biked to pickup coffee and on the way back a driver creeped up very awkwardly beside me at a red light as soon as I turned around I understood they were too busy to follow mere traffic laws, they had an emergency text conversation to focus on

the only good motor cars youtu.be/pmLJ0uUahwM TIL these are called speeders. All other speeders still need speed governors.

hey this goes against my fundamental beliefs

The effect of car dependency: in 1940, Basil Rathbone was photographed wearing an overcoat outside his home. As more men relied on cars, overcoats became shorter to accommodate drivers. Today, the right is marketed as an "overcoat," even if it would've been considered more sport coat length in 1940.

"It’s no accident."

America does potentially have a particular problem with multiple levels of government responsible for planning and funding transportation infrastructure. The American gentry benefit from over-representation of their rural areas plus the disproportionate harm car dependency imposes on others.

Ignoring the externalities of driving, if drivers were purely charged their fair share of direct govt expenditures for the roads they use, a major component would be construction costs. So drivers on empty rural highways should have very large costs per mile. Gas taxes are a subsidy for sprawl.

"They said the driver, who dropped off her child at the school, did not see the boy and drove nearly the length of the block with him pinned underneath the vehicle. Witnesses told police the car appeared to be moving at a high rate of speed." www.fox32chicago.com/news/boy-9-f...

kids should be able to safely walk or ride to see friends or buy a treat when they're six, they should not be allowed to drive a motor vehicle when they're sixteen, and these are effectively the two options when we decide which kind of community to build.

Everyone should be able to walk and bike safely around their home, especially kids. youtu.be/lShDhGn5e5s

Per the Godfather, cars are a great physical defense against cars. Bollards are great but cannot move horizontally. High speed chases are dangerous. Autonomous vehicles are uniquely suited to traffic calming in general, and could even be directed to safely slow down a particular speeding vehicle.

Absurd that crash victims of un(der) insured drivers can only get compensated from their own car or health insurance, if any. DOTs should be liable. If that's too much to bear for the government, bollards are cheap and effective ways to minimize that cost.

Unbelievably grim account of what happens after you are hit by a car in California. sfstandard.com/opinion/2025...

If a mobility justice advocate says that disabled plates are important but a driver parking with a truck bed hanging over a sidewalk is not, then the class of people for whose mobility they are advocating is "drivers."

It's also "political violence" to steal years off people's lives by depriving them of shelter, stripping away health care, and gutting environmental protections — while funneling more and more wealth to the ultra-rich.

NJB recent videos make two good points about trains. First, yes that's the best logo. Second, many towns have lost train service entirely. At least implicit that small town #urbanism would massively benefit from reinstating rail connections to regularly bring many people, not cars, to town centers.

the news covering transit policies of rival political candidates, you love to see it youtu.be/Nau5iqVfikA

My secret is being even more mad at the world physically surrounding me, than the world I read about online.

Speeding does not become safe on the highway because of the absence of pedestrians. People can exit disabled vehicles anywhere, and urban highways built to restrict pedestrian movement will have some pedestrians. www.fox5atlanta.com/news/deadly-...

arstechnica.com/cars/2025/09... Maintaining the dominance of gasoline in the automotive marketplace more crucial to the GOP coalition than one manufacturer ever was, and it'd be great for everyone concerned about the electoral ramifications of car purchases to consider that too.

A driver on a local surface street, going above any highway speed limit in the state, hit and killed another driver. One of the frustrating speed governor objections is that it'd be too complicated. No. Many vehicles have speed governors already. Prioritize safety and set them all to 55. 1/3

Such a powerful video from @boston.gov and @streets.boston.gov about the impact of e-bikes (and the city's e-bike voucher program). Just look at the joy these bikes have brought to Steven and Muriel Leonard!

But maybe bumper stickers mean that we need patches. The fundamental message of bumper stickers is personal identification with a lethal multi ton machine, but people do like them. If we wore sombreros and ponchos, and learned to sew on patches, we could show off so many messages.

Sidewalks and pedestrian islands in Pompeii Ancient Rome had better pedestrian infrastructure than most of America. from @smartereveryday.bsky.social youtu.be/dt_CG_xRnrY&...

Everyone should have healthcare. Fire fighters should have masks to protect from smoke inhalation. And the sheer number of people sent into the smoke so often is an inhumane subsidy for car dependent life in land that should be wilderness. It has never been realistic to protect it all.

