This thread is about cities and civilised life; the centralised conglomeration of constructions and the people who live in or under them, as well as the people passing by; their planners, shapers, and runners; their light, their shade and activities; their impact on the world around them and on each other; citizen getting along or across with citizen; their tools, trade, and technology; their growth and decay; and whatever else it takes to finish this sentence.

Be urbane.

I've done duck, chicken,^[1] and fish. But the free hunter still needs to realize that the forest strawberry is edible. 

Hunters were also gatherers , you can eat your strawberries in peace.

Some urban beauty contests, starting with the EIU liveability ranking.

The EIU ranking is based on a selection of 140 cities worldwide ranked on five criteria, Stability (25%), Healthcare (20%), Culture & Environment (25%), Education (10%), Infrastructure (20%). And the 2016 winners are:

• Melbourne, Australia
• Vienna, Austria
• Vancouver, Canada
• Toronto, Canada
• Calgary, Canada
• Adelaide, Australia
• Perth, Australia
• Auckland, New Zealand
• Helsinki, Finland
• Hamburg, Germany

Or in video form:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q2x9upK6oGU


But these 140 cities have actually become less liveable, as the cities in decline have lost more than the other cities have improved.

Most improved cities over five years (ranking) ∆ score

• Tehran Iran (126) +5.0
• Dubai UAE (74) +4.6
• Harare Zimbabwe (133) +4.4
• Abidjan Cote d'Ivoire (128) +3.8
• Kuwait City Kuwait (81)  +2.5
• Kathmandu Nepal (124) +2.3
• Warsaw Poland (65) +2.1
• Bratislava Slovakia (63) +1.7
• Baku Azerbaijan (103) +1.6
• Honolulu US (17) +1.3

Greatest decline over five years (ranking) ∆ score

• Damascus Syria (140)  -26.1 
• Kiev Ukraine (131)  -25.1 
• Detroit US (57) -5.7 
• Moscow Russia (80) -5.6 
• Bahrain Bahrain (91) -4.6 
• Tripoli Libya (139) -4.5 
• St Petersburg Russia (76) -4.4 
• Paris France (32) -3.7 
• Athens Greece (69) -3.4 
• Caracas Venezuela (123) -3.3

Then a branding agency has made a ranking of the world's most reputable cities.

They have polled 23,000 people in the G8 countries, and ranked 55 cities based on 23 criteria in esteem, economy, environment, and government. Further details are not available.

• Sydney
• Vienna
• Zürich
• Toronto
• Stockholm
• Edinburgh
• Montreal
• Rome
• Vancouver
• Copenhagen
• Helsinki
• Venice
• Melbourne
• Barcelona
• Madrid
• Frankfurt
• Amsterdam
• San Francisco
• Tokyo
• Dublin

The six cities at the bottom are: New Delhi, Istanbul, Mexico City, Moscow, Rio de Janeiro, Cairo.

Edinburgh

Are you sure it shouldn't be Glasgow there?

a branding agency

Information to trust about.

An alternative approach to bike sharing.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WMkqVZ-EpG0

One cool consequence is that when you get rid of the racks you also make the system provider-independent, there could be different and independent schemes providing you with the bicycle of choice.

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This Wired Future City feature on Shenzhen could fit in many places, China, technology, history of technology, politics, but ultimately it is about urban affairs.

https://youtu.be/SGJ5cZnoodY

One cool consequence is that when you get rid of the racks you also make the system provider-independent, there could be different and independent schemes providing you with the bicycle of choice.

I think the racks are primarily about ensuring availability,^[1] although of course it also keeps the amount of technology that can fail lower. There may be a 100,000 bikes in Shanghai, but what if there isn't a single one near you? (Apologies if the vid mentioned; I only skimmed it which is more effective in reading.)

¹ Meaning things like trucking them around from one collection point to another, or into the shop as necessary based on the number of km, etc.↵

Why More People Didn't Get Hurt in Times Square

Pedestrian injuries in New York City's most crowded space have plummeted since a recent redesign. But the real fix is to ban cars entirely.

Twenty-two people were injured and one person was killed when a driver raced through a busy sidewalk in Times Square on Thursday. In the immediate aftermath, New Yorkers worried that the incident might have been a terrorist attack, akin to the fatal vehicle-ramming attacks in Stockholm in April or the mass-casualty attack in Nice in 2016. It wasn't: A final determination on the crash has not been made, but the driver of the vehicle, Richard Rojas, may have been under the influence--a far more common threat on U.S. streets than terrorism.

The fatal tragedy might have been a lot deadlier were it not for the work of designers to boost public safety in Times Square over the last decade. The motorist drove north on the west-side sidewalk of Seventh Avenue for three blocks between 42nd Street and 45th Street, when he crashed into steel bollards--public-safety features introduced to Times Square in its recent reconstruction. "The car eventually impaled itself on the bollards," says David Burney, former commissioner of New York City's Department of Design and Construction. "If those bollards hadn't been there, it would have been much worse."

