Victor Villas

mostly inactive, lemmy.ca is now too tainted with trolls from big instances we’re not willing to defederate

  • 7 Posts
  • 504 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 9th, 2023

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  • Cyclist in Japan have had dedicated bike lanes or marked paths on the road for many years but still use the sidewalk even if it causes problems for pedestrians.

    I’m speaking a bit out of my field here because I’m not Japanese, but I had the impression that historically, many Japanese cities are much more amenable to share the sidewalk with cyclists (compared to EU/NA), and several of these bike lanes start and end abruptly as part of the sidewalk instead of the road anyway, right? Same goes for pedestrian sharing space with cars and bikes in their narrow streets, sidewalks are almost non-existent because they’re culturally acclimatized to just walking in the street and hop on the sidewalk only if a vehicle needs to pass by.

    And by looking at the ridiculously unsafe bike “lanes” they have (almost all are totally unprotected), I’d definitely be on the sidewalk if I lived there too. If you want Japan to enforce bike lanes, you gotta ask Japan to build better bike lanes first 🤷‍♂️



  • Welcome aboard!

    That’s literally what almost every harm reduction activist has been saying for decades, but I’m not saying this to shame you. I barely did it sooner, I was beyond my 30’s when I finally got it. The fact that it takes so long for someone to encounter the rationale for all the effort going into decriminalization, destigmatization, safer-supply and supervised consumption sites… speaks volumes about who really is holding the megaphone of the media apparatus!






  • Public yes, but not nationalized.

    What’s the distinction here? You mean that you want it to be federal instead of provincial? Or that a govt-owned company doesn’t count as nationalized because its governance is too similar to a private company?

    What I sparsely understood from your comment is that these agencies need more govt funding and less reliance on fees, which I totally agree. Not sure if that’s what nationalizing transit means, though.

    There’s Government Service, and there’s Public Service Badly Managed for Profit. Hint: if our ferry system tries to bill itself as a tour operator, it’s in the latter group.

    So is the problem with BC Ferries that it’s badly managed and the way it markets itself… or is the issue that it receives too little govt funding? I think it’s the latter.



  • It feels like I’m missing something, maybe because I’m not a politician or a transportation engineer. It’s very common that upper spheres of government will provide extra funding focused on capital expenditures like building new infrastructure but won’t commit to operational expenditures like maintenance and salaries.

    I wonder if it’s some sort of political game of being able to claim funding for shiny new things, because expansion is flashier than maintenance. Or maybe there’s a real governance aspect to it, considering that OPEX should stay under control at the right level as to not overstep the scope of each sphere of government - transit agencies should not grow accustomed to funding that is supposed to be extra. IDK, I guess I’m not ready to have an opinion on this. I’ll just trust whatever the folks at Movement say.