I’ll point out the obvious that this is entirely based on perspective. An individual whose dominant mode of transportation is not driving would probably disagree.
Seattle lowered the speed limit on a lot of roads, but didn't do much else beyond add a few "No turn on red" signs.
So now you have a road where the speed limit used to be 35, but is large and straight enough to comfortably go 45, with a speed limit of 25. That causes people to go wildly different speeds and (in my opinion) makes it a lot more dangerous.
> Seattle lowered the speed limit on a lot of roads, but didn't do much else beyond add a few "No turn on red" signs.
As you said, that doesn’t do anything since the road is designed to go 35-45 MPH, that is how fast people will go, with the exception of inflexible rule followers that drive 25 MPH and cause dangerous speed differentials.
My city has been doing traffic calming projects where they redesign the road for the speed they want people to drive at and that has actually worked well.
All lowering the speed limit does is make it easier for cops to harass poor people, it doesn’t actually change the way people drive.
> As you said, that doesn’t do anything since the road is designed to go 35-45 MPH, that is how fast people will go, with the exception of inflexible rule followers that drive 25 MPH and cause dangerous speed differentials.
If speediots followed the rules, there wouldn't be a speed differential. You're blaming the rule followers, when in fact it is the people with the patience of a toddler causing the speed differential.
Driving is, in most cases, the only life-and-death activity you undertake during your day, and if you don't have the emotional capacity to handle not being where you want instantly, you don't have the emotional capacity to handle a machine that can kill other people.
> If speediots followed the rules, there wouldn't be a speed differential.
But, they don’t. So there is a speed differential. That’s reality, you aren’t going to change that unless you start executing people that speed, and that isn’t a realistic solution.
Redesigning the road so people instinctively drive slower does actually work. You take a four lane road, and change it to a two-lane road with left turn lanes, concrete medians that make the road appear narrower, concrete aprons that jut out into the road at crosswalks to make it appear even narrower, wider medians, and so on. The two major roads in my neighborhood have been redesigned this way and the results have been great, if a road is properly designed for a specific speed, you can actually get people to drive slower. It works on me, and I know the tricks.
What you’re arguing for is akin to operating industrial machinery without safeties, relying on unreliable humans to moderate their behavior, when you could prevent it by designing the road so that even speeders drive the speed limit or slightly over.
I’ve seen redesigning roads actually work, you can be dismissive and pray that people will magically follow the rules, but that won’t make it so.
I think redesign is the way to go, but there are places that are only separated from the U.S. in terms of education and enforcement, and compliance is excellent there. Really we can do both.
It’s also a cultural problem in addition to an engineering challenge, many Americans are notoriously “independent” (aka selfish) and that is evident by watching them drive.
> That’s reality, you aren’t going to change that unless you start executing people that speed, and that isn’t a realistic solution.
This is an adult conversation, please think before you type absurdities like this.
If (A) there was enough enforcement to actually catch people that speed, and (B) the punishment was rehabilitative (you have to clean up the roadway you were endangering people's lives on and take a class to retest for your license) there would be far fewer speeders.
> What you’re arguing for is akin to operating industrial machinery without safeties
No, actually, I'd love if we redesigned roads so people instinctively drive slower. I'm not arguing against that in any way.
All my post was doing was insisting that if you're going to blame someone, you place blame where it belongs. You're blaming people doing what they should be doing instead of the people endangering everyone around them.
> This is an adult conversation, please think before you type absurdities like this.
If (A) there was enough enforcement to actually catch people that speed, and (B) the punishment was rehabilitative (you have to clean up the roadway you were endangering people's lives on and take a class to retest for your license) there would be far fewer speeders.
Red light cameras are illegal in my state, there isn’t enough money to vastly increase traffic enforcement. Penalties would have to be dialed up to 11 for people to modify their behavior, and I don’t seen that happening. Even if speeding tickets were $1,000 or 40 hours of community service, people would still speed.
It would be great if people would drive safely, but they don’t, so that’s why I think redesigning roads is the only real way to change driving behavior.
When SpaceX launches a rocket, they think it will work.
When NASA launches a rocket they know it will work.
The cost of going from "I think this will work" to "I know this will work" is really expensive. It might be cheaper/faster to fail a few times and fix those problems than it would be to verify everything up front.
> When SpaceX launches a rocket, they think it will work. When NASA launches a rocket they know it will work.
That is such an ignorant thing to say. You think Falcon 9 has had 500+ successful launches because they _think_ it will work?
The difference is that SpaceX is a private company that has the ability to iterate fast. NASA is a jobs program and Artemis/SLS a barrel of pork, simple as that.
SpaceX has flown 18 crewed launches on a single type of vehicle, all in the 2020s, all of them either doing an ISS run or an orbital launch. NASA has had over 200 manned launches spanning well over half a century, flown on all sorts of tech, with vastly different designs, kinds of engineering culture, mission profiles. They were the organization that did first-of-its-kind missions. You just bringing up two numbers makes it seem like the companies existed at the same time and were essentially equals, and not like there's a historical innovator that spilled some blood while pushing the limits and a modern private business that made some innovations but is still treading on ground that's so well-known because of all the experience and knowledge we already gathered from those past risky ventures.
So let's say you want to check something like a new fuel nozzle.
SpaceX might design and build the nozzle, then put it in the rocket and launch it. It might work how they intended, or it might not, but they'll find out immediately. They'll make changes, build a new nozzle, launch another rocket, and continue until it works like they want.
NASA will do a lot more testing, simulation, redesigning, etc. until they KNOW that the nozzle will perform perfectly on the first try.
On the surface, NASA's approach sounds cheaper because you aren't wasting rockets. In reality it looks like SpaceX's approach might be better.
You don't test the nozzle on _launch day_, what kind of ridiculous statement is that? You think the Air Force is paying SpaceX so they can test things the day it flies?
All components go through several test campaigns on the ground, while iterating on the design to address issues. These campaigns take months/years. That's why changes are stacked into "blocks", which are the equivalent of rocket versions. Each block must be certified by the Air Force and NASA to be deemed worthy of flying their payloads.
A couple days before COTS-1[1] was to launch, a crack was discovered in the second stage nozzle. Rather than wait a month to fabricate and install a new one, SpaceX had a guy climb inside the rocket and use some shears to cut off the lower third of the nozzle. The rocket launched without issue.[2]
So while you're right that SpaceX doesn't typically do this sort of thing, NASA did pay them to fly an untested nozzle design.
If someone took the time to look through my GitHub contributions then pitched me with a job relevant to that work I would absolutely consider them. That's exactly the kind of recruiter I would like to work with.
If it's obviously just a bot scraping emails and sending generic job requests, that's very different.
Yeah this - I got one of these emails someone sniffing around my GitHub not that long ago and it wasn't immediately obvious that it was a scammy recruiter, so I responded to sound out if they were actually interested in one of my projects. Got the same generic response about let's work together on something so I didn't respond.
They just announced a while ago that they performed their 100 millionth battery swap, and just now "Nio's 3,750 battery swap stations delivered 2,073,500 battery swap services between February 10-23" (Chinese new year). Seems to work fine.
Another commenter pointed that out, it's impressive, but when one imagines trying to do that kind of thing in North America where we can't even build new train tracks it seems somewhat infeasible
Maybe it's my skill with a scale, but it's much faster for me to scoop a measuring cup or spoon into a container and scrape off the top than it is to go back and forth adding/removing stuff on a scale.
I'd love for my city to just focus on making other forms of transportation more appealing. More bus lanes, more (properly designed) bike lanes, etc.
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