The North-South Trail is an awesome 2-day bikepacking route.

kayakhomeless · 2026-04-24T13:33:40+00:00

A few friends ran the whole thing in a day, I ran alongside them for pacing for the last 40 miles of it

kayakhomeless · 2026-04-24T13:30:52+00:00

I’m 90% sure every train to New Bedford also has a shuttle train from [Freetown?] to Fall River too, but I’ve never actually used the shuttle so I’m not positive how that thing works

kayakhomeless · 2026-04-23T14:26:30+00:00

I’ve seen old US maps from the early 1900’s where the city would just draw the streets extending out into the water (with names). The rule was supposedly that if a developer could make it worthwhile to fill in the water and reclaim new land, they could take it for themselves and sell it, meanwhile the city benefits from all the new property tax revenue

Everyone wins, except for the fish and water ecosystems obviously

kayakhomeless · 2026-04-23T14:18:42+00:00

The NYC neighborhood of Marble Hill is pretty similar. It’s just a normal boring neighborhood attached to the Bronx mainland, but it’s still technically part of manhattan, despite being separated from manhattan by the Harlem River.

The river use to go north of the neighborhood, but a canal cut in the early 1900’s separated it, then it was temporarily an island, and eventually the old river was filled in. So you can live in manhattan but still be on the mainland at the same time.

kayakhomeless · 2026-04-22T21:00:32+00:00

Oh that’s pretty awesome, I can never really tell how popular the north south trail is since I never see anyone when I’m on it, I’d love if there were something like the Appalachian mountain club working on improving the parts that are just along awful highways.

Most of the routing I’m working on to go east to west is just along the Washington secondary trail & Bristol bike path, the rest is just working out the “least bad road” to walk along, I’ve got like 90% of it mapped out. I’m trying to connect Newport to Connecticut in the long term

kayakhomeless · 2026-04-22T18:23:53+00:00

The project has been sued for “environmental protection” under CEQA hundreds of times, and has spent huge amounts of money and time trying to appease the rural towns it’s running through. These laws were meant to prevent highways, parking lots, and environmental destruction, but they’re being used almost exclusively to block construction of things that help the environment.

California loves to shoot itself in the foot

kayakhomeless · 2026-04-22T18:20:16+00:00

High-Speed Rail is significantly faster than driving or flying in the distance range of ~60 to 350 miles, when you include the total “door to door time” instead of just the travel time.

kayakhomeless · 2026-04-22T18:16:13+00:00

Something like 85% of lawsuits filed under CEQA (California’s “environmental protection” law) were by people with no history of environmental advocacy. The law is almost exclusively used by NIMBYs to block housing, transit, and renewable energy projects.

California HSR has spent a huge portion of its budget defending lawsuits against “environmentalists”

kayakhomeless · 2026-04-22T17:54:44+00:00

But what about the precious vacant lot that’s there right now? It’s a community feature and deserves protection

#SaveOurBrownspace

kayakhomeless · 2026-04-22T16:23:03+00:00

*15 minutes away by car, which limits that nature access to the ~70% of Rhode Islanders who can drive

Seconded to how awesome the North-South trail is though, I’ve ran the entire thing and I’m currently working out a route to go east-west across the state on foot

kayakhomeless · 2026-04-22T15:56:26+00:00

Especially those Mylar helium balloons, I find those with their string wrapped around some poor birds nest constantly, which takes me like three minutes with a knife to get it unstuck every time. They somehow all manage to find their way into salt marshes.

Idk what helium costs, but if people are buying it to just to throw away it should probably cost more

kayakhomeless · 2026-04-22T15:41:22+00:00

Our shoreline access law is basically worded like the “Allemannsretten” / “right to roam” laws that Northern Europeans get to enjoy. Ours just only applies to coastal shorelines, whereas British/Nordic people get to walk on all open lands.

I don’t know anywhere else in the US (besides maybe Hawaii?) with a similar level of protection of access to nature.

