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admiralteal

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admiralteal ,

We do not need to legalize it to get rid of the stigma. Spreading and calling out stories like this for the dreadful, inhumane, closeminded bullshit that they are is how we get rid of the stigma.

admiralteal ,

Building everything to be able to re-route to everything is WHY all the consoles are constantly exploding.

admiralteal , (edited )

Intuit and H&R Block are the reason we have this depraved, inhumane, anti-consumer tax system. They've created the laws that make it necessary to use tax prep software. They should not be rewarded for this by getting business for that very tax prep software. Everyone should say no to TurboTax.

irs.gov/freefile

There are always a bunch of perfectly good competitors to them listed. Use those competitors. For most people it's totally free.

admiralteal ,

I see the biggest protest in history as the first Earth Day Protests, which had some absurd number like 1/10 of everyone in the US, out to protest.

And it solved pollution forever~

admiralteal ,

It's not a lie. There's no malicious intent. It's just not even wrong. It so fundamentally lacks understanding of the underlying bureaucracy, technology, product lifecycle, and surrounding politics politics that it amounts to nothing.

And the overall point still stands. We should be skeptical of these kinds of intrusions into our devices from the state. We should resist them as a default posture.

admiralteal ,

Lockdown doesn't require password unless your device settings require password -- it normally just kicks it back to requiring pin. Which is still quite secure. I don't know what you mean saying it is disabled by default -- it is available by default if you long press the power button and click Lockdown.

Even better is to reboot the device. Then it will be in lockdown mode -- pin required -- and also encrypted awaiting the pin. A modern device fresh from a restart should be quite hard indeed to crack without some alternate access to the person's Google account.

admiralteal ,

You think Google pays "shitloads for ad revenue to creators"? Is that why it's so rare for major creators to rely on sponsorship deals to be their primary stable income?

admiralteal ,

But YouTube Premium is incredibly reliable, unlimited, famously has very little content moderation, and is full of enjoyable content? (i.e., all of YouTube)

I think you just don't want to pay.

admiralteal ,

I mean, I'm a happy, paying subscriber to Nebula. Any content where I have a choice to watch it there, I do. It's stupidly cheap, too. Usually you can find a promo to get it for under $20/yr.

But I am also not pretending that Google owes me free & ad-free YouTube on my terms. They don't. Nor do the creators owe me uploading their videos to my platform of choice. I'd prefer both these things to be true, but I at least can understand that it is not reasonable. YouTube, frankly, is probably the ONLY killer product I couldn't do without made by Google, other than some open source software.

People should pirate all they want. I don't really give a fuck. I don't consider it some great moral evil. But pirating from YouTube is not some symbolic, ethical stand for your values. If you really think what they're doing is bad, stop using the service and pressure the YouTubers to upload elsewhere (which they pretty much ALL could do without consequences from Google). The entire platform only exists because of advertising. Period. If you hate ads as much as I do, pay for the ad-free versions.

admiralteal ,

What other video platforms does Louis Rossmann upload his stuff to, by the way?

He does, you know. But I notice you aren't watching him there.

admiralteal ,

So you could be using and supporting alternate platforms, but YouTube is so valuable to you that you don't bother.

admiralteal ,

I don't believe you do because you would've linked to it instead of YouTube. You claim to hate that business, yet you direct people to engage on it.

You're getting on a moral high horse about how it's fair and right to pirate from YouTube because of their bad behavior, yet when given a free alternative platform to view the videos from a creator you respect enough to link, you don't. You go to YouTube.

Let's give an example:

I think you underestimate how much pirates and the opposition truly hate google and their practices and the lengths they will go to in order to get the content they want.

Apparently not very hard at all, since there was a totally Google-free way to get the content you want that supports the creator even better and is free and yet here you are not using it.

admiralteal ,

You legitimately do not understand that there are alternatives to YouTube. It's fucking embarrassing.

Give me quality service for what I pay, or I go elsewhere.
Apparently not. You'll keep going there no matter how much you claim to hate them.

And that's no small part of why Google has such market control. Because people like you give it to them enthusiastically.

