This phenomenon consistently happened to my college bus system, but on an even worse scale. The main bus line did a loop around campus, which took ~20 min to complete and buses scheduled every 5 minutes. In reality, you got a caravan of 4 busses arriving every 20 minutes, with the first one totally full and the last practically empty.
When I was a teen in Calgary the transit agency was really good at dealing with issues like this during peak periods. They would pair or triple busses together and alternate stops. If someone requested the stop the drivers would radio to coordinate. Sometimes both buses would have a requested stop, but they would work together so only one bus allowed new riders on. The non-loading bus would quickly drop off passengers and leave while the other stayed behind to handle new riders. Nearly all the stops had dedicated out of traffic space for the bus, so the leap-frog maneuver was really simple. A small amount of low cost infrastructure and some operational cooperation enabled much better service.
That sounds identical to what the Calgary busses do? You'd still need coordination between the busses to know when the loaded bus "wants" the empty one to overtake it.
Why does the loaded bus’ preference matter? If you see a bus stopped ahead of you with the same route number and nobody requested that stop then just continue.
This phenomenon is called "bus bunching". My friends, two profs from Georgia Tech and UChicago, came up with one solution for it. They wrote a paper about their solution[1], and then built a startup that has successfully implemented it at a bunch of places[2].
Looking at the second link, it seems they implement it by having the buses pause at certain points. Does it do that with riders onboard? That seems like it could be a deterioration in experience for those riders that are on the bus pausing.
I guess the reality is, as a passenger, you either wait several minutes on the bus at a stop mid-route. Or you wait much longer at a bus stop in a crowd waiting for four buses to show up.
When possible, they pick "control points" at places where there are usually no passengers on board — for example, the ends of a linear route, or the bus depot.
But otherwise, they have a bunch of optimizations to spread the pauses out so they aren't too jarring. They also display the timer prominently so that riders are aware of what's going on.
In practice, riders seem happy with the tradeoff, since it has resulted in overall lower times to get from point A to point B.
Tesla owner here. If you have the Tesla app installed on your phone, you can "share" addresses from map apps to it and it will auto-sync them to your car. So the workflow is open calendar on your phone, click on location for appointment, open with Tesla app. It's not quite as seamless as android auto, but much better than having to type everything in manually.
This is mostly true, but sometimes the cost of evaluating the condition itself is non-trivial. For example, if a and b are complex objects, even something as trivial as `if (a.equals(b)) ...` might take a relatively long time if the compiler/runtime can't prove a and b won't be modified between calls. In the worst case, a and b only differ in the last field checked by the equality method, and contain giant collections of some sort that must be iterated recursively to check equality.
There is no real difference with a skilled operator but proponents of "the better gear" will tell you otherwise, forgetting that their main problem is in fact their lack of skill.
In the end disc brakes bikes are everywhere for the same reason 2 tons SUV are everywhere. It does not have much to do with real needs or actual real-world performance with skilled operators, sadly...
> But 700x28 is really the maximum tire size you can possibly fit with rim brakes
This is patently false. Mountain bikes have been running tires over twice as wide on rim brakes for decades. I had one growing up in the 90s. Perhaps you mean caliper brakes? Even if so, I currently run 700x28c on my 10yo racing bike, I don't think I'd have any trouble going up a size or two.
This is partly because of history. From the 1980s on the mores in cycling was to use skinny tires. Thus there were no road bikes with cantilever brakes anymore. Up and into the 1980s touring bikes were still available with cantilever brakes.
Between 2015 and 2020 we came back on skinny tires and wanted more than 28mm. This was the same time road cycling moved to disc brakes. Most bikes with rim brakes are still using calipers, cantilevers are not coming back. If you want more than 28mm, you will want disc brakes.
I take it you've never actually cared for small children. One of the most obvious problems they solve is the ability to go outside earshot of the nursery - doesn't matter if the kid cries if you can't hear them! Besides that, kids often cry temporarily and then go back to sleep like 30 seconds later. It's very convenient to be able to detect if that's likely to be the case without having to walk across the house and open their door.
> This is one category of problem that should be solved through legislation, but I doubt that should such laws be passed, that they would be actually enforced against bad actors.
IANAL, but I would think this would be covered by existing false advertising laws, and maybe breach of contract. They advertised a product as coming with features x, y, and z; people paid for those features; and then the company unilaterally disabled those features. So now features x, y, and z no longer work on the product as advertised. I'd be surprised if we don't see class action lawsuits for this.
As a parent of two small kids, I just did an old cell phone running tinycam + generic ip webcam (amcrest makes a bunch of good ones). The dedicated cell phone is mostly for nannies/babysitters, I just have tinycam installed on my own. The only downside is it only works on your local network, but if you really care about that you can setup a home VPN. That last one is beyond the capability of the average consumer though.
If anyone wants this capability, the chrome extension uBlacklist ( https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ublacklist/pncfbmi... ) provides it. I've found it very useful for removing github scraper sites from search results. Whenever you see a garbage result in a google search, you just click "Block this site" and it's gone forever.
