psvrh

Can we..please just build housing directly? Just, like, build it? Not bribe billionaires, not offer P3 partnerships, just employ people, move dirt and hammer things together?

I'm glad to see this, and as someone who's lived next to a park in a downtown where people are tenting (which, let's be honest, has become a nexus of drug dealing, fencing and low-grade violence), this can't come soon enough.

Alabama Burning

And Danielle Smith. And Francois Legault.

And while we're at it, hopefully this rot won't take root in BC, either.

If these were the kinds of people who also planted a thousand trees a year and are seriously into conservation, I'd believe it, but they usually aren't.

It's like anti-abortion people who run maternal- and children's-welfare agencies and give a ton of money to help orphans, work school-lunch programs, etc. They're about the only ones who are allowed to have that opinion, and they're vanishingly rare, dwarfed by the kind that just a) hate women and/or b) want to vice-signal.

"I think this reminds us that the base of the UCP is host to a pretty substantial group of people who do not believe that climate change is real, or they don’t believe that it is driven by human activity, and they think that any actions taken to transition away from fossil fuels are unnecessary."

Or they're just jerks who know it's real, but don't care and are looking to virtue (vice?) signal their right-wing bona fides.

I'm a road bike guy, so that's probably my ignorance showing. I've sat out the recent evolution in MTB stuff.

Yup, am a Canadian, can confirm.

We stopped building public housing in the 1990s, because we were all told that "the market" would provide. Well, the market provided. For real estate developers and house-traders.

I think we already have that.

Bikes, at least non-electric ones, have an immensely long service life and there's not much margin, and thusly not a whole lot of incentive to deviate from standards unless you're willing write very big cheques to machine a million copies of something custom--and there's not really that much improvement year to year. Manufacturers are trying oh so very hard to balkanize the market, but doing so just increases their costs and allows someone else to come in and make a steel-framed 700c with Shimano whatever-they-call-it-this-week for the same money or less.

We are seeing experimentation, usually in the cargo- and fat-bike markets, as well as at the very high end, but no one's having a ton of success. Even high-end road bikes still use a lot of common components.

Reading the article, it really sounds like 95%+ of the problem is eBikes.

Traditional bikes have this problem, too, but outside of high-end stuff where the OEM is building a bespoke platform, most bikes still use common parts. Every few years, eg, Shimano, comes up with a slightly different bottom bracket, but it's usually a $20 socket, at most.

Heck, I'd hazard it's getting better now that there's fewer weird French or Italian "standards" and everyone is using more or less the same stuff.

But yes, eBikes, that's where the issue really is. A large part of the issue is that every manufacturer wants to reinvent the wheel--sometimes literally--because they feel they need to stand out in the market. No one wants to be just an integrator of whatever Shimano or SRAM are selling that year, albeit with different coats of paint, but when they realize that's where they'll end up, we'll all be the better for it.

Friction shifters work better with more gears, or rather, they're more useful with more gears.

It's comparatively easy to make a derailleur and shifter that can reliable hit seven rear gears, but making a mechanical device that can hit the index on 11 or 12 speeds is not a trivial challenge; to get that to work reliably, in every gear, with a cable that stretches and sticks, is hard to do.

A friction shifter gets rid of the indices and the requirement to adjust stops.

This is also why electronic shifters are a thing: getting the cable and shifter adjusted is finicky with 11 or 12 gears, but the little motor can do it every time, and adjusting the indexes is easy. Now, if it breaks...

Trek is particularly bad about this: they now sell a "platform" instead of a bike. This makes it comparably hard to get replacements for a Domane or CheckPoint because certain parts are sized for that bike and that bike only.

Maybe, oh, just build public housing at scale instead of relying on a patchwork of underfunded and undergoverned agencies and P3 initiatives?