I found the least I could do, and did it.

Can I steal that in case I ever take up embroidering pillows?

I live in rural eastern North Carolina, and my job involves unpredictable drives of up to 350 miles round-trip. Because we have a little farm and it's nice to have carrying capacity, I am buying my second new car ever. It's a plug-in hybrid Toyota RAV4 which I have never driven because you can't find one here in MAGA land. I couldn't even order it here - I will need to go to Raleigh to get it. But it is supposed to be able to go about 40 miles totally electric, and then it's a hybrid. When the solar panels go in for the new house, I will have spent all of the dollars to maybe reduce my footprint a tiny amount, if you calculate it over 20 years. It's so confusing.... I couldn't go all EV because we don't have the infrastructure around here.

I will need to go to Raleigh to get it.

Just like Andy Griffin. Anyway, I have a regular RAV4 and I really like it.

1: I'd be honored.

Maybe I'll use spray paint and the side of a retaining wall.

Still seems like too much work for the message. Just pee it in the snow next January?

I don't have that much capacity.

Around here, everyone used the money they saved by not taking vacations or having to commute in 2020/2021 to buy a huge pickup with a front that is higher than even most teenagers' heads and single-digit MPG in the city. It seems to me that whenever someone doesn't yield at a crosswalk or does a dangerous merge that forces me to brake, it is one of these trucks. I'm not suggesting that Biden campaign on "We helped Ukraine and fucked over the worst aggressive drivers," but maybe a congressional candidate in the right district could use it.

Gas prices really need to stay high to drive any sort of change, but I don't know how to protect sympathetic people from poverty and outsized consequences in the meantime.

I have a friend in DD who is super good on transportation issues. He's an avid cyclist who competes in races but also uses a bike to get around. He's active in the DC cycling community, and he's had at least one friend - a skilled cyclist - die while biking in DC.

Also, for some reason I developed a belief as a child that you must start at the beginning of a series and read/ watch it in order, but I'm not going to listen to every single one of those episodes. Where do you suggest starting? Do you have any favorites?

I love biking but I do not love giant trucks that are taller than I am. I also agree with Moby that while I doubt Biden would campaign on "maybe if you didn't spend all your free money on stupid let's go Brandon flags you could afford gas for your truck" but crazy uncle Joe has to be thinking it.

Also: what minivan? When our CR-V dies, * I want to replace it with a hybrid.
*It's ten years old and has 70K miles. I will have this car forever.

We have a 16 year old Jeep with only 85k on it, but I want to replace it even though it runs fine because we also have a 16 year old boy learning how to drive. The safety features are dated and the seat belt sensor for the passenger seat is broken so it beeps continually if you have a passenger. Already tried to fix it twice.

I am not American, so the calculations are all very different from me. I bike and walk more miles than I drive, although it's close, and I drive a small car with low emissions. But, I do see a lot of those stupidly high US pickup/SUV things starting to appear in the UK, and I'd ban them outright. I'm not even sure how they can pass most safety standards.

I also noticed, when I was in Boston last month, how bad people seem to drive: lots of erratic driving at unsafe speeds with unsafe distances between cars. Erratic as in cars just sort of floating about unpredictably rather than taking the natural line or staying in their lane, and floating between the two sides of the lane when within a lane, rather than maintaining a consistent distance between the lane boundaries. It's interesting how bad driving seems to vary from country to country. This wasn't the kind of recklessness that you see in some places, it was more like "I can barely control this vehicle, and I'm only dedicating 10% of my attention to it anyway." Part of me wondered how much was cruise control, or other assistive tech, and how much was people just not paying any attention whatsoever.

13: Toyota Sienna. There's only two hybrid minivans - this one and one by Chrysler. We're overpaying - we're paying new prices for one that is technically used, from Carvana, because we literally couldn't find a new one that met our most mild of criteria and would otherwise have had to wait for 2023 models. But that's a very 2022 problem.

11: I think of most podcasts as being closer to radio shows, where you can randomly pick and choose. I started w the Apr 12, '22 episode, which was better than some of the others. It's a general grab bag of topics, which I found interesting.

Also they tend to get better as they go along.

Erratic as in cars just sort of floating about unpredictably rather than taking the natural line or staying in their lane

Yeah, that's really common. Sometimes it's because they are reading their phone. In rural areas it's because driving down the center is how you drive on rural roads.

Are there any examples of cities with huge biking populations and great biking infrastructure, where it's brutally hot for half the year?

DC biker who's still alive here. And I'm not sure a Texan would consider DC "brutally hot", but people from other places do. Some thoughts...

