City Life

Been living in this new place for a few months now and wow it's crazy trying to find parking. My place has 8 apartments with 3 beds each so it's pretty much a 24 person place. We only have a 12-spot parking lot so overflow has to parallel park on the street which is its own special kind of hell.

I have a weird schedule, so there's been times I leave at 10 or 11 pm to go fill my car up with gas, notice the parking lot is full, and then I come back and my spot was taken by a car I saw parked on the street. Who has the time to do this shit at these weird hours? Just today I took out the trash and went to move my car from the street because I saw the lot was very empty, then when I finally drove to the lot there were 5 more cars there. I had only been gone for like 5 minutes!

I read the linked article recently and it got me thinking about how we approach policing in traffic stops. To summarize the article, it is reporting a new law that limits police power to stop vehicles for expired registration or nonfunctioning headlights. According to the bill's author, this was written to reduce the racial bias in traffic stops, which is a great idea. However, I think this bill targets the wrong areas for improvement.

I personally disagree with because I believe cars should have extra burdens in exchange for operating such a deadly machine. That includes basic traffic stops for operating them in an unsafe manner, and as such I will mainly be focused on the headlight portion of the law. However, the people who I sided with in the article were GOP, who opposed it on a very different principle. They opposed the bill because of how traffic stops can be used as pretext to catch criminals, not because making people operate dangerous machinery safely was a priority.

It was this along with quotes in the article about how racialized traffic stops are that got me thinking. What is the purpose of traffic stops? To me, traffic stops should be to discourage driving dangerously or operating vehicles in dangerous ways. To police, and to some GOP politicians, it seems like traffic stops are pretext to commit search, seizure, and other questionably constitutional actions. Of course both parties unfairly target minorities, mainly black people in their traffic stops.

Of course, this doesn't even touch the many scandals of officers using a traffic stop to plant evidence to punish "undesiriables".

My main question for this thread is "Why?" Why are traffic stops used as a pretext for searches and seizures. The other question I have is, "What direction should stopping the overpolicing of traffic stops take?"

Personally it's crossing the freeway where I live. My city has about 100,000 people but only six roads cross the freeway, with three more wayyy on the outskirts that are basically detours. There are also only a few pedestrian bridges that cross it, and zero pedestrian tunnels. The way our freeway works is it goes around downtown with the ocean to the south and west, so people live on the outside of the freeway and then commute inwards. This means insane bottlenecks with miles of cars in both directions trying to get to the other side. It doesn't help that our four freeway entrances are also at some of these tunnels / bridges, which means people who need to get on or off the freeway are also present. In general it's a shitshow and I'd really like to see a few more bypasses to prevent this congestion in the future.

(I'm not sure how to delete the video's youtube sponsorship spiel, sorry)

Have you ever had a friend return from a vacation and gush about how great it was to walk in the place they’d visited? “You can walk everywhere! To a café, to the store. It was amazing!” Immediately after saying that, your friend hops in their car and drives across the parking lot to the Starbucks to which they could easily have walked.

Why does walking feel so intuitive when we’re in a city built before cars, yet as soon as we return home, walking feels like an unpleasant chore that immediately drives us into a car?

Taking the blue line out of O'Hare airport and we are immediately being yanked around in every direction. Whereas in Tokyo, the curvature of the track and maximum speed inputted by the driver were linked.

In Tokyo, whenever I saw a long row of cushioned seats I thought to myself we could never have this in Chicago. It wouldn't last one day before being barfed or pissed upon.

In Tokyo, Metro trains are equipped with multiple TV screens displaying the next station, number of minutes to arrival, and a diagram of optimal exits in relation to your current car number. In Chicago, we have two or three sheets of cardstock, that are occasionally not even lined up correctly. That's the map.

The worst part is, JR is privatized, and they still manage to provide this high quality of service. How??

What’s going on with remote work and cities? How are things changing?

I saw a lot of people move to cheaper places once the pandemic happened. Are people choosing having a house/stability over city living? Were bars/restaurants/events/general downtown things just something people cared about since they were “forced” to be in the city anyway (either commuting there or choosing to live near work)?

We’ve been seeing workplaces start to force people back to the office for a little while now too. Is part of this to encourage spending money in the local economy?

Personally I’m hybrid and enjoy living near the downtown of my city, but I also hate being forced into the office so it had me thinking about all these questions and how these values could effectively coexist.

Build more trains