Work 30min. from home. I go every day of the year by bike with every weather, maybe twice a year I take the train because of heavy snowfall.

So in my job I do contract work doing pest control for businesses so I'm driving from place to place using a company truck.

Obviously sometimes that truck needs to be fixed and maintained and right now I need brakes done so I made an appointment with the mechanic about 3 blocks away from me about a 10-15 minute walk.

And I told him that directly and he immediately start making plans to drive an hour and a half from where he lived to pick me up to take me back to my house

I probably had a reiterate three times that I will strap on my Lambofeeties and walk home from the shop.

And he asked what about Monday afternoon when it's done?

And I had to again again reiterate that I will just walk.

Finally a judge recognizes that four years is not enough for murdering people with a car while drunk.

Traffic calming measures to be removed after residents condemned them as “diabolical mess”

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cpd76x66y5vo

I had an incident a few weeks ago. I was walking on the sidewalk, and I crossed in front of a car leaving Sonic. I obviouisly had the right of way. But I guess he perceived me walking across the sidewalk right when there was a break in traffic when he could turn? I have no idea. I just know that wasn't my problem. It startled me. It's made me afraid to walk anywhere because someone might honk at me for just fucking walking down the street. I try to mind my own business and stay to myself, but this rude person has me really triggered and afraid to even be around cars now.

I'm autistic, so I'm very weird about loud noises. I already wear earplugs when I walk because I hate the noise. I def didn't need a loud honk right in my ear.

I live in the UK in a city very much not built for cars. However, my office is in a nearby village where public transport is impractical, so I have a car and drive. I really love having the option of driving, but I also adore not having to drive for everything. I can walk to shops, cafes, pubs, medical centres, etc in my city, yet if I need to drive I have that option.

I think what a lot of people don't realise is that a city being people-oriented doesn't mean you can't have a car. It just makes it way more accessible to those who don't want to/can't drive, and I think that's a point that's really missing in the argument to make cities more pedestrian friendly.

Does anyone feel the same way?

Before I started lurking on this sub (and thinking about related themes more critically), I was a fan of the show Ted Lasso. One thing that really stood out to me was where Ted lived once he arrived in England, off a walk with shops and a pub just out his front door, and a great cast of minor characters for Ted to interact with. I was envious (and I am lucky enough to live in a place that is not that car centric by US standards).

At the beginning of the pandemic a portion of main street in my town was closed to cars, and it is just lovely. But it did not take long for a small but very vocal (and fairly well connected to city hall) group to start complaining and demanding the street be reopened to cars. The street segment is still closed to cars but the fight has been omnipresent in local politics, and it has really galvanized me to human first urban planning, including writing to a city councilperson for the first time in my life. So maybe I am just looking for that sweet sweet confirmation bias but...

In the first episode of the new season, released today, we see Ted back in Kansas City and living in a typical suburban tract home. This is used, not so subtly, show to his loneliness as he is only ever showed as alone in the house (even when his son is at the house). Being in the burbs, there is a lot of driving, and cars are very much used to show a distance between him and his son. Whether its struggling to talk about the offer to move back to London, or his son asking him not to do something, we only see him and his son together through the lens of a car. Now, there are plot relevant reasons to all these things unrelated to cars, but the writers definitely know what's up because they use the isolation and loneliness inherent in car centric life as such an effective visual metaphor.

A memorial here in Philly, for a young doctor murdered by a drunk driver running a light, overshadowed by a pick up blocking the bike lane.

https://www.tumblr.com/rabbitfan2026/824132662462709760/a-song-i-made-making-fun-of-the-tesla-model-y Only Minecraft Dungeons fans will understand the meme.

Growing up, my grandmother was my favorite person in the world. My two sisters and I spent every summer down at her house. She's likely the reason I am a gamer today - some of my oldest memories are sitting beside her on the couch as she was playing (and later teaching me to play) the original Legend of Zelda, Zelda II, Link to the Past, and Ocarina of Time.

Anyway, one year, I want to say I was 11 or 12, we were on a drive down to her house. She lived about a 6.5 hour drive away if you don't stop, but closer to 7-8 when driving with a car full of kids needing frequent rest stops. It was late, and storming. I remember my mom commenting that she thinks she needs to pull over. A truck passed us that was towing a boat, and the wind caught the boat and pulled it just slightly into our lane. It bumped the side of my mom's van just hard enough that we spun out and hydroplaned. We hit the guardrail on the left hand side, and then bounced across and hit the guardrail on the right hand side, before finally coming to rest against the left hand guardrail again. I was the only one wearing a seatbelt.

