This is great to see. I’m very happy the University is using modern city infrastructure options.

Being in Berlin, I see tons of personal cargo bikes, the postal service uses cargo bikes, and there’s many pedal-driven cargo trucks (including DHL and UPS ones). When you’ve got good bike infrastructure, you get a lot done one two or three wheels without much hassle.

The high speed Paris to Berlin train just started in December:

https://www.euronews.com/travel/2024/12/13/high-speed-train-from-paris-to-berlin-to-launch-this-winter-with-daily-connections-from-59

There are about 25 trains per day on the route, but I guess according to this American they’re all empty?

We’ve had several people killed in their living rooms in the last few years by cars just crashing straight through the front of the house. I’m sure keeping a head on a swivel will work there.

Enforcing speed limits has been shown time and again with research to not work long term. Just chasing people around only gets a brief change in behavior. The design of the road sets the speeds, not the fear of punishment. Re-engineering the roads to enforce slow driving is the first real step, the second being to remove car routes in favor of mass transit, biking, and pedestrian routes being the actual win.

Both lights at the end of my residential street cannot detect my motorbike. If I’m heading out from home and there’s no cars around I’m essentially trapped (legally) since they’ve also banned right on red turns in my city.

I had to go through SF a few times this year. I have no idea how much the transit cost, but it was fucking expensive and I just rode a few times per day across town or to the airport.

I love public transit systems and being free to move around a city using them. It’s a truly liberating experience to have real freedom, but damn SF was tough to understand and weird in places. They’ve got to unify the system and start paying for it or it’s going to just keep crushing their downtown areas when no one uses the transit to visit.

In my city, the last trolley went through in 1936. Still waiting for the next one.

“It turns out not burning a bunch of fossil fuels leads to less pollution”… news at 11.

The really dumb part of all of this is that people have just accepted cars as the default mode of transportation for so long that it’s hard to even envision a world without them. They’re normal, despite being expensive, dangerous, horribly inefficient, killing people actively (crashes) and passively (air pollution, plastic in our lungs, parkinsons/dementia, obesity, and more), and directly contributing to isolation in our communities. Every car we can get off the road, especially in our cities, makes the world a better place.

And only because of government support. Your tax dollars at work.