gildone

Most of the time, we only fly Southwest for domestic travel. Southwest does give you a relatively humane amount of legroom, reclining seats, two free checked bags, and junk food snacks. But it's still a bus compared to the way the airlines were 40 years ago. Americans are willing to endure a lot of indignities on airlines in order to save a few bucks. It doesn't seem worth it to me, but it's worth it to a lot of people, I guess. After a recent experience on United, I won't fly them either unless I absolutely have to. I ended up on a UA flight last month (not my choice, but that's how I was routed after a delayed flight on another airline caused me to miss a connection), my knees were jammed into the seat in front of me. I couldn't get comfortable at all on the entire flight from Newark to Cleveland.

I wondered how long it would take for a lawsuit to crop up. Was in CA last week. Throttle bikes are much more popular there than in NE ohio. They are supposed to be prohibited on recreational trails, but lots of people were ignoring that and zooming by pedestrians. There will be more accidents and deaths, unfortunately.

Unfortunately, the political class chooses to be lazy and focus on divisive, hot-button, cultural issues rather than the real problems the country is facing. Another great rail tunneling project would be Pittsburgh to DC, as would Denver to western Colorado. The latter would necessitate tunneling through the mountains in California to get to San Fran and LA. Although, California is taking care of tunneling through the mountains to get to southern Cal via Burbank.

California startup Dreamstar wants to run a private night train between SF and LA "A privately funded project to operate a nightly first-class passenger train between San Francisco and Los Angeles is underway." Read More: https://www.sfgate.com/travel/article/la-sf-night-train-proposal-dreamstar-17891587.php?IPID=SFGate-HP-CP-Spotlight

No. What was said is city decisions in some cases on where cameras are placed is resulting in racial bias. Not the same thing at all.

@Brutus_buckeye You have failed to make a convincing argument that there is a due process problem and keep repeating the same things with no evidence. You haven't provided any court cases. Someone asked you to back up number and you said they were "just for illustrative purposes". All of your writing boils down to this: All you have is your opinion. That's fine. Opinions are fine so far as they go, and I have made no claims that anything I've said is anything but my opinion. And in my opinion, we can put you in the camp of: "I want to break the law and get away with it. I'll just scream about due process, even though I can't back any of it up". So let's just agree to disagree and be done. On the tracking subject brought up by others, I find the paranoia about traffic cameras to be rather ridiculous, when far more tracking of people and their behavior is done via their smart phones and no one bitches about it. Plus, the privacy arguments put forth here conflate the issue. All traffic cameras do is the same thing a police officer does at less cost to the municipality. It's not really comparable to government access to dash cams, ability to disable vehicles, etc. As for this little gem: "I supported...the successful effort to have "traffic calming" (a.k.a. "driver enraging") measures uninstalled on Akron city streets. " It's just another example of driver entitlement. Translation: "We can't make drivers mad, but it's ok to have unsafe, pedestrian-killing streets." The most thoughtful recent comments here are from @ryanlammi

Affected how? How far should people be allowed to go to stop their communities from evolving? Separate question: Does Tallmadge have a master plan?

None of this changes the fact that these cameras have been in use for many years in other states. If due process was such an issue, there would be relevant court cases, and @depacincy covered this already in this thread. There have been court cases, and they have found no due process violations. If you know of one, please cite it here. The hand-wringing by people over these cameras is because people want to be able to break the law and get away with it. Period. All the whining about due process and them being nothing but revenue generators is just a distraction from that. All people have to do to avoid being ticketed is follow the law wherever they are driving. Speed limits are posted and everyone learns in driving school to obey traffic signals. It's pretty simple. There is no right to break the law. Personally, I'd like to see more of these cameras. 20 years ago very few people ever ran red lights. Now it's commonplace. I've had two instances where I was getting ready to cross a street in my own town at a legal crosswalk when I had the crossing signal where red light runners could have killed me. It's a good thing that I was paying attention, otherwise my son (who was little at the time) and I would be dead. People who run red lights deserve to be ticketed, even by contracted-out traffic cameras. Now, I will say this: Enforcement isn't the best way to keep people driving the speed limit and obeying traffic signals. Road/street engineering and providing high-quality options to driving is. The US doesn't seem to want to accept that. Until we do, enfocement is the only tool we have.

