traingang

I could literally bike across the Great Plains faster than a train and save enough money to buy a new bike. You first have to take the train to California, then to Oregon, and back halfway across the country.

You can almost see the border between the countries on that map

Full report here: https://chuuchuu.com/2025wrapped

As Europe baked in a record-breaking heatwave, rail tracks expanded, overhead lines sagged, and trains crawled to a halt. The 4 most delayed days of the entire year? All in this scorching week (1/Jul/25). When steel gets hot, schedules get... flexible

But can it melt steel beams?

cross-posted from: https://ibbit.at/post/147743

[header image of an arbitrary Manhattan street removed because it's 8192 × 5464 and you've seen any movie about New York]

E-ZPass readers and license plate-scanning cameras over Park Avenue in New York, on April 24, 2025. | Michael Nagle/Bloomberg via Getty Images

Could a $9 toll change notorious traffic? New York became the first American city to find out.

A year ago, it began charging drivers for entering Manhattan’s busiest central neighborhoods during peak hours. Critics called it a cash grab, and President Donald Trump even vowed to kill it.

But a year in, congestion pricing has largely proved to be a success, according to new data released by the Metropolitan Transportation Authority — the agency that runs New York’s massive network of subways, buses, and commuter rails.

Since tolling began, 21 million fewer vehicles have entered the toll zone, an 11 percent drop from what was projected without it. And average vehicle speeds improved by 23 percent. That’s the difference between a one-hour crawl and a 45-minute commute.

But the real gains came at the entry points. At the Holland Tunnel, for example, morning rush hour speeds jumped from 10.8 to 16.2 miles per hour — a 51 percent improvement. A separate analysis that used anonymized Google Maps data found these improvements spilled over to regional roads, meaning even drivers outside the zone got faster commutes.

Public transit riders benefited, too. After years of steady decline, average bus speeds in the zone ticked up 2.3 percent, reversing the trend seen in 2023 and 2024. Subway and bus ridership is up too, carrying more than 400,000 riders every day compared to 2024.

It’s easy to dismiss traffic as just a nuisance, but sitting in it is linked to higher stress, lost productivity, and worse air quality for everyone. Getting people out of cars and onto transit helps on all three fronts.

Streets got safer. Crashes involving trucks in the zone dropped by 21 percent compared to the previous year.

The MTA made money. Net revenue exceeded the MTA’s initial projections. That cash is earmarked for transit upgrades, including modern subway signals, 56 new elevators for accessibility, and the Second Avenue Subway extension.

The one place the jury is still out is on air quality. It’s worth watching because air pollution is a quiet killer. In New York City alone, fine particulate matter contributes to roughly 2,000 deaths and over 5,000 hospitalizations each year — and traffic is a major source of those pollutants.

A recent study from Cornell found a 22 percent decline in one kind of particulate matter after congestion pricing went into effect, while another analysis found little effect. The MTA’s own analysis showed no significant change in pollution levels. If London and Stockholm are any guide, it’ll take a few years of data before congestion pricing’s effects on air quality becomes clear.

There’s also the question of drivers who, looking to dodge the toll, might reroute through Queens or other neighborhoods outside the zone. The MTA has anticipated that and earmarked $100 million to offset potential air quality impacts in those neighborhoods: funding school air filters near highways and swapping out diesel equipment for electric.

The vocal opposition that greeted the program’s launch has largely died down, similar to what happened elsewhere. When Stockholm launched its congestion pricing in 2006, two-thirds of residents opposed it. After a six-month pilot, they held a referendum. More than half voted to keep it.

New York seems to be on the same arc. Gov. Kathy Hochul, who delayed the program in 2024, now touts it as an “unprecedented success.” And other cities are paying attention. Officials in Los Angeles have already reached out to New York for advice on their own potential pilot project, according to Gothamist.

Turns out, if you charge people to drive, fewer people drive. Who knew.

From Vox via this RSS feed

https://news.asu.edu/20250124-environment-and-sustainability-depending-car-could-be-impacting-your-life-satisfaction

The research revealed that when individuals relied on cars for more than 50% of their out-of-home activities during a typical week, their satisfaction with life declined.

[...]

*Answer: One way we measured car dependence was by asking respondents to estimate the percentage of time they rely on a car for out-of-home activities in a typical week. What we found is that, generally, as car dependence increases, life satisfaction tends to go up — but only to a certain point. Beyond that, we start to see a decrease.

To make sure the relationship we observed was not influenced by other factors, we used regression analysis and controlled for various external factors that other research has linked to life satisfaction. The tipping point, or threshold, where life satisfaction begins to decrease, is around 50%. When people rely on their car for more than half of their out-of-home activities, it seems to have a negative effect on their life satisfaction.*

[...]

However, what we observed is that car dependence does not just affect how people feel while traveling — it seems to have a more lasting impact on overall life satisfaction. This finding is surprising because existing studies often display a weak link between car use and broader life satisfaction. Our research suggests that the effects of car dependence go beyond the immediate experience of a trip and may influence long-term sense of well-being.

