Comments by "" (@kaitlyn__L) on "City Beautiful" channel.

  1. Ah, that just proves you already had a psychic connection when your future wife when you’d find yourself wondering who was living there……
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  2. I didn’t realise that about steel production. I guess once it’s all automated, the same economic calculus that led to outsourcing… becomes “why are we spending all this money on oceanic shipping if we can build an automated factory near the end uses?”. Huh.
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  3. I understand you didn’t want to accidentally make a whole video about the problems with company towns, but it’s also worth noting that company towns also served to keep most workers’ wages reinjected into the company rather than dispersing into the wider economy. And they also had their own private “police”/security, and stuff like that. I know you said “not so great for the workers”, so it’s not like you ignored that aspect, but yeah!
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  4. efficiency is higher, sure, but internal combustion engines still lose 60-80% of the energy to heat... so that's still not great compared to trains which are almost universally electrified for cities and commuter routes, and electric motors are 90-98% efficient. plus the optimal speed is rarely reached outside of a segregated fast highway (aka motorway or freeway or autobahn) so that argument is pretty irrelevant for city driving, which is usually 20-30mph. certainly driving a highly aerodynamic vehicle with a small engine will do far more for efficiency than trying to drive the same car fast all the time. and auto-start-stop turns off an engine completely when stuck in traffic. i know it used to take up to 5 seconds to fire up the engine again, but the car i learned to drive in was a 2020 model with the feature and now it takes less than half a second, easily the engine was up and running again quicker than i could take my foot off the brake and onto the accelerator. basically even if driving is still common and still based on burning fuel, there are many better mitigations than trying to avoid stopping the car at all costs, even by doubling the person's commute distance. after all, if a person who got 30mpg suddenly had half the distance to drive, at a crude calculation they would use the same fuel as if they'd switched to a 60mpg car for the same distance. mpg is measured in distance, not average speed, after all. it's also worth noting many engines don't have a linear relationship between mpg and co2/mi, the lower fuel economy also generates many multiples the same co2 per engine mile on average, in most cars. even when the engine is physically the same, but tuned to product more power in the ECU. i know not everybody wants to live in a city, some can't stand hearing any traffic noise at all, or need to see a forest and birds out of their window. but certainly we should make city living easier, safer and more convenient for people who live there, and enabling walking journeys and quick subway or bus connections makes that much easier (and accessible to all teens) than driving – which absolutely has its place in a city, even the best public transport system still isn't suitable for many disabilities, either you need to carry too much equipment with you or the nearest station is still just too far from your house bc of the disability, or whatever - so there will always be some place for cars in cities, as they'd be breaking disability accessibility legislation otherwise. but i don't believe cars need to be a first class citizen in dense city cores, and i'm personally happy to wait at traffic lights, knowing each person crossing the road is potentially one less car sharing the road with me, and making my journey less crowded and more pleasant as well. easily worth 2 minutes at some traffic lights. (plus if you have a shorter distance to travel, even in a car, you're going to deal with fewer traffic lights.)
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  5. Are they that hard to get in the USA? :(
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  6. He did that a long time ago, or maybe it was the SimCity, but I'm pretty sure it was Cities Skylines. That's actually how I found him!
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  7. Appreciate the little aside about assistive devices that use pavements 👍 a good pedestrian street also has to accommodate wheelchairs and mobility scooters! So I'm glad that none of these examples were the extremely narrow, cobbled, uphill streets – which are extremely picturesque but can be annoying to use regularly even on foot! Having enough width for other pedestrians to be able to move off to the side to let a wheelchair user past is a big deal, after all, plus the relative smoothness of the paving.
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  8.  @stevecarter8810  install your password manager on your phone too. Even the open source locally hosted ones allow syncing to an app
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  9.  @ardentvibe6917  no, it's not a "he said she said" thing, because if they crossed the road without looking they'd still be on the hook for negligence instead. If they said they did the proper stop look listen checks before crossing, then it'd be like... so you did see the car then.
