But lots of people _do_ already ride buses! There are already current riders, and potential riders who are making these marginal decisions. Occasional riders will decide between transport modes based on the trip - making marginal improvements (or regressions) would change the rate at which they choose to ride the bus.
Even if every current person's mind has been completely made up based on past experience, there are always "new adults" learning to get around and forming opinions.
So I strongly disagree: marginal improvements DO matter. And I agree with the author that this would be a relatively easy improvement to deliver for many cities.
I live in Chicago with the third-closest stop spacing per the article. I'm personally able to walk a block or two further to a bus stop no problem. Bus stop consolidation would save me a lot of time over the course of a year!
It's amazing to me that in the official Gemini app on Android, the hamburger menu on the left does not open on swipe - only if you click the hamburger button. A basic native UI interaction in the home screen of one of Google's flagship apps.
This is so disappointing! When they added the command palette, that actually gave me the final nudge I needed to start trying to minimize mouse usage and keep my hands on the keyboard. It's been great.
I don't use GitHub occasionally, I use it throughout every workday. Power-user tools like the command palette feel like exactly the kind of feature that fits a tool like GitHub.
In 2023 I moved into an apartment across from a school in Chicago. The room I work in looks over the street. It's shocking how many drivers are looking at their phone as they approach a crosswalk where children are actively crossing to go to school! It's worse in the morning: parents drop off their own child and they just pick the phone right up, I guess. Other kids be damned.
I can only find data up to 2021, but in urban environments in France that year, 165 pedestrians were killed in crashes involving a passenger vehicle. 2 were killed in crashes involving "Personal Mobility Devices (motorized)".
A minivan is a lot better for society than an SUV! It's a far more efficient use of space and weight, and isn't unnecessarily lifted so your visibility is better and your vehicle is less dangerous in a pedestrian collision.
You have a practical vehicle for your situation and location. We would all be better off if a lot of urban/suburban SUV purchases were minivan purchases instead - like they were 20 years ago, and like your more recent purchase was.
I'll take the theoretical chance of an "epidemic of minitruck highway deaths" over the current reality of an epidemic of traffic fatalities made worse by cars and trucks getting heavier, taller, and deadlier.
> At a high level, Cicero combines a dialogue module with a strategic reasoning module, along with a filtering process to reject low-quality messages.
The strategic reasoning module generates "intents" (a set of planned actions for the agent and its speaking partner) which are sent to the dialogue module.
They trained the model to be able to generate messages from those intents using data from messages in real games which were manually labeled with intents based on the content of the message.
I don't want to discount that you're largely content with the the suburbs as they're built today - that's fine and there's nothing wrong with enjoying it. I do want to point out that from my point of view living in a really dense area, some of the reasoning is contradictory.
> I walk for exercise in my neighborhood
> Public transit will never work for me ... I hate wasting my time traveling and cars are the only things fast enough to make going anywhere vaguely tolerable
The suburban model doesn't allow people to live close to any of the places they go. I too dislike wasting my time traveling, but I don't have to: I can walk five or ten minutes to the grocery store, dentist, park, restaurants, etc. I end up walking a lot over the course of a week, and personally I also bike to further destinations (a lot more people would here too if there were protected bike lanes like you mentioned you want). My travel time _is_ my exercise time - no need to spend time on extra walks to accomplish that, and there's interesting things around me when I go from place to place. The subway or commuter rail can take me further away faster than a car when I need to go somewhere distant.
But I'm lucky I can afford to live in a part of Chicago that hasn't been totally disinvested in over the last half century, like a lot of the city has. The state didn't pave a highway through the middle of it like they did to other - mostly black and brown - parts of the city to convenience suburban drivers.
The suburban model that works just fine for you comes at a cost to society. We need to reckon with that and build more places where people aren't forced to drive for their day-to-day necessities and desires.
There was a cool challenge in the Code Golf community in Stack Exchange, where participants wrote python scripts to compete in this problem over 1,000 rounds. The bots had access to previous rounds' results to inform their choice in each round.
Riding a bike doesn't need to be the only or primary way that people get around in every city, all the time, for it to drastically improve quality of life for people living in cities the world over. Most people are capable of riding a bike - especially an e-bike - to get to where they're going. It's cheaper than a car, it can be faster than driving a car, and it is obviously better for both the global climate and the local environment.
More than half of all daily trips in the US are less than 3 miles[1]. If cities give people the option to ride a bike for those shorter trips without feeling unsafe, a lot of people will ride bikes to complete those trips. That's shown over and over again. Change is hard, but a future with less cars and more trips by bike and public transportation is better, and possible.
My company uses Imgix, we're overall pretty happy with it. I'm not sure how we feel about pricing - that's not in my wheelhouse - but it works well for our needs. Our contact there has also been really helpful.
The reliability isn't great though. "Elevated Rendering Errors" almost always is "increased errors rendering uncached derivative images". Basically any image variant - by file and transformation/dimension parameters - that hasn't been viewed recently won't load. So a srcset homepage hero image probably has all size variations a user might see in Imgix's cache, and will render. But on less-traveled parts of our site, photos generally won't load. We're a rather image-heavy site and it's pretty debilitating to the UX when this happens, so it's frustrating that this happens more than the "almost never" rate we'd wish for. FWIW, we've never noticed problems on their end that aren't closely followed by an incident report in their status page, so they're not under-reporting at least.
If that syncing is done through Plaid (or maybe even if not), it might be fixed now. I use a similar product, Lunch Money, and syncing didn't work for a long time but within the past month it became possible.
I'm only moderately familiar with this topic (mostly from following racing, where many major series have integrated hybrid powertrains), but this doesn't seem accurate to me. All the hybrid vehicles have to develop and integrate an ICE in addition to the hybrid system, not instead. I don't see where the simplicity gains you refer to would come from.
Again, I'm not very knowledgeable here, I just have intuition to go on and familiarity with the fact hybrids are definitely viewed as more complex to develop and race, in motorsports. I'd love to be more informed if I'm missing some major factors
"Hydrogen trains are equipped with fuel cells that produce electricity through a combination of hydrogen and oxygen, a process that leaves steam and water as the only emissions."
Even if every current person's mind has been completely made up based on past experience, there are always "new adults" learning to get around and forming opinions.
So I strongly disagree: marginal improvements DO matter. And I agree with the author that this would be a relatively easy improvement to deliver for many cities.
I live in Chicago with the third-closest stop spacing per the article. I'm personally able to walk a block or two further to a bus stop no problem. Bus stop consolidation would save me a lot of time over the course of a year!