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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 18th, 2023

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  • Booking international train trips in the EU like connecting flights at once. You book the entire trip from perhaps different rail operators at once and get relatively secured connections.

    Especially it should imo include that you have to be rebooked onto the next best connection if you miss one because of a delay which currently isn’t really the case. Idk if that specific clause is in there but some part of the EU is supposedly working on a platform that at least should allow purchasing tickets for routes across multiple carriers and countries in one ticket.




  • Yeah I’m in Germany so my context is somewhere in between and here the projects that improve my life the most is when cars don’t get to/need to travel on the streets as much, this can either be through modal filters, removing car lanes or just banning cars (with the usual delivery window in the morning and such). And they are starting to get to the kind of streets where you could go 100km/h (in terms of size) that are in practice 50km/h, and are now getting them down to 30 (taking 1 of 2 car lanes and giving it to bikes as well as adding obstacles to indicate slower speeds). So it’s doable and of course it takes time, but with a bit of luck it might be faster than some Americans imagine it could be.

    So of course bike lanes along mayor roads (corridors) make sense, and it can be a good starting point to get a skeleton network in place, which then can Kickstart intersection redesigns and traffic calming, wherever it’s reasonable around it. To me the best bike paths don’t go along roads though, they are the “recreational” paths that still connect things. Cutting through a patch of Forrest or a park, going along the waterfront, parallel to a tramway or rail corridor or just along/through the fields. These are probably also politically cheaper than some other measures, but you run the risk of building a thing that just connects nothing because there is no real infrastructure on either end.

    I feel like Americans think they are 60+ years behind when they are probably only 30-40, if the attitude turns somewhat sharply, either just in your local area or more generally, maybe just 15-25.

    A lot of this stuff is monetarily very cheap, depending on how desperately you wanted change the actual infrastructure you’d need, would boil down to planters, bollards, cones, maybe hay bails or large stones/concrete pieces. The problem with that stuff is that it’s only possible with the right opportunity politically, otherwise your traffic calming might get bulldozed by police or something.


  • I sorta agree and sorta don’t, all streets should be 30km/h or less and shared traffic, everything else should be with bike lanes. Streets meaning a piece of infrastructure that provides access to places lining it, not a piece of infrastructure for longer distance travel.

    The Netherlands is good not because there is a bike lane on every street but because all the streets with destinations (private homes, business, schools)are connected by bike lanes as well as roads, often more and more direct bike lanes.

    There are a lot of areas where cars bikes and sometimes pedestrians share the same space both in inner cities and in residential neighborhoods, it’s just that they aren’t through roads for cars or at least very very slow ones, while they are often through roads for bikes and peds.




  • I was at a theater for the first time in a long time recently and it was definitely my favorite to visit so far. “Zoo Palast” in Berlin, the interior/the entire vibe was great. The building screams 70s even though it was renovated/rebuilt 2010-2013 so they did a great job there. I can’t speak to video or audio quality because I just don’t have a a reference but the movie sounded and looked good to me. Also it has a lot of original language showings which is always nice to see here instead of just dubs.


  • Probably because trains are limited in both weight and volume compared to ships and also less efficient. If you have this short route and know it’ll need this amount of cargo shipped it likely makes sense.

    This single ship can carry more containers than any train could be expected to pull, likely by at least one order of magnitude.

    All in all I’d guess the advantages are roughly:

    • Reduced staff
    • reduced energy use (land based shipping is less efficient almost by default)
    • no need for infrastructure except ports (if you assume there is no train line or this shipping would move existing lines over capacity building this ship is likely cheaper or at least in line with 300km of rail)
    • simpler logistics (loading / unloading)

    Disadvantages:

    • Speed (a train would likely move at 3-5x the speed)

    I would also not expect the risk for catastrophic fires to be all that high. This ship has the batteries be containers. So once you’ve designed a container that is a large battery, you’ve already spent so much that a proper BMS including proper battery fire suppression as well as proper breakers/contractors are things you’ve built into it without even thinking about cost. The separation provided by building containers as the battery is the next line of defence if one container fails spectacularly, it also allows the batteries to be maintained on land, much cheaper than if they were part of the ship.




