It’s Melbourne, taken from the 40th floor of a CBD hotel looking east towards the sport precinct. The large stadium in the middle is the Melbourne Cricket Ground, and to the right of that are the tennis centre and the rugby/soccer ground.
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Nice.
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I have little faith that my fellow Lee’s Summit residents will understand that this is a good thing, but here’s hoping!
Right now, trash collection here is entirely privatized. Some HOA’s contract with a trash company to collect trash for that whole neighborhood, but in many neighborhoods, it’s like signing up for cable or internet. Each homeowner has to pick a company on their own and contract with them on their own. It’s stupid and inefficient.
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That’s how it’s done in rural areas too. You still pay taxes, but then everything covered by taxes in big cities you still have to pay private companies for, separately. Which means each of those garbage companies, for example, run their trucks down the same county roads, often on the same days, but only pick up a fraction of the garbage and/or recycling. And they’re not cheap.
Single payer is better for basic utility services, not just healthcare.
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Yep. Unfortunately, a lot of people have been told for 45 years that anything the government touches is less efficient and more expensive. Overcoming that bias may prove difficult, I’m afraid. Our HOA voted to contract with one company for our neighborhood late last year, and it barely passed. Even there, a lot of people were convinced it would be more expensive, even though the HOA presented the numbers and it was clearly cheaper.
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We’re in such a frustrating place right now… like, the whole entire world is… I don’t know how we fix it.
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Lee’s Summit is doing some cool things, and I’m hoping maybe that helps this trash collection change go through. We have a new public outdoor event space and indoor farmer’s market opening here this weekend. It used to be a side street and a parking lot. And now it’s just this really cool space.
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Was gonna put this in the oligarch asshole thread but here will do:
Certainly he has a particular kind of expertise or set of skills: leaching off public investment and sucking up grants to destroy the environment.
Notable that this is the only columnist whose expertise they ridicule. The man who brought contemporary European racism to Irish politics (Michael McDowell) regularly writes fact free anti public transport rants.
By the way, I’m not sold on a train to the airport unless it’s funded by a tax on every single fucking flight into or out of the airport, but I am certain that “AI” will not replace all other transport. Or if it does it will be us humans scuttling around at the mercy of billionaire’s bots.
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How do you live with such an awful crime wave right on your own streets!!!
/s (obvs!)
Looks like a lovely day!
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The answer is that societies made a Faustian deal with the automobile. As urban planners calibrated the built environment to the needs of cars rather than people, cities spread out into vast systems of traffic-clogged asphalt that disgorge solo commuters into soul-crushingly monotonous suburbs. Car-centric design has contributed to making metropolises more polluted, more socially isolating, less sustainable and hot as hell.
…
The neighbourhood was also designed to mitigate heat and curb air-conditioning use. That’s essential in a city that last year sweated through 143 days at or above 100F (38C). To make Culdesac cooler, Parolek and his team at Opticos Design took their cue from sun-soaked locales like Italy, Greece and Mexico. They painted the buildings’ walls and roofs as white as the towns on Mykonos. White paint reflects the sun much better than Phoenix’s typical sand-hued homes, helping reduce the urban heat island effect.Because no space is needed for driving and parking, the architects could also employ another classic cooling strategy in Mediterranean towns: setting buildings close together. Consequently, Culdesac’s structures almost constantly shade each other, as well as the paved or earthen “paseos” (Spanish for walkways) that connect them. These narrow paseos also act like funnels that draw in breezes. Similarly, all apartments have windows on opposite sides, allowing for cross ventilation.
The shade, airflow, desert-friendly landscaping and absence of asphalt create a microclimate. As a result, in 2023, Harvard University researchers determined that the ground surface temperature within Culdesac was 30-40F (17-22C) cooler than the pavements in the surrounding area.
It reminds me of the original optimistic concept for Southdale to be a community. But the services and residential parts were not built, so instead it became the USA’s first suburban shopping mall.
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Waymo robotaxis are set to return to the streets of New York City after a four-year absence. But with a list of caveats longer than a Midtown bagel shop brunch line, Waymo’s return isn’t something for pedestrians to get nervous about yet.
I never was aware they were here in the first place.
New York City Mayor Eric Adams announced Friday that the NYC Department of Transportation had granted Waymo the city’s first-ever permit to test autonomous vehicles. Note we said test, not operate.
I wonder how much Waymo “donated” to his re-election funds?
Edited to correct perpetually terrible spelling.
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