PS: it's Rumble. That's the actual alternative (with a HEAVY emphasis on the "alt" in "alternative") you could use to watch Rossmann if you really are so passionate about how bad Google is. Plus Rossmann also is one of the cofounders of GrayJay.

admiralteal ,

The Chinese are also pretty cognizant of their emissions. Might be weird to hear, but I've been working on a painful research project for the last few months and see a lot of very frank discussion of it in the research. Example, which starts with a pretty matter-of-fact statement about the "unsatisfactory" state of recycling and carbon emissions in the Chinese construction industry.

Clearly, this kind of frank writing doesn't get you in trouble with the authorities. They know they have a problem that will need to be addressed. They aren't bullshitting about it. Their officials aren't pretending the problem of climate change is made up woke propaganda they can ignore. And they have a command economy, so they can simply order businesses, labs, and universities to focus efforts on developing solutions.

Lot of bad things to say about China. It's an authoritarian state led by a dictator. They definitely put the economy ahead of addressing climate issues. But the also see the harsh reality -- failing to address climate will destroy their economy. Failing to address climate will result in anyone else who does out-competing them on the global stage. And soon.

admiralteal ,

There is no "possibly" about it. Right now, solar is the cheapest form of electrical generation ever, in human history, and it is still getting cheaper. It has literally seen price drops of more than 2 orders of magnitude in my lifetime. It is, without a doubt, going to be the primary means of energy generation for the future of our species, assuming our species is to have a future.
It's hardly something the Chinese can claim as their achievement, though. There's a large economy for solar panels -- and frankly, the Chinese production ramped up in response significantly to Californian demand under their (now besieged) rooftop solar policies. A lot of players are involved from research to production to demand and any one country that claims it's all thanks to them is sweet-talking you.

admiralteal ,

Grade A tankie shit is taking advice on how to respect religious freedom and human rights from Saudi Arabia, UAE, Egypt, Syria, Bahrain, Tunisia, and Bosnia and Herzegovina.

admiralteal ,

I don't think there's much for consumer single heat pump systems that do both. I've seen a few, especially with geothermal systems, but mostly it's just a tiny heat pump built into the cap of a traditional water heater.

Worth pointing out that the nature of a heat pump is that the housewide heat pump is first pumping warm air into the house to make it available for the water heater, which then pumps that warm air into the water. So it is just one big machine, fundamentally. Or, if your air conditioner is running, the water heater heat pump is adding some cooling to the space.

The criticism of the heat pump water heater: they're loud. A high frequency compressor buzz while operating. If you are switching to one, make sure it is located somewhere where the noise won't bother you. Mine is in a mechanical room in the middle of my house and it is annoying when operating -- I program it to run at night and close doors when going to bed. If I could do it over again, I'd put in in the (insulated) attic in spite of all the risks involved in that. More hot air available for it to use up there anyway.

Facebook Watches Teens Online As They Prep for College (themarkup.org)

An investigation by the media organization The Markup found the pixel by Facebook and Instagram-parent Meta on dozens of popular websites targeting kids from kindergarten to college, including sites that students are all but required to use if they want to participate in school activities or apply to college....

admiralteal ,

Big "guns don't kill people, people kill people" energy.

Facebook has the resources and personnel to maintain basic ethical standards for whom they sell their products to and how they are used. They chose not to because it is more profitable to chose not to. This isn't either/or. You blame the operators of those websites AND you blame big tech.

We need to stop pretending it is remotely OK to behave without any semblance of humanist morals in the pursuit of capital. It isn't. It never was. It never will be. Anyone who tells you profits need to be prioritized over ethical standards, in any situation, at any time, for any reason, should be committed.

admiralteal ,

Ironically, the US by some metrics has more freight rail than anyone else.

We're just using it to carry around rocks and coal and shit, and putting literally everything else in trucks. We SHOULD be using the trains for rocks and coal and shit, don't get me wrong, but it'd be nice to put some other stuff on it.

But the class 1 railroads mostly own the actual track and right-of-way. Norfolk and all their moronic lot. They're slaves to the lines going up and pass on good, sensible business expansions that would make them lots of money just because it would lower their profit percents by some tiny margin. Everywhere else in the world, the rail and right of way is a public good even if the service on them is deregulated.