People talk a lot about how candidates in other places can't run on Mandani's ideas. Almost every local official who cared about car crash victims in their community could campaign on something akin to this. Mamdani actually does it.

imagine if drivers were as serious about distraction due to reading and writing texts as children playing video games are about somebody walking in front of the TV

in #Atlanta a group of rich NIMBYs formed a group called Better Atlanta Transit to block construction of #transit in their area. No transit proponents got reverse polarized against it. I hope opponents of #Abundance see through the name and continue supporting good transportation and housing.

letting carbrains design our transportation infrastructure means we get beg buttons that can only be pressed after an able bodied pedestrian climbs onto a retaining wall

This is the first I've seen of anything related to #abundance promising fewer cars, and I mean that disparagingly for this ad and for everyone at that conference. There's no way to build what we actually need without fewer cars, and no way to have fewer cars without a political fight. #bancars

Does anybody know roughly what % of ad revenue for local papers comes from car dealerships or other automotive businesses?

@bostonglobe.com My condolences. These both being on your home screen now is disappointing.

everyone gets, true or not, the idea that Musk wanted to sabotage high speed rail to encourage more driving across the board How many people hate elon musk enough to have reduced either how far they drive, or how much money they give to the Automotive sector?

I enjoyed this. And what an infectious laugh. ❤️ "Reporter left speechless after witnessing Japan's new $70 million Maglev train in action at 310 mph"

one way to ~eliminate the market for Flock cameras that drivers will never bring up is for local DOTs to operate license plate readers and respond to requests from local cops and victims of drivers (could be other drivers, pedestrians, or bikers), without enabling nationwide searches

I don't blame any individual but there is a slight of hand by driving advocates. Fines are supposedly regressive, because they aren't tied to an individual's income. Yet license plate readers are surveillance, somehow more than phones or phone payments, because they might be linked to people.

Saw a TV commercial for the Cadillac Escalade IQ, with a curb weight over 9,000 lb (!!!), that features the driver taking his hands off the wheel thanks to their driver assistance technology. A functioning society would not have this, everyone involved should be ashamed.

One thing to keep in mind is that all those tired and frustrated drivers busy ordering food on their phones are picking up their kids at the end of the day, and 110 kids are injured in parking lots and driveways each week in America. www.ksat.com/news/local/2...

Great #urbanism in Paris! New rail lines to connect the city center to historical suburbs plus investment in housing means a greater number of people can more fully participate in the life of the city. Mode shifting away from cars is great by itself and enables so much more.

When Republicans say the quiet part loud about the politics of cars: The political forces encouraging and subsidizing driving are both antagonistic towards cheaper, safer, and more accessible means of transportation, and also opposed to serious responses to the climate crisis.

Drivers hit and run after killing people all the time, with no compensation to their disproportionately marginalized victims, and a likelihood of reoffending. But online carbrains make every story of potential harm from surveillance of license plates go viral. aaafoundation.org/wp-content/u...

here’s a version where the POV is blacked out whenever the driver takes their eyes off the road

@thewaroncars.bsky.social There's a story about cars and loneliness with causation in the other direction. Before Moses was tearing down NYC tenements to build highways, all cities were necessary heterogeneous. Large scale residential segregation created loneliness and a need for more cars.

This seems to largely be a BYD story. Too bad there's a bipartisan consensus to stop Americans from buying Chinese automobiles, and especially unfortunate when it comes to cheaper and smaller EVs. "BYD recorded 13,503 new registrations in July, up 225% annually." www.cnbc.com/2025/08/28/t...

this is really bad in general, but the worst part of this translation specifically is retaining "accident" (a failure which also applies to that 404 writer in other articles) www.404media.co/citizen-is-u...

this was a joke about a bad restaurant, but it is genuinely hard to open a good small restaurant at that location with no foot traffic to peruse the menu and the imputed cost of parking in their rent. Foodies should support urbanism.

Today when we arrived at a children's activity, somebody was sitting in an idling luxury SUV beside the front door and playground full of kids. They were still idling there an hour later. There's sitting room inside, plenty of parking further away, and it was a nice day outside. It's obscene.

thinking about a thread yesterday about #urbanism communication and reminded that a century ago it was already clear that adding highway lanes won't fix traffic and that exclusionary zoning lowered property values, yet just those two policies have done much to ruin cities. Urbanism has to organize.

The automotive market is complicated, any model is imperfect. I suspect too many people interpret this as inflation akin to egg prices. Relative to eggs it's closer to conspicuous consumption of a rare good by an increasingly wealthy elite, like yachts. www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

one police reform that would directly reduce violence, without any additional arrests or training, would be mode shifting cops out of police cars and towards walking, biking, or using transit to get around their communities www.atlantanewsfirst.com/2025/08/25/s...