• 179 Posts
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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 7th, 2023

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  • Oh wow, that opened up a can of worms!

    Yes, the user does seem to work for Lyft, and their profile has a few links. One leads to:

    "We have 3 kinds of data that owned by Lyft:

    “Lyft telemetry data" – Lyft drivers GPS tracks
    “Lyft-owned street-level imagery” - photos collected by cameras installed in our drivers' vehicles. This data is updated frequently. Photos are not older than a year, and sometimes even a month.
    "Lyft-owned aerial imagery" – As for now it is Nearmap imagery. They do allow us to use their imagery for OSM edits by license.
    

    "

    I guess that explains it! Thanks for putting me in the right direction. It’s a shame that they don’t share and grant an open license to that imagery. Seems more updated than Google Streetview, and since Lyft uses OSM data, it only seems right to share.




  • Hardly any biker in the Netherlands wears a helmet

    Yes, but:

    1. Head injuries are extremely common in the Netherlands.
    2. Since a large number of bike accidents do NOT involve cars, riders should still wear a helmet to keep their brain safe.

    With the increase in e-bike use, especially among the older population, injuries in the Netherlands have gone up dramatically, so there’s only so much that infrastructure can do.

    We do still need safe cycling infrastructure to separate us from cars as much as possible, but it’s not the panacea that many of us believe it to be.


  • It’s rare here to see cars in the sidewalk but there was this one house that consistently did it for a while

    Part of the problem is that too many people have large trucks for personal use… these trucks were never designed to be parked in a residential area. So, they take up the sidewalk AND often back onto the bike lane… double-whammy!

    This is the type of nonsense our cyclists have to deal with on a marked bike route:

    FYI: not long ago a cyclist was hit and critically injured just down the street from where this photo was taken. These bike lanes aren’t safe when you have cars blocking them.



  • To clarify, when I say “mobility device” in this context, I’m referring to an electric scooter like this:

    And yeah, that was a photo taken from the dash cam on my bike… seeing old or disabled people having to navigate around cars just angers me.

    I have no problem with someone like that using the bike lane:

    At least around here, people with mobility aids are expected to be with pedestrians, on the sidewalk.

    That would be nice, except the areas around here often don’t have clear sidewalks (i.e. cars parked on them, snow not cleared, poor surface quality, , too narrow, etc.).

    I went for a walk yesterday, and I can say with 100% certainty that someone in with a mobility device would not be able to use the sidewalk to get to the local grocery store because of snow and snow banks leading into intersections, despite the roads being 100% clear.

    The mobility scooters I see during the summer are large and go faster than walking speed, so I’m sure the user simply finds it better/safer to be using the bike lane. Hell, we have a lot of joggers who use our bike lanes rather than the sidewalks, and I don’t blame them - sidewalks are a hazard when you’ve got cars around. And that’s assuming you’ve got a sidewalk to begin with!

    Or maybe they’re similar in speed to bicycles so we just need bigger bike lanes

    We need bigger bike lanes, regardless of the speed of the users. Some places (i.e Montreal and Paris) have areas where the “bike lane” is as wide as a standard car lane, and it allows ANY non-car user to travel on it without conflicts. It’s glorious!

    Some sidewalks in my area are so narrow that you can’t walk past another pedestrian unless one of you goes on the grass. I can’t imagine someone using a wheelchair, mobility device, or stroller on those same sidewalks.

    And that assumes only ONE of the people are in a wheelchair or mobility device… if you have one going in each direction, it’s a stalemate.

    When you’ve got cars parked onto those same sidewalks, even partially, it’s a nightmare.






  • I’ll just share with you my experience:

    I was also paying for a YouTube Premium family plan, but still got ads. What made me cancel was the fact that they’re still using trackers, so they were making money off me three times (subscription, ads, and selling my data)!

    Coupled with the fact that “content creators” don’t really make content for the love of making it. It’s all created “for the algorithm”, especially the “watch to the end”, clickbait titles and thumbnails, “like and subscribe” begging, “only 15% of you are subscribers”, sponsored content disguised as education, etc… Videos today are nothing like they were 15 years ago, because it became solely about making money.

    Google is one of the pioneers of the enshittification movement!