  • Also some application of similar tech has worked itself into industrial machines and factories over the last 10 years or so, it’s downright ubiquitous for anything that’s expensive and requires maintenance/ upkeep. Also it’s well intertwined with the ML tech we see consumer facing nowadays, the image recognition of 4+ years ago was made to recognize issues with materials, unexpected growing patterns, anomalies, as well as recognition and counting etc… before we got just point your camera and it’ll tell you what you’re looking at.


    • Bring Me The Horizon | POST HUMAN SURVIVAL HORROR
    • YOASOBI | everything is post 2020
    • Paula Hartmann | everything is post 2020
    • Toe | 独演会 "DOKU-EN-KAI

    It’s a bit hard to find stuff that is new that I’ve actually listened to a lot, but it’s not because there isn’t new stuff just because I have no new music entering my rotation except from artists I already know, other media or friends recommendations. And music from other media often doesn’t end up being on any album.




  • Both are abused by criminals and narcos and dictators

    Everything is subsumed and used by those hungry for power, and with the means to solidify it. That doesn’t mean that the content of their claimed political thought doesn’t have meaning, or that we can never conclude anything about humanity or its ideologies from looking at history, understanding theory, analyzing culture, power …

    Maybe understand why people here seem ‘extreme’ left, instead of just writing nonsensical, and obviously bad faith or confused arguments.




  • Your experience might be true, but to frame it as representative or real in any general way like you insinuate with;

    if you/they want people to switch up the way they do things, there needs to be an alternative that’s at least as good, but preferably better.

    is just disingenuous, you admit you live in a place with 4000 people, yet still you complain about transit. It fundamentally doesn’t matter because you are in the last couple of percent in terms of transit viability.

    That’s why it reads like propaganda because while the examples you give are likely true, the overall picture you paint is significantly worse than the lived experience of most people that use the system, because you consciously or accidentally collect examples that make it seem dysfunctional. It’s mismanaged and it could be much better but it isn’t dysfunctional.


  • I somewhat harshly disagree with this sentiment, sure most of the problems you mention are real, although I always feel like criminal danger in central/western Europe is just not really something anyone should let impact their live decisions, as it’s generally so rare –

    Punctuality is very much a mixed bag regional and S trains are usually pretty good here in Köln, there are delays of course but half of them seem to be idiots walking on the tracks which I don’t really attribute to DB.

    Long distance is a bit worse than that, you could definitely say delays are common and sometimes very long delays occur as well.

    And communication is usually pretty atrocious. Although this usually can be sidestepped somewhat by just reading the app carefully and at least occasionally reading the upcoming construction notices.

    But and this is the actually important thing that makes it all worth it, they run a ton of service, to a just insane number of stations. You can legitimately use it for all your travel if you just impose a time buffer about as long as the initial trip. From everywhere to everywhere in this country, usually for under 50€ if you just plan the slightest bit, or with the Deutschlandticket travel regio.

    The amount of stations we have in towns of under 50k people might be among the highest in the world. The amount of people within x km of a station with regular (usually at worst hourly) service is enormous. The amount of track per person both in the country as well as company is staggering.

    It’s nice and easy to call DB a joke but I think it’s far from it, public transit especially in urban areas, where as we all know most people live, is nearly world class in terms of coverage. You don’t need a car anywhere in Germany if you don’t want to and that’s a great thing, sure if you are impatient or get stressed when things outside of your control have impact on you, you might want a car but it’s very much not a requirement. Unless you almost pretty specifically have your home or work as far away from civilization as you can get.

    DB has much more potential and probably should be much better than it is but it’s far from bad even. Some of the arguments brought against it also in your comment will just read like old anti transit propaganda for the car companies, wether rehashed out of habit or ignorance. Please at least get your mostly valid criticism and don’t aim it at DB but the car lobby, and 20+ years of neolib transit policy that’s responsible for this situation.

    I knew 14 year old girls who would use the trains in the middle of the night and I have used them for all my transport that’s not on a bike for the last 6 years. And I like the system. Your comment reads like pure anti transit propaganda to me. Even though some of it I’d say myself as a jokey complaint.

    To end on a lighthearted note, at some point in time I borded a train (45mins delayed although for me it was essentially 15 mins early in a hourly schedule)heading for Aachen from Köln Deutz. After heading successfully through Hbf and Ehrenfeld we found ourselves on the track heading onto the südbrücke back to the eastern side of the rhine, with our train conductor being about as confused that we were now rolling through the same station i borded the train at, as everyone else on the train. All in all we ended up almost another hour behind.