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Joined 26 days ago
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Cake day: December 27th, 2025

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  • While I agree with using government policy to allow flexible work schedules and more work-from-home, it’s not going to do jack-squat to help with traffic congestion. It’s not that hard to understand once you know why: The insane level of congestion on the M50 suppresses demand for travel on it; anybody who doesn’t need to be on the highway at that time either stays home, or goes at a different time. That means that there are many car trips that aren’t happening under current conditions.

    The latent demand means that If flexible scheduling or WFH does free up room on the M50, it becomes attractive to drive on it again for those people who previously stayed away due to congestion. And they will, as long as driving on the M50 provides them some marginal benefit. It won’t be until the congestion reaches a level that caused them to stay off the motorway in the first place that they’ll stay off the motorway again.

    So, uh, crazy suggestion, I know, but unless the cars themselves have some business in Dublin, maybe provide a fast, convenient way for people to get in and out of the city? It’d be way more efficient, because gosh do cars take up a lot of space.






  • Look up “Humbert College LRT Station” on Google Maps, and you can see it for yourself. Unfortunately, the Street View imagery is out-of-date, and shows the station under construction, but the aerial view shows that this door opens onto literally just a 4- or 7-lane highway/stroad a few meters away. No bus stops, and no passenger loading zones. There’s at least a sidewalk.


  • Despite all the (phony) reverence for the document in the U.S., the Constitutional Convention fucked up, badly. The Founding Fathers disliked political parties, considering them divisive, so they drew up a system that assumes that all office-holders are independent. That system is supposed to leverage the mutually-opposing interests of the representatives to check and balance each other. It simply can’t work if a group of people with aligned interests control multiple branches of government.

    They signed their new constitution in 1788, and by 1792, Alexander Hamilton formed the first political party. Whoops.











  • From the passenger’s perspective, a taxi and a self-driving car are functionally identical. But back when Uber, Lyft, and the rest were offering cheap rides subsidized by VC money, all that happened was that they made traffic congestion slightly, but measurably, worse. People didn’t give up private cars in large numbers, though.

    If we get self-driving cars, then people’s private cars can add to the problem by cruising around empty most of the time, and if they’re not in them, there’s nobody to be bothered by traffic delays. The only way to achieve the dream of eliminating gridlock would be to ban private cars. And if that were politically feasible, why not just do it now with transit?