and what pray tell would cause a neck kneel to be absolutely necessary

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That’s the code to my heart, I go
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Star

There’s a rail station in my neighborhood (in the middle of the freeway that also runs through my neighborhood, fucking awesome thanks California) that has some five-story apartment buildings near it, but the nearest grocer is 1.7 miles away. It would literally be faster to walk to the train station, take the train to the city, get your groceries, and then take the train back than to walk to the one that’s actually close. Whose fucking idea was this?

Wait, did I misunderstand you the whole time? Are you actually saying that the problem with puberty blockers is that they block puberty? Did you somehow miss where that’s literally the entire point of them?

Also, repeating the same claim you just made again while ignoring the authoritative source I just provided that contradicts it is some shit I see creationists doing. Not a good look. If you support trans people, like you say in your next comment, then why are you arguing this in the same way someone who doesn’t support trans people would?

They’re more reversible than suicide.

But sure, I hear you, that doesn’t actually answer the question. So here’s an authoritative source on the matter. To drastically hyper-over-simplify, they basically are.

Well, I’m no medical professional, but medical professionals have been prescribing puberty blockers for other things for decades, and if they were as dangerous as all that, then you’d think the FDA would have banned that by now.

Besides which, access to treatments like those ones are documented to reduce rates of self-harm, including suicide, among kids with gender dysphoria. And if your metric is the body turning out like it would have without these treatments, well, I hope I don’t need to fill in the blank for you.

I have up to 4 kids at a time in my vehicle along with an often substantial amount of their stuff ( school backpacks / sports equipment ). It is not uncommon to stop for groceries already loaded with passengers and gear. What model of eBike should I get?

That’s a valid question, and it’s one that anybody who advocates for better urbanism, like I do, needs to be able to address. Fortunately, there are multiple answers.

The most direct answer to your question on its face is that you could get a bakfiets, or what the English-speaking world calls a cargo bike/cargo ebike. These are available from brands like Orbea, Aventon, Tern, Co-Op, Specialized (that’s Specialized with a big S), and more, they have been showcased as potential car replacements capable of carrying people and large amounts of stuff on Youtube channels like GCN, Not Just Bikes, Oh The Urbanity, Propel, Shifter, and others, and some specialized (that’s specialized with a small S) models have even been deployed as low-footprint urban delivery vehicles in so far highly successful trials by companies like UPS and FedEx.

However, to address the frankly incredibly frustrating assumption underlying your question, neither I nor the vast majority of other urbanism advocates will actually try to take away your car, even if we were given dictator-like control, because I for one am not interested in controlling people, I’m interested in having multiple viable choices for how to get around. You would still be able to have your car. Driving it in the city center would be inconvenient and expensive enough that you wouldn’t want to do it, but it’d be trivially easy to get there by transit or cargo bike instead. Plus, while the drive to your work would be largely unaffected, that road wouldn’t be the only way to get there, either. Speaking of which,

Also, I work 50 km from home and commute on a road that was made primarily to provide large trucks faster access to the port. It is a road along the river. In addition to the huge, fast moving vehicles, it has no artificial lighting and is away from building that might help with that ( so pitch black at times and also prone to significant fog ). Please recommend something safe.

This is a systemic problem, not a you problem. As such, you shouldn’t be expected to take responsibility for solving it, least of all by just protecting yourself. You mention a port: most ports have existed for longer than cars have been the dominant urban species, and as such, that road you describe might have either replaced or run parallel to a railway that would have also gotten you there. The fact that that railway is no longer a viable option for you means that an option has been taken away from you, and that’s what you should actually be angry about. That, and the lack of artificial lighting on said road. Allow me to refer you to the second half of my earlier comment:

Of course, this does also require development patterns to support it, i.e. roads that aren’t fucking death traps for anyone outside a car and stuff being close enough together that you can actually get to it in a reasonable amount of time, but hey, there are also non-car-related reasons we should be doing those things too.

Emphasis added. Anyway:

Now, not everyone has my situation.

Yes. Hi, it’s me.

That said, I am sure MANY people ( in North America at least ) have needs that require cars today. Our culture and infrastructure has been designed around it and changing that is a bigger problem than migrating to electric vehicles.

That is exactly the problem I’m talking about. They have those needs because our infrastructure has been built to create them, and that causes far more harm than just switching to EVs will ever solve. EVs are like trying to wallpaper over the hole in the Titanic: better than doing literally nothing, but won’t actually fix anything.

Shared ownership or shared fleets is one middle ground.

Sounds like communism to me.

Autonomous cars would help but that timeline is uncertain.

Adam Something has a thing he does where he takes some kind of pie-in-the-sky techbro gadgetbahn idea, like AVs, and gradually addresses all the design flaws with it until he’s invented trains again, then ends with his catchphrase “just build a regular fucking train.” And I think that’s where I’m going to leave off.

Amen. Don’t have to worry about the house, neighborhood, or city infrastructures supporting your EV if your EV is an ebike that can plug into a standard outlet in your living room, or wherever you keep it. Or if you can just walk a quarter mile and hop on a light rail. Or if instead of driving a Ford, you just use your Chevrolegs. Of course, this does also require development patterns to support it, i.e. roads that aren’t fucking death traps for anyone outside a car and stuff being close enough together that you can actually get to it in a reasonable amount of time, but hey, there are also non-car-related reasons we should be doing those things too.

I would slightly rephrase this to “too little housing.” Houses per se is not the answer, because just building more single family houses is not going to solve any problem that isn’t going to be massively outweighed by other problems that are exacerbated, as we’ve seen over the past 70+ years of suburban development. Increasing infill density and allowing for “missing middle” housing and mixed use development is the way to go, at least as far as the problems faced by your downstairs neighbors are concerned. This also must be complemented by prioritization of public transit and active transport as preferred modes of transportation in cities, coupled with redevelopment of parking lots and a moratorium on any new freeway construction, as more traffic lanes always and only ever make traffic worse.

yeah, but it was repurposed for that. “pulling yourself up by your bootstraps” also has its origins in a saying referring to something that is impossible, but was later repurposed into having the opposite connotation for most people.

don’t let the dnd people hear you say that, they still haven’t gotten over lizardfolk boobs