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linkages

Thirsty Thursday Linkages…Now with More Bicycle Terrorists

By Patrick Kennedy |

Los Angeles plans to revolutionize transportation funding as Mayor Villaraigosa intends to build 30 years worth of transit projects in 10 years. How you ask? By raising the sales tax .5% and then leveraging all thirty years worth of receipts against the first 10. Sounds good to me. LA voted for it, but they vote for everything. Ambition. I likes it [sic]:

Among the plan’s projects is the long-awaited Westside subway extension — the so-called “subway to the sea.” If the funding plan does not work, this subway could only be completed in 2032. Other projects include a regional connector linking three downtown rail lines, a light rail extension to Los Angeles International Airport and new bus-only lanes along various corridors. In all, the 30/10 would add 78 miles of rail and bus-only lanes — a 75 percent expansion of the current 102-mile system.-

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Car/Road hegemony likes their transportation monopoly just the way it is, thank you very much and are willing to employ dopey wannabe (or existing) politicians in order to pedal (see what I did there?) the insane:

Mr. Maes accused the Democratic front-runner, Mayor John Hickenlooper of Denver, of instituting bicycle policies that turn the city into “a United Nations community.”

“This is all very well disguised, but it will be exposed,” Mr. Maes told supporters, and The Denver Post reported. Denver recently began a large-scale bicycle share program, known as B-Cycle; it is one of several cities around the country to do so in the last year. (New York’s own program remains in the planning stages.)

“These aren’t just warm, fuzzy ideas from the mayor,” Mr. Maes said. “These are very specific strategies that are dictated to us by this United Nations program that mayors have signed on to,” he said, referring to Denver’s membership in the International Council for Local Environmental Initiatives.

“Phase 1: collect underpants,” posted Matthew Hill, a Seattle cyclist.

OK, bicyclists. Everybody off your bikes and back into traffic where you can experience some real freedom. Now if you excuse me while I try to find freedom from the moronic by wrapping my mouth around a tailpipe.

Good ol’ fashioned, unfiltered and unfettered hypocrisy just makes me weak in the knees. This does remind me of a very old post of mine, “Don’t MAKE me walk:”

But, I will not link to it, because it is from an extreme right wing website (ya know, one of those hate filled ones so larded up with garish advertisements that it looks incredibly cheaply done), the words of a former congressman suggesting “why the automobile is the ultimate manifestation of freedom, mobility, and personal choice, and argues for a re-allocation of public spending away from mass transit and other alternatives.”

Alternatives? You mean like choices? Yes, no other choices. So you can have the freedom to drive, and only drive “On the Great American Freedom Machine” (I kid you not):

It’s time for drivers to stand up against efforts to demonize the automobile. Forcing people to use a particular mode of travel is not the American way. Life is better when you have the freedom to drive, not just find a ride or wait at bus stops.

Hell Yes! And you MUST live the way I say you must live. And, that includes spending all of your pay check to my good friends at Exxon Mobil. Damn Plebeians.

Freedom, the American way. My way AND the Highway.

Because, why spend tax dollars on mass transit? We don’t spend tax dollars on Automobile infrastructure, ohhhhhhh wait…..
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And here are those commies in Copenhagen, despite being considered the most free and fair capitalist city on the globe, has FORCED everybody into $20,000 vehicles with whips and chains…oh, what’s that you say? Bikes can be had for a few dozen Kronor?

Copenhagen’s Car-free streets & Slow-speed zones from Streetfilms on Vimeo.

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Remember how I wrote about the void between the parallel geographies of the real and the virtual and the need to bridge those gaps to advance web 2.0’s role in self-organizing clusters? Well, it turns out people are working on just that:

“Invisible Cities maps information from one realm—online social networks—to another: an immersive, three dimensional space. In doing so, the piece creates a parallel experience to the physical urban environment. The interplay between the aggregate and the real-time recreates the kind of dynamics present within the physical world, where the city is both a vessel for and a product of human activity. It is ultimately a parallel city of intersections, discovery, and memory, and a medium for experiencing the physical environment anew.”

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