https://josh.works/traffic-bean

Something about strava and the data we get from it is really special to me. It's a fun step into a deeply physical thing (moving our selves around the surface of the earth) and renders it in this digital space - a website, an animation.

I'm literally trying to fix broken junctions around me.

It's at the same time laughably easy, and wildly complicated.

I'm calling the alternative, correct junction a 'traffic bean':

https://josh.works/traffic-bean

It's relevant to software, sorta. I've got rather a lot of GIS/mobility-related data available here. It's just a rails app that renders a bunch of my strava activity data all at once: https://josh.works/mobility-data

The fixes are entirely accomplishable with nothing more high-tech than traffic cones. They can be upgraded to more permanent and pretty physical objects, but the key bit of the traffic bean finds traffic cones fully sufficient. No half-million USD traffic signals, no red/green/yellow light cycles. continuous flow. safety. peace.

Some stuff that's obvious in some domains, like "at high-throughput times, don't allow key bits of infrastructure be completely unusable".

Bringing this to american municipalities is like trying to speak a language with someone that doesn't speak your language, but demands that you treat them as if they do.

it's been a big, long-running project. Most tradition in the USA is really a fig leaf for supremacy, and people can smell that I'm coming for their supremacy a mile away, and they immediately begin deploying emotional defenses.

Or so it seems.

It sounds like you think I use more self-citation than you would expect, for someone writing only for themselves.

Are you saying I'm wrong about police originating as deputized slave patrollers?

I suppose I'd refine my statement from "political authority is not real" to "political authority _is not legitimate_."

That someone holding the fantasy of political authority is willing to murder someone else because of that fantasy doesn't make political authority legitimate, though it's obviously 'real' from the POV of the oppressor/victim.

My first claim was that 'jaywalking' is a propagandist term that actively harms every subsequent part of the conversation. It's a slur ('jay'), and supports a narrative supporting, basically, vehicular homicide.

I don't find most people in the USA to be worth taking seriously, either. Liiiike if someone thinks the primary purpose of police is something like "protecting and serving" vs. being deputized slave patrollers.

How could I take that person seriously?

If I don't think political authority is real, and 90% of the us population does think it is real, and votes, I'm already out of sync with all of those people.

And I've got at least one or two additional hot takes that could alienate another few percentage points.

race and gender are constructs of supremacy thinking, the US government commits 100x more acts of terrorism than the next most terroristic group, evangelicalism is a cult, all religion is self-and-other harming, monogamy is way over-rated, marriage is harmful to everyone...

honestly, I'd be concerned if it seemed like lots of people agreed with me, especially lots of people in America! One doesn't get a nation that did 400+ years of chattel slavery without most people being pro-slavery.

I think it's the latter.

Indeed, the junction can be a bit unfamiliar, and it looks like the one in Bodmin could be less confusing - I think delinieating the inner space and keeping cars to the edges (to make it more of an actual roundabout) would improve things for everyone.

Maybe I should call it a 'traffic doughnut' to highlight the difference between the inner/outer space of the junction.

American road networks were designed to be impervious to the opinions of everyone who uses them, so I'm very pleased with myself to have gotten so close to the permission I need to do a novel junction design.

If you can do UK-style traffic circles, you'd be fine on this junction.

My proposal to to shape down all inbound lanes of traffic to a single lane, then connect them all to the inner circulating channel - it's a little lumpy, thus 'bean shaped' instead of 'circle shaped'.

But as far as using it, from the POV of the driver of a vehicle, it's identical to a roundabout.

A normal ethical system would say the obligation to not kill anyone with a vehicle is on the operator of the vehicle. The environment should also support safe handoffs between priorities.

The parents are not at fault - they were born into this shitty country. It is the road engineer, the city engineer, full stop.

Consider this book: [Killed by a Traffic Engineer: Shattering the Delusion that Science Underlies our Transportation System](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/201978334-killed-by-a-tr...)

Jaywalking is a supremacists, propagandistic term, I would propose it be excised from your vocabulary: https://josh.works/jaywalking

It was used mostly to imprison formerly enslaved people for walking around. In some american cities in the 50s and 60s, thousands of people PER YEAR were ARRESTED for jaywalking!!!!

It's how deputized slave patrols (police) can easily initiate harassment against the enslaved/formerly-enslaved class.

There's a house near here that was written about in an article - it's at the end of a long straight road, and then there's a curve, and often-enough people go way too fast on the road, don't catch the curve, bounce through a bunch of grassy median and end up HITTING THIS HOUSE!

It's been hit so many times.

so, I really like bollards (https://josh.works/bollards) and I went to his house to see about adding some. He'd already had large rocks (1000lbs) placed in his yard, and after the most recent car hit them (and bounced one of them into his house) he added some 3000 lb rocks. It's still not a full layer of protection, but it's better.