In fact, the death was the first pedestrian traffic fatality in Times Square since 2003. Burney, who is now the director of the Urban Placemaking and Management Program at the Pratt Institute, says that he regular takes his students through Times Square as a case study in how to do traffic calming. Between 2010 and 2017, the architecture firm Snøhetta rebuilt this area, one of the hottest pockets of foot traffic in the world. This redesign work, spread across two-and-a-half acres, included the dedication of a true public plaza for pedestrians in the heart of the Times Square Bowtie, the area between 42nd and 47th Streets along Seventh Avenue and Broadway. Pedestrian injuries in the Bowtie fell from an average of 62 injuries per year in 2006-2008 to 37 in 2014-2016--a 40 percent reduction, according to New York City's Department of Transportation.

How to prevent rat running

Bollards have a bad reputation. They are considered dangerous for cycling and indeed many people get injured when they hit one, but bollards also have a very good side. They can regulate the traffic volumes in areas inside and outside the cities. This prevents rat running and increases the safety for walking and cycling. It also improves an area's liveability, even more so when automatic retractable bollards are used.

https://youtu.be/Okb63flApDY

Think that central New York picture is a groan and shows the power of corporate advertising everywhere. A friend of mine from younger years when she got married to a another Glaswegian went to live in California in her twenties. On her two visits back home to see an ageing relative she commented to me when we met twice for lunch that the obvious thing that struck her was that back across the ocean big advertising boards everywhere but a constructive difference here. had noticed that on my two ex-colonial visits years ago but was amusing to note that someone who had lived there for ages noticed the big difference between her old home country and her long term stay where she is!

Bollards have a bad reputation. They are considered dangerous for cycling and indeed many people get injured when they hit one

I'd say news items stereotypically look something like "driver ignored red light and hit bollard." In at least one unfortunate cases followed by something like "airbags activated and driver subsequently hit cyclist." It seems odd at best to blame bollards as being unsafe in these scenarios, given that drivers would be causing far more accidents still by turning into cut-through traffic. But also I've never heard of that in the first place, so maybe it's car-centric propaganda from a foreign car-obsessed country.^[1]
Or like you can see on this video: someone deliberately trying to game the poles:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9xB1FMimxNo

In rare cases this could happen legitimately, I suppose, but you must understand that these poles aren't some kind of lonely warrior against traffic sneaking. There'll likely be a sign at the beginning of the street that says dead end and a sign prior to the poles saying entrance forbidden. The poles are there because of the few @#$@#$ who ignore the signs. You can fine them, but that only helps state income without improving actual safely. The goal is to keep these kinds of drivers out before they become a problem, not to fine them afterward.

¹ Of course it's also well-documented that in the UK and the US they don't know how to do cycling infrastructure. It wouldn't surprise me if they randomly stuck dangerous obstacles in the middle of cycling lanes making this actual reality.↵

Self-driving bus involved in crash less than two hours after Las Vegas launch

A truck driver is blamed for the accident, which passengers say could have been avoided if the autonomous vehicle had only reversed

Basically, the truck driver backed on the nose of the self-driving bus that apparently had no concept of going in reverse.

Good thing humans have, we can be blamed. It seems machines can't.

Looks like a bus not a truck.

More bike sharing.

More bike sharing.

Less bike sharing https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2017/nov/25/chinas-bike-share-graveyard-a-monument-to-industrys-arrogance

Population density thingie https://pudding.cool/2018/10/city_3d/

Interesting, but Fx on my laptop brings my whole computer down and in Vivaldi it's just slow. On my desktop it might work out.

So my laptops are better than yours? Or maybe Palemoon manages resources so much better. I don't even remember when I last opened Fx, but I remember that I opened it only to see what it looked like after some update a while ago. Everything looked ever more misaligned and I did not feel like trying any actual website with it. I should uninstall it because it has no reason to exist on my end.

So my laptops are better than yours?

It works smoothly on my desktop in Fx.

The reason it became nigh unresponsive for a few moments is RAM of course. Naturally I have most RAM used up with the 4 GB on my laptop but I still never expect a new tab to be an issue, which it never is... normally. This website is heavy.

As for speed my laptop is an Core M i3 something or other. But the i5^[1] in my work laptop certainly doesn't render it smoothly either (in Chrome/Vivaldi), and memory usage for the tab is what, 1.7 GB? It's no surprise my other laptop would have issues with that unless it were just about the only thing running.

Interestingly, performance on my phone is similar to those laptops, presumably mainly because of the GPU. It has a 4-core Intel Atom CPU, which may or may not put it lower in CPU power than my laptop.

¹ Intel Core i5-6300U @ 2.40GHz with 8 GB RAM.↵

Russian "urbanist" and youtuber Varlamov introduces Tallinn, featuring head of Tallinn central district Vladimir Svet

A Russian dude made a decent docu-vlog about Japan https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gb0TQ7VeApY
Nice cinematography and mostly coherent commentary. A few places I did not know about.

The drone part begins at 27 minutes. Have I mentioned earlier that I hate cities? I particularly hate dense cities.

https://youtu.be/JkrrKhuTjNY