parents refuse to pay)
"frkrygowHALTSPAM" wrote in message
... I suppose my vision of New Urbanist design may be different than yours. (And I'm not sure what features would be on the "official list", I admit.) But I see no reason that the problems you list _must_ exist in this design scheme. For example, can't open space for kids and presence of trees be easily designed in? One could call such spaces "parks." Wouldn't local, walkable schools provide a sense of community, and wouldn't summer concerts in the parks do the same? They do in my village... and so on. The need for shade trees isn't in the parks, it's to shade the homes from summer heat. The "yards" in NU communities are designed to be small. Planting a tree which will grow large enough to mitigate the effects of solar gain will result in a tree that also messes up the sidewalk, messes up the irrigation system, and can cause foundation problems. Open space in the system is restricted to small parks, many of which are also used as water detention facilities for mitigating floods. All of the "features" of New Urbanism are easily thwarted by bad developers and result in a community that has the NU facade, but is really lacks the underlying design to function as a NU community was intended to. I've seen many examples of this happening. NU designs focus on a central business area which is within walking distance of all the entire community. Early NU communities based on this design discovered that the businesses usually failed - primarily because of a lack of traffic. Newer designs either split the community with a major thoroughfare which served the central businesses or used a half-moon shape adjacent to a major road. These worked better because the businesses had access to a major road and higher traffic counts, but they also suffered because either NU design restricted parking or the parking interfered with the walkability of the community. It also disrupted the function - people would just drive to the store anyway. Ah well. Perhaps we should get back to talking about cycling. An emphasis on cycling would make the NU design work much better. People these days don't want to walk - especially when they have to carry a load. Design the homes with great access for bicycles (a wide door into the garage, storage space for bicycles, etc.), the community to be bicycle-friendly, and provide a couple of free utility bikes with baskets for the homeowners, and a NU community might just work. -Buck |
#273
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Fla. 8-Year-Old Gets Traffic Ticket For Bike Mishap (irresponsible idiot parents refuse to pay)
On 09 Nov 2003 00:59:09 GMT, David Reuteler
wrote: Rick Onanian wrote: : I so wanted to walk, but they wouldn't allow it. I had to take the : bus with all those other assholes. the, uhh, short bus? Even that might have been an improvement. I could have been king of that bus. Nope, the long bus, full of more normal assholes. -- Rick Onanian |
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Fla. 8-Year-Old Gets Traffic Ticket For Bike Mishap (irresponsible idiot parents refuse to pay)
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#276
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Fla. 8-Year-Old Gets Traffic Ticket For Bike Mishap (irresponsible idiot parents refuse to pay)
On Sun, 09 Nov 2003 01:13:17 -0800, Zoot Katz
wrote: I'm saying there's a cultural prejudice in favour of driving that effects how law enforcement and the courts handle the cases. It effects how media reports traffic fatalities which in turn effects how the masses think (don't think) about the actual and preventable horror. Zoot, it sounds to me like you dislike the culture and the legal system, as well as the masses, in your country. That's a lot to dislike and still stay. What's so compelling about it that you stay despite those major issues? It's almost like somebody who stays in an abusive relationship. Personally, I love my country; the major stuff is ok; the minor stuff is within my reach to have an effect; and there's lots of opportunity to have the life I want. -- Rick Onanian |
#277
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Fla. 8-Year-Old Gets Traffic Ticket For Bike Mishap (irresponsible idiot parents refuse to pay)
"Zoot Katz" wrote in message
... Devoting so much space to the car spreads the city out further and makes car ownership even more necessary and inevitable. As we spend more on roads, bridges and overpasses, we have less to spend on public transit infrastructure to nodes of higher density mixed use developments. There could have been more pumpkin patches in green belts between population nodes instead of strip mall parking lots. Even when we have public transportation in place, people don't want to use it. Look at the failure of the BART system, or the more recent light-rail system in Dallas. We also know that preserving open space, while necessary, comes at a social cost that many cities were unwilling to pay in times past. It's hard to ignore property owner's rights, especially in the U.S. Forcing an owner to give up the economic value of his inner-city property so it can become a park is a sticky political issue that many aren't willing to tackle. And the city's coffers aren't big enough to provide fair-market value. Now we can agree on the need for more mixed-use development. There are some market segments that can utilize it. But if you are thinking that we should have scrapped suburbia in favor of only mixed-use development, you are ignoring market needs. On the ownership side, there is a market desire for homes with private yards. On the commercial side, there will always be a market need for high enough traffic voumes (whether by foot, bicycle or auto) to support the businesses, especially in these markets with smaller margins. This is why businesses are concentrated around larger collector roads. Place them on a smaller secondary road and unless they are within a niche market which will seek them out, the business is doomed to fail because the competition is on the main road. When the houses are all spread out to make room for streets and driveways, the land requirements are greater, therefore more expensive. Because the building lots and houses are larger to accommodate the cars, they're more expensive too. There may be slightly higher costs in infrastructure and materials, but the land costs at the periphery are