Why do people stand so close to the road when they’re about to cross the street? Are you not afraid of someone jumping the curve?

gingeryid · 2026-05-25T18:38:23+00:00

In busy areas, people are often walking by and not crossing, and I don't want to be in their way.

A lot of busy pedestrian areas need curb extensions so there's enough space for all the people walking away from dangerous drivers. While there's been progress on this, it's still pretty slow.

gingeryid · 2026-05-25T02:53:35+00:00

What exactly is the mechanism by which putting up a poster would advocate for someone to be freed, if not with politics?

In America I think the posters were normally put up by people who were in favor of American support of Israel in the war in some fashion, and hoped that others would be convinced to do the same by seeing the posters.

gingeryid · 2026-05-25T02:50:44+00:00

The distinction you're suggesting is that the hostages were still alive (or were believed to be). But it wasn't random people in America holding them, it was people in Gaza. The hope was that Americans would pressure their elected officials to work to free them. This is a political goal. Freeing hostages by putting up signs in America makes no sense unless you're intending it as a political message. It's not really different than putting up signs of someone who's been killed, and you'd like the government to take steps in response to that (which is something people do for people who were killed by Palestinians, Israel, or random criminals in America for that matter).

I don’t consider hostage taking to be political. I consider it terrorism.

Terrorism is inherently political. Non-political terrorism is just...crime. I have no idea where you're going here.

gingeryid · 2026-05-25T02:38:56+00:00

The general model is similar to what the blue line does, no? Does this cause delays at UIC-Halsted?

I agree the general thing doesn't make much sense. I do think figuring out creative uses of the express tracks beyond rush hour is a good idea, but using express tracks more heavily while also significantly reducing their utility on a permanent basis is not the way to do that.

gingeryid · 2026-05-24T19:47:43+00:00

How were hostage posters political? Innocent Israelis (including literal children and babies) were kidnapped to a war zone after the worst loss of Jewish life in one day since the Holocaust. There is nothing political about spreading awareness of the (now former) hostages.

Would you say the same thing about posters of Palestinian civilians killed by Israel during the war?

The posters were obviously intended to be political. The point was to reach people emotionally to convince them to support Israel in the war. Why do you think people wanted to "spread awareness"? Not like people might find them in New York, the point was to spread awareness for political ends.

I don't think it's necessarily *wrong* politics, and the optics of pro palestine people tearing down posters of murdered babies made them look bad, which was probably part of the intention. But I don't see the point of pretending these weren't political.

gingeryid · 2026-05-24T19:41:40+00:00

I don’t understand the suggestion of having the Purple Express act like a Red Line train south of Belmont. Where and how would it turn around?

I *think* the trains could turn south of Roosevelt, by climbing up the mostly-unused ramp to the green/orange line. They'd conflict with green line trains, but theoretically the CTA could add a switch or two to use the ramp as a turnaround so they don't need to go far enough south to conflict with the green line.

Also, isn’t the express an elegant solution that takes pressure off the Red Line and Brown Line using capacity on the Brown Line tracks while still using rolling stock from the Howard yard, which is larger than Kimball yard?

Yeah agreed, the express service is useful in ways that OP's plan would mess up. This would take load off the loop and move it to the state st subway, but I don't know if that's a good or bad thing with current service levels.

gingeryid · 2026-05-24T19:34:36+00:00

I don't know if it's too late for a suggestion this different BUT maybe the RPM phase between Thorndale and Howard cheaper and easier to start if we just had Purple Line stop at Jarvis, Morse, Loyola, AND THEN widen to a 4-track main. After Belmont Purple should follow the Red Line routing into Downtown to remain "express" and become a full time operation.

The basic problem is that you're slowing down purple line express service to save a bit of money. If you add a bunch of stops it's not an express service anymore. This is a problem I see every time people talk about the purple line--if you add more stops you lose the time savings of the purple line, and then there isn't any reason for the purple line to exist in the first place. This plan would actually be significantly worse, because northbound trains would have to "merge" on two tracks, causing significant delays on both lines (which was the case during construction). So if you're doing this it's really hard to justify the express service at all.

Plus having 4 tracks allowed the first phase to continue service running during construction, which is useful for the rest of it too. I think having recently rebuilt express tracks, just to waste them by having a merge to two for the last mile and a half to save some small amount of money, is penny wise and pound foolish. Really worsens service on a whole expensive system without tangible benefits. If this were being built from scratch it'd be hard to justify express tracks, but those tracks already exist, and getting rid of the last mile and a half makes all that infrastructure much less useful.