Cities need to start doing a better job educating their residents about the financial effects on cities from different types of development. People want smaller gov't. Well, the best way to do that is for cities to become less dependent upon state and federal handouts for infrastructure and services, which also comes with strings. The way to do that is with walkable, bikeable mixed-use development. People are knee-jerk reacting to quality, mixed-use development all over the country. A small minority of triggered residents show up to meetings, bitch and moan, then the city caves. Start first with educating residents.

There is the option of parking at the South Bend Airport ($1.50/day) and taking the South Shore Electric Railway into CHI. Have to mind the schedules, though as not all South Shore trains stop there. Not the best option as a train all the way would be best, but it's something in the mean time.

We have solar panels at our house. We make more power than we use. Recycling is getting better. Currently, the best recycling tech can recover about 85% of the lithium. We absolutely need to mandate recycling for lithium batteries and/or have product takeback laws. If we continue going forward with electric vehicles and not do enough to offer quality alternatives to driving, there is going to be a lot of environmental havoc from lithium mining.

Similar problem in DC. Most cameras there are in poorer neighborhoods. Completely ridiculous.

That may be true for bikes with throttles, but not class I's. I occasionally get passed by regular bikes on metroparks paths.

Considering speed and red light cameras have been in uae in other parts of the country for years now, due process isn't the argument @brutus_buckeye thinks it is. Also, the accuser is the gov't entity issuing the ticket. Doesn't matter if it's an officer or camera catching it.

Ohio's distracted driving law went into effect on 4/4/23 https://www.transportation.ohio.gov/phonesdown#:~:text=As of April 4%2C 2023,they can pull you over.

People want to break the law and get away with it. They're entitled.

Traffic cameras don't prevent people from requesting a trial.

Brunswick-Rockland service to be launched this year: Most passenger rail startups consume cash by beginning with a ridership study, but that isn’t happening here. As Midcoast’s Smith puts it, “We can just run the damn service and see if it works!” https://www.trains.com/trn/news-reviews/news-wire/maine-dot-proposes-3-million-for-pilot-of-brunswick-rockland-rdc-service/

A Carman's Perspective on the East Palestine Derailment and the RR Industry: https://therealnews.com/a-carmans-perspective-on-the-east-palestine-derailment-and-the-railroad-industry-as-a-whole

Not Just Bikes hits it out of the park again: These Stupid Trucks are Literally Killing Us:

I bought an e-bike last year and love it. I still get good exercise without killing myself. I bike further now than I used to.

@Dev Good to hear. Let's hope some good comes of it.

I didn't realize it was that old. Oops...

Good article by Cleveland's own Angie Schmitt. More cities are failing to enforce against dangerous driving and pedestrians are dying because of it. Washington, DC has $1 billion in unpaid traffic fines. They have backed off on enforcement because of concerns about racial equity in traffic stops. Yet, at the same time, most traffic cameras in the city are in the poorer neighborhoods. Where's the equity there? Not wanting to put traffic cameras in wealthier (i.e. whiter) neighborhoods because they might whine and complain? (I will stand behind a long time assertion I've made to others that people don't like traffic cameras because they want to be able to break the law and get away with it). While the country still has racial equity concerns, and traffic stops have been all too often used as pretext by police, how can local governments be so stupid as not to see blatantly obvious folly in decisions like this? The result is more innocent pedestrians and others dying under the wheels of people who should have their licenses revoked. What Can Cities Do About the Most Dangerous Drivers? https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-04-04/how-cities-can-get-the-very-worst-drivers-off-the-streets

In the US and Canada, the setting of speed limits is far too disconnected from the engineering design of roads. In the Netherlands they do very little traffic enforcement because they design roads to encourage the speed outcome they want for it. In the States, we design city streets for higher speeds than what is truly safe for the environment in which the street exists. It's completely backward, and people are dying because of it. Speeding is an engineering problem first and an enforcement problem last. To make matters worse, we have ridiculous bureaucratic hurdles in place if a city wants to do any re-engineering of city streets to make them safer. There are also too many city engineers out there who refuse to acknowledge that road design matters and keep saying that speeding is an enforcement problem.