It’s quite a theoretical approach. Antwerp has a lot of 30 kmh streets, but you shouldn’t expect cars to actually follow the rules in many of them. Same with many bicycle streets: it’s not allowed, but you’ll be overtaken A LOT by cars in those streets…

I only once encountered it in Czechia near Plzen with 2 lanes. Think it took me 5 minutes before I could/dared. Can’t imagine it with 3. Crazy dangerous situation. Stay safe!

Tho not preferable, there’s cases where it can work. The roundabout layout still provides a better (easier) entry to the crossroads, the traffic lights can create a “cadence”. Technically not a roundabout anymore, it does use some of it’s qualities.

Anyhow, pedestrian crossings on 2 lanes right before any kind of intersection without any lights is way more dangerous than a roundabout with lights.

Pedestrian crossing without traffic lights at a 2 lane roundabout entry? That’s just murderous design.

That’s happening in Paris. Some other cities are moving in right direction too, some installing new trams from zero etc. Most bigger cities have subways. But you should try visiting rural France without a car… Not a butcher or a bakery left for many kilometers/villages around, only big roadside Malls with an enormous supermarket and some fake little “shops” at the entrance. Many rural villages are dead and without a car you’re screwed big time. This is where the Gilet Jaunes came from.

War sucks. Drones are really messed up, everyone permanently watched, day and night nowhere to hide, every lawnmower-sound in the distance might be the last you ever hear. And it’s not even autonomous swarm drones yet…

Imo this is really very very unlikely to happen unless they completely rebuild Köln Hbf or send the Eurostar to another Köln station and rebuild that one entirely or close it off to pretty much all other trains. You need room to accommodate hundreds of people for multiple hours, like in an airport terminal, in=in, so you need separate toilets, shops & restaurants and so on, +room to accommodate controlling personnel and their equipment too. It would cost many tens of millions if not more then a hundred million euros.

Köln platforms are barely large enough to accommodate people for regular ICE without border control stuff. Even after big investments it would probably mean more half full trains, just like on the London -Amsterdam, the passenger limit being the terminal size, not the trains.

They pick it up, but it takes a while, days or weeks depending on where you dump it. Meanwhile the trash in the streets attracts rodents and vermin. Old electronics end up in the environment, batteries can leak etc.

I get the smell part. I’ve “dumped” an opened empty can of fish sometimes, because SO can’t stand the smell of it so it can’t wait until trash pick-up day. I dumped it IN A TRASHBIN at a busstop, not randomly on the ground between houses, soccer clubs and parks… that’s just disgusting. The trashbin at a busstop is emptied very regularly and a lot less accessible to most rodents and vermin, yet a lot more accessible to trash collection service from the city. My inconvenience (bad smell) is so not enough to justify just dumping trash anywhere without any care at all.

As for the part “they get paid”: it costs a city a lot more to keep streets clean when everyone dumps everything everywhere, than to pay for arranged pick-ups. Everyone including you ends up paying the bill anyhow through taxes and/or less service from city in general because budget’s too tight.

Housing is definitely very very expensive in Basel too. But a bit less problematic because of border spillover into Lörrach, Saint-Louis, …

These kinds of people are why we can’t have nice things like public barbecues and toilets in city parks and it makes me sad.

But WHY don’t they care? They were clearly people who themselves like to have clean new clothes, the car was neatly washed et cetera. They like cleanliness for themselves. Why burden others with your trash when the effort to legally and correctly throw it out seems to me barely any more effort than the effort they put in! For the thrill of it?

when you’re in this situation, i can try to understand, tho i luckily have never experienced this. It sucks and I hope you’re better now. But these people i’m ranting about were clearly by far not poor or homeless or socially or economically on the fringes of society, that’s the part I find very hard to understand.

when i finally thought about taking out the phone camera, it was too late, driving away, license plate is unreadable in the picture. Will try to remember to make pictures sooner if I see someone doing stuff like this again

you make a ring with your thumb + index finger and move up and down

yes i thought about that too late… should have done that indeed

It’s free for broken electronics too! Trash it… where it belongs.

It is FREE to give old electronic devices at recycling plant. They drove into a little dead-end corner they thought was a “good dumping spot”. They had not from this city license plates. Chances are they researched a good spot on maps before driving there. It would have cost them not more effort to drive to the recycling plant and give the vacuum cleaner for free. The recycling plant is literally just a 4 minute drive away from where they dumped it.

Best podcast app I’ve ever used.

I would only switch to another app if that could remove the ads from downloaded podcasts :')

To be fair, Swiss never gave up on general conscription, got strong army and will forever remain somewhat weary of all of their neighbours, neighbours who have all blobbed out at least once before in history, except Liechtenstein :')

That’s the biggest fuck up off it all. Just holding Crimea was enough for it to be impossible for Ukraine to join NATO, as there may be no disputed territories and they would have never given it up formally.

Putin should’ve backed out and regrouped a lot better and more carefully after his full scale invasion failed miserably. It’s been a nonsense keep going out of principle war for years now and the biggest loser is Russia (it’s hard to even calculate the impact of a lost generation of young men + loss of influence world wide because of how crappy weapons systems turn out to be in real war instead of demonstrations.

Meanwhile there’s an enormous diaspora of Ukrainians growing in many western European countries now and they became de facto part of the club a lot stronger and faster than anyone could have ever imagined before 2022.