grue

I'm not the person you asked, nor have I been going around defending Platner, but I have to admit that I don't know what to believe. Between so much bullshit and disinformation floating around in general (especially against progressives/socialists), and remembering what happened to Al Franken in particular, it's all too conveniently-timed and politically-motivated for me to trust the accusations.

I'm not going to go to bat for the guy (especially since it's a moot point now anyway, obviously), but I'm not going to join the character-assassination dogpile either.

Don't get me wrong: traffic engineers aren't out there designing whatever they want with reckless disregard for [driver] safety. In fact, I would say that they're probably more conservative than other types of engineers in terms of following established practices (especially since civil and especially traffic engineering is often more about customizing known-"good" designs to the circumstances of the site, rather than trying to innovate/improve performance the way a mechanical engineer working on a new airplane design might be).

The trouble is, the established practices themselves are wrong and bad in a lot of ways, in particular that they have a very 1950s view of what the goal of the engineer is (moving cars as fast as possible) and don't take enough consideration of the ways that an urban street is very different than a rural highway.

Chuck Marohn of Stong Towns does a very good job of explaining it. He's got a book and long-form videos, but I like citing his "30 days of confessions" playlist of short videos. In particular, as someone working in aviation, you might be interested in "#8 Plane Crash vs. Car Crash", but I recommend watching them all.

Don't order the Moghlai cuisine after midnight.

Nah, better yet just unilaterally appoint a (D) replacement, as laid out in the state constitution. The law "requiring" a special election is unconstitutional.

It's worth noting that the laws the other people are mentioning are just state laws and therefore do not supersede Kentucky's state constitution, which gives Beshear the power to simply appoint a replacement. Including a Democrat, if he wants.

If Gov. Beshear has any balls or patriotism whatsoever, he'll appoint a replacement on August 3 in any circumstance short of McConnell actually being present in the Congress building.

Upvote for something properly dull, for once!

Bleh, I don't want to keep running old software, either. If they're making the newer versions worse then it's time to ditch them for someone who's not doing that.

Don't get me wrong, I've been procrastinating about upgrading for a few weeks, but that isn't the same as staying on the same version for years.

I have no idea if you're joking or serious. I'm hoping the latter, aside from the "lost media" part.

(I have no idea who this person is, but I'm always happy about interesting maker videos.)

I ride on this street fairly often. So let me tell you from direct experience: for Atlanta, this bike infrastructure is actually pretty damn good.

Ironically, the next bike crossing over I-20 further East, at Bill Kennedy Way, has Jersey barriers and urbanists are complaining about them because they're done wrong. GDOT refuses to anchor them into the street properly (claiming bullshit about "maintenance problems" or something), so when cars hit them they get pushed into the multi-use path.

over the past few years, phones have just gotten more hallucinatory with their output images in an attempt to “fix” the photos they’re [taking]

Meanwhile, here I am with my non-stock-firmware and third-party camera app, and I'm not sure I even have access to those fancy computational photography features to begin with.

I wonder what the field of study is called that prepares people for this kind of traffic management/design job and...

Civil engineering, and traffic engineering specifically.

whether is includes average driver/distracted driver/lowest common denominator design considerations.

Sort of, but not really. I'm sure there are some traffic engineers somewhere that do research on distracted driving, and their findings get turned into recommendations about signage placement and such. But I think most engineers actually doing the road design 'assume' drivers are mostly rational actors and are not overtly defensive in their design. Instead, they wait until crash data collected after the fact forces the issue.