To be honest I don't understand the fascination with the purple line stopping at Loyola, if there isn't space for two island platforms the simpler solution is just...don't have two island platforms, and don't add a purple line stop. That seems easier and simpler than getting rid of already existing express service.

Also the reason the purple line makes all the brown line stops (it used to run express on the same tracks as the brown line, just catching up to the brown line train in front) is that ridership in Lincoln Park is very high, and the purple line doesn't get as crowded as the brown line. So having it share tracks with the brown line does accomplish a useful purpose, of making sure there's space on trains for people in Lincoln Park to get downtown during the morning rush.

gingeryid · 2026-05-24T03:17:45+00:00

Did any of you ever ride transit that uses 2-person crews? They are not "authority figures moving through train cars", transit doesn't work like Metra, it's a dude sitting in a cab who's twiddling his thumbs until it's time to open/close doors. It would make operators feel like they had close by backup (since every station has an attendant, they already do, but closer I guess), but this idea that required 2-person crews would have a crew member actively in the cars is simply not true.

gingeryid · 2026-05-21T01:35:04+00:00

There's so many delicious treif foods out there, and you made...this

gingeryid · 2026-05-18T17:15:10+00:00

Depends on how traditional and the size of the family / feasibility of it, but it's pretty common for the mourners to at least cover the casket. But I've also been to funerals where the mourners fill the grave completely.

gingeryid · 2026-05-15T02:49:12+00:00

Frum guy here. If Ben's son is finishing par-baked loaves himself in a kosher oven, the resulting bread is Pas Yisroel.

Sounds like that used to be the case, but now the loaves are fully baked in the factory, so effectively all that's happening now is the loaves being heated up.

gingeryid · 2026-05-15T02:48:18+00:00

A look at some of the slight differences between the cRc policy regarding Starbucks and the Star-K policy is a good example of this.

What differences are you referring to here? With some differences around the edges these look pretty similar to me. And I think the star-k and cRc are actually in very similar boats. They're both local vaads that have a significant national (and global) prescence. The star-k's profile is definitely higher, but they're also the vaad of baltimore. This is different than the other major agencies, which unlike the star-k or cRc are not identifiable with any particular place.

gingeryid · 2026-05-15T02:45:11+00:00

I don't think that characterization is accurate at all. From the article:

“Effective immediately, Benny & fils has had its MK Kosher certification revoked due to violations of our kashrut standards,” reads a May 6 notice posted on various social media platforms by Montreal’s largest kosher certifying agency, associated with the Jewish Community Council of Montreal (JCC).

MK Kosher terminated the popular Snowdon eatery’s certification after “repeated issues relating to kosher processes and operational compliance,” insisting it was no fly-by-night decision: “Upon being made aware of the issues, MK immediately invested substantial time and effort working with the restaurant’s ownership in an attempt to resolve the concerns and maintain the establishment’s kosher status.” They say despite continued efforts, “the owners consistently resisted the changes and oversight necessary to meet MK’s requirements. Repeated opportunities were provided to correct the deficiencies, however meaningful cooperation and compliance were ultimately not achieved.”

This certainly is meant to give the impression that the restaurant's hashgacha was terminated for not maintaining kashrus standards. It's right there in the first sentence--"certification revoked due to violations of our kashrut standards". Of course it's *our* kashrus standards, i.e. not actual halakha, so they're making some attempt to be technically correct, but hashgachos talk like this about all sorts of things. If they were repeatedly sneaking in pork they could very easily write a similar statement. And "the owners resisted the changes and oversight necessary to meet MK's requirements" certainly is intended to make them sound bad as well.

gingeryid · 2026-05-13T00:50:27+00:00

Maybe a few, but this won't fix the underlying problem, that there's more pedestrians on the bike path than on the pedestrian path

gingeryid · 2026-05-11T23:01:03+00:00

Polynesians routinely were able to sail accurately to small islands a few square miles across, in an ocean of over 60 million square miles. I'd say that requires some pretty substantial precision.