Meanwhile Cincinnati just sold the Cincinnati Southern Railway to Norfolk Southern for a short-term cash injection. Fucking idiots. Norfolk TOLD them they were undervaluing the line by offering to buy it and they sold it anyway. And now that's one more route that has 0 chance of ever having meaningful passenger service.

admiralteal ,

My assumption is that it's almost certainly the other way around. Ads visible surrounding you in your life work their way into your head and make it to your conversations. At that point it stops being subliminal and you're thinking about it and notice the ads.

My entire theory is hinged on the idea that advertising works. That all these companies spending millions and billions on ads fundamentally know what they're doing and that you're being hacked in an insidious and grotesque way by them.

My worldview still makes it a duty to protect your own goddamn soul by installing as many ad blockers as possible though

admiralteal ,

I don’t think that introducing electric motors into the mix is going to be the factor that drastically changes the above ratios.

Very confident you're wrong in that sentiment.

American urban design is awful. It's really bad. And I would feel safe claiming that most Americans who might consider bikeped commutes rule it out because it is just not practical with our sprawling, idiotic suburban model.

That electric motor decreases your delta with prevailing traffic substantially and massively expands your range both as a function of literal distance and as a function of how far you can get in a given time. ebikes have absolutely HUGE potential to act as a transition as US urban planners (hopefully) get their act together and stop building financially and environmentally unsustainable, ugly, unsafe cities -- and start opening the door to the kind of infill needed to fix the already-busted ones.

admiralteal , (edited )

Literally everything you've written here is premised on the idea that people have a choice. That both kinds of living arrangements are equally available and people are choosing one over the other. That and a mistaken understanding of density that so many people have, where you think only Metropolis style apartment blocks could possibly be walkable when really the small town Main Street has been the icon of walkability for basically all of human history.

It's such a fundamental error that I'm comfortable dismissing pretty much everything else you wrote based on it. There's a reason almost the entire world and human history has cities that generally follow the same pattern. Walkable, modest density communities with a mix of uses that grow organically.

And there's a reason those don't get built anymore in the US. It's not because people hate them. People love them. The ones that do exist are some of the most desirable places to live based on so many metrics. Particularly price, which is the true story - the supply on these kinds of towns is unbelievably tight and so people can't afford to live in them. They're forced by factors outside of their own preference and control to instead live in places that 100% require a car for all day today life activities with absolutely no mix of uses and where it is only legal to build single-family detached homes. Because these places are way cheaper. Even though they shouldn't be. They absolutely and objectively should cost more to live in because it costs more for the municipal government to service you living in them. You consume more public resources living in them. But we subsidize them so much that they magically get cheaper even inclusive of one or two $10,000 a year cars.

The reason suburbs show so much clear growth is because we subsidize them intensely in so many ways.

And it wouldn't even matter if you were right and people genuinely preferred suburbs because they're not financially productive they're not financially sustainable and they're an environmental disaster. Just having a preference for something doesn't mean that the government should tax everyone else and subsidize it for you.

admiralteal ,

Our current model of urban planning has only existed since the middle of the 20th century. Only really got started in around 1960s.

I think it's important to point out that it is definitely under 100 years. On the scales of human urban policy it is the brand new experiment. And it is a disaster. And we're still throwing bad money after good on it in huge quantities.

Cities are already remodeling themselves, small bits at a time, to start fixing these issues. There is no choice in the matter here. They have to do it or else they're going to find themselves with roads full of potholes that they can't afford to fix and failing water systems and all those other modern signs of decay growing worse and worse until they basically aren't a town anymore. As someone in the Bay Area you should know this well, because that City both has some disastrous symptoms and is building policies to this effect.

admiralteal ,

The federal aid highway act.

The broken modern urban planing pattern did not predate it. Period. The suburban experiment is post war.

The rest of the 5000+ years of traditional urban design were overturned.

admiralteal , (edited )

Who's erasing anything? Christ man, I said 1960s and cited the 1956 law that represented the profound changes happening then. And yes, news flash, this is postwar. Cut this disingenuous shit.

