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.

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.

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.

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.

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...

I think your claim is way to optimistic in light of the fact there are other people claiming that the LCS boondoggle is the fault of faulty procurement and not Congress.

These sorts of statements are analogous to the median vs mean slight of hand (aka lying) that people routinely employ to intentionally mislead.

At the very best it's "not the whole truth". To just build stuff and have it be used to a useful degree you need latent demand for transportation of all forms. These assumptions are generally questionably optimistic or untrue outside of urban areas (like real ones, not the census definition).

A bike lane to a strip mall off the highway that has nothing else immediately around it does nobody any good. Slap up a bus stop. Even if the bus service is crappy it will still benefit somebody.

>But maybe you should just stay off the road instead, so you have less blood on your own hands.

Tape won't undo all the other changes to cars that OEMs engaged in once they were required to have a screen.

Congratulations. Your pet regulatory change has reduced back over deaths by under a hundred a year. In a vacuum with spherical cow that's great but reality isn't a vacuum with spherical cows. And now that you've put this hardware in cars and engineers have taken advantage of it you've increased back out accidents and merging accidents (both are inversely correlated with rear visibility) and you've made many of the critical 2nd order functions of operating a car less intuitive and more distracting to use. You've but you don't care about that because the metric you were gaming (back over deaths) is marginally improved. And when called out by people who want to look at the big picture you respond with insults. Screw you and the safety vest you rode in on.