Similarly the strange US habit of text on the ground being written bottom to top. I get what they intended, but I don’t get why, then they first saw the effect, they didn’t laugh and realize it didn’t work.

The text on the ground is written bottom up because the bottom is seen earlier in a moving vehicle, making reading it easier when in motion as the 'bottom' word is 'first' to the driver. This is more noticeable in cars that are lower to the ground, and they continue to use it because it does work.

Not all applications need to take vehicle motion into consideration, but they keep it for consistency.

ONLY BUS

I’m so glad someone made this photo. I’m always telling people I should do a photo like this, and now I don’t have to.

start taxing trucks proportional to the wear they cause on public roads. doing so will supplement funding for repairing said roads as well as to encourage rail hauling instead of dangerous hulking vehicles on the same roads we have to commute on.

While this is a nice thought in theory, it breaks down as soon as you start actually thinking of it in practical terms.

• Some rural road that gets a few cars a day at best does not really need sidewalks and certainly does not need bike lanes.
• A road with potholes is more dangerous to pedestrians and bikers due to the potential for cars to lose control, or for drivers to swerve to miss a pothole and potentially endanger other travelers.
• Adding bike lanes and sidewalks is just impractical in a lot of areas. Where is that space coming from, when private property extends to the road edge currently? Are we just declaring eminent domain and taking 3-6 feet of everyone's property frontage for this initiative? I'm sure that will be a very unpopular initiative. What about areas where buildings are too close to the street to allow for this? There's just too many areas where it's not practical or possible to do.

I'm all for phasing out cars in areas where it's reasonable to do so, but your proposal just isn't compatible with reality.

Someone posted this link below and you have the right idea (that bike = less damage = road lasts longer) but you're ever so slightly off with you 2x estimation. Just a smidge out :-D

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth_power_law

The road stress ratio of truck to car is 10,000 to 1.

The road stress ratio of the car to bicycle is 160,000 to 1.

To put it another way. This means that after 160,000 crossings, the bicycle causes as much damage as the car does when driving on the road only once.

A truck, ONE truck, ONE time, is this number of bike crossings (if I mathed it right??): 1,600,000,000?! What even is that number?? It's in the billions!? I mean there might not be that many bike crossings before the heat death of the universe?! And that's just ONE truck, ONCE!?

Conclusion: Roads would last till the ends of time if they were only utilised by bicycles! Even if you only built roads to last ONE year under heavy truck use, under heavy bike use this same road would last 1.6 billion years!? Is this even real?! Am I mathing wrong?!