They should just make it one lane and allow street parking. It would make driving on it a little slower and a lot less white knuckle and people who want to drive somewhere before exercising instead of, I dunno, just exercising on the way, can do that.

I think anytime you get committees involved you're going to end up with blandness. Better to bore everyone than anger anyone.

Why is that preferential treatment? It's just letting them keep the parking availability associated with the density of their neighborhoods before someone decided to build apartment buildings after 150 years of nothing but rowhouses. Besides, parking is always the issue that makes people fight development, so take that off the table and it will be way easier to turn rowhouse neignhoods into higher density. Again, if it's really true that apartments don't attract car owners this will be win win for everyone.

I didn't say force developers to build parking I said don't let the residents of new developments park on the street.

I just told you how to change them. If you want to build up density to create a car-free utopia then ban the residents of new buildings from parking on the street or make their parking permits reflect the actual value of parking. It's really that simple. I always see urbanists insisting apartment buildings don't need on-site parking because everybody will take the bus or ride their bikes. If that's really true, then why are they allowed to get parking permits?

Either that or occasionally let them murder someone with no consequences. I mean that could be a nice perk for some people.

Yeah, it's bizarre to do that in South Philly. I did occasionally drive to work when I lived in Kensington because it was ten minutes vs. 40 by bus. But that's just because the bus route was so stupid.

Only time I bought a late model car I immediately hit a poll by accident but honestly it was a real load off my mind. I sold it anyway though and bought something cheaper. I'm 43 and other than that one time I've never paid more than $4500 for a car. And the only reason I've owned six cars is because one just smelled too bad, one got stolen and one was deemed by my wife to be too dangerous to transport a child in. I've only actually junked one car and it was just because I was too lazy to fix it.

No way in hell would I own a car worth more than $5,000 in the city. All my cars have been pre-dented. Happiest I have ever been with a car was when I bought a Ford Escort that had been sideswiped. I didn't fix it, just enjoyed having a $1200 car that had already been totalled and was still drivable.

Sure, people live in a neighborhood all their lives then some yuppies discover it and they have to move? Why not just ban new apartment residents from parking? If density is so great and nobody needs a car then people will be lining up to live in apartment buildings that do not come with the option to park on the street. And no, reverse commuting is impossible in most cases because there's no transit near the office parks. Hell just getting between neighborhoods in Philly without going through Center City is a pain in the ass.

Yes but if you keep allowing more people into the neighborhood with cars it becomes impossible to ever find a spot. I'm all for increasing density, but out of fairness to the people who already live there, there has to be some way to make sure that new apartments without parking don't bring more cars to the area. I mean people always say "the location has great transit, it doesn't need parking" but if that's true, don't let people who move there have parking permits.

Not anymore. I worked in communications for a nonprofit that had programs for foster youth so I used to interview them and I had some other interactions here and there. Not gangbangers or anything, just kids with really rough lives. They know right from wrong like anybody else but they tend to have a lot of trauma and self regulation issues and just do so much ridiculously stupid stuff that messes up their lives as a result. I don't know the answer here, but community mediators has generally been the most successful at reducing violence but it's hard to scale and easy to cut when the budget is tight. It also works best when the police make an effort to keep the same cops on the same beats and building relationships, but we know how hard that is.

Honda uses the same bolt pattern on most cars year after year and a lot of other parts are interchangeable between years and models which is part of why they became tuner favorites in the first place.

Never buy a Honda if you live in the city! I've seen them on blocks with the doors removed which begs the question as to why you wouldn't just bring a flatbed and take the whole thing.

I'm not a lawyer but it's not as if the defense can drag things out indefinitely so at some point there's a judge forcing a case to trial, right? So it's really a matter of degree. Under our laws the defense in this case has every right to mount a case that considers things like intent, premeditation, whether a murder was the product of another crime, etc. I simply don't think that's how it should be.

There shouldn't be degrees of murder. If a person is dead because of your intentional actions that could reasonably be expected to cause death, it's murder, period, not manslaughter, second degree murder, etc. Now I admit that would strike many people as unfair and my own instinct is to agree. "But he didn't mean to kill him, just rough him up. Who knew he had a heart condition?" However, it's much closer to how non-western societies view things and I've come to believe that's a better view.

Tesla was there first but the legacy carmakers are catching up quickly. They're like Netflix - huge stock valuation based on the idea that being the first big disrupter matters when the barriers to entry aren't that high.

There's nothing special about Tesla when Hyundai and Volkswagen are already making electric cars that are as good or better and others are not far behind. These companies already have the capacity, the engineering staff, etc. and they aren't run by sociopath dude bros. Tesla's real value is a fifth of its current market cap at best and most of that is the energy side. That's why I expect them to eventually sell the vehicle side to the Chinese.

I doubt they'll ever make a high volume low cost compact vehicle. There's no money in it which is why so many companies have left that segment. Tesla is never going to anything but a niche player that a lot of people lost a lot of money betting on. When it all comes crashing down it will end up being a Chinese brand.

Electric vehicles should be reliable and cheap to maintain but in practice they're regularly in the shop. I'm sure this will stop being a problem at some point but it's just weird.

Maybe if all the jobs weren't in the suburbs.

Because a lot of people need cars because commuting to anywhere but Center City by SEPTA is very difficult. They live in houses without parking in neighborhoods with no paid parking lots and know what an apartment without parking is going to result in a lot of new residents who also have cars. You could, of course, solve that problem with permit parking that residents of the apartments can never be eligible for. That's not something we do but we totally could. A less draconian idea would be to grandfather in current residents or even houses to the current ridiculously cheap permits and make any new ones or ones associated with new apartments significantly more expensive.

That's a really handsome building and very well suited to the location. If only one could say the same of so many other projects that are hideous, gray and completely out of scale with their surroundings.

So I'll give you the answer poor Black teens have given me. Some of them just want to live fast, die young and leave a good looking corpse but most of them don't want to live this way but they have no choice. If everybody has a gun you need one too. If turning the other cheek marks you as weak and invites further transgression you have to fight back to survive. If you can't trust the cops to enforce the law when someone steals from you or assaults someone you care about, you take the law into your own hands.

It's an endless cycle of violence and retribution that often spans generations. The kid holding the gun has usually lost a father, uncle, cousin or brother to gun violence and the kid he's pointing out at has too.

Yeah but we won't. There's absolutely nothing Philadelphia can do to reduce availability of guns. Thanks to SCOTUS there's not much any state or local government can do and even Congress' hands are tied. So, gotta think of what we can do which is to get these kids to stop shooting each other over stupid shit. Hell at this point just give them shooting classes so they can actually hit their targets without spraying the whole block in bullets.

That's only if you think it's appropriate to build a defense case on mitigating factors and all that other stuff common in western legal and moral arguments. Personally, I think that's irrelevant. Either you committed the crime or you didn't. It doesn't even matter if it was premeditated, a crime of passion or an unintentional yet inevitable outcome of reckless behavior. That's why I also think the punishment for attempted murder and murder should be the same. Why should you get a lower sentence for shooting someone just because you missed a major artery? Why should a drunk driver who hits a telephone pole get a lighter sentence than one who hits a person?

Our system is one in which you are innocent until proven guilty. The purpose of bail is to ensure the accused show up for their trials, not ensure pretrial detention. If the accused is deemed too dangerous to release on bail, then no bail of any amount should be offered.

The real scandal here is how long these cases take. The constitution calls for a speedy trial. These kids are on video killing a man. There's no need to spend months putting together a case when you have incontrovertible proof of guilt. These kids should be convicted already.