Sustainable Cities.

Brooklyn, NY
Joined September 2008
Cindy McLaughlin retweeted
This is what it looks like when we light money on fire. Encouraging people to drive to the airport is nothing to be proud of. Bringing more traffic to Queens is an own goal. The AirTrain should be free and should offer a one seat ride.
🚗 Major milestone on the Van Wyck Expressway in Queens, NY! The new HOV lane is OPEN to vehicles with 2+ occupants! Today, NYS announced the completion of major work on the $1.4 billion project that helps reduce congestion and improve airport access. 🔗bit.ly/47D1M2l
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I think something like this could work for “city says we have to make it super dense” sites. IF the blocks are point access I will show a pretty version of this at some point
We have this “beggars can’t be choosers” mentality about development that means we have to accept these “lives like an office park” proposals We can’t have nice things like dense, fine-grained neighborhoods. It’s just too hard, we don’t know how etc
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Cindy McLaughlin retweeted
BREAKING: America’s $1.7 trillion auto loan market is headed for a crash, per Reuters. Auto loans are now one of the biggest sources of household debt, bigger than credit cards. And the strain is showing: 1 in 5 Americans is behind on at least one loan, the highest since 2010, and the average car on the road is now nearly 13 years old, a record.
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Cindy McLaughlin retweeted
So much "pedestrian infrastructure" is actually auto infrastructure in disguise. Even in Manhattan we force pedestrians to climb flights of stairs just to keep car traffic moving uninterrupted on the Harlem River Drive.
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Cindy McLaughlin retweeted
Having a train that takes you directly to the airport is genuinely one of the top 10 things a city can offer. No expensive taxis, no sitting in traffic, no begging someone to drop you off. Just get on the train and arrive at the airport. Every major city should have this.
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This is insane. Cars are not freedom, and they're especially not financial freedom.
BREAKING: A record 21.2% of new-car buyers now pay $1,000 or more a month, up from 19.1% a year ago, per CNBC 69% of them took loans of six years or longer to make it work.
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Cindy McLaughlin retweeted
I still don’t know what they expected to happen tbh
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Costco blade tenderizes its steaks. The label says so, and it's the reason a Costco steak comes with a cooking temperature printed on it. Before the steak hits the case it goes through a machine that pushes rows of thin blades into the meat to cut the muscle fibers, so a Choice steak eats more tender than it would on its own. You can't see the cuts once it's done, except sometimes in the fat on a ribeye. The catch is what rides in on the blades. E. coli lives on the outside of a cut of beef, which is why a rare steak is normally safe. The sear kills what's on the surface and the inside was never exposed. Push that surface into the middle with a blade and rare isn't safe anymore. That's why USDA says a mechanically tenderized steak gets cooked to 145F with a 3 minute rest, the same number as a pork chop, where a steak that wasn't tenderized carries no cooking instruction at all. USDA figures about 11% of the beef sold in the US is mechanically tenderized, and since 2016 the words have to be on the label. Costco started printing them in 2012, after an E. coli outbreak in Canada was traced to its blade tenderized steaks. The ground beef isn't tenderized. If the package in your cart says blade tenderized or mechanically tenderized, cook it through.
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Cindy McLaughlin retweeted
Some highlights from the Tompkins Square Halloween Dog Parade, where even crossing the street becomes an iconic New York City Monument. Which costume was your favorite?
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“The mobility transition’s biggest obstacle isn’t a lack of support, but a misunderstanding of how much support there is. We must stop blindly accepting the loudest voices and focus on what the silent majority wants: a city where the car isn’t the norm, but one of many options.“
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Cindy McLaughlin retweeted
NYC would look even cooler if we had more blocks without on-street parking.
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Would Americans in the 20th century have demolished their urban cores if they had been built of dense, green, walkable, amenity rich, family-friendly courtyard blocks? I had a professor who was obsessed with how weak and pathetic counterfactual are as arguments, so I feel like this is not a strong or important point But I do wonder about it sometimes
The pre-war cities had very attractive buildings But very little urban fabric capable of competing with suburbs for middle income households Because historic American cities failed to balance density and green space In contrast to many European cities, which provide both (and have fared much better)
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Highways concentrate traffic, producing traffic jams and points of conflict where the traffic enters the city – and those points are ALL places with high traffic fatality rates, where suburban and sub-urban drivers in the middle of journeys filled with road rage run people down. Urban grids disperse traffic, and when the streets are properly designed, they civilize traffic, slowing it down making it safe for everyone, and supporting city life.
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🗣️ 'We cannot make our car dominated streets human friendly; we are not 𝗔𝗺𝘀𝘁𝗲𝗿𝗱𝗮𝗺!!1!' Amsterdam wasn't 𝗔𝗺𝘀𝘁𝗲𝗿𝗱𝗮𝗺 either. It took bold, consistent and persistent choices of citizens, policy makers and politicians. Stop making excuses. Start making change.
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Cindy McLaughlin retweeted
Replying to @bookingcom
@bookingcom Your customer service bot glitched and couldn't get past the greeting to solve my flight change. I've now been on hold with your telephone "hotline" for over an hour. I've been booking through you for years, but am now seriously frustrated with your service.
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Cindy McLaughlin retweeted
1907.
"When I left America at that time, I told a New York reporter that Indianapolis was the most beautiful city in America." - Arthur Conan Doyle, absolutely correct.
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Cindy McLaughlin retweeted
@bookingcom a man just picked up the phone, breathed heavily for a few seconds, spoke with an unintelligible accent, asked for my customer number, said, "thank you for using @bookingcom" and hung up.
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Replying to @bookingcom
@bookingcom Your customer service bot glitched and couldn't get past the greeting to solve my flight change. I've now been on hold with your telephone "hotline" for over an hour. I've been booking through you for years, but am now seriously frustrated with your service.
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@bookingcom a man just picked up the phone, breathed heavily for a few seconds, spoke with an unintelligible accent, asked for my customer number, said, "thank you for using @bookingcom" and hung up.
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Cities don't have to expand space to implement better active infrastructure, they simply need to reallocate the space they have away from cars.
Avant / Après Avenue de la Porte Chaumont dans le 19ème arrondissement de Paris. Sans la nouvelle piste cyclable, la famille avec des enfants à vélo aurait sans doute roulé sur le trottoir.
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