* Commuting to work (which hasn't happened in over 2 years, but will happen again on a temporary basis soon, but as for a regular basis, who knows) in the summer is easy due to a locker room specially for bike commuters, so I could always get cleaned up and change clothes. If that didn't exist, there's a gym nearby, but membership isn't free. If that didn't exist either or I found the fee too high, I could still take the bus to work in the morning and bike home with a bike-rental-by-the-half-hour service.

* Cars matter more with a big family whether you're in a place with good bike infrastructure or not, so there's only so much you can do. I can carry groceries for 2-4 days by bike, but I couldn't if I were trying to feed twice as many people. I can put one 6-year-old on my bike as a passenger, but two or three kids that size would be a lot harder.

* "Bike infrastructure" is vague. Obviously separated bike trails are the safest, with various kinds of bike lanes being less safe than that but presumably better than something designed with only cars in mind. But aside from details like that I wonder about the street layout. DC has lots of narrow residential streets, and even in the central business district, there are places where cars couldn't go too fast if they wanted to. Biking on streets like that seems fairly safe with or without bike-exclusive lanes.

* Bike accidents can be scary, but try to... keep things in perspective? I know that might sound like minimizing the risk, which isn't my intention. Lots of bikers have been killed around here. Cassandane and I have each broken bones in bike accidents. But on the other hand, some bike accidents turn out like this one. And you're just replacing one risk for another. I'm pretty sure none of our accidents have been as bad as my mother's car accident in the 90s, when she was on a state highway (so, ~50 mph or so) and someone turned right in front of her without yielding. And exercise is valuable, especially because people with car-centric lifestyles often don't get much. (I know you used to do CrossFit. If you still do, feel free to disregard this.) How would an actuary weigh the small-but-real chance of a bad accident against the increased fitness?

(I still do, but they stopped paying for the "CrossFit" licensing. And I go for long walks. And my commute is 20 miles of country roads with speeding cars and tiny shoulders. So the argument shouldn't be made too specifically to me.)

Shouldn't CrossFit make your shoulders bigger?

I'm actually the longest-running member of my gym, having been there for all four gym owners. The current owner was actually a wee 20 year old trainer when I started, and then he left, and then eventually bought the gym from the third owner.

I don't think the gym is actually a successful business model. The current owner is the longest-running, having had it since 2019, but he has worked fulltime at Amazon this entire time. I don't know how he sustains this, but he did downsize the gym when the old location doubled the rent, to join in the city-wide rentier-class profit-grab this past spring. The old location has now sat empty since March, so great job, asshole.

(And yet I'm possibly still the weakest member of the gym! I really just don't put on muscle at all.)

Bike accidents can be scary, but try to... keep things in perspective? I know that might sound like minimizing the risk, which isn't my intention. Lots of bikers have been killed around here.

This is the least persuasive collection of sentences!

Lots of bikers have been killed, but death is inevitable.

15: Boston really is a special case in terms of unsafe driving. Cars are bad everywhere, but Boston drivers are uniquely bad.

I think TWoC does recognize that there's not much to be done in terms of making suburban living car-free. They had an episode with a kind of meathead-type environmentalist talking about his plug-in electric truck, making the point that it was going to be necessary to sell low-carbon transportation even to meatheads. But their big target is getting cars out of, or at least deprivileged, in places like NYC where the car-free lifestyle is possible at all, and where cutting down on cars will make the car-free lifestyle easier and more attractive.

Vietnam and India both have huge moped/tiny motorcycle contingents. Here, electric bikes help some. You're still outside in the sun, but your tiny engine generates breeze unless traffic jam or red light.
Accident fatality rates are probably not great. One thing I've noticed in cities in Turkey and Mexico, both places with lots of insane car traffic coexisting with motorcycles, is a noticeably higher proprtion of youngish guys in casts. Pro tip: if you are visiting, do not drive in Istanbul. Mexico's not bad outside rush hours.

15: Bostonians are known for our bad driving.

Car-users die a thousand deaths. A biker dies only once.

I think e-bikes should help with the "too damn hot to bike" problem. You get less sweaty if you can let the battery do a lot of the work.

The electric scooters seems like a good way to die if cycling is too uncertain for you.

I bet those uniwheel things are entirely safe.

I've seen them ridden in traffic.

I don't want to brag, but Heebieville is the unicycle capital of the world, due to this perilous sport which I've linked here before. Unfortunately, it looks like the league might have died during Covid, which is sad. It had a long run.