Staten Island's Freshkills Park, once the world's largest landfill, has been remarkably transformed into one of New York City's largest wildland areas. With Freshkills Park Administrator Mark Murphy.

For decades this was the world’s largest landfill, where 150 million tons of garbage was dumped along the banks of the Fresh Kills estuary in New York City’s Staten Island. But today these 200-foot tall mounds of trash have been transformed into a wildland recreation area nearly three times the size of Central Park. To see it first hand, my friends at Open House New York organized a sunset group walk with Mark Murphy, President of this impressive project, and Field Educator Jen Gallo.

Discover the innovative landfill waste management techniques that led to this environmental sustainability success story on Staten Island, New York. Witness the ongoing ecological restoration efforts that are bringing new life to this urban green space.

An Aventon Abound LR. With three shopping bags inside the storage boxes for about 30kg of weight, but it was still nimble enough to do mixed-terrain riding on the way home. Since last April it has travelled 3200km without issue. Donkebike is the closest I'll get to having a pack mule.

Under communism, this will be the only kind of car. We will all be provided one.

i was/am an urban cyclist for the last 15 years and would like an ebike because i find more and more excuses not to ride, and part of that is - riding a bike is kinda tiring.

i have a surly steel frame bike with 41mm tires that would be a great candidate for an ebike conversion. i don't think i'm interested in a bike doing most of the work for me, i still want to exercise. i want a stealthy conversion (don't want to look too much like an ebike, trying to avoid large battery bricks). torque sensors preferred over cadence.

budget: ~$1k

what i've learned is that there are four ways to convert a regular bike to ebike, listed in increasing cost/complexity (see table pic below - couldn't figure out how to format a table)

What I’m determining is - around $400-$600 can get you a basic front hub or friction kit if one wants an entry level/starter option, with kits starting to get “good” at about the $800 range and really good above $1000. I’ve priced out a good front hub kit at $700 and a good rear hub kit at $860. A friction drive kit would be around $400.

As the price approaches $1000, it seems more sensible to get an entire ebike for that price rather than add $1000 in parts to my existing bike. There’s lots of great ebike options out there in the ~$1500 range and having an extra bike could be really useful for guests etc.

So, I guess the question becomes: $500 subpar front/friction kit or $1000+ new ebike? after typing this up, I'm leaning towards the "QiRoll" friction motor as a lower cost of entry option

Catch up here

After some hollabaloo about whether there were any traffic simulations the situation as of now is Ute Bondes (carbrain democratic union) says there were traffic simulations, but the car drivers refuse to adhere to them.

Now you might think this is deeply, deeply stupid but it gets better: all the car drivers actually do adhere to them, because all the traffic simulations showed exactly what is happening; perma-congestion. I assume this was too woke for the CDU and as such they ignored it and opened the thing anyways. Proposed fixes now include turning a bike lane into a car lane (instantly got thrown out because it's too complicated) or turning a parking lane into a car lane (instantly got thrown out because muh parking). The solution as of now is wait for the nearby bridge to be fixed (not happening) for more lanes, surely that'll alleviate the problem.

When she's not busy fucking up an entire district of Berlin on account of carbrain, Ute Bonde spends her time proposing good things such as "building another landing strip at the catastrophe that is the BER Berlin airport" or "building a maglev tram"

linky

cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/7191494

For years China tried to stop a desert from swallowing entire regions — and for years, nothing worked. From space, the land looked dead. Rivers choked with sediment. Farms collapsing. Entire communities trapped in a cycle of erosion and poverty that modern engineering couldn’t break.

This story follows one of the most dramatic environmental turnarounds ever recorded, hidden in plain sight for decades. In northern China’s Loess Plateau, a landscape once considered beyond repair began to change — not because of massive machines or futuristic technology, but because the land itself was redesigned.

As this documentary unfolds, you’ll discover how reshaping slopes, redirecting rainfall, and rebuilding soil structure quietly reversed generations of damage. Satellite data confirms what many thought impossible: vegetation returning, water staying where it once vanished, and livelihoods rebuilding alongside the land.

What makes this transformation so powerful isn’t just the scale — it’s the lesson. While billion-dollar projects failed by fighting nature, a radically different approach succeeded by working with it. The implications stretch far beyond China, offering a blueprint for regions facing desertification, food insecurity, and climate instability worldwide.

This is not a story about planting trees, this is about to understanding landscapes — and how one of the world’s most degraded environments rewrote the rules of restoration.

Prof. Kaika talks about the relationship between city and nature and introduces the conceptual approach of urban political ecology. This is the eleventh lecture of the first SIC course organized by the University of Manchester and ICTA-UAB under the FP7-Marie Curie project “The European Network of Political Ecology”; Manchester, 18th-22th February 2013.

Part 2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lx0DUcO1_5I

Kaika's City of Flows: Modernity, Nature, and the City is a really good critical urban ecology book.