>Gas cars got fast out of nowhere because it moves units and CAD changed everything for engine design.
Gas cars got fast because sufficiently high quality computer control matured to the point where making a high power for its size/weight engine that both met emissions standards and reliability expectations and did so at a reasonable price point was doable.
The ability to actually build the hardware has preceded the ability to run it in a reliable and emissions compatible manner ever since we've had emissions rules. Having better FEA software so some engineer could shave a gram off a piston, get his bonus for achieving his KPI and ensure half a million engines start knocking at 120k on the dot was never the bottleneck.
I appreciate the gesture but let's be real here. It's not like the requirement ever mattered. Just like a white house internship, nobody was getting a job as a congressional staffer without a recommendation from someone worth listening to.
Your line of reasoning reeks of Europe worship with a token exception for obfuscation purposes. There are tons and tons of people who live in places like Boston and SF and Chicago without cars and do not feel any worse off for doing so. I used to be one of them. I would go so far as to say these people can enjoy all the opportunities of city life. Are they a majority? Probably not. But that's mostly a figment of how these cities absorbed their urbanized suburbs in the 20th century.
>Living without a car in those cities is severely limiting; I tried to do that in two of those and felt it was very difficult to buy groceries and get to work quickly and do easy recreation things on the weekend.
So now we're just splitting subjective standard of living hairs? I think we can all agree that living car free in Manhattan is fine and living car free in nowhere Idaho is not but drawing a line in the middle always just turns into a dumb circle jerk.
>It's not even practical to stay out late in many of those cities.
That's mostly because people who think they know how other people should live don't want the bars open all night and in cases where that's not politically possible to just decree they screw with other things they can effect like public transit schedules.
I think what you mean to say is that there are few "medium" cities in the US where "techie and richer" people elect to voluntarily live without a car.
You absolutely can live without a car in a lot of these cities but if and only if you want to bike. If you want to ride a lot of public transit it's gonna suck.
What you can't do is do it in a trendy way that "befits your tax bracket" so to speak and prevents the white collar types from looking at you like you're inferior when you bike lock your cargo bike to the lamp post beside the liquor store.
As for bigger cities, you absolutely can live without a car in Boston, DC, SF, Atlanta, Chicago, and the list goes on but toward the bottom it's gonna require more biking and less public transit.
Are they measuring "reading ability for the real world" or are we talking "analyze any interpret fiction literature" type reading skills? Serious question. Because I feel like "real world reading" stopped after about 8th, maybe 9th grade and everything else was just fluff.
Most of their calls are mundane stuff. And they leave a pretty decently wide path of destruction in doing that. We're talking like mundane situations where there is no urgency and no need to tear shit up in the interest of time.
I once arrived to a minor rollover after the cops but before fire. Nobody injured. Occupant trapped because she was a large lady and couldn't release her seatbelt upside down and was having difficulty unlocking the car because side curtain airbags.
I offered to flip the car and treat it like a lockout. "Customer" was fine with it. Cop was iffy. FD showed up, didn't want to hear it, broke the window, unlocked the car, opened the door, cut her belt rather than release it and dropped her on her face and then had difficulty getting her out. Now I get that they have "procedures" but this seems like a forest for the trees situation.
Or they'll show up, shut down two lanes for a minor fire on the shoulder and not move the trucks until the car is loaded on a tow truck and gone. Supposedly it's to keep them safe from being hit by traffic. Meanwhile here I am not blocking traffic to recover shit that broke down.
Sure, they'll save a life if the situation presents itself but they sure don't care about being tidy about it.
Anyone talking up firefighters like this clearly hasn't been around them much.
They're boys with toys that they don't frequently get to use and they work for the government. Follow the incentives. They'll do their jobs but they don't give a lot of fucks about things like "unnecessary property damage" and "other people's financial well being" and anything else not written in their KPIs.
I used to drive tow truck. I can't count the number of cars they totaled peeling the roof off (granted some were totaled anyway) because that was easy and cutting a door off was hard. And don't get me started on them and their stupid stands they use to prop shit up in the most questionable of ways...