tinydbass.bsky.social
Likes jazz, cycling and software development. Hates bad and lazy arguments used to avoid taking climate action. Opinions my own only and don't reflect anyone I work for, know, am related to, make eye contact with.
288 posts
1,171 followers
365 following
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Active Commenter
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Such grownups. Look how serious they are.
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I have to say that in face and general demeanor terms these guys are completely 110% all over the tricky stuff
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I really like the not-at-all-bashed vibe of the dudes in the photo
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Agreed, and one cancellation and you're talking about a 40 minute wait which for most drivers is their whole commute.
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The good news is that the buses themselves (and fares) have been much improved over the last few years. Problem now is the routes and frequency.
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Yep, exactly. Yet if you were to follow local media and the pronouncements of most local politicians and business leaders etc, the "gridlock" only has one cause - not enough space for cars.
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It's politically much easier to tell kids to dress like construction workers than to tell drivers to modify their driving behavior and car buying choices.
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Progress...
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A bus service that's treated as a serious method of travel would be a start. e.g. no viable bus route linking adjacent Knocknacarra and Salthill. Result: hundreds of short car journeys.
E.g.2 Bus between city and Salthill infrequent even when not delayed or cancelled. Result: more driving.
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Simple question for anyone who claims that new road will solve Galway's traffic: "once it's built, can you show me how a child in Knocknacarra will travel to their school in Salthill?"
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It's a revealing figure and confirms what everybody knows during school holidays - that much of Galway's notorious traffic is people making short car journeys that (with a modicum of ambition around public transport and other modes) could easily be eliminated from such a small, compact city.
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The 3% figure was from a pretty old survey (2012?) from what I remember. Both numbers are so small that any difference could easily come down to normal error margins or slight differences in methodology.
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This is the key point. There's nothing committed in writing, or in the records of agencies and most local politicians, to suggest that they'll be prepared to remove any space that's currently allocated to drivers for other modes of transport even with a new road.
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This is what supporters say the ring road will allow. But I won't believe it until I see it as a strict obligation for the ring road to get the go ahead.
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Could it be similar to the way that Cuban music (with its strong African roots) went back across the Atlantic and influenced some contemporary modern African music?
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It's the same for bands in pubs. Been to a few where the volume is nuts, rendering the whole experience pretty painful. I'm old now but I can honestly say that i felt the same in my 20s. If I want banging tunes I'll go to a gig/club
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57% of peak AM car trips are completely within a compact Galway city; 43% originate outside the city but terminate there and eh … 1% bypass it.
Business case for a tram right there. Weak business case for a bypass, even if it's rebranded as a ring road. Only ego keeps this zombie project standing.
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"Sort things out" = "let us deflect for a year or two".
I fully expect any tricky questions about housing to be met by ministers with "we need to give the tsar time to come up with findings" etc etc
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They don't want to change anything but they need to give the appearance of doing something.
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Plus ça change and all that. Chucking money at a person / body to go off and do some unspecified work as a substitute for actually implementing change has been a FFFG staple for decades.
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Exactly. The people who voted for them don't want anything to change.
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I think an Irish politician watches scenes like this and performs some kind of elaborate mental trick of blocking it out or convincing themselves that it's AI
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The piece itself is all over the place. I think she (and presumably her editors) think she's deftly weaving different strands together into something, but it's just word salad.
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I wonder if sales of stockings have declined in proportion
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Yep, exactly. Algorithms, machine learning etc can help but gen AI doesn't make sense in this context.
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If you strip out the ground, falling off a cliff is fun
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Yep, and there will be another slew of "actually we should talk about how he was right" columns from sensible, hard-headed "realist" columnists who as always completely ignore what climate scientists have been shouting for decades.
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I want to know if you can use it to spell rude words if you turn it upside down.
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Seems a bit lightweight to me. I'd have a lot more respect for him if the drones themselves could do the crushing. Sure, they might make the odd mistake, but anybody in the vicinity of a dumped car is probably dodgy anyway.
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Yep, and there was a nice bollard in Salthill that prevented drivers from mounting the footpath that got hit one too many times and has not reappeared
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The cynic in me says that in Galway it would be twatted a couple of times by drivers and then quietly not replaced
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Nothing worse than a Blur-loving priest.
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Yep, absolutely. That's where the will/courage comes in - telling the truth and outlining what action will entail. Like you say, in a democracy, the rest is up to the people
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Agreed, but I don't think most people think it's *just* political will. But without it, we're screwed because climate delay/inaction has been painted as a moderate political position, and so it's pretty easy to pretend that it's someone else's problem while maintaining a respectable centrist image.
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It seems baked in at so many levels of the system alright. Not much in the way of harm reduction - it often seems that it's mainly about keeping drivers on the road if at all possible.
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Nothing guaranteed to fix something quicker than being pulled away to give updates to people who don't know how stuff works.
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Yep, I've heard that but I experience the opposite, and this is going through the city as well (so not comparing different journeys). My feeling is that when going faster I'm more prominent and keeping up with traffic etc. I think this is could be an advantage with e-bikes as well...
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I notice a big difference in how drivers act when I'm lycra'd up and going fairly quickly vs when I'm in normal (non-avid) clothes and going more slowly on a city bike (second is worse).
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I reckon it's part of a general thing with a lot of media reporting where they don't really understand (non financial) numbers and they much prefer to talk about more abstract "court intrigue"/"vibes" stuff.