Atlanta has made great strides towards becoming walkable and bikeable lately, and we have MARTA which isn’t awesome but punches far above its weight given its budget.
My neighbor and I live in a neighborhood not far east of downtown and we both work downtown. I ride a bike and those are the fun parts of my day. Owning, maintaining, and insuring a car would severely cut into my take home pay. I’ve owned cars and don’t miss them but I’ve structured my life around not having one. Today I visited a friend directly after work and more than half that trip was on dedicated paths, it just so happens that trip coincided with the few paths we have, but there are now many painted bike lanes on in-town streets, which is great.
My neighbor owns a car but seldom drives. Paying for parking near her job is too expensive, and it is hiked capriciously during e.g. the Superbowl. She walks a few blocks to the MARTA station and her work stop is literally under her job. Unfortunately this requires a line transfer which adds time but can’t beat the price. She also uses Uber sometimes.
Statistically we’re still anomalies. Most of the other neighbors work not-downtown and drive.
I will say, when I was new here I was always the only bike or pedestrian on the road. Today I saw too many bikes and peds to count. The tide is changing. Not turning, but significantly changing
ETA: all models of electric scooter shares are extremely popular here, too, and bike shares to a smaller extent.
In my first apartment, it was superior. We lived in an apartment building right on the strip, with shops below us, in front of us, and a Walgreens next door. There were plenty of fast food places, 5-7 convenience stores, and a couple of bars within a few blocks distance (aside from laundromats and other shops). The rest of the bars and the downtown district were about 30 minutes walk. Work was a 15-minute walk down the street, through the park, and across a street. That was such an ideal location!
I say it was superior because at the time a lot of our friends had bought cars and liked to talk about how much freedom that gave them, but whenever we wanted to do anything they couldn’t, either because they were working a second job to pay for the car or their car was broken down so they couldn’t go anywhere, or they had no money because they’d spent it all on their car and gas. We didn’t have cars, so we could just go wherever we wanted and do whatever we wanted whenever.
More recently, I’ve lived in places where downtown, parks, and stores are all within walking distance if the weather’s nice. Work has been the only real difficulty. When I worked locally I could walk out to the job at the edge of town, but would be exhausted so I took the bus mostly, but I’d walk if they weren’t available. When I started getting real career jobs, which for some reason are always off in another town or city, carpooling became critical. But over the years I’ve advanced to the point where I mostly work at home and only need to carpool a few times a year.
I still think a car would be more expense and trouble than it’s worth for me. I still enjoy walking and if I have something urgent like a dentist appointment, now we have uber and lyft, which are cheap and effective. A car’s a big expense if you only need it once a month or once a quarter. To me, not having one is not ‘getting by’ or inferior to having to work a second job and worry about all that expense and stuff, it’s putting money into my investment and retirement funds instead of burning it to pollute the environment.
Also, I’ve noticed that car people without their car have a tendency to freak the fuck out and feel trapped and helpless. Even when we’re in a spot where no one else uses a car. They can’t comprehend walking 3 whole blocks. I’ve even known some that use their car to get their mail or put their trash out because they can’t imagine walking all the way to the end of the driveway. I don’t want to end up like that.
I’ve never lived in a city with good public transit, but I’ve always ended up in good locations where I have lived. Had I lived out in the 'burbs or rural areas, I’d be a completely different person with very different opinions about that.
Discussion about how you don’t need a car in New York also applies to San Francisco. Unfortunately, the same arguments also apply to how only the super-rich can afford to live in either place anymore.
I grew up in a city with what was, at the time, chequered (in that there was more than one authority) but very good transit. I lived in Pointe-Claire, a suburb in the West Island of Montreal, some 16 miles from downtown. I used to walk 5-10 minutes to Valois Station on the CPR line, catch a train into Windsor Station (about 20 minutes), and then walk 5 minutes to wherever I was working downtown (usually within the area from Guy to Peel St., call it a 6 block radius). You couldn’t do that faster by car - quite the contrary. (Granted that trains run to a sparser timetable than buses, but the rush hour coverage was good at that time.) If I needed to get around the city proper, well, I had the Metro.
Later, I moved further West within Pointe-Claire to the Quartier du Village. By that time, the CPR had got out of the transit business, the CTCUM (Montreal Urban Community Transit Commission) had taken over the trains on leased tracks, and had extended its bus lines to the West Island. At one point I worked across the island at Boul. des-Grandes-Prairies just East of Pie IX. To visualise, the axis of the island is from Southwest to Northeast, Pte-Claire Village is toward the SW tip on the Southern shore of the island, and Grandes-Prairies is toward the NE tip near the Northern shore - a real crosstown commute, maybe 24 miles. I caught a bus a block from home during peak morning rush hour, transferred to the Metro at Lionel Groulx Station, got off at Pie IX Station, and took a bus straight up Pie IX to a stop a block away from work. Total time: 40 minutes.
You really couldn’t do that by car at that time of the morning. You’d need either to take the 20 to the Decarie Expressway, Decarie to the elevated Metropolitan Expressway, and turn off at Pie IX, or take the 20, head up Boul. St. Jean or Boul. des Sources (in Pte-Claire) or Côte-de-Liesse (beside Dorval Airport) to the Metropolitan, and turn off at Pie IX. Either way, those roads are hairy at rush hour.
Bike paths weren’t really a thing when I lived in Montreal, but I gather they definitely are now. I let my licence lapse when I was 23 - Quebec added insurance in its licence price, and I was rather poor at the time. I never needed a car in Montreal anyway, even though I lived in the 'burbs. Since I moved to Ottawa, I’ve lived in and around Centretown, and Ottawa’s transit has been improving steadily, so I don’t really need one now.
pretty harsh review, and apparently, the anthropomorphizing of countries is the least of its problems. (when absolute monarchism was popular, such simplifications might have been quite successful-- but that age has long since past)
There’s something to be said, though, for tryingto break the problem down instead of fighting the same political battles on the same lines laid down in 1848.
ETA: Hawking himself suggested he may have been misdiagnosed. I recall that at one point he suggested his body may have had difficulty absorbing certain vitamins, leading to long-term neurological damage.
As the article pointed out, being misdiagnosed doesn’t make you psychosomatic.
If it’s psychosomatic, then the health system can save money on treatments, can prescribe harmful treatments to punish patients, and the disability system can get out of paying anything. From a certain medico-legal point of view, perhaps these override strictly medical or entirely legal concerns.
See the history of Graded Exercise Therapy for CFS.
But here’s the mystery—the feature that the scientists detected is tens of times longer than the distance that a relativistic electron can travel in its lifetime.
Why does a relativistic electron have a finite lifetime? Is that just statistically how long the average one travels before hitting something? Or do they decay?
The find is especially perplexing given just how long the filament is, says Felipe Andrade-Santos, an astrophysicist at the Clay Center Observatory at Dexter Southfield and the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics who was not involved in the study. According to the study, the energetic lifespan of the filament’s particles would be, at most, about 230 million years (not much on cosmic timescales), after which they would effectively run out of mojo and no longer be detectable from Earth. That’s just barely enough time for these particles to cross a distance of 300,000 light-years—a paltry fraction of the 10 million light-years between Abell 0399 and Abell 0401.
In other words, the surprise of these results doesn’t just amount to finding congestion on a remote, 10-million-light-year-long highway. It’s more like finding congestion on a remote, 10-million-light-year-long highway completely devoid of gas stations.