Yeah, that’s the thing for me and Richmond VA. My tastes are relatively modest and my cultural frame is deeply middle class. I like how huge cities usually have a couple of amazing book / record shops, and it’s nice to know for sure that any touring culture thing you might want to see will definitely come through your town. The vibrancy of being in the center of where stuff happens gives life a real sense of energy, too.
the flipside, like you say, is that there’s this real doom vibe for everyone who works in co-operative economies, who works as a teacher, who wants to hold down a coffee shop job so they can do a weird politics podcast and a semi-popular blog. Everything’s getting sharply more expensive, the jobs that pay well enough to keep you around are either open only to people in elite college alumni networks or require years of re-training (good luck with that while working and raising kids). I don’t begrudge anyone’s life who works for Amazon / Google / some private equity entity that invests in eventual Amazon/Google acquihires, getting those jobs takes a lot of work, and advancing in them means working intensely hard. It’s just that these companies don’t hire that many people relative to market cap - they aren’t going to employ enough people to make the rising tide that floats all boats, and their tax scams mean that their profits aren’t going to enrich the places where they’re based.
So, yeah, I’d expect that the Minneapolises and Richmond, VAs of this country are going to really take off as / get ruined by huge influxes of people who, in other eras, would have moved to or stayed in big west coast cities. I get the feeling that the big cities of the east coast, despite being similarly expensive, tend to have slightly better networked communities, so it’s easier to find things like cheap housing and below-market childcare. They are more mature, less transplant boom towns like everything past the Rockies.
Boise is pretty rad and also getting flooded with Californians. Cost of housing (and everything else I guess) is increasing and availability is dropping. Meanwhile, the minimum wage is still under $8ph. So sometimes I fear for the future a little bit
I wish I had been able to afford to buy a house in Richmond while I lived there. Now the way things are going it’s unlikely that I’ll be able to move back to any of the areas I’d want to live, since salaries aren’t increasing commensurate with home values.
huh? Where did you want to live? Church Hill 2014? Church Hill is bogus.
So many great parts of town that are just as close to the rest of everything.
Woodland Heights and Lakeside being two solid examples.
Lakeside is 15 minutes from down town by bike. Woodland Heights is the same. Nice little places slightly further out the Monument/Patterson corridor past Libby too.
People looked at me like I was growing horns when I said moving to Church Hill was dumb.
Look just because Church Hill is really inconvenient for grocery shopping and there’s only one good school and the only streets in and out of the neighborhood are always either gridlocked or have stop signs every block and it’s full of NY/SF transplants and there are only three restaurants open past 8pm and the sidewalks are made out jagged bricks randomly sticking out of the ground doesn’t mean that it’s a shitty place to live oh wait oh god why do I live here
I happily concede that Church Hill is a nice place to live, but not to buy a house in. I’d also point out that if you’re used to the traffic and travel times of a bigger city, fucking nothing in Richmond VA seems bad. For all my griping about having to go all the way across town to see a picture at The Byrd or whatever, really, it’s 4 miles. That’s like, two blocks in Chicago.
Carillon/Byrd Park, the City Stadium area, Riverside, were reasonable but not so much now. I guess I’m biased against Northside but maybe it’s safer now with less property crime.
New roundabout in Amherst increases my chance of cycling-related death by 200%
The intersection was already bad. if they just put in a simple roundabout it probably would have been fine, but they dotted the whole area with weird triangular concrete barriers, creating a go-kart track of confusion. Through my department, I now get to see behind the curtain at the planning/zoning process that goes into projects like this and I’m stunned it turned out so terribly.
Okay, cool, you actually know about this stuff, so lay it out: I always hear that roundabouts are better for managing smooth flows of traffic and that they’re safer for cyclists. My anecdotal experience leads me to think that’s a huge pile of horseshit, and that for cyclists in the US, roundabouts are murder carousels. So, prospective traffic engineer, what’s the deal?
The main issue I’ve experienced with roundybouts are due to a lack of driver training/understanding. They’ll probably be great after a generation grows up watching their parents use them.
Mostly, I don’t really know. I am in Regional Planning but i’m in climate change adaptation, so I know the basics of how the decision process goes, and I know in Massachusetts there are sizeable grants that towns can apply for for “innovative” road construction projects, which 99% of the time seems to be roundabouts. Massachusetts has a real hard-on for roundabouts right now. The problems with roundabouts in the U.S. usually go as follows, especially in the crowded Northeast (as I can tell):
Roundabouts that are overmarked, over-separated, and over-developed tend to turn into high-speed cars-only infrastructure. The heavy use of medians and barriers and islands essentially channels cars into their approach and sends a clear message that it’s a cars-only zone. There are lots of roundabouts in the area that are extremely simple, with no markings and no signs, no white stripes, and tons of crosswalks, and they send the opposite signal - slow down, there could be bikes/people ahead, this is a shared space. This phenomenon applies to all kinds of car-related road features. If you undermark/underpaint your roads, counterintuitively, safety tends to go up in a lot of cases (but not all).
Roundabouts with too many approaches. When you have six or seven entry points, things get very difficult to manage, and this isn’t uncommon. The one I showed has 5, when it could very easily have had four. It’s overly complex. I found the plans so you can see what I’m talking about with the entry points/islands:
I don’t actually think roundabouts are fundamentally more dangerous than any other intersection. 96% of bike accidents happen in intersections, they all suck. The previous iteration of this exact intersection made left-hand turns from the east road almost impossible for cyclists, since you had to contend with traffic going west-east, AND traffic turning right from the west road. It was nightmarish. I often took the sidewalk, which I would otherwise never do (I’m a chronic “bicycle rights!” lane hog).
And some U.S. roundabouts just really, really suck. Two of my favorites:
~1000 feet from my house, we have “The Spin Zone” double roundabout:
Ah, somehow I thought you were a road design civil engineer type. Yeah, agreed on all of that. There was a roundabout in a town I used to live in that included a FREEWAY OFF RAMP which was, I assure you, an absolute treat to navigate on a bike. “Ah, I have exited the freeway, and there is nothing immediately indicating to me that I should not continue to drive at 70mph while watching Dancing With The Stars on my mobile telephone, Hmm, a funny sort of curve in the road, better just fucking blast on through”
Yeah. That’s the story with the last one there, in Hull. Highway speeds.
Here’s a better picture of the new one (it’s really, really new so pics are hard to come by):
They could have easily, EASILY cut the road from 3 lanes to 2 lanes for this. They are going to significantly reduce the amount of congestion with the roundabout, so the third turning lane is no longer needed. Then you put in a nice simple roundabout, with no barriers or islands and no massive road hazard paint jobs and less than the current 22 road signs, and four simple entry/exit points, and everyone would actually use their eyes, instead of being distracted/lulled into a go-kart mentality.
I think the over-striping is an attempt to mitigate the issue of folks not understanding how to use them.
TC: I get nervous around roundabouts because I’m not 100% sure of what I should do in any given situation. But I think that’s kind of the point of not striping them.
Prison island has millions of roundabouts. They’re perfectly fine when they’re incorporated into driver training. You’ve still gotta deal with inattentive drivers and whatever, but as long as there’s no clever design fuckery going on and they stick with tried-and-true roundabout norms then it’s not really a problem.
On the flipside, first time I came to the states and had to deal with driving through 4-way stops? I nearly shit myself every time, we don’t have these at all…
