Advocates for public transportation often promote practical advantages: affordability, accessibility, environmental friendliness, reduced traffic jams.
In New York, there’s an anti-loitering statute that has come to be known colloquially as the “Walking While Trans” ban. Advocates say that the law, which is ostensibly meant to target sex workers, allows officers to arbitrarily arrest and detain New Yorkers for simply walking around or standing on the street. It allows police to decide, for instance, that a woman’s skirt is too short, or that she’s been lingering too long on one street corner, and to apprehend her based on suspicion that she’s “loitering for the purpose of prostitution.” Trans women — and particularly trans women of color — are disproportionately targeted this way, activists say. “Whether you are ho-ing or not ho-ing, even if you look like you might be trans, you are going to jail,” Tiffaney Grissom, a trans woman from the Bronx who has been arrested multiple times under the law, told The Village Voice in 2016.
I’ve long been fascinated by the role of safety devices and greater risk taking.
Study after study has shown that if people normally act a “danger level of 2”, they’ll notch up their danger level to “danger level of 3” or “danger level of 3 1/2” if a safety device is designed to keep the device safe up to a “danger level of 4”.
This obviously undercuts many of the benefits of the safety device, when increased safety margins are just used to promote more dangerous behavior. Often redundancy encourages bad practices, even if it’s designed to increase safety.
General Motors plans to completely phase out vehicles using internal combustion engines by 2035, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Mary Barra announced Thursday. The automaker will go completely carbon neutral at all facilities worldwide by 2035.
Barra has frequently touted GM's plan for “an all-electric future,” recently increasing to 30 the number of pure battery-electric vehicles it will launch by the middle of this decade, but this marks the first time the largest Detroit automaker has set a hard target for completely phasing out gas and diesel engines for all light-duty vehicles, including pickups and SUVs.
I think Americans will like electric cars. They'll have good acceleration, with rocket-like starts onto the freeway if the drivers want to really wallop the accelerator. Battery packs are big and heavy, which necessitates larger, higher profile, longer vehicles. The demand for larger ranges and bigger battery packs might actually bring back some of the 220-inch behemoths that once ruled the road in 1950s and 1960s, especially for people who don't live in cities and have to parallel park.
It's unclear if there will be much of a push for efficiency standards with the new vehicles, especially right away, as electricity is so cheap and plentiful as gasoline once was, and the tailpipes for generating plants tends to be located outside of cities, so localized pollution is a lot less of an issue.
But the suburbs, in the sense of the idyllic American pastoral Trump and Carson referenced, have been changing for some time—not necessarily the physical homes, stores, roads, and offices that populate them, but the people who live there, along with their needs and desires. Previous mainstays of suburban life are now myths: that the majority of people own their homes; that the suburbs are havens for the middle class; or that the bulk of people are young families who value privacy over urban amenities like communal spaces, walkability, and mixed-use properties.
This mismatch has led to a phenomenon called “suburban retrofitting,” as documented by June Williamson, an associate professor of architecture at the City College of New York, and Ellen Dunham-Jones, a professor of architecture at the Georgia Institute of Technology. They have a new book out this week: Case Studies in Retrofitting Suburbia: Urban Design Strategies for Urgent Challenges. Money Welcome to Metropica, a Supposed City of the Future Allie Conti 08.29.19
Since the 1990s, Williamson and Dunham-Jones have been watching the suburbs evolve. They have found that much of the suburban sprawl of the 20th century was built to serve a very different population than the one that exists now, and so preserving what the suburbs once were doesn't make sense.