And yes, it was the postwar era that heralded these changes, leading up to an explosion starting thanks in significant part to the construction of the Eisenhower system.

Stop pretending that the prewar streetcar suburbs have ANY similarities to postwar era "suburban experiment" development. They have no bearing on each other. After WW2, out of terrible fear of returning to a major recession, the entire country instead devoted itself to massive, massive, massive debt spending to build entire whole-cloth developments, to keep the wartime economic machine going. We expanded vast highway networks to encourage longer-distance commuting. We offered incredibly cheap, government-guaranteed, 30 year mortgages for single-family homes. We began the process of cinching down hard to "urban blight" (i.e., poor, productive neighborhoods). We updated building codes with completely unscientific mandatory parking minimums. We made it increasingly illegal to build anything but R1a residential or huge apartment developments. We changed our entire urban model to the one everyone grew up with -- suburbs and strip malls.

And it all happened within the last century. Well within it. Postwar, starting in earnest in the 1960s and only starting to slow down in the last decade or two as more and more cities had the bills start to come due and have realized the total insolvency it has left them with.

You can show me a picture of pretty much any neighborhood in any city and I call tell you whether it was a pre 1940 or post 1950. The difference is dramatic and obvious and I don't believe you if you claim otherwise.

admiralteal ,

To be clear, he wasn't "praying on the field". He was leading the whole team in prayer as part of the school event, at the 50 yard line, with the audience watching, inviting others to participate, apparently creating an atmosphere of pressure to participate, etc.. He was using his role as a coach and as faculty of the school to formally endorse and encourage his particular religion as part of the identity of the team.

And the stupid fucks at the SCOTUS thought this was not an establishment violation based on lies. Kavanaugh literally repeatedly lied in his opinion on it, claiming repeatedly that it was a private prayer instead of a giant, intentional public spectacle.

Anyone who looks at the photos of clips of the prayer will have ZERO illusion that this was a small private prayer on the field. It was a megachurch-inspired moment.

admiralteal ,

All the other corruption and such aside, imagine how terrible this is for the urban development of your town.

The municipal government has no incentive to invest in forward-thinking policy that will lead to healthier and more economically sustainable communities. If they invest in any kind of maintenance or developments that increase road safety - and thus decrease fines - it hurts the government's ability to operate. Indeed, they have direct Financial incentive to make the roads less safe. Not to even mention that they have no incentive at all to do things that improved the city in ways that won't affect their traffic fines.

They've committed to giving up on good governance of their small town. They found a way to function by just parasitizing others. They've given up.

admiralteal ,

Especially re: road safety, this is the American approach. Build with unsafe designs according to decades out-of-date engineering practice and design philosophy. Blame enforcement when things inevitably go wrong (which they are doing -- most American towns are heading towards financial insolvency because of their idiotic design and planning patterns and American roads are among if not the least safe ones in the developed world).

In threads about roads, people will inevitably bring up two pieces of perfectly-harmonized bullshit. First, that the drivers are just particularly bad in their context. Second, that there is way too little enforcement. Both are total bullshit. Drivers are basically the same everywhere. It is literally not possible for the police to enforce enough to make a dent on road safety.

When some municipality decides they want to get serious about safe roads, they do so primarily through better engineering of the roads. It's proven effective. And bonus points: the same design practices that make roads safer encourage better development patterns creating safer and more pleasant streets for EVERYONE. Especially people outside of cars. Which creates a virtuous cycle of multi-modal development patterns. Safer streets mean more people are on them, and not just in cars. This leads to lower crime, more productive neighborhood businesses, more aesthetic neighborhoods (since people are actually there to look at them, they care how they look now). Everything just gets better when you use better road engineering.

But no, we still rely on AASHTO standards and their ilk which rate roads according to "level of service". They literally put everything, including safety, as secondary to how many cars the road can move.