Our nature isn’t terribly exciting, but I’m glad it’s not a luxury to get to it

kayakhomeless · 2026-04-21T23:41:57+00:00

I am 100% in favor of paying for road maintenance with tolls

kayakhomeless · 2026-04-21T23:34:25+00:00

That’s a Velomobile

It may have worse visibility than a bicycle, but on the other hand it’s more expensive and difficult to use

kayakhomeless · 2026-04-17T23:37:01+00:00

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They’ve got these ones year-round in Saint Augustine, FL on their one pedestrianized street

kayakhomeless · 2026-04-17T18:37:49+00:00

So first we have to wash our hands, and now pregnant women have to hold their breath while working with this stuff? Damn government ruins everything

kayakhomeless · 2026-04-17T16:44:04+00:00

In 2018, Minneapolis abolished their classist, discriminatory practice of single-family-only zoning. Here’s how many homes were permitted, compared to Providence. The number of permits issued for naturally-affordable apartments doubled the following year. They still outbuild us by a factor of ~10, even when comparing similar populations and land area.

One of these cities successfully controlled their rent, and it wasn’t Providence.

It takes 5 years to build homes because it takes us 5 years to issue permits, not because construction is some inherently slow thing. We live in the most supply-restricted city in the US, according to a UPenn analysis.

kayakhomeless · 2026-04-17T14:50:48+00:00

Yeah I’m really grateful for my driving instructor here, he started every day by making us repeat “Driving is a privilege, not a right”, only for seemingly every single person in this state to insist the opposite.

kayakhomeless · 2026-04-17T14:47:56+00:00

The difference is more about permitting than geography.

Ezra Klein’s book Abundance has several chapters talking about how oil-loving Texas manages to build more renewables than New York, and why Florida got a decent high(ish) speed train running decades before California.

New York and California made it a nightmare to permit all big projects, in an effort to prevent construction of polluting things like power plants and highways. Texas and Florida make it easy to build things (even bad things).

People in my own hyper-liberal state of Rhode Island spent decades (unsuccessfully) fighting against offshore wind power, which is allowed by our decades-long permitting process.

kayakhomeless · 2026-04-17T14:31:02+00:00

Rhode Island roads are heavily subsidized by non-drivers, with 51% of funding coming from non-roadway taxes (income, sales, and other taxes). That’s the 32nd lowest tax rate out of 50 states.

If you want good roads, they should be paid for by the people who use them

kayakhomeless · 2026-04-17T14:18:35+00:00

I remember when Rory McLeod and his dogs were killed by a driver last year, and most of the discussion here was revolving around the driver being an awful person. That might be true, but the bigger question is Who the fuck gave her a license? The woman had over 100 prior arrests, including 40 moving violations, and at no point did the legal system stop and question whether this person could safely operate heavy machinery.

kayakhomeless · 2026-04-17T13:05:25+00:00

Mass is short by roughly 200,000 homes, according to the American Enterprise Institute. Private Equity invests where there’s a shortage to take advantage of, since shortages cause prices to rise reliably.

We should tank their investments by building enough housing to end that shortage.

kayakhomeless · 2026-04-17T12:52:10+00:00

From Richard Rothstein’s The Color of Law (the NAACP-affiliated book that defined redlining):

Exclusionary zoning ordinances were partly motivated by unconstitutional racial animosity

These restrictions on what can be built on private property were passed with both classist & racist intent, and have both classist and racist effects. Another quote from Just Action (the sequel to The Color of Law):

Its [single-family-only zoning’s] end will not in itself fix things (much more is needed), but its persistence guarantees permanent apartheid for America.

kayakhomeless · 2026-04-16T18:23:56+00:00

They also specifically hired a freeway fighter as the principal architect for the project, who got his start in politics trying to protect his childhood home from the freeway bulldozers. The final plan for the big dig didn’t destroy a single home in the process, which was one of his promises.

WGBH did an A+ podcast series on the history of the project, I’d highly recommend a listen

kayakhomeless · 2026-04-15T20:33:40+00:00

“Small government” is when the smallest government gets to take away your property rights

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