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Topic: Travelling and such (Read 6312 times)

Re: Travelling and such

Reply #25
Another observation from trains in France: They have the sockets where you can stick your smartphone charger (or some other suitable device) but the sockets have no power. On this point French trains are the same as in Romania. In Estonia and Finland sockets in trains are powered, not merely for show.

Re: Travelling and such

Reply #26
I'd say that most trains in .nl/.be don't have sockets (or few when they do, give or take perhaps in first class) but the few times I've tried them they were powered.

The train might be innocent though. Maybe someone plugged in something that shorted it.

Re: Travelling and such

Reply #27
...cars invented the ludicrous concept of "jaywalking"
This just out.

Jaywalking – that time-honored practice of crossing the street outside of the crosswalk or against the traffic light – is now legal in New York City.

Legislation passed by the city council last month officially became law over the weekend after the city’s mayor, Eric Adams, declined to take action – either by signing or vetoing it – after 30 days.

The new law permits pedestrians to cross a roadway at any point, including outside of a crosswalk. It also allows for crossing against traffic signals and specifically states that doing so is no longer a violation of the city’s administrative code.

But the new law also warns that pedestrians crossing outside of a crosswalk do not have the right of way and that they should yield to other traffic that has the right of way.

Re: Travelling and such

Reply #28
It took me a second to realize that by "against the traffic light" they probably mean "when there's no traffic" and not to randomly walk in front cars who might be waiting to go.

 

Re: Travelling and such

Reply #29
I'm getting a feeling that when jaywalking is legal, it no longer makes sense to have traffic lights on crosswalks. Pedestrians should always have the right of way on crosswalks. This would probably mean less crosswalks overall.
“Cities that truly care about safety focus on street design, speeding and dangerously large vehicles,” Mike McGinn, the group’s executive director, said Tuesday. “Not jaywalking laws.”
What can cities do about dangerously large vehicles, such as SUVs? They are dangerously large, but service vehicles are larger.

What can be done is to prevent automakers produce and sell such vehicles. This is the role of the government of the country.

As to street design, I am against dividing the streets into more parallel traffic lanes than absolutely necessary, and the necessary maximum seems to be three: rail, vehicles, pedestrians. Rail has right of way wherever there are rails. Otherwise vehicles should pay attention to pedestrians.

To add e.g. bicycles between vehicles and pedestrians on their own lanes in addition to cars and pedestrians so that everybody, bicycles, cars, and pedestrians, have their own crossings with traffic lights when crossing over each other is counterproductively complicated. Bicycles should be either in the midst of cars (with right of way ahead of cars, but not ahead pedestrians) or in the midst of pedestrians, not on their own lanes.

Right now Estonia is emulating Finland with attempts to build as many "light traffic roads" parallel to car lanes (and parallel to highways outside towns with expensive space-wasting greenspace in between). "Light traffic" means pedestrians and bicycles together. The problem is that this design implies and imposes that pedestrians and bicyclists have no business ever on car lanes, so in places where there is no "light traffic road" built, pedestrians and bicyclists simply do not belong, they have no right to exist (because there are no plans to design car roads such that they would accommodate pedestrians and bicyclists, nope, that's what "light traffic roads" are for!). Moreover, in Estonia's laws and traffic regulations there is no concept of "light traffic road", so building them should be illegal, but it is done by way of copy-paste from Finland (and maybe from Germany), regardless of what our own laws say.