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  10.  @ardentvibe6917  no, and I'm telling you that's not how it works in the UK. You're cross applying, wrongly, to how you think such things might work in the USA. The infrastructure is different and we have many decades of history behind it. You're acting as if people will just throw themselves in front of cars en masse for a payout or something, when that DOES. NOT. HAPPEN IN THE UK. Everything else is conjecture on your part, a "well if that's true it'd be like this!" parade. The only roads in the UK where pedestrians don't have right of way is segregated roads, like dual carriageways and motorways. Because they don't have any pavements on! When there's pavements, the pedestrians have right of way. Easy. Those roads happen to be 30mph limit in law anyway, as that's the default speed limit for roads with street lamps and pavements, and we don't need signs to tell us it's 30 because we learn it's 30 when learning to drive.
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  11.  @ardentvibe6917  this American preoccupation with sueing and how people might be able to sue them.... smh The video is about a history of why jaywalking in the USA is illegal, and it touched on other countries where it's not, and I've been talking about how it works where I live. You keep saying "but then people could do X" even though they can't. Believe it or not the laws aren't just thrown together with no clauses or exemptions. And people don't need to sue for medical bills because we have the NHS. It's really quite simple. You keep complicating it by worrying what might happen if this rule were implemented in the USA without changing how your roads are built nor any of the other changes which would be necessary for such a thing to work. I already said it plainly, roads with pavements and street lights they have right of way. A dark unlit country road they don't. It's really simple and you keep complicating it with catastrophic "what if"s which don't have any bearing on reality. You keep saying as if I'm saying people can walk on a dark country road with no pavement and no high vis and get hit and go "it wasn't my fault!", well they can't. Stop perseverating over what the implications of a law you half understand based on people chatting about it might be, and actually look into how it actually works before you keep spouting off on half-baked theories about how you'd try to abuse our system?
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  12. the joke is that the scene makes car commutes seem extremely unappealing, from an author who prefers walkable cities.. not that he really believes it's an advert intended to sell you on driving to work
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  13. Yeah
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  14. Lots of trash isn’t strictly useless, it’s just cheaper to extract brand new resources. 🙄 There’s a lot of iron and aluminium sent to landfills for instance, not to mention copper, silver, gold, etc especially in throwaway electronics. I often wonder if some future civilisation is going to find buried old landfills, with the organics long decayed and the metals long turned into salts and other minerals, and wonder how exactly such a concentration of all these resources which don’t normally occur together happened.
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  15. In one of the places I lived, some people built their own house. As part of the planning process, it was compromised to make it a square fronted house like all the older ones, rather than a tube shaped house like they wanted to build. But in every other way they had a modern house. It was clearly not old like its neighbours, and used different materials, but the style wasn’t so distinct as to look totally out of place. An excellent balance IMO.
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  16. If you have a debit card that should work too. Even if they only specify credit card. It’s still the Visa/MC networks.
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  17.  @Ciph3rzer0  it’s true
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  18.  @kelaarin  so some of the wealth will spread out into the surrounding area a little. Places grow and places shrink. If Seattle sticks around I’m sure growth over time will make up for it sooner or later.
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  19.  @unvergebeneid  having your properties south or west facing is important for heat and light in the colder parts, vice versa north and east in the hotter parts for more shade.
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  20. I guess Oxford would be considered a college town by this definition?
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  21.  @heinuchung8680  but the seat behind him is fully in focus. It’s obviously an autofocus fail rather than a greased lens. That’s hollywood type stuff, where you pay someone to clean it off after. No way you’re greasing up your own lens on your own time.
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  22.  @АртурБратц  exactly! It’s just rent-seeking, making it so no-one else can collect their own water. And of course water bottling companies often get better rates than domestic customers too…
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  23.  @unterhau1102  oh okay, you thought it was somehow a dig at the USA to make me feel better. No, I just hate corporations buying-up the rights to the natural world and rent-seeking, wherever it happens.
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  24. It’s similar for me, no way to park at home in the apartment. The cost is competitive against petrol that I’d consider having to go to a fast charger on the same cadence as a petrol station, if only it didn’t take 30-60 minutes with so many of them being underpowered 50kW or worse units. But in 5 years or so, it may be an option for me. Either with regulations for home charging, or the speeds improve such that we’d get 100 or 150kW instead, or so on.
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  25. I’ve never seen a water tower in the UK. What do we do? Just hide them?
