The increasing size of American cars has done a lot of damage to our roads. They’re less safe for the roads, for pedestrians, and even sometimes for the occupants.
Tangentially, thanks to red light structure in the city, I often make just as much forward progress as the cars around me on my bike.
The roads are in such bad shape because sprawling road (read: car) infrastructure is unsustainable and bankrupts cities. What we need is economically sustainable micromobility and public transit infrastructure.
If you ever go and look around America on Google maps, it seems insane how much sprawl and unnecessary road infrastructure you have. I can’t imagine America being able to effectively maintain these
I contribute to OpenStreetMap through surveying and tracing. It’s given me some perspective on how wasteful our infrastructure is and how colossally unusable it is on foot.
(If anyone’s interested, please, please ask me about it; I highly recommend it as a way to have more fun on walks and hyper-familiarize yourself with where you live. The built-in, web-based iD editor is great on desktop, and the third-party Vespucci editor is great on Android. Unfortunately, the appearance of Go Map!! on iOS seems possibly lackluster, but it seems just as functional.)
As a fellow OSM mapper, thanks for advertising. :D
I’ll be entirely honest, I’m a big map nerd, looking around the world, different infrastructure, city layout, sprawl Vs density, how manmade interacts with the natural etc etc. I’ll give open street maps a try, but I’ve been using gmaps for a while and Google earth is one of the best things I’ve ever seen
OSM has a ways to go to be entirely competitive with GMaps as a navigation tool in most regions (although it gets the upper hand in other areas). OSM’s major advantages are four-fold:
- It’s open to be used by anyone for any reason for free.
- It can be contributed to by anyone.
- (Crucially) It has a way higher ceiling than GMaps could ever hope to have. The level of potential granularity in OSM is absolutely insane. You can mark fire hydrants down to the color, diameter, pressure, and number of couplings. You can mark power lines down to the voltage, shape and material of each individual pole, etc. Individual trees can be marked down to the species. Every street crossing can be marked as having tactile pavings, a type of curb, a material, signals, refuge island, elevated or not, etc. Individual entrances to buildings can be marked as different types and with different door mechanisms. Heights of buildings in meters, whether they have air conditioning, etc., can be marked. This is barely scratching the surface. For navigation, things like this can be superfluous (I would argue that for people with disabilities like blindness, some of these things like the crossing types could be useful), but for research and specific applications, it can in theory crush GMaps rather than just being brought into parity with it.
- The non-satellite map is just way, way better. If I look at my neighborhood which is reasonably well-mapped on OSM and then compare it to GMaps and Bing Maps, the latter two look like an absolute joke and rely heavily on satellite imagery to fill in the gaps. The problem with that of course is that not everything is visible from space, and it often gets fuzzy with minute details.
Road crews carry the world on their SHOULDERS. haha punny
In my country, that’s just not the case. Road will be patched but badly, so a patch is always be bumpy, sometime enough to act like a road bump.
