Most phones has gone this way as a marketing ploy for waterproofing or water resistance. When was the last time you dropped you're phone I'm the toilet or urinal?
I do have a feeling its more of a cash grab in having to purchase a new phone once your battery kicks the bucket.
Yup with inflation the $60 would be somewhere between $80-85 dollars equivalent in buying power.
So its technically cheaper. $60 today is $40-45, 14 years ago.
To get to a 15min city in North American towns and cities we need to have a deeper look at city zoning.
We need more mixed neighbourhoods, and we need to get away from large suburban sprawl that has no transite options within the development.
Current suburban areas need to start looking at adding "missing middle" housing between the large swaths of single family homes. (Missingle middle housing is low rise housing generaly no taller the 5-6 floors and no larger then a single family home plot of land). We need train stations, trams and subways to run inside, and underneath these types of developments.
We need to look deeply into roadway classifications. We need to stop designing every single roadway as a "strode" with hwy specifications. We need to clearly have a different design for hwys/roadways/roads/streets. We need low density and traffic calmed streets where people congregation, we need city streets that are closed to traffic during certain hours or months.
We need to look at the implementation of pedestrian greenways, these are walkways that don't run next to a road and are usually green and enjoyable to walk or cycle along. We need better and wider sidewalks with clear buffer zones from higher traffic roads. We need sidewalks that don't have utility polls right in the cemter.
The addition of pedestrian crossways needs to implement. These are pedestrian crossing areas that are located between intersections. These crossways need to be built with a "pedestrian first priority". Automobile traffic needs to understand to slow down and stop fully till a pedestrians makes it fully to the other side, only then can the automobile proceed.
All signalised traffic intersections need to be set to no right turns on a red, and all left turns need to be signalised. Pedestrian signals need to be to a "advanced start", and automobile traffic needs to be educated to allow a pedestrian to cross fully to the other side before proceddding. Roundabouts need to become second nature in city planing and implemented as much as possible (these are cheaper and safer then signalised intersections).
Any city or town can become walkable, the problem is that a walkable city and a "enjoyable city" are two different things.
The trouble really is that in North America we have become so accustomed to our infrastructure that we fail to see the shortcomings of our designs. We all treat it as normal to live in a suburban area and have to drive 40min to get to the closest Walmart to pickup two things, or to drop the kids of at school with the car when its only 10min for them to walk.
Edit: If you think your city is "walkable", but it looks like the pictures within this website link below then its on the really low end.
https://www.boredpanda.com/unwalkable-city-pedestrians-the-happy-urbanist/
Was the tittle not "Groundhog Day Reloaded"?
To quote a line from Interstellar.
“We can care deeply - selflessly - about those we know, but that empathy rarely extends beyond our line of sight.” -Dr. Mann.
Literally no one asked for this.
The American dream!
Didn't I pay for the OS?
Amazing, I love the cobblestone streets and simple implementation of the loading platform to make it barrier free. (Guessing there is a small ramp not shown to the side for wheelchair access). The whole street also has a "pedestrian focused" feel to it at a human scale.
I wish in North America we could get our shit together and start turning our strodes into actual community focused streets. Instead every place in north America looks like this. With giant seas of parking lots everywhere.
Great video to watch about road design. Link below.
What are Stroads https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ORzNZUeUHAM
I feel we really forgot how to design proper high-speed roads in north America and at the same time killed what was classified as a local street.
A common argument in north America is that everything is far apart, so we need cars, but we need to make everything far apart because we need parking lots for our cars. Thus everything is far apart.
This video here explains one of the issues one minute in. Definitely worth a watch.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fh4H9qZ-_6Y&t=55
The way car companies are working around this legislation is why it's so hard to find and buy smaller sized cars (like smart cars) even if there is demand. It also makes our community less safe for pedestrian traffic.
Was not one a convicted criminal? Wondering when the jail time kicks in though?