Taipei is brutally hot, nearly year round, and more people bicycle to work than drive. The city put a lot of money and work into building up its infrastructure, including reserving dedicated bike lanes everywhere, and incentivizing bicycling. (Most people take public transit, and I think the second most common commute option is motorbike/scooter; bicycling (including electric-assisted bicycling) is I think third.)

We don't even have a Taipei correspondent anymore.

Are there typically accommodations somewhere to get cleaned up when you get to work? Or is it primarily people who for whatever manual labor/being outside/etc will continue to be sweaty on the job?

E-bikes are very popular, and I'm told they are easy enough to ride that you don't get sweatier than you would, say, walking from the metro stop. But I don't have any personal knowledge.

The e-bikes sound way more appealing to me for commuting, for that exact reason.

when I was in Boston last month, how bad people seem to drive

This is making me laugh, in a Martian goes to Scotland and notes the all the knifecrime on Earth kind of way. I've been all over this country, and Boston drivers are the worst.

I've never seen anyone drive recklessly or poorly in Boston.

I've done the commute to work by bike here a few times, which is about 12-14 miles each way. London has patchy cycle infrastructure although my route has pretty decent bike lanes for about 40% of it, so it's not awful. The time is slightly shorter than using public transport, too, and driving wouldn't even be possible.Getting sweaty wasn't a huge problem. I had a change of clothes and kept the speed down a couple of mph from what I'd do recreationally. Nothing that couldn't be handled by a splash of water and a change of clothes.

But the weight of stuff was a big problem. A proper secure bike lock and a laptop is a lot of weight. If I did it regularly I'd leave a load of stuff there, I guess, and invest in a Tailfin rack or similar.

" Are there any examples of cities with huge biking populations and great biking infrastructure, where it's brutally hot for half the year?"

I'd look to Spain - certainly plenty warm most of the year (heatwaves above 40C this spring, in May) - and lots of successful transition away from cars eg in Barcelona.

The factoid that's helped me the most in thinking about transitioning away from cars is that people tend to spend around 20-50 minutes on their commute regardless of the mode - they just go further if they use a car/train vs walking or biking. So transitioning away from cars involves some changes to what is considered a "reasonable distance" and decisions about housing/work/school that are made accordingly.

June of Newt's junior year of high school, he had just learned to drive and we were going to Boston to tour schools. I told him he could drive to outside of Boston, but we had to switch over before getting to the city because someone would turn and drive at right angles across traffic directly in front of him. He rolled his eyes at me being dramatic.

Fifteen minutes after I took over, we saw someone changing lanes in stop-and-go traffic, with their car literally at 90 degrees to the lane lines.

Vertically.

39: I've now done a 5.5-mile ebike commute about a dozen times in work clothes, and I can confirm. Granted, it's Bay weather, but I'm not sweating even slightly.

I'm mostly not doing it at the moment due to the route being a choice between unsafe neighborhoods and unsafe streets, unfortunately.

45: Tim used to see that right angle thing on 93 when he commuted to the Suth Shore. Once near the tollbooths he saw someone drive across 3 or 4 lanes of traffic that way.

44: I just moved further out, because Ethan's where I could find a place with a home office. I'd really love to have better train infrastructure.

I live three miles from my office and within an easy walk of the most frequently served bus line in the area. It's really nice even though I stopped going to my office.

huge recommendation of the ep they did with jessie singer, there are no accidents. heartbreaking & essential.

This feels like a lot of hate at Boston driving. Having learned to drive in the DC suburbs, including the Beltway, and now living in the Boston area.... no. Boston drivers know they're playing a game. DC drivers are assholes.

I also agree with Moby that while I doubt Biden would campaign on "maybe if you didn't spend all your free money on stupid let's go Brandon flags you could afford gas for your truck" but crazy uncle Joe has to be thinking it.

Rewind to 2008 when gas prices were considered high at 4-5 dollars per gallon, IIRC:

Obama: The other day, I was in a town hall meeting and I laid out my plans for investing $15 billion a year, energy-efficient cars, and a new electricity grid and all this. Somebody said, well, what can I do? What can individuals do?

So, I told them something simple. I said, you know what, you can inflate your tires to the proper levels, and that if everybody in America inflated their tires to the proper level, we would actually probably save more oil than all of the oil that we would get from John McCain drilling right below his feet there, wherever it is that he was going to drill -- wherever he was going to drill.

So, now the Republicans are going around -- this is the kind of thing they do. I don't understand it. They are going around. They're sending like little tire gauges, making fun of this idea, as if this is Barack Obama's energy plan.

