Interesting Links for 20-09-2016

[andrewducker]

The Kremlin Really Believes That Hillary Wants to Start a War With Russia (tags: russia usa politics war ) Inside Google’s AI-Powered War on Trolls (tags: abuse internet google ai ) Edinburgh's Christmas expands across city (tags: edinburgh christmas ) RuneScape Adding Auctions For Banned Players’ Stuff (tags: games money ) Cornell wants to

Comments

[andrewducker]

Totally agreed on Russia.

And largely on the comedy - I think there was a place for comedians in shattering some of the restrictive social mores of the past, but a lot of it does seem remarkably pointless nowadays. (Less so in places where such social restrictions are still in place).

The key takeaway from the car article, I thought, was that cul-de-sacs are worse because there are no shops or jobs in them, and so you have to travel further afield, along highways, to get to places that people typically need to get to:
“The reality is yes, you’re safer - if you never leave your cul-de-sac. But if you actually move around town like a normal person, your town as a whole is much more dangerous.”
...
On average, they found, people who live in more sparse, tree-like communities drive about 18 percent more than people who live in dense grids.
...
This undoubtedly has to do with the fact that the grocery store, your house and your office are probably farther apart - and with less direct connections between them - if you live in a subdivision. But the difference may also have to do with the fact that people who live in gridded urban networks get in their cars less in the first place. They’re able, instead, to walk, bike, or ride transit.

[skington]

It's not just topography, it's the fact that density is lower / there's no public transport. So you have to drive.

[kalimac]

They're not able to walk, bike, ride transit: they have to. I lived in Berkeley. I walked to the grocery, though it wasn't any closer than the suburban one where I live now. Why? Because I didn't have a car, and one reason I didn't is because they were built before expectation of universal car ownership, and consequently there were few places to park one: no driveways, no garages, and street parking under severe pressure and consequently severe legal restrictions. If people don't drive in grid cities, it's because they can't move (congestion: a case of the ironic "nobody goes there, it's too crowded") and they can't park. You can easily walk or ride bikes in the suburbs, and many do, and the bike paths are easier and safer.

There's more transit in grid cities not just because of more demand (driven by cars being impossible) but also because, being older, they're more centrally located and thus more densely built. When I lived in Seattle, that was a grid but it was also much farther out, and I soon got a car out of need: bus lines, though present, were relatively minimal, and as it was a late-stage grid it was built with more elbow room to drive and park cars in. It's these things - space to put cars in, and closeness and nodality of destinations - that make the difference, not grids vs. cul-de-sacs.

[threegoldfish]

Your suburbs must be very different from mine which don't have sidewalks or bike lanes or paths on a good percentage of the streets and have cars that move at high speed down them with little regard for bikers or pedestrians. I see just as many attempts at traffic calming (speed bumps, lane narrowing) in suburbs where people want to walk these days as I do in the city because of this.

Danger in driving is a numbers game in a lot of ways. Risk increases with number of miles traveled. So of course suburbs designed in a way that maximizes the amount of driving a person has to do to run errands increases risk.

[kalimac]

Cars can't move at high speeds down them. They're full of twisty curves and cul-de-sacs. That's the kind of suburbs the article was describing. On the arteries, yes, they can move fast, but those arteries are very wide, and well-provided with bike lanes and traffic lights. But this is California.

[anton_p_nym]

They can't do it safely, however it's still physically possible (however reckless) to break the speed limit in a cul-de-sac neighbourhood. And so some do.

-- Steve's glad his particular suburban experience was in a part that still had sidewalks and a few destinations still within walking distance, including two schools and a shopping mall.

[kalimac]

"Breaking the speed limit" does not necessarily equal "driving with reckless abandon towards pedestrians and bicyclists." We don't get that here: it's not really physically possible on these curved streets unless you're a crazed hot-rodder, and this is not an area with a lot of crazed hot-rodders in it. This is Silicon Valley: techies, nerds, and a lot of quiet Asians.

So in this case, it might be the drivers, not the street layout.

[threegoldfish]

A pedestrian's likelihood of dying goes up between 30-40% (source) when the vehicle speed increases from 20 mph to 30 mph. So yeah, breaking the speed limit on suburban roads looks like reckless abandon to me.

Whether that comes back to design is a chicken and egg question. Were the roads designed because people want to move faster or are people moving faster because the road allows it? And given that I regularly see people gun it to a speed bump, slam on the brakes to crawl over the speed bump, then gun it again, plain old physics doesn't always make a lot of an impression on drivers.

[kalimac]

Your statistic is meaningless, because it's an increase from a starting point of nearly zero. That kind of jump doesn't amount to reckless abandon.

In any case, the kind of alternating revved speeding up with screeching stomps on the brakes is exactly what I was calling crazed hot-rodders, and we don't get that here.