Anyway, the real danger is the junction, not him having good enough or not good enough bollards. So, there was a meeting at his house the next day with city traffic engineering staff, police, city council, lots of neighbors...

and I'm popularizing a fix that I'm calling 'the traffic bean' - it's a shared-space junction, that is as effective as the existing junction, and much, much safer:

https://josh.works/traffic-bean

The director of Denver's DOTI has been looking it over, as a city council person has been pushing for it to get approved, and it might get approved! This would be basically the first real improvement in how american junctions are designed in decades.

It's currently just my side-project wish. All I want is to live near and use a road network that doesn't deal death constantly to others.

i fear for my kid's life, the same way these kids lives were affected. American road networks are horrific, I cannot take seriously anyone who takes them seriously.

I currently 'go hard' on tiktok, because I've recently been collecting tons of footage of mobility networks via drone and 360 camera (mostly while I ride my scooter/small motorcycle around)

the tiktok editor is pretty good for that purpose, and then I bring some clips back to my blog.

For instance, https://josh.works/traffic-bean has text, links to some substacks I wrote, a youtube video embed (drone footage) and tiktok embeds (insta360 footage).

It does the trick.

But everything that isn't on my website I count as ephemeral, discard, creative detritus that I create lots of so I can occasionally get the good bits.

I love having my website. I can write whatever I want. I can write about grief, or supremacy, or ruby, or american road networks, and I have a list of subscribers (~300) via email that I can talk to directly.

I love to see other people's blogs. It's so much more interesting to me than an instagram or tik tok or whatever.

:)

(Purchased sorta 'just for fun', to evaluate my own metabolic responsiveness. I wrote about it once: [0])

if I moved around much after eating, my muscles would "soak" lots of glucose from my blood and the insulin change would be relatively low. If it was something sugary and I then went to sleep, it would be a big slow rise for a few hours of blood sugar, then insulin would seem to be released, and it would decline a bit, then flatten, then decline, until it went back to a regular level. When waking up, it would often by around 70 mg/DL, and even if I eat zero carbs (or am full-on fasting!) it would bounce up/around during the day. I appreciated that my body seemed quite capable of doing whatever it needed to do to raise my blood glucose levels. (They always go up when exercising, for instance, even if no food is consumed)

I think everyone would likely find the data interesting, it's so freaky customized to yourself, it cannot help but be interesting. They're expensive, so I think buying even one sensor and wearing it for 2 weeks or however long is worth it.

[0]: https://josh.works/cgm

Lower the center of gravity, reduce the weight, increase the wind protection, make the riding stance really comfortable.

Make it easily accommodate a backpack, or a passenger, or both.

And you have a scooter!

They're unconventional in the greater usa, but wildly fun.

Generally, it seems like one can entertain the best parts of a bicycle, feet, and a car, and a motorcycle, all in one.

I wrote a bit of an ode to scooters, here: https://josh.works/scootering

I wish more of my friends rode scooters!

https://josh.works/scootering

In 2019 I was a bicycling a lot, and really wanted to get something with a motor, so I could be a bit faster/farther/not so sweaty with my trips. I had access to a car but rarely used it.

I really don't like many inherent safety issues with motorcycles and never seriously considered obtaining one, but kept wanting a two-wheeled vehicle with a motor.

I'd ridden a 50cc scooter in 2019 for a few days, and it was fine then, but I never considered one seriously since.

Eventually, in 2020 it was an emergency room doctor who suggested I look at 'real scooters' instead of the 50cc things.

So I did, eventually I ended up owning a 170cc scooter/moped thing, and it feels infinitely safer than a motorcycle, and a bicycle. I've done 20,000 miles on scooters since then, probably, all over the world,

including Denver to Canada and back once.

Cheaper lighter more efficient, than motorcycles. more stable, lower center of mass, better wind protection, useful storage options, too, compared to motorcycles and bicycles.

I ride mine year round, no issues.

I wrote a page trying to capture some of the upsides, but it's hard to get the tone right on the internet:

https://josh.works/scootering

I also can sometimes endure a day that I detect fatigue in myself. I don't necessarily love it, but I'll note it easy to go to sleep early the second day if I am tired the day before, and if something happens that causes my sleep to feel shorter than i'd like, I don't really worry about it at all.

Same reason I don't really concern myself if I detect notes of hunger in my system. Meh. Sometimes I've fasted a long time, usually I don't fast at all, but I really don't concern myself with "oh my gosh i have not eaten in {recent hours} I am STARVING" energy.

Anyway, I suggest this article to most people I find myself discussing sleep with, and enough people have said it was worth their time to read it, so I continue to share it:

[1] Matthew Walker's "Why We Sleep" Is Riddled with Scientific and Factual Errors

[1] https://guzey.com/books/why-we-sleep/

The animal-ish part of a human existence is always interesting to me. Elsewhere in the comments I've seen sorta uncomfortable references to pressuring someone for sexual intimacy before bedtime based on this paper. Meh. Something that IS really nice before sleep is emotionally connected sexual intimacy, and I hope no one would want emotionally _dis_connected sexual intimacy from/for a partner, and I, personally, would make some big steps back if I thought a partner wanted something like... disattuned sex out of me.