Now, two points. One, they know they're lying about what my energy plan is. But the other thing is, they are making fun of a step that every expert says would absolutely reduce our oil consumption by 3 percent to 4 percent.

It's like these guys take pride in being ignorant, you know?

This is making me laugh, in a Martian goes to Scotland and notes the all the knifecrime on Earth kind of way. I've been all over this country, and Boston drivers are the worst.

Maybe the worst, but possibly also the safest. Massachusetts has the lowest rate of traffic fatalities per mile driven of any US state. (But, then again, 92% of them are in cities, so maybe rural Mass roads are just incredibly safe, and Boston is doing its best to make up for that.)

The off-duty police officer who got shot in a road rage incident here over the weekend is a good reminder of non-collision risks.

In London now and I've seen hundreds of delivery bikers zooming around on electric bikes. Many of the bike shares are electric too which is currently not allowed in Boston because electric bikes are still ambiguously legal in MA which is totally ridiculous. There was some bill to deal with that but don't know if it passed. I saw a bike store here with some nice foldable ebikes that weren't too expensive, although they were only 250W. My commuting bike in Boston is 700W (legal limit before it's a moped and needs registration is 750W).
I always say there are two ways to use an ebike- travel the same rate with less sweat/effort, or use the same effort and get there a lot faster. I usually do the latter since my office has showers- I used to commute by regular bike for about 40 minutes, by ebike the same is about 30 min, doing 6+ miles through downtown Boston.
eBikes make it easier to handle bad city drivers because you have more control and acceleration to avoid them or not get trapped in dangerous locations like where you might get right hooked, which seems like the most common car-bike accident along with dooring.
I crashed a month or so ago due to some stupid infrastructure. There were some parking spots by a govt building blocked off by cones and police tape. The tape was looped up on each cone like a streamer, not strung between the cones. It was windy so the loops of tape blew into the travel lanes, and one wrapped around my handlebar and yanked it over so I flipped off the bike. I skidded on my thigh and onto my back and my head snapped back, cracking my helmet partially in half. I had not a single cut or anything wrong with my head- only thing I felt after was a minor bruise on my thigh.

so maybe rural Mass roads are just incredibly safe, and Boston is doing its best to make up for that

I don't think the kind of bad driving we're talking about maps very neatly to fatalities. There's a lot of "oh, another wreck at the rotary" where no one is seriously hurt, in addition to the "really, dude?" that I think we're talking about.

I would also believe that the Boston-style insane driving puts the Massachusetts drivers who aren't themselves maniacs into a constant state of high alert, and that helps. You could get the same sort of safety improvements in other jurisdictions by having a small number of heavily armed clowns riding zebras wandering through traffic.

We've got heavily armed clowns.

People are used to the ones in the navy uniforms. You need something flashier.

This isn't anything new, but so much that is frustrating about biking more is infrastructure+ kids. I'd been hoping to bike to work (14 minutes) more regularly, but the kids' magnet program moved from down the block to ~2 miles away, across a busyish street. No busing, so I need to get them there.

Both kids could handle the biking easily there. Pebbles attended kindergarten at the university (3 miles away) and she loved biking in, and this commute is easier. There aren't protected bike lanes but it's a reasonable place to ride and I can avoid the busiest streets. The hills are too much for Pebbles on the way back, but shiv could pick them up in the car at the end of the day. But -- then we've only saved two miles in commuting, and in any case I'm only comfortable with them biking when it's light out/not cold so only fall and spring.

They're too big for a cargo bike or trailer. And I'm willing to bet we're more willing to entertain biking than most people.

58: I have a theory that Utah's brand of bad driver is occasioned by the relative lack of population, so the close calls that make you drive defensively don't happen.

I blame my inability to parallel park on my rural upbringing.

I was just reminiscing about my mother's parking skills with my daughter. Right up until she stopped driving, Mom could drive into a space about six inches longer than her car at about 40 mph, and end up 2.5 inches from the curb, perfectly squared off and equidistant from the cars in front of and behind her. Fifty years of street parking in NYC will do that for you.

I need like 1.5 car lengths or five minutes.