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  26. It is VERY individualistic. Many of them will deny they’re part of any systemic trend at all, with the usual “they can do it elsewhere! Just not here!” arguments. Many refuse to entertain the idea that that’s a widespread-enough viewpoint to be causing problems, or will just insist if it’s widespread it’s therefore good because Will Of The People. (Even though funnily enough a significant fraction will also defend the imbalance in the Senate because “can’t crush the minority, tyranny of the majority!” 🤔🤔)
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  27.  @nunyabidness3075  I… think you’re reading into it too much. I believe what I said — NIMBYs are selfish and the Senate should be proportionate. Kind of an odd question for someone called “none of your business” to ask though… Edit: regardless, I’m allowed to analyse the common responses/deflections to common criticisms. You admit that they’re their positions, so…
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  28.  @ahadumer418  just
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  29.  @ahadumer418  “just”
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  30. Tactile paving can be a PITA for front wheels, yeah. Not sponsored or anything but I have them and I love them, so I’d recommend looking at whether Frog Legs front forks are compatible with his wheelchair. It’s a small suspension made of composite material which helps a lot going over bumps up to about an inch tall.
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  31. Tulsa was, before the white population destroyed their businesses and killed people
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  32. Ooh I feel this. One time back when I still walked, I still had 5 seconds to make a crossing but a Range Rover was revving the whole time, and at that 5 second mark it actually STARTED PUSHING AGAINST MY LEGS at about 1mph. I threw a pebble at his bonnet (hood).
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  33. Good to see the American campaigns use the properly-rhyming "twenty is plenty". Not like the fudged rhyme "twenty's plenty" – which I suspect was chosen because it saves marginally on sign space.
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  34. I'm perfectly content staying in my modern build apartment... the kitchen is much larger than, say, a terraced house from the 40s-60s would've been, and many people are still living in those passed down from their parents. Yes they have a garden, but I prefer warm and quiet anyway. I've never overheard my neighbours doing anything except for occasional drilling and hammering now and then. I live a quarter of a mile away from a convenience store, so it's easy to pick up essential groceries without straying too far. I'm just happy there's been no post for weeks! Usually there's a ton of junk mail – a problem no matter where you live! Plus I still have a great view of the city from high up, and can watch various lorries, emergency services vehicles and so forth make their way through the empty streets. I'm actually thoroughly enjoying it. I dunno man, it's fine if you'd personally find it hellish to go without a garden or whatever, but... any apartment block built in the last 20 years is probably better sound insulated than any thin wooden American 50s house.. my floor is perfectly level, which is nice for laying round things on a table... my water pressure is great because there's a pump in the basement supplementing the mains pressure... I could go on. Certainly to characterise all dense housing as slums is wildly inaccurate, hell, just look at the price some people pay for them in places like New York and London. There are poorly maintained and overcrowded apartment blocks, mainly from the 60s and left to rot, but there are plenty of people crammed into houses too small for them too, in poorer neighbourhoods or regions that were deliberately cut off from the local area (such as Easterhouse in Glasgow, which had a lot of 2 and 3 storey houses, and a few apartment blocks). The density of the housing doesn't really affect whether or not a place will be neglected and turned into slums or not, building owners and absentee landlords decide that. As for the current coronavirus, being separated from the apartment across the hall from you or the house across the street from you really makes no difference, you're both sealed up in your own home anyway?
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  35.  @jaredross9  you’re through the looking glass if pointing out someone’s self-evident ignorance on a topic is racist, but attempting to erase the strong racial elements involved in white flight, intimidation, redlining etc… isn’t? Honestly as a fellow white person, it’s a super embarrassing look to want to say something is racist against you so badly.
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  36. The comments don’t mention it because that’s what he says near the end.
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  37.  @afgor1088  it’s older than that, it predates the founding of any of the colonies. It’s called Terra Nullius. Clearly some people still cling to it.
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  38.  @crazy808ish  not really — transit oriented development is fine if it’s centred around the humanist needs. But these were built to sell land along the railroad first and the rest was an afterthought. That’s the actual message in that sentence.
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  39.  @historythyme  what city centre would’ve been left if they had? D:
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  40. only if high speed internet stops being limited to cities and denser areas! of course some countries have achieved that, but the USA and UK will often still be giving basic ADSL down a crackly phone line in the countryside, often with not even enough bandwidth to watch youtube or netflix in HD, let alone do video calls and screen sharing and stuff. which also forces a lot of independent artists who would otherwise prefer to live out in the woods to live in a city, because it'd take days or weeks to upload their projects from the woods... once that barrier is clear and with so much online delivery shopping happening anyway, I could easily see people moving out. Maybe potentially losing access to delivery pizza would be a deterrent to some.
