traingang

In 2023, the city reduced the street from three lanes to two and installed protected two-way bike lanes with a state grant intended to improve bike safety. The project cost almost half a million dollars.

Counts of bicycle traffic since the bike lanes were installed showed that traffic increased sixfold. Engineers also didn’t find any major congestion issues with automobiles after the revamp.

cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/7473094

A group of five people stayed warm in Oklahoma City by staying near a fire they had burning for 24 hours amid bitterly cold temperatures overnight.

cross-posted from: https://news.abolish.capital/post/22888

The Trump administration is planning to use artificial intelligence to write federal transportation regulations, according to U.S. Department of Transportation records and interviews with six agency staffers. The plan was presented to DOT staff last month at a demonstration of AI’s “potential to revolutionize the way we draft rulemakings,” agency attorney Daniel Cohen wrote to colleagues. The demonstration, Cohen wrote, would showcase “exciting new AI tools available to DOT rule writers to help us do our job better and faster.”

Discussion of the plan continued among agency leadership last week, according to meeting notes reviewed by ProPublica. Gregory Zerzan, the agency’s general counsel, said at that meeting that President Donald Trump is “very excited about this initiative.” Zerzan seemed to suggest that the DOT was at the vanguard of a broader federal effort, calling the department the “point of the spear” and “the first agency that is fully enabled to use AI to draft rules.”

Zerzan appeared interested mainly in the quantity of regulations that AI could produce, not their quality. “We don’t need the perfect rule on XYZ. We don’t even need a very good rule on XYZ,” he said, according to the meeting notes. “We want good enough.” Zerzan added, “We’re flooding the zone.”

These developments have alarmed some at DOT. The agency’s rules touch virtually every facet of transportation safety, including regulations that keep airplanes in the sky, prevent gas pipelines from exploding and stop freight trains carrying toxic chemicals from skidding off the rails. Why, some staffers wondered, would the federal government outsource the writing of such critical standards to a nascent technology notorious for making mistakes?

The DOT plan, which has not previously been reported, represents a new front in the Trump administration’s campaign to incorporate artificial intelligence into the work of the federal government. This administration is not the first to use AI; federal agencies have been gradually stitching the technology into their work for years, including to translate documents, analyze data and categorize public comments, among other uses. But the current administration has been particularly enthusiastic about the technology. Trump released multiple executive orders in support of AI last year. In April, Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought circulated a memo calling for the acceleration of its use by the federal government. Three months later, the administration released an “AI Action Plan” that contained a similar directive. None of those documents, however, called explicitly for using AI to write regulations, as DOT is now planning to do.

Those plans are already in motion. The department has used AI to draft a still-unpublished Federal Aviation Administration rule, according to a DOT staffer briefed on the matter.

Skeptics say that so-called large language models such as Gemini and ChatGPT shouldn’t be trusted with the complicated and consequential responsibilities of governance, given that those models are prone to error and incapable of human reasoning. But proponents see AI as a way to automate mindless tasks and wring efficiencies out of a slow-moving federal bureaucracy.

Source

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Not like a lot, but I've seen what a lot of westerners complain about and I think its important that each of you have one mildly annoying experience with a fellow human being a day to build up your tolerance.

Also all the other stuff that's good about public transport I guess.

cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/7442665

"I will give one shocking number. Last year in Europe, we installed a record 80 gigawatts of renewable capacity. More than 400 gigawatts of renewable capacity were ready. But we couldn't connect it to the grid. And it didn't go to the households or the factories. This is completely crazy. Economically, it doesn't make sense at all."

Birol compared this push for green energy to developing the necessary infrastructure to build a fancy, efficient car, while forgetting to build roads.

Grid failures were also tied to the Iberian Peninsula blackout that left 60 million people without power in April 2025.

The ageing European grid was highlighted in a study by energy think tank Ember published this week, which found that the EU doesn’t have an issue generating green power — wind and solar generated more EU electricity than fossil fuels for the first time in 2025 — but that its “outdated” grid means it has a problem moving that power around.

Just waiting for an announcement from them about pumping subsidies into the auto industry and its infrastructure

https://www.reddit.com/r/pittsburgh/comments/1qiiq5p/hahahahahhahahahahahha/

JDPON Carney?

I ended up getting a plush donkey hat and stuffing a plant pot inside to give it some rigidity. Then I stuck zip ties through it and secured it to the handlebars so that it stays upright. Donkebike finally gallops majestically, its tail flapping in the wind. I just need a saddle and a MIPS cowboy hat. The model is a 2025 Aventon Abound LR.

In 1908, Wilbur Wright’s flights at Le Mans stunned Europe and inspired pioneers like Louis Blériot to adapt the Wrights’ revolutionary wing-warping system. Just a year later, Blériot’s XI became the first aircraft to cross the English Channel — marking the dawn of modern aviation.

The Thulin A, a Swedish-built version of the Blériot XI, is one of the few survivors of this pioneering era. Built by AB Enoch Thulin’s Aeroplanfabrik, it trained pilots between 1913–1919 and stands as a rare living link to the earliest days of flight.

Mikael Carlson owns and flies two original Thulin A / Blériot XI aircraft, both powered by authentic 1908 Gnôme Omega 50 hp rotary engines. He has restored them to flying condition and even recreated Blériot’s Channel crossing in 1999 and 2009.

Over 110 years later, these fragile machines still take to the skies — a breathtaking tribute to the roots of aviation.