Tab Combs
@drtcombs
Transport-Equity-Resilience Planning academic Venerable Road User & Villagist She/hers. Occasional outbursts about dogs, kids, Davidson hoops, severe weather, & gardening. My opinions are mine. Blocking bots and bot-adjacents
TIL from our local FB that it's kids' fault they keep getting run over by distracted drivers Look at me not replying!
Y'all last night she brought her 4 babies and an elderly possum along to sniff the camera.
I honestly had no clue how much I needed this advice until now Flashback to 2016, watching the kiddo shredding the local trails on her balance bike
Great idea! Here's a photo of one of my host parents in El Salvador, 21 years ago, tootling around their house on a kid's bike.
Hi @chapelhillgov.bsky.social I ask this with love: Why are you leaf blowing? In June? In a drought? With a gas powered leaf blower? Before 8am? It's really loud. And smelly. And not necessary. And also REALLY loud. Did I mention it's loud?
Example of the seepage: the pot at the top of the photo has a big wet ring around it. Its stopper doesn't seal perfectly in the pot. No such ring around the pot at the bottom. Incidentally, this pot's stopper is the one we used for our proof-of-concept testing... #Drought #Gardening
Proof of concept! (pay no mind to the sad cucumber plant in the background. It's fine)
Someone, probably: "But how will you water your garden when @chapelhillgov.bsky.social finally enacts long overdue water restrictions?" Me:
Relatedly, we started using olla pots this year. It's been so dry I've had to fill them almost daily, but they do actually work. We're down 15" of rain already this year and it'll hit 100 degrees tomorrow. And our tiny #garden plot is producing the biggest veggies I've ever seen.
At least we don't have to worry about slugs in the garden this year 🫠 droughtmonitor.unl.edu/CurrentMap/S...
PS. Sometimes when we go back and forth between streets and sidewalks, we get places faster than drivers. Drivers complain about it not because they think we're being unsafe or unlawful, but because we're not stuck in the same traffic they're stuck in.
11. "How TF am I supposed to get across this intersection in one piece? So, yeah. Not only are we permitted to pick, we're forced to do so by a road network that routinely lets us down.
7. trash cans, parked cars, dog shit, 'sidewalk closed' signs left behind for months by utility contractors, construction equipment, piles of leaves, EV charging cords, pedestrians (who have every right to be there), etc.
6. ...they often represent the least lethal path for someone on a bike, esp. if the adjacent road is full of high speed car traffic. But not always. Some stretches of sidewalk are chock full of driveways. Sometimes they're falling apart, or covered in mud, or blocked by all manner of things:
3. This flexibility is critical, because our roads, by and large, are awful for bikes. A teeny tiny fraction of road miles in NC have any sort of recognizable bike facility. On-street bike facilities that do exist rarely provide the level of protection the conditions warrant.
I hung a cucumber beetle sticky trap, caught and stuck a cucumber beetle to it, and then filmed it as it it freed itself. Y'all got any other ideas? These jerks did a number on our #garden last year. #gardening
I confess I was delighted to be delayed by these ducks on my way biking home with (probably now cold) dinner
8/ The myth that congestion is dangerous and must be 'mitigated' costs thousands of lives a year in the US. Yet it's so pervasive that almost no one questions it when an engineer says "widening this road is important to for congestion and safety" as if they are the same problem (they're not).