I ride a push bike, and had an electric one for a while. I've had my fair share of accidents. The last one was when the local council put in a drain at the bottom of a hill - and then didn't bother to place a proper road mix over it before sealing it with asphalt. Trucks then turned into something that looked more like corrugated iron with 300mm corrugations, which being at the bottom of a hill I hit at about 70km/hour. I lost a lot of skin (I pitched over the handle bars and slid along the bitumen) - but walked away.
That would not have been the outcome had I been on a e-scooter. I've tried an e-scooter when on holidays, found myself effortlessly doing doing 30km/hr, my first thought was "gee this is dangerous". The wheels are tiny, so a small obstacle is going to bring you undone. Your position is all wrong - standing on the thing you are a pole waiting to be vaulted through the air and slammed head first into the road, or possibly skewered by the handle bars on the way down. (Push bikes tend to send you over flying the handle bars which sounds bad but you don't hit the road - you slide along it.)
I'm not at all surprised to see serious accident and death rates and took a sudden surge upwards with the introduction powered scooters. They are inherently far less safe than bikes, yet as you say appear attractive and safe to inexperienced riders. It's a recipe for disaster.
There is a belief, with a number of associated caveats, that "Today's luxury apartment's are tomorrow's affordable housing" [1]. They are one piece of the puzzle, and I don't think it's helpful to block their construction. That said, they aren't the only thing that's necessary for affordable and equitable housing, but I've become less hostile towards the luxury condo/shopping complex projects near me, even if I can neither afford them nor have much interest in living in one.
I hear this a lot in Brooklyn. First, the reality is these units aren't very big (in fact, they are often smaller than cheaper units in Brownstones), so they're not significantly less efficient than "non-luxury" housing. Second, it's not like if the luxury buildings didn't exist the people who live there would just pack up and leave New York. Instead they'd just be moving into that renovated postwar that a lower-income person might have been able to afford.
luxury units can create affordability immediately.
if 100 thousand luxury units suddenly came online at a cost of 1.5M each
Here are a few possible outcomes:
1) 100K people can afford them and decide to move from their current homes into the luxury homes. Homes that were 1.5m get downward pressure. As every level moves up it puts downward pricing pressure on the level below. Luxury housing will impact entry level housing if enough is built.
2) 100K people choose to not buy the new luxury housing
a) the owners go bankrupt and the price of the luxury housing goes down. Then see 1)
b) the owners lower the price of the new luxury housing. then see 1
The point is that any inventory puts downward pricing pressure on existing inventory.
You generally don't see the effect so obviously because the new supply of luxury housing rarely keeps up with demand in hot markets. You can see the impact in flat markets where new housing dries up demand for existing houses such that agents recommend you not buy existing homes in areas that are being actively developed.
Don't forget 3) Foreign oligarch parks questionable money in the entire building and then leaves it unoccuped for a decade in the hopes that he could sell it to another foreign investor at double the price
I wish SF would listen to this way of thinking. I'm no urban development expert, but this seems pretty cut and dry to me. Unfortunately I've seen it being coupled with "trickle down economics"
Personally I would love to move into a more luxury (some call cookie cutter) apartment which would free up my existing dwelling and potentially lower housing costs.
Unfortunately the belief is false, since it is easily demonstrated that an old luxury building has such high HOA fees to account for the increased needs in maintenance and upkeep that it is anything but affordable.
Inevitably the costs for the building's aging infrastructure upkeep will be pushed on its residents, so the costs going forward (aka the esoteric 'tomorrow') are unlikely to down if at all.
Most affordable housing today was once the luxury housing of the past. Since WWII we went from 1 billion people to over 7 and no one could plan for that. The housing crisis is a population crisis.
I see your point. However I don't agree that nobody could plan for the increase in population. They can absolutely plan for that. The failure is in planning modes of housing that nobody in the city wants(single-family detached housing with a 45 minute commute by car), and in blocking the increasing densification of neighborhoods in desirable areas. Because the density and housing type of a district is controlled by government, the zoning lags behind how people actually want to live. That's the source of the housing crisis.
It's shameful that our local governments continue to allow people to block the construction of housing when it's clear how much the NIMBYs contribute to the homelessness and impoverishment of their neighbors.
You have to remember that in the time when suburbs were being created, most people in the city did want to escape it. The white flight was a huge change. And once the whites left cities, cities drove out poor people and put them into Projects. For a while later, in the last century, downtowns were pretty much deserts with the wealthy living in pent houses and everyone else either suburbs or the streets. It is only in the last couple of decades that cities have become able to attract the grand-kids of the suburb generations back to the cities. Largely because that is where profitable work is located. It is a feedback loop.
Also humans don't work well on the larger scale. Nimbys exist because that is the scale human people can operate at. A million seconds is 11 days, a billion seconds is almost 32 years. Maybe IBM could use Watson to figure out the housing crisis. A few less variables there to work with than cancer.
Boston does not require a car. Got rid of my car 10 years ago.
Only problem is that rent is more expensive near the subway. But we have buses and many many international workers and students. Very livable without a car.
Get out of their job for $5k? I agree I may be used to an area with a higher cost of living, but folks don't win $5k on Wheel of Fortune and think "now I can finally pursue my dream of becoming a poet."
I don't use it all the time. It takes extra effort and energy to set up and 'get into' a VR game that sometimes I just don't want to expend. And it's a very singular experience.
HOWEVER, without a doubt it has provided some of the most amazing experiences I've ever had in gaming. Get your VR legs and play through Resident Evil 7 and Skyrim VR and tell me that it's just a gimmick. No way.
And don't forget the chicken-egg problem. People see it as a fad because the majority of games are smaller 'tech-demo' types, but of course very few companies will invest much money in something available to only 5% of the gaming market.
Resident Evil 7 is the exception, and my God is it an amazing experience.
This really comes down to what you expect from the product and what your use case is.
I don't want something to select music for me. I listen to whole albums. I want to be able to search or an album or an artist and listen to one of their albums. Not a playlist that might feature them.
I hated Spotify's UX because it felt like it was hiding all of its music and trying to force me to listen to what it wanted me to hear.
The entire iTunes catalog free for me to listen fits my needs exactly.