And that's not even jumping down the rabbit hole of what it means for my country to be a police state. How insane it is that we have laws that criminalize completely mundane, normal, predictable behavior that can be selectively-enforced or used as pretexts for unnecessary violence.

admiralteal ,

If the water cycle shuts down to such a degree that the desalinated water is not making it back into the oceans, we have planetary-scale problems far more worrisome than a slightly elevated ocean salinity.

If you had an absolutely huge number of these in a small area, I'm sure you could probably create a localized disturbance in the salinity. But 13k gallons is a pretty trivial amount. That's a 50 meter cube of water per day... in the ocean.

admiralteal ,

About 50 cubic meters. An Olympic-sized swimming pool is ~660,000 gallons, so it would take over 50 of them to produce that much water in a day.

admiralteal ,

More and more of the US is going to be a tropical climate and will have to deal with tropical diseases in the coming decades. We'll need to stop pretending the Gulf is substantially different than Central America in ecology pretty soon, including for diseases.

The best time to get serious about fighting back against these diseases was generations ago. Of course, capitalist systems didn't care about suffering and death that didn't effect the bottom line, but as the threats loom closer they finally get off their haunches. Any progress on it is good.

admiralteal ,

Probably invented, but it's worth pointing out that Socrates did not write. Most of his stuff came from Plato or others.

The Ancient Greeks also had a fundamentally different idea of what it meant to be a historian. It wasn't a fact and evidence-driven field, as it is thought of today. Herodotus, for example, regularly wrote stuff in the framing of "I wasn't there and it was many scores of years ago, but if I HAD been there this is what I would've seen happen", so to speak. Assuming he was a real person and not an invented personality.

admiralteal ,

Also 14th and 19th, plus the Civil Rights Act. A non-corrupt SCOTUS would toss the Florida law immediately, but absent a couple minutes under Warren we have never had one of those.

admiralteal ,

They were told the other acceptable courtesy titles were Mrs., Ms., or Miss. Using "teacher" was also out of the question.

After being denied Teacher, Professor, or Dr. as the title (the last because they did not have a PhD even though evidently others in the school go by Dr. without a PhD without discipline). And note that "Mr." was apparently not an option?

The school's hands weren't tied. They appear enthusiastic.

Nashville DA says "law must be altered" after suspect released from jail is accused of shooting college student in the head (www.cbsnews.com)

The Nashville district attorney called on Wednesday for the Tennessee legislature to make it easier to commit someone to a mental institution after a man who was previously released for incompetence to stand trial was accused of shooting an 18-year-old college student in the head....

admiralteal , (edited )

Don't forget the severe, widespread lead poisoning that affected anyone born before about 1980.

admiralteal ,

Ironic that megacorps get privacy rights they don't deserve while the rest of us get jack shit and are told we should be grateful for it.

admiralteal ,

Yeah. On the one hand, fuck all the evil fucks at meta. On the other, we need to stop pretending the private sector is going to make rules and frameworks to protect anyone. We all know that private capital is not capable of behaving ethically unless directed to at the barrel of a gun.

It shouldn't be that way. We should be able to trust that people will behave ethically. But we can't. They won't. They are unethical and like being that way. They're monsters and have no intention to be otherwise.

admiralteal ,

That's why I'll defend vigorously the way we use SMS in the US.

Sure, it's an outdated, insecure, bad system. Improvements like RCS are still iffy and poorly-rolled-out. But it's also a standard you can use to connect with EVERYONE, isn't controlled by a single private company (even if the evil fucks at Google desperately want it to be), and is totally interoperable between apps (since the apps are, after all, merely implementing a protocol).

I have high hopes the interoperability standards the EU is proposing will amount to something, but I won't be holding my breath for it. In the meantime, I am not going to switch to whatever app is trending until it can at LEAST do everything I currently can with SMS.

admiralteal ,

A lot of billionaires do wake up at 5AM.

I'm confident that a lot of them -- probably most of them -- do indeed work very hard, in every sense. Whether effective at their tasks or just fucking lucky (hint: it's the latter) the ones we know about do put in the hours. Hording wealth is their profession, hobby, and entire life all wrapped up in one.