1. This is not a problem that is solved at the individual level. As a society, we need to transition the grid to renewable+battery and nuclear for baseband power generation. Then people can buy electric cars and not worry about this any more.
2. Families need cars. We need to drop off child 1 at school (a mile in one direction) and child 2 at daycare (a 1.5 miles in other direction). Unless an adult is watching child 3, child 3 needs to be along for the ride. Nope A works at least a mile from either of these locations, nope B likewise. And this is in the absolute middle of a city that is easy to get around using public transit if you are an adult without children.
3. Bikes are far less safe than cars. Everyone I know that relies upon bikes for commuting has suffered some serious injury. One went over her handlebars and knocked her front teeth out. Another fell and suffered multiply complex fractures of his forearm. A third fell and messed up up his knee badly. None of these accidents involved cars. Instead, they involved ice, gravel, and poorly maintained roads.

The new house (which I am going to start calling Huntingtower) has a back yard I can park in, but using it requires me to reverse through a very narrow gate either on to or off of the busiest street in town. Admittedly here in Dalquaharter the busiest street is seldom particularly busy; the worst I've seen it was at the annual tractor parade a couple of weeks ago.

See if someone with a tractor can't crash the gate to make it wider.

66.2 is puzzling; I see adults with children on public transport all the time.
66.3 is a good point, but 92% of injuries to cyclists in the UK result from collisions with motor vehicles, so that's unrepresentative, at least from a UK point of view. This sobering tradeoff is from the BMJ (Welsh et al, 2020): " If the associations are causal, an estimated 1000 participants changing their mode of commuting to include cycling for 10 years would result in 26 additional admissions to hospital for a first injury (of which three would require a hospital stay of a week or longer), 15 fewer first cancer diagnoses, four fewer cardiovascular disease events, and three fewer deaths." Though this was a Biobank study, so the mean age was high (52).

57: Yeah, I hesitated to say it in 20 because I was already talking crazy enough (and because this is the sort of thing that hard data must exist about but I couldn't be bothered to look it up), but my sense is that even though city driving is nerve-wracking, it is safer overall than country driving just because speeds are lower. More fender-benders, fewer head-on collisions at 50+ miles per hour.

61: Same here. The kid is a bit behind on learning to bike (no one's fault except maybe mine, she's just not eager to learn and forcing her isn't worth it), but even if she wasn't, I wouldn't want her biking all the way to school alone for years yet. And now that I think of it, I don't know where kids could lock their bikes if they biked to school. What's the point?

On the "Boston drivers are bad" side of the ledger, there are multiple pedestrians hit by cars every month on the few-block stretch of Tremont St next to where I live. Occasional fatalities. I don't know how that compares to other pedestrian-dense parts of the country. The city has been putting in traffic-calming measures, narrowing Tremont Street, and adding raised crosswalks and protected bike lanes. I'm curious to see what that will do to the statistics. Of course, it provokes lots of insane rants on Nextdoor and the local Facebook group about how absolutely any reduction in car traffic is going to kill restaurants and small businesses.

@69

We have no problem with taking kids on public transport. When we had one kid, we often did. It is simply not feasible in the morning to get two children to two different locations that are several miles apart when both parents work (at locations that are themselves several miles from the locations of said children). By car it is a 40 min round trip, as is.

@69
Also, the cancer death, cardiovascular event modeling, etc sounds like utter nonsense. Piling results of observational health studies atop speculation about the composition of cyclists vs non cyclists and making assumptions about how those populations would change.

Yeah, as urban and subway-triumphancy as I talk, there were various childrearing periods that involved cars. I was almost never the driver, but Tim drove them a couple of miles to nursery school (carpooling with neighbors, but still). I drove to swimming lessons once a week for quite a few years. My mother ferried Sally by car to afterschool swim team for another couple of years.

All of those, we would have managed somehow without a car if it was off the table as an option, but the car did make life easier.

Our city has an ordinance to greatly increase bike infrastructure and as part of this they're adding bike lanes on the main road through town and relocating commercial parking to side streets and eliminating a handful of spots. Businesses sued to stop this claiming it would destroy their lives. They lost an injunction last week and the leader of the business association compared the decision to the overturning of Roe. So clearly everyone is being totally rational and calm.

3. Bikes are far less safe than cars. Everyone I know that relies upon bikes for commuting has suffered some serious injury. One went over her handlebars and knocked her front teeth out. Another fell and suffered multiply complex fractures of his forearm. A third fell and messed up up his knee badly. None of these accidents involved cars. Instead, they involved ice, gravel, and poorly maintained roads.

FWIW, I've been primarily a bike commuter for ~20 years and never had a significant accident/fall. I have favorable conditions (a short, ~3.5mi commute, the option to take the bus when the weather's ugly, and trails that cover a significant portion of the route) but it's not that scary.

