>many cyclist don't understand this because they are bad drivers
So charitable of you to assume that they are only bad at driving.
I find that people who don't "get" mixed traffic create uncertainty and danger for everyone else around them whether they are on two wheels, four wheels or two feet. And then many of them have the gall to assume it's everyone else who's doing it wrong.
How do you square the "three ton death machine" with the whole "recreationally gallivanting across Africa in a Jeep and blogging about it for internet points" thing? Your words say a car usage should be minimized. Your actions say another thing. It comes across a lot like taking your private jet to a climate summit. I'm genuinely curious how you reconcile this apparent conflict.
Take a ton of people with CA urban ideology and plop them down in a random city in TX and "intentionally bad traffic because we expect everyone in the city to give up their cars" seems like a not unforseeable outcome.
Frankly this is why we leave major infrastructure planning up to the states so that the state can wring the best possible outcome out of an entire economic region without getting too bogged down by local politics. Left to their own devices cities would build shit infrastructure because they'd try to exclude the poors and other petty stuff like that.
>Median home price in austin is nearly 600k and in California its 800k,
Compare Austin to somewhere near Freemont or compare TX to CA. Comparing Austin to all of CA is more than a little dishonest since there's a lot of rural nowheres in CA to drag down the average price but the comparison exludes all of Texas's rural nowheres.
To be fair, highway/road construction is notorious for being an industry where the .gov and the unions bloat things in order to make more easy money for each other.
Tropes about one guy working and four supervising or tearing up recent work just to fix something you didn't fix while you were at it don't persist because the industry is a shining beacon of economic efficiency, they persist because they're universal enough to be relatable.
>If you think bricklaying is a simple task, you've probably never laid bricks, or likely ever worked a construction job.
If you think the bulk of the actual laying of bricks, siding of a wall or shingling of a roof isn't a simple task you've never worked a construction job.
Thinking is required around corners, windows and other interruptions. The bulk of the material laid, hung or otherwise expended is done so in a simple and repetitive manner. Once you've figured out your non-standard bits of the job you basically just run on autopilot.
That said, I agree that 99% of the the engineers who try and design this stuff never actually have the requisite experience to understand the nuance of what's going on.
The person appears to be from Europe. If HN is the bulk of their exposure to mundane topics regarding the US I can see why they'd be unaware that California building codes are not representative of the rest of the nation.
Three dudes can do the bulk of a cinder-block foundation in a few workdays with no special equipment. Blocks and bricks are cheap to work with because there are no special material handling requirements to increase overhead costs. This approach is economically viable pretty much everywhere except the urban areas most heavily represented on HN.
When you get into fancy high dollar construction in HCOL areas where time costs more money that's when you get bigger blocks that need machines to move them or you get formed and poured structures.
Nobody ever takes pictures of normal things. If you just looked at photos you'd think all my male ancestors ever did was fell trees and pour concrete and all the women ever did was hang out together drinking coffee and smoking.
I wasn't talking about rural cities. I think those are generally pretty good and pretty well run. I was talking about how it works in the tourist dumps. Protecting your "authentic" <place> branded Chinese trinket importers from the big boxes is SOP in a tourist economy.
Walmart doesn't "try" where they have to compete with upscale options because even if they do good the rich people will still shop there.because of the Walmart stigma. And the poor people only care about price so they won't be turned off if Walmart doesn't try hard.
Also, there are some really crappy Home Depots out there. In my experience they're the ones without appreciable competition.
They're probably using highly restrictive zoning/permitting to keep it out. Local businesses that are charging tourist prices don't want big box stores (who can't get away with a very big local markup) to compete with and local consumer facing businesses hold basically all the influence in that kind of economy.
Be careful trusting what you read. The blogs are run by people who've drank the cool-aid or move there already having made their money and life, not the kids who grew up there, saw it for what it was and GTFO'd or the townies who are either living on the relative poverty line (these economies are screwy, federal numbers don't apply well) or have a substance addiction.
Source: Grew up in one of those shitholes, actively rooting for sea level rise wipe it off the map, there is nothing of value there.
When you consider "part time + another job" vs full time employment the "who is solely dependent on what for their livelihood" comparison probably tips even further toward the federal government.
I used to flip cheap (like buy non-running for $500 or less, do work, sell for $1k-2k) cars of all types. I was space and time limited to I made money on throughput so I sold stuff below market to make it go quick. You'd think Tacomas and similar would be great because if you can get in for cheap you can sell for $$$, right? Wrong. I eventually stopped buying Tacomas/4Runners because the prospective owners were entitled jerks. No, having a ton of door dings and a roof that's beat to crap from hauling stuff on it does not entitle you to a discount on a vehicle in a price segment where price is determined by raw functionality. No I will not accept partial payment in weed regardless of what the street value is because I'm not a street pharmacist. The screening mechanism I wound up using was if someone called about a Taco/4Runner and they weren't having a tough time speaking in English I didn't want to deal with them and I'd tell them it was sold. Even then it was still a massive waste of my time because I'd have to answer 50 calls from non-serious buyers in order to get someone who was likely to show up and do the deal without making a problem out of themselves so I stopped buying those vehicles. Contrast with selling random commuter shitboxes where if you price it below market someone who is hard up for transportation will show up, pay asking price and both parties can walk away highly satisfied with the deal. Like FFS I'm successfully dealing with the stereotypical "problem customer" demographics and yet Toyota people manage to find a way to make problems out of themselves.
Would be pretty easy to integrate airbags into old cars.
Measure minimum distance from seat back to steering wheel and then configure airbag based on that (probably remove jumpers or something to control detonation). Sensor locations are pretty standard and modern airbags and computers are fast enough that you don't need to use crumple zones as a hack to buy time for the bag to go off before the occupant starts moving toward the space the bag will be in.
So charitable of you to assume that they are only bad at driving.
I find that people who don't "get" mixed traffic create uncertainty and danger for everyone else around them whether they are on two wheels, four wheels or two feet. And then many of them have the gall to assume it's everyone else who's doing it wrong.