As an ambulance driver, im used to this.
No, what pisses me off if when they design a suburb with a semi-sensible road layout, and then decide that they’ve fucked up and created something useable so they fill it with speed bumps every 20 feet.
Hope you didnt break a long bone or have an aneurysm or something. Gonna be a few little bumps
What is with these fractal-ass suburb layouts? Who thought this was a good idea?
lol, (among other things) it’s because drivers can’t keep themselves from committing vehicular homicide unless you make it physically impossible to build sufficient speed. Luckily car companies have worked around that…
i just had a vision of some post-collapse future where the suburbs are the most dangerous places. while the urban cores have various features of civic life rebuilding among the inhabitants, and little micropolitan communities are dotted along various routes between them… the suburbs surrounding cities are dreadful places. well marked arteries pass through them quickly and people are advised not to wander into them alone.
the street signs have all been torn down or are constantly rearranged/vandalized, exacerbating the labyrinthine nature of these amorphous, seemingly quiet and depopulated places. essential services like water and power have been turned off, as they are impossible to maintain. many homes are burned down or burnt out from haphazard fires started to keep warm in the early days. many places have been stripped out of valuable material, marked with symbols indicating what has been taken and what is left.
but deep in the recesses furthest from well traveled routes, in the mutated single family housing of forgotten cul-de-sacs, strange lights can be seen at night. ecstatic chanting and pained screams. rumors of teeth filed to points and cannibalism.
my face pressed against the glass as we move along the tracks, looking through gaps in the trees, fences, and walls. "there is no water out there, dad. what do they drink? what do they drink? "
i won’t pretend that this uncompromising vision of the future wasn’t in part informed by places like detroit. i went there for a work thing once some years ago. well, i used to have family around there back in the 80s when i was just an oblivious little kid and they had all been there since whatever like the 50s. but anyway, i went to detroit as a fully formed adult and leftist for work and went on a tour of some of the emergent local food movement stuff.
the geographic contraction is fucking wild as shit. like the gentrified areas along the water front with their hip, boozy stuff or the absolutely dystopian GM Renaissance Center rising up into the sky… and like you walk away from that stuff, and how rapidly the surroundings become hollowed out, vacant lots, etc. i’ve been to a lot of de-industrialized places around the rust belt and central/southern appalachia, but detroit is my first hollowed out world class city.
lol, I wish
if they stop seasonally mowing those empty lots and along easements, in 20 years, there will be a fuck ton of wood lots. it would compound the disaster of power/water infrastructure above and below ground because tree roots can break through just about anything.
bIKe lANEs sLow FiRST RESPONdER rEspoNse times
New F1 circuit seems lit.