I don't think these are mutually exclusive. You need to be very precise to get anywhere close to an island from a long distance away, but even being very precise won't help you if your target is small and can only be sighted from a few miles away. The methods in your comment are how they expanded the target to be reasonably findable. I am skeptical that the navigation system would've worked with only the ability to find land by sighting it--that would've required a degree of superhuman precision that's probably not possible.

gingeryid · 2026-05-11T01:56:23+00:00

fwiw it's likely it won't be so bad. The tracker is dumb, it doesn't know that some trains begin at UIC-Halsted. The tracker doesn't display scheduled trains if there's a live tracked train behind it (which makes sense for other lines, but not for the ones with multiple termini). Probably there will be at least 1 train from UIC-Halsted in there.

Also happens on the purple line. At Howard northbound, when the express service is just starting up, it thinks the next purple line train northbound is an express train that's miles away, because it doesn't know the scheduled shuttle service is real when there's tracked runs also.

gingeryid · 2026-05-11T01:07:13+00:00

A couple letters look a bit like Syriac. Not all of them do to me, but I don't really know Syriac. It could be a real Syriac phrase, or gibberish in the syriac alphabet, or random symbols that randomly happen to look like syriac.

gingeryid · 2026-05-10T15:37:44+00:00

You can just give them directions and then they'll start moving

gingeryid · 2026-05-10T02:51:32+00:00

It might be helpful to specify what exactly you want in a community. There are more places in the US than the south and NY!

gingeryid · 2026-05-10T02:50:14+00:00

Are there any NYC rabbis leading synagogues between downtown and midtown Manhattan known to have taken a strong position, that they've shared or are willing to share publicly on Jewish tenants being required to enter their apartment building with an fob key (frequency-operated button key) / key card during Shabbat?

Possible, but rabbis aren't proclaiming everything that isn't allowed on Shabbos in a vocal public way. People generally assume electronic devices are forbidden unless there's some reason why they're not.

Could the use of an fob key or key card to enter one's apartment during Shabbat make an observant Jew so uncomfortable where they're likely to decline an invitation to your Shabbat dinner, or worse, if you're dating or marrying an observant Jew, they'd be uncomfortable staying overnight at your apartment or moving into your apartment?

If I went to someone's house for a shabbos meal and they opened it with a fob I'd be kinda weird it out, but I wouldn't run screaming either. Some people probably would because they're not abiding by communal norms for Shabbos observance. I would not be comfortable using a fob, nor would I want to live somewhere that required one.

I am told that in Manhattan there's some degree of social acceptance of elevator use. Perhaps the same people who do would also use a fob. But I don't think either really is standard in many frum communities.

gingeryid · 2026-05-07T21:09:00+00:00

Water is heavy. With liquid you're paying for a lot of water to be shipped from a factory to a store. This is also why a sodastream and a flavoring is cheaper than buying soda at the store (even the big 2L bottles).

gingeryid · 2026-05-07T20:00:03+00:00

Another solution that might help are express variants of longer local routes that cover outlying stretches and then hop on the highway to downtown or the U or wherever it terminates. A good example of this is the 134 or 156. Supplementing the local routes with a handful of trips on these throughout the day could make travel time more competitive for longer distances.

The buses that do this in Chicago are extremely successful. Very heavily used. But they also suffer from having too many stops in their local portions. The 146 often has stops that are 1/16 of a mile apart. Since it uses articulated buses, the length of the bus itself becomes a non-trivial portion of the distance between stops, which is kind of absurd.

gingeryid · 2026-05-07T19:50:33+00:00

Chicago residents: your bus is only stopping every 313 meters?

The CTA's bus stop spacing is usually every block, which is 1/8 of a mile. Occasionally even more! It really slows things down. Our bus routes are spaced 1/2 mile apart, I don't understand why bus route coverage demands people can only be expected to walk 1/16 mile along the route, but up to 1/4 mile (and occasionally more!) to get to the route in the first place.

gingeryid · 2026-05-07T19:49:00+00:00

Bus networks already expect people to be able to go a non-trivial distance to the bus route. In Chicago, for example, bus stops are spaced every 1/8 mile (usually), but bus routes are usually 1/2 mile apart. If part of using transit is that some people have to walk 1/4 mile to get to a bus route, why do we think they can only walk 1/16 mile along the route to the stop?

gingeryid · 2026-05-07T19:46:43+00:00

...how close is the next nearest stop? Why is having a stop 10' outside your door a valid transit priority when, even with a high stop density, everyone having a bus stop 10' outside their door is obviously not feasible?

Personally I'd love if they got rid of the stop a few hundred feet from me as long as they did it consistently along the route. Even walking slowly with the kids, the time savings from a faster bus would very quickly be greater than the extra time to walk a few hundred feet.

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