Saw this thought you guys might appreciate it. It's a fantastic experience as a tourist, its a nightmare for anyone living, let alone working/having a business.
The irony is that they
do often build stuff like in the United States as planned developments, but then urbanists sneer at them for being malls and not "real". Amsterdam-Centrum's canals were built in medieval times, and besides, Amsterdam-Centrum's population and commercial mix have been gutted for tourist bars, shops, DUDE WEED shops, and brothels.
- There’s no mention of why trams were replaced in most places. Apparently, it’s all the fault of cars. But if trams were so great, why were most lines shut down in the first place? There’s a list on Wikipedia, and most of them are closed.
Well, you know the answer they'll give--the long-disproved theory that General Motors bought perfectly functional streetcars to replace them with buses. Nevermind that this isn't what happened and there were plenty of lines that replaced streetcars with buses without any (supposedly) corporate meddling.
The noise people complain about the most is sharp loud sounds out of the quiet. Bars/clubs are generally constantly the same volume so you can easily get used to it and ignore it.
Bars also tend to encourage spontaneous hooting and hollering, which would be a "sharp loud noise" that would wake one up.
I think the reason why most of these people don't care about bar noise and street festivals and whatnot and specifically is due purely to the fact that they are rootless and itinerant people with no family or true friends, and alcoholics on top of that. They work shitty dead-end customer service jobs and drown themselves in alcohol regularly because that's their only definition of fun; drinking. Read their posts and realize that they just want to be 19 forever and they're the ones who are at the bar until oh dark every night getting blasted, so of course they aren't going to complain about the noise they're making.
It's possible that like black people and chirping smoke alarms, your brain has zoned it out so it's not a problem...on the other hand they lie all the time so there's a good chance that they know bar noise is a major problem but choose to ignore it for ideological reasons (and I wouldn't be surprised if there's some answer like "bars have to play music loud to drown out the cars" out there).
This is total youtube essayist bullshit. At least in Europe, many trams use the stephenson track gauge (1435mm), and use overhead wires for power, just like trains. That's where the similarities end. Trams run on lower voltage - usually 500-700V DC. Normal trains use much higher voltages like 3000V DC and sometimes even 15kV and 25kV AC. And even if you could adapt a tram to run at these voltages, the tram cars are not built for such high speeds to run on inter-city tracks and they do not have any of the safety and signalling equipment that is necesary to do so. Trams run at most 30mph, and thats only if the tracks are well maintained. You will never be a train.
As I understand it there's a bunch of idiosyncracies about train tracks, even without the overhead line issue. For example, light rail tracks (in addition to having far too tight curves for a real train) just aren't built to the same standards as real trains are, especially when it comes to bridges. Generally, you can use real train tracks to light rail/tram use, but never the other way around.
So it's a county trunk highway then?
I wouldn't call them highways even, they're numbered state routes and are maintained by the state rather than by the city. In Houston, we've discussed Westheimer Road before, which used to be an actual road out to the farms (there was a side-by-side picture I did of the farms in the 1940s versus completely developed now); FM 1960 is the same way. It's further out, but what used to be a rural road is now full of stoplights and is a major traffic corridor with restaurants, major stores, gas stations, apartment complexes, and so on.
But out in the country, it's a
very different type of road. You can see some safety upgrades have been made, but there's no shoulders like the state highways have (rural state highways often have wide shoulders which can make for good bike lanes—if you really were serious about bicycling and not just some dork who larps as a pro athlete). Thankfully for those that want to bicycle around the state, there's no shortage of lesser-used highways that are more accommodating than the typical major routes.
Comments tell him not to feel guilty because believers are allowed to drive cars:
You can see just how much the pH level has changed in the last few years. It used to be that it "no, we don't hate cars, that's just hyperbole see, all we want is alternatives" and now most of them don't even bother with
that.