But if the average lifetime earnings of the typical American is around $1 mil you would need to work 1,000 times harder than them, saving and investing every bit you earn and not spending it on anything including necessities, to just barely qualify as a billionaire in America by the time you retire. The average American works somewhere around 35 hours a week, so was the minimum billionaire working 3,500 hours a week? I suspect not.

There's no point or value in calling a billionaire lazy. It may or may not be true, but it ignores the point. It does not matter how hard anyone works. You don't get to a billion ethically.

admiralteal ,

Absent the coercion brought on by the threat of starvation, illness, and homelessness, most people wouldn't be able to handle a lot of minimum wage jobs. They wear down your body and soul. But having a gun pointed at you and your family is a hell of a motivator.

Who cares, though? Laziness is not the problem with billionaires. I wish for everyone to live in a world where they can get away with being "lazy". Where they can pursue their passions and refuse to do the tasks that make life a drudge. Not wanting to do thankless and brutal tasks for low pay is normal and healthy and refusing that bargain is what we ALL ought to be able to do.

The wealth hoarding is the problem. Even if every single billionaire was provably the hardest worker in their company, even if we KNEW that being a top 1%er in wealth absolutely mapped to you being a top 1%er in grit, it doesn't change how I feel about the injustice of the vast inequality.

admiralteal ,

That quote is ignoring the fact that it was his fellow conservatives who went after him to destroy his life. It is his fellow conservatives -- the ones he chose to stand among and support -- that enjoy this outcome.

You cannot be surprised when bullies bully. And the people who hang out with bullies because it benefits them to do so? They are also bullies.

And unfortunately, I think that's exactly why you're wrong. The issue isn't partisanship. The issue is bigotry. These people outed him because they hate and want to destroy LGBT people. There's no shades of grey here. There is no moderate position. This story happened even with no one from the opposite partisan position being involved.

admiralteal ,

Nah, I'll go ahead and say it.

No one has a pass to be conservative, especially a queer person. No one. Not one person. It is not acceptable to be a bigot, a bully. It's not acceptable to be cruel just because you believe there is a certain social hierarchy that ought to be enforced. All the tenants of conservatism are unacceptable. And if you are queer, you now have INTIMATE knowledge of what it is like to be on the receiving end of that hatred and oppression and should know better than most to take no part in it.

admiralteal ,

In general, urban signal-controlled intersections are just the traffic engineers screaming "I've tried nothing and am all out of ideas."

We use them pretty much by default in the US, but most urban areas should be vastly cutting back on them. All-way stops and, of course, roundabouts are both provably FAR safer often with no impact or a positive impact to overall congestion. Plus, pretty universally much cheaper to build and maintain.

Signal-controlled designs should be reserved for intersections where it is literally not possible to fit a more passive design while maintaining sight distances or for places where truly huge traffic volumes are involved (a significant interchange) where no other traffic flow redesign is possible.

Using traffic lights is ALL about increasing level of service. Which is just code for "The city values keeping more cars moving faster over both safety and financial responsibility."

All that to say, I bet a lot of the intersections that would be most annoying without right on red... don't really need to have lights controlling traffic flow in them at all.

admiralteal , (edited )

These climate-based arguments for why we should maintain cities primarily designed around the car are just... dumb. Don't fall victim to them. There is only one effective way to reduce congestion long-term and that is reducing the need for cars. Creating streets that are safe and pleasant for people outside of cars promotes alternatives to driving. And in doing all of this, you'll have a huge impact on the climate instead of a worthless marginal one.

Road user cost is an EXTREMELY well-studied field with hundreds of complete manuals and textbooks written on the subject. Most states have their own full guidelines. You can very, very directly quantify what the impact of things like work zones is in terms of dollar figures based on theoretical impacts to travelers. So yeah, in those terms, the DOT does put a dollar value on congestion, absolutely. Just as the EPA creates a metric for putting a dollar value on a human life when analyzing impacts of pollution.

The actual traffic study for this would be comparing an intersection with ROR AB tested to without ROR, modeling the increased delay for drivers, and translating that into a figure. A minute or two delay... actually doesn't amount to very much, and that's what a typical case would be of forcing a driver to wait an additional cycle. Not to mention that, in a world without ROR, there is no a very good reason to force engineers to do their fucking jobs and design the intersection to work better without that dangerous crutch.

