2 pointsby Brajeshwar8 hours ago1 comment
  • taraharris7 hours ago
    I have a home in Seattle, so I get to see intersections and signs that are so confusing that I can't understand what I'm supposed to do when I encounter them. On residential streets around my house, people put up all these "20 is plenty" signs, close off streets, etc., have speedbumps put in, place their cars in driveways that block off the sidewalk, put in traffic cameras in school zones, etc.

    My wife's car has FSD (it's a Model X Plaid with HW4) and it does a great job at navigating all of this madness. The magical milestone for autonomy is here already, and it's a part of my daily life. I drive my girlfriend to her job and back four round trips a week, from Ballard to Green Lake.

    Three thoughts come to mind:

    1) At some point a federal limitation will be legally imposed on the kinds of special cases residents can force on the roads and/or we'll just shrug and let the tunnel-boring machines go under our homes.

    2) I think the Boring Company tunnels would be a lot better if they had a grid topology and a story that's more than just lip service about public use.

    3) It would be really cool if people got together to take over some of the surface streets and made old-timey functioning streetcars from 120+ years ago. The city and state governments could support this by simply ceding control to worker-owned cooperatives that build and maintain their own streetcars. Ballard was going to get a train that connected it to the rest of the city by 2039, and now that plan is dead because it can't be sustained for financial reasons (public planning is rife with linear assumptions and other forms of myopia).