so low that you can buy much more home per dollar in suburbia than you can in the inner loop. You also ignore the increased costs of building materials and construction complexity when building multi-story housing in an urban area. The only way to offset the increased costs of building and land is to increase density (greater number of living units per lot). This results in a living situation that is obviously undesirable to a majority of the population. And if we have to build at higher densities, we cannot include those gardens that our houses are supposed to be designed around! When the first household expenditure surveys were conducted in 1901, (cycling's heyday) transportation accounted for less than 2 percent of the family budget - now it is 18 percent and rising. With transportation costs eating up a bigger percentage of household budgets, saving for a home becomes increasingly difficult. We can blame much of this on the manufacturer unions and our general greediness in this modern society. Everyone wants to make as much money as possible, and unions can enforce pay rates. This is why a guy who picks up a brake caliper and bolts it onto a car can make $35 an hour. And we wonder why our manufacturing base is leaving the country? The utopia that a few people around here envision is not the utopia for everyone. I like cycling and even commuting by bike, but I'm not willing to give up the amenities of suburbia. I think that small-town USA is more like what everyone wants. It's small enough to have few traffic problems, small enough to bike in, small enough to know your neighbors, but needs to be big enough to have a local economy of some measure. I grew up in a town like this. Living in the suburbs of a big city is not quite the same, but is close enough for now. Thinking about all of this does make me wonder about your living situation, Zoot. Does your home share a wall with someone else's? Do you have any kids to think about? How much access to open space do you really have? -Buck |
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Fla. 8-Year-Old Gets Traffic Ticket For Bike Mishap (irresponsible idiot parents refuse to pay)
On Sun, 09 Nov 2003 12:11:06 -0500, "frkrygowHALTSPAM"
wrote: Rick Onanian wrote: That's because some people have a truck for when they need to truck stuff, and a car for when they don't... Apparently, some people have never heard of utility trailers. What do you suppose the towing capacity of a Toyota Prius is? I know that my Pontiac Grand Am v6 was only listed for 1000 pounds -- wtf can I tow with that? Sorry, a utility trailer weighs most of the capacity of a compact car's towing ability (the 4 cylinder version, btw, is not rated to tow _anything_). Back when a small car had a body on frame (like a modern truck) and could be had with a v8, you could probably tow useful trailers. Finally, who wants a road full of small cars with light-duty brakes towing rotted trailers with leaking tires just to get some furniture (or a family-sized load of bicycles) home from the store? You know how good the drivers are now, that they are so dangerous (at least, in the context of this discussion; they get much safer when we discuss helmets)? Now imagine them towing trailers, too! -- Rick Onanian |
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Fla. 8-Year-Old Gets Traffic Ticket For Bike Mishap (irresponsible idiot parents refuse to pay)
On Sun, 09 Nov 2003 16:49:13 -0800, The Real Bev
wrote: Rick Onanian wrote: wrote: What? Do you have any idea how much space it takes to keep a car at your house? None, on most streets; you're welcome to park in the street, and parking in the street doesn't suck. If you want to park on your lawn or cut a driveway in it, you can; I wish! No overnight parking, no parking between 7-9 and 4-6, and you can get in all kinds of trouble by parking your car on your front lawn, and a few other kinds for having more cars than The City Fathers think you should have. And what's really crappy is that I live in the next best thing to a slum. Well, I was under the impression that we were talking about suburbs, not one-step-above-a-slums. Every suburban street I've seen allows 24 hour parking for residents; even city streets in residential areas allow it, but they require that you get a permit (presumably to gather some additional tax, as well as making it easier to enforce -- no permit, must not be a resident). I've never heard of trouble from parking your car on the lawn; how do they differentiate between a lawn and an unpaved driveway? Garage space, unless you're really rich, is much too valuable to waste on car storage. The damn things have waterproof paint, why do they need their own rooms? I agree, but I was pointing out how it affects the cost of a house. It's a totally contrived and manipulated way to live. Note the quotes -- Zoot wrote that. I don't want to live in an apartment. I've lived in one and I hated it. I want to live as far away from my neighbors as possible, even if our yards are 50x150, and every once in a while I want to grow some 100% agreed. flower. If everyone feels like I do, the automobile is pretty essential. So be it. Rather than whining because people like to drive cars, wouldn't it make more sense to devise a system where it didn't hurt? Actually, I figure it makes more sense for those who hate car culture, the legal system that caters to it, and the masses who love it, to move somewhere where those fundamental issues don't exist. -- Rick Onanian |
#280
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Fla. 8-Year-Old Gets Traffic Ticket For Bike Mishap (irresponsible idiot parents refuse to pay)
On Sun, 09 Nov 2003 22:43:13 -0800, Zoot Katz
wrote: Sun, 09 Nov 2003 16:49:13 -0800, , The Real Bev wrote: If everyone feels like I do, the automobile is pretty essential. So be it. Were the automobile designed to be essential, we wouldn't have plushy macho-toy trucks and boombox low-riders. No, automobiles are designed to be consumable tokens of ones social standing and promoted as ones ticket to instant freedom and assured breeding success. If winter boots were designed to be essential, we wouldn't have leather or camouflage boots available...they'd just be plain rubber. If housing was designed to be essential, we wouldn't have raised ranches or colonials, just cinderblock apartment buildings. Etc. -- Rick Onanian |
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