Funnily enough at least in my personal anecdotic case it works about like that. I do just remember when my meetings will be (or look up where the meeting was decided on), do try to remember what I had planned (sometimes I forget, but almost always for the better), and written notes are rare enough that pen and paper are sufficient. And also don't have a driver license. I don't think my case is exactly rare, even among softdev croud.
And I am pretty sure every single one of those "billions of people" have had the experience of returning back from the grocery store, only to realize they were actually out of eggs.
Traffic signs have symbols and shapes. You are allowed to drive in the US with an international drivers license if you don’t speak English. Are they going to arrest someone who doesn’t speak English and got a license in another state?
Traffic signs are readable by almost anybody regardless of English language skills. A vision test is much more safety-valid than an English language test.
I disagree that traffic signs are readable regardless of language skills. Yes, it's just a matter of developing recognition for simple pictorial signs. You just have to learn it. If I put a French "No Vehicles" sign in Florida, nobody is going to have a clue what it means, even though there are no words on it, and that's dangerous.
Not recognizing or incorrectly interpreting "Crash I-9 N/B Exp Right 2 Lanes Closed Merge Left 2000 ft" is also dangerous, right?
That level of English would be considered below A1. Just being in the US for a few months would give you that level of English even without any other education. So you're conflating "can you read about 2 dozen English words" with passing an English exam - let's say B1.
It's a chicken and egg problem. If you retain the parking but build transit, people will keep doing what they've always done. Partly because people are resistant to change, partly because the areas you can take transit to are still mostly parking lots.
Places like Los Angeles are grappling with 30+ years of investing in transit with minimal changes in modeshare, because they continued investing in automobility at the same rate.
It takes decades for good transit to change habbits. Others have written about mistakes LA has made on the way, but still transit is making a difference even if small.
An unfortunate side effect of car dependence is people forgetting how to dress outside in the place they live, a skill humans had for thousands of years but apparently lost some time in the last ~100.
If you myopically look at the instantaneous usage of infrastructure then you could argue that most roads are pointless because they are, on average, empty.
The bus might have less than 5 people on it at any given moment you observe, but over its >2 hour route it transports dozens or hundreds of people between stops.
Passenger-mile vs vehicle-mile is a useful metric (you can add driver-mile if you want, or cost-mile) but you can probably do something similar with some measurement of storage space, too.
A full minivan ranks surprisingly high on all of them, which is one of the reasons it's disappointing that carpooling and such aren't discussed as much anymore.
> probably only be the best alternative on a densely packed island
So Manhattan or the San Francisco Peninsula?
I suspect the refusal to kowtow to car owners and the density are interrelated. Tokyo is more dense, in (small?) part, because there is far less space consumed by inanimate appliances.
No, it's in very, very large part due to this. You can see it not just walking around, but especially when you go up in one of the tall buildings or in SkyTree tower and look at the city from above: you can't see any parking lots anywhere, and most of the roads are pretty small (there's some large boulevards, but not that many). Compare to any American city that was built up after the rise of the automobile and it's staggering how much space is wasted on cars in those cities.
And those cost money. That is the crux here. Free parking is frankly insane. It became untenable in Amsterdam as early as the 1960s when most people could afford a car.
If you want trees, a sidewalk and bike lanes something has got to give.
You can still make an open source printer with some extrusion and stepper motors, same as always.
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