*knock on wood*

I get some people move to Satan's asshole because the rent is cheap, but most people moving to hot places claim they like the weather. I would never live anywhere other than Cascadia or the mountains given the choice, but should I not be believing people who claim to like the heat?

I think letting insurance companies do the dirty work would help on the tank-pickups. Change the law so that when you run over a kid it cost a few dozen million $, require insurance coverage for it, and I bet the https://thewaroncars.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/Chevy-Inundator-1024x631.jpeg vehicles get a lot rarer.

I get some people move to Satan's asshole because the rent is cheap, but most people moving to hot places claim they like the weather. I would never live anywhere other than Cascadia or the mountains given the choice, but should I not be believing people who claim to like the heat?

I think letting insurance companies do the dirty work would help on the tank-pickups. Change the law so that when you run over a kid it cost a few dozen million $, require insurance coverage for it, and I bet the https://thewaroncars.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/Chevy-Inundator-1024x631.jpeg vehicles get a lot rarer.

...but should I not be believing people who claim to like the heat?

Good question. Like the other day I was walking to the bus and I saw a guy wearing a puffy. If it was a decent quality jacket, it would be something I'd wear in weather close below freezing, but it was over 80 degrees. Maybe it was a fashion thing, but I thought that fashion ended 20 years ago.

79: Maybe he had schizophrenia, and he had trouble with temperature regulation.

Just want to say that it's a mixed up, muddled up, shook up world, except for Unfogged. Always so pleasant to come here and see interesting, not-so-toxic discussions.

but should I not be believing people who claim to like the heat?

In my 20s, I was about 30 lbs less well-insulated, and I loved the heat. It just wasn't nearly as unpleasant as it is now for me. I was freezing in air conditioning, and while I'd get hot in the sun, the shade was sufficient to generally feel okay again. Maybe youth is generally protective, too.

81: we really do have the best commenters, don't we!

I'd left home just a week before, and I'd never ever read an eclectic web magazine before.

I think letting insurance companies do the dirty work would help on the tank-pickups. Change the law so that when you run over a kid it cost a few dozen million $, require insurance coverage for it

Preach. Of course, I also spent years wistfully wondering when the reinsurers would step in to save us from fossil fuels.

We took my Bolt to Houston (2.5 hour drive) this weekend, then charged it overnight for free in a Whole Foods parking garage. Not scalable, but satisfying.

The best thing about having an electric car in Texas in the summer is that I can idle with the A/C on without spewing CO2.

70: I think we have bike racks. Pebbles (6) is a very good rider by most standards (excluding the mountain bike prodigies) - and she *loves* bike commuting. Walks into kindergarten with her helmet under her arm like she's rolling up to a bar - such pride and swagger! But like nope, we have the "everything is within two miles but not the right two miles problem."

The kids want me to get a Tern, because it is enticingly in the bike shop.

86.1: Do you like it? I guess I'd been ignoring it because of the whole Chevrolet thing. Bolts are in stock.

I biked to school in middle school and every time I think about the streets I went down and the intersections I crossed I wonder how I never crashed or got hit. Coming home, uphill, I took a leisurely pace and side streets. But going to school was downhill and I was always nearly late.

We were always getting flat tires on sandburs. I don't recall ever riding to school, because no one did. We'd get a ride to school with dad and then walk home.

The shooting I mentioned in 55 turned out to have been done by a neighbor and after an interaction on highway that I am currently driving on daily. See here. Remind me that I should really stop flipping off everyone who merges in front of me too abruptly.

Somebody must of purged his NextDoor account. Maybe a family member or maybe the mods do that.

I was trying to figure out what street he lives on. I know from the picture he's not the guy one block over with all the Trump signs.

Maybe I should just get a Tesla. It says that even though I care about the environment, I might be an asshole, so don't cut me off.

The Boston driver thing wasn't the usual semi-aggressive urban driving that you see in cities the world over, where traffic density and time pressure makes it to the norm to make certain kind of aggressive moves, or play a bit loose with certain road norms. I see that in London all the time. It was just shitty driving. Poor car control, low attentiveness. However, I'm completely open to believing that's nothing specific to Boston, I just haven't been in cars much elsewhere in the US, and the one state I've actually driven in was New Mexico, where the roads were not busy.

re: 76.2

Yeah, I've cycled about 4000 miles in the last 18-20 months. I've never had any fall or crash.* A friend who commutes on his bike does slightly less mileage. In the same period, he's has 4 crashes/falls, two of which left him with minor injuries. I do sometimes wonder if he has some balance issues as all 4 of his crashes/falls didn't involve other vehicles, he just came off after hitting a bump, or misjudging a corner, etc.

