Local shopping street in the city of Montréal, It's the beginning of the summer here, and more and more streets are being closed to cars every summer (although they're reopened during the cold Canadian winters), the difference in the amount of people there now vs last week when it was still open to cars is absurd.

Since It's the beginning of the summer there was a marching band to celebrate, which was nice.

Businesses set up stands where they sold stuff, offered free samples and stuff like that, and there was also seating and games set out for kids, like a bouncy castle, some (mini) mini-golf courses and a mini skate park.

Just closing the street to cars made the space much nicer, and there were way more people there than when the street was open to cars.

Every few years, a Silicon Valley gig-economy company announces a “disruptive” innovation that looks a whole lot like a bus. Uber rolled out Smart Routes a decade ago, followed a short time later by the Lyft Shuttle of its biggest competitor. Even Elon Musk gave it a try in 2018 with the “urban loop system” that never quite materialized beyond the Vegas Strip. And does anyone remember Chariot?

Now it’s Uber’s turn again. The ride-hailing company recently announced Route Share, in which shuttles will travel dozens of fixed routes, with fixed stops, picking up passengers and dropping them off at fixed times. Amid the inevitable jokes about Silicon Valley once again discovering buses are serious questions about what this will mean for struggling transit systems, air quality, and congestion.

Five years ago, the Union of Concerned Scientists released a report that found ride-share services emit 69 percent mo

re planet-warming carbon dioxide and other pollutants than the trips they displace — largely because as many as 40 percent of the miles traveled by Uber and Lyft drivers are driven without a passenger, something called “deadheading.” That climate disadvantage decreases with pooled services like UberX Share — but it’s still not much greener than owning and driving a vehicle, the report noted, unless the car is electric.

Khosrowshahi insists Uber is “in competition with personal car ownership,” not public transportation. “Public transport is a teammate,” he told The Verge. But a study released last year by the University of California, Davis found that in three California cities, **over half of all ride-hailing trips didn’t replace personal cars, they replaced more sustainable modes of getting around, like walking, public transportation, and bicycling. **

https://archive.ph/xcnRy

This was a Critical Mass event, which is why the bicyclists are taking up all of the street as a way to reclaim the streets and protest the lack of safety for riders under usual conditions. It's not legal, but protests are never useful if they're fully legal now, are they.

"This isn't a step backward. It's a step toward doing things more inclusively"

Source: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/nova-scotia/andy-fillmore-motion-temporarily-pause-bike-lanes-1.7554700

Not the first time this has happened either, here's another similar case in Atlanta: https://abcnews.go.com/US/mother-boy-killed-hit-run-driver-probation-community/story?id=14158040

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ca/post/45504300

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.bestiver.se/post/424410

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The grieving parents of a 7-year-old child who died hours after being hit by a car were charged with involuntary manslaughter after allowing him and his brother, 10, to walk home unaccompanied by an adult from a nearby grocery store.

According to the L.A. Police Department, the incident occurred at the end of the school day during pick up at the rear of the campus, when the driver of a green 2025 Rivian SUV reportedly struck a 15-year-old boy as he was walking in between vehicles.

The boy was pinned and possibly crushed between the Rivian and a smaller, white SUV, officials said. LAFD paramedics rushed him, along with his uninjured father who witnessed the terrible accident, to the hospital where he succumbed to his injuries and was pronounced deceased.