The Philadelphia paper is the seminal work on all way stops being safer than signals in urban contexts. It is pretty definitive and similar studies have confirmed the results, cementing them into most complete streets design guides.

Studies on roundabouts being safer are... even more conclusive and abundant. I really can't cite just one because damn, there's so damn many.

admiralteal ,

They tend to be significantly larger in new construction because small ones don't really cost a lot less than big ones and most designs prefer to do something nice with the landscaping. Plus, bigger ones flow better. But you can retrofit ones that aren't vastly larger in size.

All of this is equally true of a road with bike lanes vs one without them... yet cities always seem to be able to find the space, typically by dieting the road a bit. There's typically lots of options. Narrow lanes, reduce lanes, eliminate some/all on-street parking, cannibalize the median, etc..

Neighborhood traffic circles are a pretty easy drop-in replacement for most of the worst-offender small intersections, too, and they can be achieved with as little as painted lines.

admiralteal ,

my experience with them is great when people aren’t total morons

It really doesn't matter. They're safer and better even if -- maybe ESPECIALLY if -- total morons are going through them. They just change the geometry of how an incident could even happen and leave everyone safer.

admiralteal ,

This is the Philly paper. You can explore through its cited bys and references if you want to see the continuing state of the research, but it's pretty rock-solid. There's very little doubt in the minds of any policy experts I know of or have read that signaled intersections, in urban contexts, should be used far less. That all-way stops are almost universally a safer design.

Your response on my points about delay is very much just one small problem thinking. I admit, LA's traffic situation is utterly fucked (thanks to putting the car at the center of all their urban planning for decades, which results in cities that are somehow undriveable AND impossible to navigate outside of cars at the same time). As a person who is immersed in this (and currently published in the TRB, if you can take my word on it because I won't be doxxing myself), let me assure you: traffic engineers are lazy, unimaginative fuckers. They follow their design manuals like bibles. ROR is easy to execute so they execute it rather than spending the extra 30-40 minutes to include more comprehensive phasing in their proposals. The manuals tell them that's all they have to and most others are too scared to challenge their "expertise".

Any traffic system that is going to gridlock because of removal of ROR was misdesigned. Period. Also was probably going to do it anyway, especially as traffic naturally grows over time (outside of the effective policy projects to reduce traffic, e.g., complete streets/multi-modal transportation plans).

If it is low enough volume that it makes sense to have ROR, it shouldn't have the signal at all.

If it is high enough volume that it risks serious problems if ROR is removed, the ROR almost certainly unsafe to begin with and a dedicated turn signal should be incorporated. Even if it just a signal indicating when it is acceptable to make an unprotected right on red.

ROR is currently the default and "opt-out" in relevant US intersections. It should, at best, be an opt in (e.g., with an arrow indicating you can turn right while yielding during certain phases).

I am not saying all traffic lights should go, but we have far, far, far too many of them. ESPECIALLY in the US, where they basically always have extremely simplistic phasing that, outside of peak rush hour times, simply increases average trip times.

To put it another another way: Braess's paradox hints at a larger truth: the systems that intuitively seem helpful to prevent congestion are often what CAUSED the congestion. There's no strong research on AB testing for congestion vs traffic signal removal that I am aware of, unfortunately, because the study is just laden with confounders eliminating any real AB comparison (e.g., making streets safer for multimodal traffic, e.g., by removing signals and replacing with all-way stops, leads to fewer people driving and that may be the "real" reason congestion goes down).

Don't miss the forest for the trees. Removing right on red is a safety win anywhere you do it. The congestion effects, if and when they even exist, can be addressed through separate system adjustments.

RE: crime... nothing is a better crime deterrent than humans present. My prescription is still to make the streets and neighborhoods more walkable. Adjust policies and designs to get more people comfortable being out there. Not even going to get into challenging the idea that crime is truly on the rise -- we both know that it isn't really.

admiralteal ,

I feel goal posts shifting away to any response I make. Pass.

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