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  41. when you consider how powerful automobile lobbies were for a time, even getting many cities to rip up their trams/trolleys/streetcars, it's no surprise that the metric conveniently skews to making longer, less-busy trips. in the 60s that was considered comfortable and convenient, even if it did take longer, because you weren't crowded and it was a pleasure to drive your 2+ metre land cruiser boat car wafting down the road. now of course many more of us prefer to live close to the action, even if it's more crowded.
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  42.  @Nota-Skaven  lmao exactly
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  43.  @d.b.4671  now I understand why it’s Evergreen Terrace. Damn I mean, the UK has plenty of tree streets too, but not to the point where it’s an Everytown kind of thing.
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  44.  @BonaparteBardithion  maybe the definitions are different in America, here a highway is any public access road, I know people colloquially call separated roads highways there (what I would call a dual carriageway) but I'm pretty sure that technically public roads are "public highways" in America too, even if that's not how ppl use the word day to day
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  45. For what it’s worth, those folding steel chairs hospitals give out are completely unusable long term, and we feel sorry that they make people recovering from surgery use them 😅 (The lightweight wheelchair was invented by a company called Quadra, run by just a couple of people making them by hand out of racing bike spec aluminium tubing. They were eventually bought out by Quickie who are still around, and making quite similar looking designs for their midrange and high end models!)
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  46. what is this "2-4x the energy in wastewater" about? flow rate? if so, that's mostly still coming from pumps. by all means recover some of it, like regeneration braking on a car, but it wouldn't be free energy.
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  47.  @shotelco  oh okay, biofuels from the decomposition. (gonna be honest, I skimmed most of your comment because I'm already extremely familiar with the chemistry there.) I guess that applies more to blackwater than greywater, which is what I was thinking. In the UK, "wastewater" is usually close to greywater, while the blackwater we would tend to call "sewage". So that's why I had trouble imagining where the energy lay. But, like, fair enough. I'm all for biogas from food and farm waste. Collecting the solids from sewage treatment and putting them into the digesters seems like a decent idea, I guess. Like, I'd certainly prefer to burn bio-methane instead of north sea gas or shale gas. Especially if the methane would otherwise go into the atmosphere, since it's more insulating than the CO2 it releases. But in the longer term, I would suggest sequestering the methane from sewage, when we don't need it for the energy.
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  48. Fast chargers have their own batteries and they trickle charge off the grid. They can also be coordinated so no too many start recharging at the same time. So in likelihood they’ll just absorb all the baseload at night that’s just burned to keep the power stations going tomorrow. The issues with brownouts are not for total capacity but for being able to cope with the very brief peaks when many people turn on at the same time. In addition, there are proposals to use an EV at home as an energy buffer for the home, which also helps to smooth the demand peaks out on the grid. In this way, EV adoption can help rather than hurt grid stability. Especially when some of these larger charging facilities will be able to provide load balancing services to the grid as well, much like Australia’s Hornsdale Power Reserve operates. When there’s enough of those, grids can reach out to their batteries in demand spikes rather than having to ramp generation or cut supply like today.
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  49.  @dziooooo  as a kid I often wondered why so many American media had “I’m bored, wanna go to the (mall/skate park/arcade/etc)” as a plot driving point, but you’re so true about having NOTHING to do in a 10 mile radius. My first time in a sprawling suburb in New Jersey it was really disorienting. I never had a great sense of distance (I’d usually estimate half the walking time at home) but in those suburbs you could walk 10 blocks and feel like you ended up where you started. I was amazed the person I was visiting could navigate to the commuter rail station, tbh, though I’m sure recognising the different houses and cars probably happens eventually.
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  50.  @stephenjenkins7971  I’m curious if there’s been any studies examining whether crime is truly reduced, or if it’s simply displaced elsewhere. I’d personally prefer reducing the overall amount of crime in the whole system, though of course “hot spots” should be avoided too. But if a policy merely shuffled those hot spots around, I’d personally call that policy a failure. I’m not prejudging what the result would be, I’m just curious if that’s been studied.
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