The entire thing needs to be completely overhauled tbh. It requires exactly 0 months of training to know that you don't need to beat to death a guy who can't even fucking defend himself anymore.

Not with that attitude. Suburbs can be built in a more transit orientated way without increasing density (depending on what you're defining as density), we just have to actually put the effort in to actually do that. But we've deliberately done the opposite so it's not surprising that it'd be hard to immediately overlay effective transit all at once.

Plus, affordability is kind of a whatever point. Driving a car is not very affordable either, not just in maintaining the roads and infrastructure, but in forcing every family to have at least one or more depreciating assets that they have to pay to maintain, insure, fuel, etc. just to do anything. And regardless, transit should be a service, there's nothing wrong with the government providing a service without being inherently profitable.

Personally I think every driver should just have a shotgun in the passenger seat to shoot any pedestrian they see that dares go outside and walk. That way they'll all feel very unsafe and not even think about going outside without a motor vehicle, thus drastically reducing pedestrian fatalities.

It's also just a fundamental infrastructure problem. Even slowing down and being hyper vigilant only does so much when there's not even a sidewalk for pedestrians to walk on. It's a 40 mph one lane road through a residential area where pedestrians are forced onto the shoulder. And it's not even particularly rural or empty or anything; if you make roads like that it's going to kill someone sooner or later.

And a lot of people will say just don't walk, but like god forbid someone wants the luxury of being able to walk outside of the place they live without getting run over.

The American Meteor Society is a great resource if you ever see a meteor and wonder if anyone else saw it. It's a very cool website, they basically have a public database where anyone can submit a meteor sighting and if there are enough sightings it gets cataloged as an event. They are even able to calculate the rough trajectory based on the locational information and direction of travel that users submit and sometimes if you're lucky someone else might have a video or picture of it.

If you go into their current pending reports section there was indeed a meteor at 7:20 that two other people saw, one in Mass and one in Vermont. The guy from Mass even included the note "Was the most distinct meteor I have ever seen, clear night, no overcast, and from start to finish in my field of view from my right to my left - traveled like a skipping stone of light - what a joy to have seen this tonight."

If you submit your report that would make it three!

The question regarding "how much additional drive time would you be willing to have in order to improve safety" frankly felt very dystopian. Like imagine flipping that question the other way around, "how much increased risk would you be willing to inflict on non-drivers in order to cut your drive time by x minutes". I'm sure they didn't intend it to sound like that, but that's a very good look at how car oriented the default line of thought is.

Yeah, I think the full wish list would be something like two crossing lines, one going NYC-New Haven-Hartford-Boston and the other going NYC-New Haven-Providence-Boston. A fully connected rail network in the northeast would be a dream, I hope there's one day enough political capital to get it done.

Hey if we're dreaming, might as well dream of some high speed rail using that connection as well. It'd probably be the only way for a NYC-Boston line to reasonably hit both New Haven and Hartford, otherwise most routes seem to have to pick one or the other. And maybe it'd be marginally more effective at dodging NIMBYs as opposed to using the existing corridor?

Robert Moses actually came very close to running a freeway through lower Manhattan. Right through Greenwich Village, Washington Square Park, Soho... imagine trying to propose that with what we know now? They'd call for your head on a pike. It's a shame that so many other cities were 30-40 years too late to figure out how much damage this sort of infrastructure would do.

The fact that they still bothered to convert the thin strip of land between the highway and the river into decent parks feels pretty indicative of what people actually want for the area. It really sucks because you can see the underlying urban fabric that would allow Hartford to really flourish as a city, it's just buried by the highways. There are other parts of the US, especially in the south and the west, where the sprawl is so bad that you can't even see how they can begin to dig themselves out of the problem, but places like Hartford genuinely feel like they're only a few very big but achievable steps away from being much much better.

Crazy that the footprint of the mix master is basically the same size as all of downtown Hartford. Even if you want to look at it from the most conservative economics only perspective, that is trading off a fuck ton of potential economic opportunity and tax revenue for an interchange.

Well yeah, it's the only way to commute by design. The fact that removing it would increase your commute by that much doesn't say much about I-84 being designed well or even being inherently important, it just means that the US has not given you the freedom to have any alternative options. The entire infrastructure system is built around car ownership at the expense of other ways of getting around.

Hopefully it passes and we can add ranked choice next