It’s a mob style government elected by a mob of angry, hateful people. Unfortunately for the rest of the world, the US was allowed to grow too big and now it’s being weilded against you.

Dallas is making some progress at densification. It’s not letting real 5+1 buildings, but even this is much better than merely single family homes and sprawling roads endlessly forever. The line cannot go up forever.

Thank you for the detailed info about Belgium and Brussels.

I have been to Brussels for a few days. The transit in the core was great (says the American whose city is a wreck for transit). We used the metro and trains. We headed out by hopping the train to London.

It sounds like the wider situation outside of Brussels and the policies regarding car use need some serious work. If the taxes make it beneficial to drive, people will. A budget is a statement of an organizations values. The same goes for how taxes are balanced in a nation.

Hopefully the leadership in Belgium can find a way to roll back those highways. Removing freeways through cities is a fast way to improve the city as a place for people to live.

The data keeps rolling in: every time we remove cars from an area, the quality of human life goes up, local stores usually do better, and lives are saved.

Great work out of Brussels! Their ridership per capita is 60x my city’s in the US. Out city continually scores very high for mid sized US city public transit and it’s barely a blip on how well Brussels is doing.

America is owned and operated by rich people. They couldn’t make money running passenger trains so once we were ordered to invest in car-only infrastructure the trains were mostly disbanded and shut down. There’s a ghost of a system left with just a few corridors that could be considered bare minimum service in a developed nation.

How many kilometers of high speed rail does the US have? Zero. We have some that gets close, but not really.

My mid-sized city has two trains per day, one each direction, and they both leave between 1am and 2am. In Germany you would have 30+ trains per day in a city this size, likely a notable S-Bahn network, and also some trams and/or U-Bahns in the city to compliment busses. I’ve got busses in town, but they operated about every 30-45 minutes each, with evening service being every 60 minutes. Here’s the fun part: our busses are the most used public transit system for a mid-sized city in the US right now and it’s still pathetic when compared to even basic services in Europe.

DB needs to keep getting investment. Germany must get to a dedicated passenger rail network to separate out the freight trains. DB should also be re-nationalized and operated as a national service, not a for profit system that will inevitably fail as a commercial venture, leading to yet more terrible service. Here’s hoping the latest German Parliament follows through on investment money that they pushed through at the start of the year! Also, keep the Deutschland Karte! That’s such a great resource for everyone.

Her husband voted for ®. There is no evidence that she voted.

Her husband is on record saying that despite his wife being taken away by ICE, he still supports the ® agenda.

She lost her green card as a youth for stealing something under $200. She then kept going to immigration court and was told “you’re fine” by the authorities for 25 years.

The US immigration system has been a tragedy for many decades. It doesn’t work well, efficiently,not clearly. It’s basically designed to allow in people who fit certain profiles, but any weirdness in your situation puts you in indefinite limbo and at the whims of various officials. It makes an underclass of grey zone residents. This was generally fine, but openly set up conditions for a racist regime to start snatching people out of their homes. People who played by the rules for decades.

The US immigration system today: When Kafka meets Hitler.

I loved seeing the Tram move though the crowd. Trams integrate very well with pedestrian areas in a way that busses or cars never can. The crowds were making way as the tram trundled along because the rails tell everyone exactly where to move to clear the way.

That kind of movement through crowds happens every day in major cities in crowded tourist areas. The big benefit is that when there’s no tram on the tracks, people can walk there and use the space. This isn’t true for car/bus streets where the space needs to be kept clear at all times for safety from the erratic vehicles on rubber tires. Rails FTW.

One of the various conservative thoughts is to make large swathes of US territory governed by corporations and billionaires. Basically, non-state zones subject to rules set by non-state systems.

Surprise! They’re trying to make feudal / monarchy systems. Welcome to bring peasants again, fellow peasants.

The underlying foundation of conservative thoughts was, and is, to uphold a hierarchy that supports a monarchy. It has been from day 1. The American Revolution was a war against conservatism.

My state doesn’t have party registrations. It’d just be cheaper to wall us all off and leave us alone in our miserable place, just to be sure.

Of course, you can’t wall the side to Canada, but we’ll promise to not go there while we are isolated from the rest of the US.

Costco polish dog (from the freezer aisle, since they stopped selling the real ones at the counter). Mustard, catsup. That’ll do great. Oh, but make sure to grill it! Yeah, now I’m hungry.

Given the size, wealth, and density of India, I expected the list of underway and upcoming train projects to be much longer and ambitious. Of course, the hyperloop project is… special.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Future_of_rail_transport_in_India

I also expected there to be more high speed rail going on. There’s at least one actual HSR route being constructed, but a very long list of “maybe nots” built up. Once the single route goes into service, India will have 300km more HSR than the US does (which is zero):

https://themetrorailguy.com/high-speed-rail-projects-in-india/

Sample size: 1

That’ll do! Let’s hit the pub.

Top 3 for adults. Top 2 for children.

The downtown Wien area is gorgeous! They’ve got a good transit system to start with, so there’s no reason more of the city can’t become pedestrianized. I haven’t been there for a while, but I hope they’re making progress on turning the city into a better place for people.

A quick search turns up at least some efforts:
https://cityhallwatch.wordpress.com/2024/05/15/mariahilferstrasse-pedestrianized-street-vienna/
https://www.wien.gv.at/english/transportation/road-construction/kaerntnerstrasse/

The city does score well on urban mobility:
https://www.oliverwymanforum.com/mobility/urban-mobility-readiness-index/vienna.html

I had one of the 10" eeePC machines for years. That thing was a tank. It did everything I needed it to, especially weird networking configurations. The battery also lasted over 6 hours. I mostly ran Crunchbang #! Linux on it.

I don’t think I could live on a 10" screen anymore, but back in the day it was a dream machine.

That’s a phenomenal idea, and one that many other cities have used to make their venues usable for big events.

We used to ride the MAX train into events in Portland. Trying to drive to a huge stadium and park is just a huge mess for everyone involved, including the surrounding city that’s impacted by it.

TriMet would run extra trains at the start & end of the event. Back then the stadium was also in the Fareless Square area so you didn’t even have to pay. Yes, the trains were packed, but that’s a good thing. Over time they would run more and more trains, and now the area has trams as well. Downtown event arenas are 100% doable with modern public transit.

To sum up: the referendum to make the core of Berlin largely car free is proceeding past court challenges. If enacted, it would make Berlin the largest pedestrianized city area in the world by a long shot.

Nice. Germany has some good visa programs for skilled workers. If you’ve got the credentials, the consulates will work with you on immigration and it’s not a very onerous system.