* I have come close to being hit a couple of times, the most recent was a delivery guy on a moped where he was driving about twice the speed limit, on the wrong side of the road, while texting on his phone. But generally, my experiences are pretty positive.

For distances less than a couple of miles, we basically never drive anywhere unless I know it's going to rain heavily or we have heavy things to carry. Luckily, my son is a fairly confident cyclist--we rode 30+ miles into central London and back a month or so back--and he's used to walking or scooting most places. Obviously, this is London, where there are pavements and (some) cycle lanes.

It's approx 2 miles from where we live to where my son used to go to nursery school, and--on days where I wasn't then driving 50 miles to Oxford right after--he would usually get walked there and back in a stroller until he was about 3, and then after that, he'd ride his balance bike there and back, weather allowing.

re: 79

There's definitely a fashion here (teenage boys, men in their early 20s) for dressing like it's mid-winter, in July. Also often combined with what, for me, are all signifiers of being some kind of "care in the community" case. Literal, no shitting, balaclavas (neoprene types, not knitted). Pool sliders with socks. Haircuts like Smike from Nicholas Nickleby.

I just drove my new hybrid to the gym. This is almost as virtuous as buying cat food at Target.

As opposed to stealing it?

My neighbor used to get cat food from Chewbacca, but now the cat is dead.

Hey wait, wasn't the hybrid minivan my idea? Do I get (partial) credit for this purchase? W00t!

Was it? You win credit! I have the memory of a goldfish so I kinda have no idea, but it sounds plausible!

74: I vaguely discouraged the children from after school activities precisely to avoid excess driving. Neither was ever very motivated, so it's not like we were being cruel, but the whole parent taxi thing was and is anathema to me.

For my sins, Kai is now taking sailing lessons down by the stadiums. ~5 miles away. Only twice a week, but too long to stay and wait, and at least somewhat coincident with rush hour on the one day. It's bikable in principle, but I can't see how it would work in practice (he's almost 14, I don't think I could send him alone, although it's mostly bike lanes).

102: I mean, I suggested the Chrysler, but "hybrid minivan" was the core concept. You can drive me around the block next time I'm in town.

My son hates biking. I made him learn, but then he stopped.

I do sometimes wonder if he has some balance issues as all 4 of his crashes/falls didn't involve other vehicles, he just came off after hitting a bump, or misjudging a corner, etc.

I do wonder if there's something to the skill of bike handling that some commuters are missing. Like, if all you ever do is commute-style cycling (non-sporty bike, moderate speeds, bike lanes or city streets), where do you develop the skills that you gain very quickly doing either mountain biking or road cycling? Even if you're a bit of a daredevil as a kid, I'm not sure that translates to the typical adult who doesn't ride for awhile and then starts commuting.

Anyway, not to jinx things, but I've done maybe 20,000 miles over 21 years, for 4.5 of them commuting 9 miles round trip, and I've never had a bad car experience and my only accident of any sort was hitting gravel in a park at 30 mph. I certainly know that's good fortune, but I don't think I'm an extreme outlier.

104: Oh, are you coming to help us figure out how to find a bedroom for the 4th kid? We're stuck!

106: I wonder. I bike commute sometimes, and put a lot of miles on my road bike, but my bike handling got so much better after mountain biking for a season.

I've heard the Model X described as Tesla's version of a minivan.

I used to commute by bike, but lived downtown in a mid-size city. Round-trip home-to-bar-to-home (my typical commute) was around 10 miles, most of it of it at a time of day and in places with little traffic. And I was very paranoid. The advice I followed: Assume you are invisible to other traffic. The one time I almost got killed was totally my fault.

But it's a really dangerous way to get around, and I haven't gotten on my bike for anything serious in maybe 10 years. And as with 105, my son doesn't bike and I'm kind of glad.

Your typical commute involved cycling home from the bar?? I think I can see one very easy safety improvement.

Just-published and apropos.

More than 63% of polled drivers said they use their cellphones while driving.... More than half of respondents said they "always" or "often" read or send text messages while driving, 43% said they watched cellphone videos always or often while driving, and more than a third said they always or often drove while engaged in a video chat.

And that's just how many people are willing to admit it, on the phone, to State Farm.

re: 106.1

Maybe. I'm confident moving through traffic at 15-20mph, and at the ordinary skills of judging turns, blending with other vehicles, reading and predicting the intentions of other road users and so on, so yeah, there's maybe something to be said for having better bike skills, or at least bike skills honed going much faster than my friend does on his commute. He's riding at 12mph or so--I know, we've discussed it, and I've ridden the same route as him once or twice--and for me, 12mph is gentle stress free spinning along or freewheeling paying full attention to everything.