This last paragraph might be best left off the comment, happy if a mod wants to not have it go that way. I do stand by the link to Guzey's "Why we sleep"!

If someone is hustling up a staircase, the output can be quite high, even at the level of the 3rd floor. I notice myself, sometimes, forgetting something and moving quickly in and out of my 3rd floor apartment by stairs, and I'll notice myself breathing hard after just the 3rd floor.

And sometimes I hike the building (6 floors) twice or three times, because it feels nice, and everything is timing. One can get easily get a high-intensity, short-interval fairly-involved full-body effort out of ten flights of stairs.

I note a part of me that wants to be defensive wants to say "or perhaps someone else does not know how to try hard enough to make ten flights a good workout?"

Something about your comment feels dismissive, and this random passer-by didn't like it, but I could certainly be projecting, etc etc.

I find myself walking down from my middle floor level to the first floor, then to the top, and then the bottom, and the top again, often enough, after a meal.

My body contains 4.5 liters of blood and I sometimes imagine pumping it a few times through my system to help the rest of my body process the meal.

This is especially true if the meal was carby/sugary. Instead of lying there motionless and making my insulin do all the work of bringing my blood sugar back to normal, I imagine myself "pumping" the sugary blood through something that is happy enough to do something with the sugar (your/my muscles, as walking up 12 flights of stairs obviously accomplishes).

I am on the margins "athletic", but some days find myself at the end of a pretty sedentary day.

I _always_ am thrilled to have a single airpod in and listen to a book while meandering 12 flights of stairs, even if it's late, like, midnight. I've 100% done that a few times, and i find it helps me sleep well. Maybe the lack of exercise + insulin spike + no muscle activity usage of blood sugar would disrupt my sleep more than having pumped the sugary blood through muscles a few times.

I quite like this for me. I've lived in this building longer than I've made use of the convenience of walking up these flights of stairs. Some days I do 40+ flights of stairs!!! Even I am impressed. But doing them simply a few times a day, two or three trips. 12-18 flights at a time. Adds up quickly, obviously.

[0]: https://zoningverydifferentthanours.substack.com/p/a-pattern...

This gets complicated because the reason things are the way they are is _crucial_ to efficient, easy change, and the greater united states is a place obsessed with continuing _ethnic cleansing_. it's sad and tiring to exist inside of, the dehumanization caused every day, anew, by american style road networks, supremacy.

tl;dr american road networks and american zoning is two sides of the coin some groups used to accomplish 'regimes of social control', which was a mix of ethnic cleansing for some neighborhoods, and ensuring conformity for others.

Oh, and a cool data visualization project. Here's a map of most of my travel for the last few years: https://josh.works/mobility-data

polylines for daaaaaaaaaaays

Clauses like "by purchasing this property you promise to sell it only ever in the future to a white person" are sprinkled like salt across legal documents from certain eras.

Everyone was saying the whole thing out loud.

They are not enforceable, per se, today, but they still remain like landmines or unexploded ordinance in the landscape. Where there were clauses like that, that are currently unenforceable, something else might be close-enough to enforceable that it matters.

I simply ask people involved with these institutions something like "Do you know the racist/supremacist underpinnings of (HOA's|zoning|road design standards) in America?"

and usually the first half-second of their next facial expression correctly telegraphs how it'll go.

Every industry I've worked in, I read with fascination the lurid writings of those who hate the industry, either as insiders or outsiders. That an institution in the USA is _soaking wet_ in supremacy, and exists purely to propagate the concept of 'race' into the future is so banal to me, it's not really a hot take, though I remember when I thought something like this was improbable.

Anyway, HOA's are one of 'em. The hold up as ideal the concept of the suburb, which existed as "the alternative" to all things 'ethnic'.

That ideal uses threats of violence to expunge all things 'ethnic'. Sometimes under the guise of displaying class conformity/'not looking poor', but, lets be honest, that's an anti-ethnic sentiment.

It hurts to behold, all of this.

There are people who live like that, and the quick social shaming response is not a bad one. "you said you care about people {here}, and you are now behaving in a dehumanizing way. how interesting"

I simply used a word that means one thing to me, and I use it in spoken language often enough, but it happens to have an equally prominent alternative usage that means directly 'to hit'.

No apologies needed or received. I think apologies are useful for some mistakes, but in some cases, if it seemed like you're witnessing online bullying... I say keep on keeping on.

Me saying "i'd hit you in person if you said this" is straight-down-the-middle bullying. Me saying "I'd sadly think less of you, if you said this in person" is not bullying, IMO, so I say we're both right. how nice.

now i wanna take my frisbee for a walk in the local park but it's as bit too windy for good throwing... hm.