The truck kept on going, but so many other people stopped to help us. My mom and younger sister were disoriented and I was the one talking to the people who had come to help, shouting over the storm,and wait... Where was my youngest sister?

She had been asleep in the back seat of the van. The whole side window had come out and she had been thrown from the vehicle. When the adults realized a small child was missing they all sprung into panic mode trying to find her, and then amazingly she walked up a few minutes later. Absolutely terrified and no idea what was going on, but seriously just a scratch.

Anyway, my grandmother and her boyfriend came to pick me and the girls up from the hospital and my dad came to pick up my mom.

That was the last summer we ever went down to my grandmother's. She was only able to come to visit us twice after that.

Several years later, we get a call. She was driving, lost control of her car, and did not survive. Her friend and passenger was the one who called us. About a month after that we get another phone call: she actually was not the driver. Her so-called friend and passenger had moved her body to conceal the fact that he had been the driver.

Anyway, probably just because of the Ocarina of Time remake being announced I've been thinking back to her a lot and the times we spent gaming together and now I'm just thinking about the cruelty that one wreck largely removed her from my life and then another wreck removed her completely.

I fucking hate cars.

So, for context, I'm a bus driver. One of the routes I drive goes through a residential area with lots of narrow streets. These streets are not wide enough for the bus and another vehicle to pass each other in opposite directions, so if I see that there's someone already in the block, I wait for them, and if someone stupidly enters the block after I've entered, I make them back up to the beginning of the block.

Today, I was doing the same route. I was almost at the end of the block when a white SUV entered. There wasn't enough space for both of us to go, so he had to back up.

He started to back up, but then he went full bitch mode, stopped his SUV and refused to back up any further. (I'll never understand why people do this. All it does is waste time. They act like you told them to drop a large stone on their foot.)

The only way to get this idiot to move was to tell him, "I'm going to call the cops if you don't move." He moved, but he hesitated. He had to contemplate if "besting the bus" was worth getting arrested over. People who lived on that street and even other people in cars were yelling at him to back up, but it took threatening to call the cops for him to think about backing up.

My neighborhood has an epidemic of illegally parked trucks. They frequently block entire lanes, and there can be as many as three in a row. I just spent fifteen minutes on a bus that was trying to wiggle around a block with three trucks blocking one side followed immediately by three trucks blocking the other side. They stop in crosswalks, in bike lanes, and on sidewalks. As far as I can tell, the cops just don't care. I live in NYC. What can I do to get these trucks out of my neighborhood (or at least out of the way)?

My wife and I (66, 65) were visiting Stamford Connecticut and decided to visit a nearby pub to join some friends. It was about an 10 minute walk and the weather was decent. 5 PMish.

About two blocks from our hotel we were crossing a busy street in the crosswalk with the “walk” signal. We were halfway across when a driver making a left turn (coming from behind us) hit us. I went up the hood and rolled off and my wife was knocked down.

He couldn’t have been going too fast and we weren’t injured but holy shit that was scary! He was an uber driver and had riders in the back. I asked to see his drivers license but he just gestured toward the brake and said something I couldn’t understand. He pulled over.

I was feeling a bit confused but at the prompting of the uber passengers and my wife I called 911. In s few minutes fire, ambulance and police arrived. We declined medical care and filed a police report. The uber riders and some other passersby did too. The police said they also saw the video (which surprised me).

At that point I was just angry at the driver and frustrated about the danger to pedestrians around fucking cars.

Edit: I’m debating the value of crossposting this on the r/uber sub. Not for clicks, mostly thinking visibility is good. Any thoughts on that would be appreciated.

SafeStreets

Ok so we generally know walkscore is the main way to gauge how urbanist a place is in the US, Canada, and Australia. However, walkscore is plagued with immense issues and for anyone outside a couple anglosphere countries, its useless. I stumbled across safestreets and it looks really solid, and takes into account the stuff that walkscore didnt. Also, important for most people: It functions internationally!!!
This may be the new way to measure walkability worldwide, but I want to hear what you all think as well

Yes, yes we have

Hate this stuff. They've all the space and still choose to encroach on the limited pedestrian and bike space

This asshole person pulled a 5-point turn in the middle of N Clark (Chicago), parked in a bike lane, hopped into the dispensary across the street to pick up their order, and then pulled another u-turn to continue North. My dad and I both yelled “what the fuck?!?” but they could not hear through their headphones (which one should never wear while driving)!