On the other hand, I know I'm a cowardly descender and I'm not good on MTB style surfaces or on sharp downhills. I know that my confidence and my bike handling skills are not there once it gets above about 25mph or if the surface is loose, gravelly or sandy. So I wouldn't describe myself as especially skilful compared to many.

111: Whoops. I didn't quite get that right, but yeah, for awhile there, pretty much five days a week I'd go home-work-bar-home. I worked nights in those days, and leaving the bar, the streets were deserted. (I did get chased once by a guy who wanted my bike, but he was on foot and I had a small head start.) My one close call happened when I was entirely sober.

Sobriety is optional. Safety is not.

But if you drink drive, they take away your driver's license, not your drinking license.

Exactly.

I was a pretty regular bicyclist in urban NJ and Pittsburgh, commuting and shopping, and never had trouble. When I moved to Eastern NC I tried for a couple of months and quit. It's a city of about 100,000, but very low density, very car-centric, and pretty politically conservative. The hatred for bikes on the road is what stopped me - every interaction was hostile, and I never felt safe.

86.1: Do you like it? I guess I'd been ignoring it because of the whole Chevrolet thing. Bolts are in stock.

Love it. Comfortable, sits up higher than some similar sized cars, responds well, etc. There was a wee problem with some people's batteries spontaneously combusting, but for me that just meant getting a new battery for free.

What whole Chevrolet thing?

My wife's uncle used to work at Fisher Body so if we wanted a General Motors car we were supposed to ask if he had a discount. But we don't keep in touch so it would be a whole thing to ask, but maybe worse to not ask. And same with his daughter, except she's at Ford. So we just always bought Jeeps until we gave up and started buying from Japanese brands like normal people.

One more kids-and-cars anecdote: a month ago we'd probably drive six days a week, mostly picking the kid up from school or getting her to activities. But now she's out of town, staying with Cassandane's parents for a couple weeks. We have only used the car once since dropping them off at an airport, to see friends at an out-of-the-way bar. We've also gone out at least two other times, but walked or took the bus to those.

She's capable of taking the bus and has plenty of times, it's just that every little annoyance of the bus - waiting, carrying stuff, dealing with strangers being antisocial, boredom - is greatly magnified with a kid. Maybe we'll try picking her up from school by bus more often in the fall on principle but it'll have to be on the nights without activities.

I just learned that one of my high school classmates is now working full time as staff for a major west coast university despite having never lived outside of Nebraska. Having worked as staff at a university, I'd always wondered how the staff survived in places without cheap housing. Internet arbitrage.

So, apparently the battery thing means there's signs up in downtown parking garages saying "No Bolts Allowed".

On the subject of medicine, it was a real doozy to find out about that Greg Abbott/Ken Paxton order to investigate the families of transgender children for child abuse as I was checking my phone leaving the dogtor's office after I got my estrogen and spironolactone prescriptions.

Geez. I hope you're in a state where things are safer.

I'm guessing not? T, are you still in DFW?

Also, congrats on transitioning! I hope you are feeling great. (Maybe I missed an earlier announcement?) and I'm so sorry about our shitty state.

I missed it also. Congratulations.

125: Congratulations! And I can only imagine how that news felt from up close.

Trivers, congratulations and sympathies. What a fucking year with clear implications for the fucking decade. Please feel very free to post here if you need advocacy help, donations to local orgs, whatever, to make trans life in Texas not suck.

(Someone, inevitably, picked the handle "spironolactone agnew" on Twitter; my eyes rolled too hard to let me work out an apposite anagram.)

My favorite trans Twitter handle continues to be "adult human chicken."

Needs a hyphen.

Hi after I think 10 years lol. I'm finally drunk enough to post. My daughter who wouldn't exist for another several years last time I posted is pretty confident on a bike around the park without cars, but actually going say to school by bike with her terrifies me (see other comments about Boston drivers). We do drive a lot, it just seems impossible with a family to not. And I'm literally a planner for non auto modes here, and I feel quite embarrassed - when I last posted I was in grad school for planning, and would roll my eyes at how I've become my car driving parents. At least we're saving the planet a tiny bit by using the same compact car we bought in 2010.

My car gets 12 mph, so I'm not even doing that with a 2006.

Welcome back, drunk Alfrek!