DL Open Thread: Sunday, November 21, 2021
Could Traffic Circles Actually Be Good? I grant you, they confuse me, especially when you’re supposed to ‘take the third right’ at the roundabout. However:
Carmel, a city of 102,000 north of Indianapolis, has 140 roundabouts, with over a dozen still to come. No American city has more. The main reason is safety; compared with regular intersections, roundabouts significantly reduce injuries and deaths.
But there’s also a climate benefit.
Because modern roundabouts don’t have red lights where cars sit and idle, they don’t burn as much gasoline. While there are few studies, the former city engineer for Carmel, Mike McBride, estimates that each roundabout saves about 20,000 gallons of fuel annually, which means the cars of Carmel emit many fewer tons of planet-heating carbon emissions each year. And U.S. highway officials broadly agree that roundabouts reduce tailpipe emissions.
They also don’t need electricity, and, unlike stoplights, keep functioning after bad storms — a bonus in these meteorologically turbulent times.
Oops, my headline is incorrect. Roundabouts are not the same as traffic circles:
But Mr. Brainard (not to be confused with ‘Dr.’ Brainard) discovered that the consultant was confusing roundabouts with rotaries, or large traffic circles, which are bigger, arguably scarier and include Dupont Circle in Washington and Place Charles de Gaulle, the multilane beast around the Arc de Triomphe in Paris.
Gotta say, this sounds pretty cool. A fun article. Read it.
Owner Of Anti-Vaxx Facebook Group–Well, See If You Can Guess The Rest. Another case of hospitals killing patients for profit, no doubt.
Rittenhouse’s Defense Attorney Blisters Rethugs. He, at least, has come out with his reputation intact:
Kyle Rittenhouse’s criminal defense attorney told Insider that he thinks it is “disgusting” that some prominent Republicans have tried to cash in on his client’s acquittal.
“There’s a lot of people trying to profit on this, and I don’t think people should,” said Mark Richards, who represented Rittenhouse in his Kenosha homicide trial, during a phone call.
“They’re raising money on it and you have all these Republican congressmen saying come work for me,” Rittenhouse’s attorney told Insider. “They want to trade on his celebrity and I think it’s disgusting.”
Richards also spoke negatively of Donald Trump Jr. tweeting that a gun rights organization would “award” Rittenhouse with an AR-15.
“Gun Owners of America is sending Kyle Rittenhouse an AR-15. Sign the card in support of Kyle. Americans have a fundamental right to defend themselves and to keep and bear arms. The verdict in the Kyle Rittenhouse trial is a recognition of those rights,” Trump Jr. said in a since-deleted tweet.
Richards told Insider: “He’s an idiot. I don’t have to expand on that because it speaks for itself.”
Republicans Embrace ‘Toxic White Male Masculinity’, And Campaign On Its Behalf. It’s also why they own so many big manly guns. Good interview, despite the fact it’s on Politico.
How Many Georgia Cops Does It Take To Kill One Naked Man? Five. Back in 2019. Maybe he had a weapon hidden somewhere? Only now are they facing charges. Song time:
What do you want to talk about?
New definition of “peacefully:” Sussex standoff ends peacefully after trooper wounds gunman
Ongoing definition of ‘bad journalism’.
Was his rifle an ar-15? Then no laws were broken
The Arc de Triomphe stands at the center of 12 lanes of traffic, fed by the convergence of 12 separate avenues, including the Champs Elysées. Unlike the rules of American traffic circles, traffic entering the rotary has the right-of-way, but entrance is controlled by traffic cops. Traffic jams are constant, so nobody’s saving any petrol.
Place de l’Etoile (it was renamed after de Gaulle died) was designed and built before the invention of the automobile, but I can’t imagine it was any less chaotic when horse-drawn carriages were the ones jockeying for position.
There is nothing like this in the US, or anywhere else in the world for that matter, and there never will be.