Solarpunk Urbanism

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/16047797

(Let me know if this is inappropriate for the community)

Photo taken by me

This bus stop is one of the major stops in Transjakarta network--arguably the biggest BRT (bus rapid transit) in the world.

On the top of the bus stop there's a commercial area and a viewing deck, where you can see amazing view of Selamat Datang Monument, visible in the photo.

To access the viewing deck and the commerce area, you need to go through the ticket gate. This way you can familiarize and attracts people to use Transjakarta.

If you didn't know, Jakarta is the most populated province in the most populated island in the earth, Java Island. This fact, combined with the very lack of public transportation, making it has one of the worst car traffic in the world. So much so that Indonesia's government decided to move its capital to Nusantara, Borneo Island, to reduce centralization on Java Island.

That doesn't make it Jakarta stop being developed, many people get this part wrong.

Just last year, 2023, Jakarta got another addition of public transportation named LRT Jabodetabek, serving from Central of Jakarta to outskirts of Jakarta--Bekasi and (almost) Bogor. In addition to that, working together with CRRC from China, Indonesia launched Whoosh, the first high-speed railway in the Southeast Asia and in the southern hemisphere, connecting Jakarta to Bandung, another big city in West Java.

There are also many public transportation projects in the work, such as MRT Jakarta phase 2, continuing from Bundaran HI to Kota Tua, Jakarta's old town located in Northern Jakarta. There is also LRT Jakarta phase 1B (not to be confused with LRT Jabodebek, easy mistake to make) connecting the LRT Jakarta to the rest of Jakarta's transportation network. INKA, working together with Nippon Sharyo, I heard is making trainsets for regional railways. CRRC (China) also making another too.

Honestly, as a Jakartan, this gives me a hope to the city. What was once a car-centric city could be city that are friendly for everyone. The roads towards that is gonna be shaky and it's gonna take a while, but in the end it's gonna be worth it.

Thank you for reading, sorry for posting lots of Jakarta in the slrpnk.net--I previously complained that the whole Fediverse feels very centralized on USA. I though I was gonna give a shot on exposing my ~~invisible giant~~ country.

I also made !publictransport@slrpnk.net, feel free to visit and post about the public transportation in your city!

Glasgow: how free transport drives better health and happiness.

On a Montréal, Canada project to design a space in the city for kids, rather than for cars.

Youtube version

Consider watching this video with FreeTube, a nifty open-source program that lets you watch YouTube videos without Google spying on your viewing habits!

Combined with Libredirect, which automatically opens youtube links in Freetube, it becomes really slick and effortless to use.

For the last 10 years I have been able to draw around 1,753 stations from different European cities, motivated by the curiosity of understanding how engineers were able to fit underground stations comprising 4 or 5 lines under Place de la République in Paris or the Puerta del Sol in Madrid. 

A pen, a notebook, a bit of spatial vision and the willingness to navigate all the staircases, corridors, platforms and mezzanines are enough to draw a station. Some may content errors, despite I try to complement themwith information found in the internet: historic, construction and survey maps, pics and videos, as well with data about train lengths.

Due to the boredom provoked by the COVID-19 lockdown in 2020, I decided to digitalize all the sketches I had drawn in since the early 2010s, plus all the station plans I collected from construction projects. I have also drawn stations from cities I have never been. Sources may vary, but some of them come from construction projects (London, Buenos Aires and Rio de Janeiro), other sketches found in Wikimedia Commons (Boston).

A home insurance policy offers a discount to AAA members. The discount is the same amount as the cost of membership. I so rarely use a car or motorcycle that I would not benefit significantly from a roadside assistence plan. I cycle. But there are other discounts for AAA membership, like restaurant discounts. So my knee-jerk thought was: this is a no-brainer… I’m getting some benefits for free, in effect, so it just makes sense to get the membership.

Then I dug into AAA a bit more. The wiki shows beneficial and harmful things AAA has done. From the wiki, these points stand out to me:

Even though the roadside assistence is useless to me, the AAA membership comes with 2 more memberships. So I could give memberships to 2 family members and they would benefit from it. But it seems I need to drop this idea. AAA seems overall doing more harm than good.

(edit) And doesn’t it seem foolish to oppose mass transit even from the selfish car driver standpoint? If you drive a car, other cars are in your way slowing you down and also increasing your chances of simultaneously occupying the same space (crash). Surely you would benefit from others switching from car to public transport to give you more road space. It seems to me the anti mass transit move is AAA looking after it’s own interest in having more members paying dues.

I also noticed most AAA club’s websites block Tor. So the lack of privacy respect just made my decision to nix them even easier.

Cities are never truly complete and done; instead they are always changing, always evolving. One positive change is the rise of regenerative cities—urban centers designed to have a restorative relationship with the environment that protects and enhances local ecosystems.

WIRED Japan collaborated with the urban design studio For Cities to highlight some of the world’s best sustainable urban developments, which are harbingers of what is to come. From using local materials and construction methods to restoring ecosystems, these projects go beyond merely making green spaces and provide hints of how cities of the future will function as well as how they will be built. Here are some places where the future is now.

I'm a country boy all my life. I can't cycle or take the metro anywhere. Walkable cities are great but they're a hundred miles away.

Everyone goes on about how they hate cars, but what else are you supposed to do?

https://electrek.co/2023/12/04/livaq-equad-unveiled-as-most-capable-electric-atv-ever/ – this article talks about something with a 108km/h and a range of 273 km. It's mad expensive unfortunately, but that is normally to do with adoption rates and scale.

(It says "claims a range of 170 miles (273 km) from its 15.4 kWh battery pack", which implies consumption of about 55 watt-hours per km travelled, though that'd be variable depending on speed and conditions)

If I had one of these, I could get to town, get to a train station, without a car. I could carry one child, which is worse than a car, but the energy consumption is a 3-4× lower than a car. If train stations had swappable batteries, that would be ideal, but I don't see that coming any time soon.

In New York and elsewhere, the rules typically take the form of ratios [of parking spaces to retail and housing] that have been copied from one city to another, handed from one generation of engineers to the next without much study or skepticism.

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cross-posted from: https://yall.theatl.social/post/3949298

From the Saporta Report:

Hurricane Helene rocked the Southeast in late September, bringing devastation to parts of Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, and more. The storm, a Category 4 at its peak, arrived in Georgia on Friday night and affected almost every part of the state. Gov. Brian Kemp has called the damage left by the storm “unprecedented.” Georgia cities […]

The post Atlanta’s green infrastructure at work during Hurricane Helene provides an example of learning from the past appeared first on SaportaReport.