It’s rated as one of the best (sometimes the best) public transit system for a small->medium sized US city. That doesn’t stop the city council from continuing to annex every stupid exurb they can be bribed into taking on.

One of the exurbs they pulled in recently has 10m (32ft) wide roads! That’s in a neighborhood of houses. It’s not some freeway. In fact, it’s around a 3 lane freeway wide. Roads designed for people to drive 60mph, three semi trucks wide are about how wide the residential streets are. The sheer amount of pavement that introduces to take care of for a handful of houses is crazy.

A quick measurement that it has a total of 1.6km of linear road. That’s just over 4 acres of asphalt to maintain. All of that for a mere 76 houses. That’s 1/10 of an acre per house. The road maintenance alone will eat up about 30% of the property tax revenue from these homes. There’s no way the neighborhood will be a net zero on revenue for the city. It’ll be a huge revenue sink for now and forever more.

Even if they do the get the signatures, it will be a huge uphill fight in the public vote. The strange part is that the public are more open to the idea than you’d think. Within the S-Bahn ring (the area proposed to turn into a pedestrianized zone), only about 10% of all trips are taken via private car. It’s an astonishingly low number for a modern city. A very large portion of the populace truly do live here without using a car for the majority of trips.

Would a more moderate plan likely do better? I’m not sure. Germany is heavily burdened by an older voting population pulling Boomer-like approaches to “don’t change anything, I liked how it was in the 1970’s” kinds of policies. I’d almost rather have a big vision be put forth instead of a weak center right one. Most of the polls show that once you put forward strong leftist/socialist ideals there’s more support available than you think, but it’s got to be big enough to get the younger populace to actually think you’re on their side for once.

Zero tanks? Russia must be seriously running low on armor.

This isn’t even a vote yet. The political parties are campaigning against a signature drive to get the referendum on the ballot for a vote later this year.

The referendum process is now happening after an initial city council discussion (they voted no), an initial signature drive (sued by establishment right wingers which went all the way to a supreme court style challenge, ruled constitutional so could proceed), so the city council was forced to look at it a second time (votes no), so now it’s a second larger signature drive to force a public vote.

Car drivers. Car culture. Established wealthy people. They’re all fighting the autofrei group tooth and nail, which means it’s likely worth fighting for.

Or, hear me out, what if you also had fewer square miles of roads to maintain? Maybe, just maybe, if you didn’t have as many lanes and narrower lanes you’d have a whole lots less to maintain the first place! I think it’s a crazy idea, but if the sarcasm hasn’t set in yet, here’s your final clue: holy fuck stop having so much asphalt you idiots!

My old US city only has about 180k population and it’s a usual US design. It has over 8 square miles of road to maintain! It’s crazy what we keep doing.

No wonder Putin is taking a pass on attending. It would make his time and location line up publicly.

Our family public health insurance in Germany is 12.5% of your income. There’s minimum rates for people who make very little income, but it does cover your household and dependents.

Checkups, illness visits, and initial consultations are free. I had a specialist visit with a cardiologist and it cost zero.

The dental only covers basics. The cost on extra dental is way less than it was in the US for basics.

In the US our good company insurance cost $1200/month, and even then we’d have $3k/year deductables. Oh, and every visit not in the annual checkup was a minimum of $170 out of pocket. Specialists would be $400 out of pocket per visit.

Seeing a non-emergency specialist in Germany can take months. Of course, it was the same in the US, so whatever. Both countries could be better, and should work to improve services available. I’d take Germany’s system any day over the commercialized mess that is the US commoditzing and charging people to live.

As the old joke goes: Emacs is great if you want to learn another OS.

I’m a barbarian vim user. Whenever I watch a real Emacs user operate a full dev environment inside of Emacs I’m always left stunned. It’s a whole universe of functionality, not just a refined line editor like vim.

That’s what I was taught at my first tech internship. It’s all they had on the UNIX system running the webserver in 1998.

I did write some web pages the pulled live data from the backend. I had the pleasure of writing them in C. I got the data binding to some kind of CORBA system using extern variables that were bound at compile time. All of the html (no js or css yet) was hand built and generated from the C code.

vi was the only editor on the system and there was no way to use arrow keys (the UNIX system didn’t have them on the keyboard at all).

I also had the displeasure of building a backup system on a floppy where I had to write a bat script that could manually load a token ring driver, bind a SMB share, load Ghost backup software and backup the local hard drive at under 2mb (yay coax thicknet). The tool used to query and write through the hostname for the backup? Copycon. Fucking copycon in DOS. That showed me how a terrible (but working) tool could be to work with.

Unless an editor can do reasonable vim emulation, I can’t take it seriously. You’re welcome to use it, but I won’t be able to get anything done in it quickly. The vi keys are too ground into my reflexes.

“The insider trading will continue until the Empire falls”.

Congress DGAF. Conservatives cheer for a monarch to empower their hate while establishment Democrats wring their center right hands over the fires of the workers’ lives they’re burning to get rich.

Until there’s a real left party and real economic justice it’s just a pantomime to keep people from taking inspiration from 1789 France.

Of course… too long and you only get a fraction of the cookie after gravity wins again.

You should pay half for streaming services.

Weird. I guess I might have not noticed the possible route. I do heavily favor taking railed transit, so normally I would have found the tram if it was available.

It’s even worse than I thought. I was there in 2017 and the tram was definitely open to the airport May 31, 2014! What was I not seeing?!?

I guess I’ll have to come back and visit again to make up for it. I’ve been to Scotland & Edinburgh a few times and it’s always worth the visit. I live in Germany now, so I should be hopping over at some point for a quick trip when I can find the time.

Nice! The last time I was there was 2016 (I think)? I remember seeing just a bit of the tram on Princes, but had to bus out to the airport still.

That’s great to hear! Congratulations on having a city leading to a better future. Those investments take time and political willpower, but they’re very worth it.

Nice. Hasn’t Edinburgh been building trams? There’s one to the airport now, isn’t there? They need to get up to digging and make a local Tube network. The city has plenty of rock to bore through.

The Wien public transit network is stellar. I don’t know much about the rest of the country, other than ÖBB is inexpensive, on time, and clean (DB needs to take notes). Oh, and Salzburg needs some transit build out. The busses won’t scale forever there.

Woohoo! One of the great secrets for public transit is to keep building. If you stop, you lose the people and skills to do a good job building. When a city just keeps going, it builds internal skills and knowledge on running the projects so they get cheaper, faster, and hit fewer problems.

One of my kids said thank you for some work I did to help them.

It’s hard being a parent. Even a little gratitude can go a long way.

… And improvements to public transit also increased for long term security? Right?