laur⧗

THE FIRST STREAMER TO GIVE A TED TALK THAT’S MAYA HIGA 👏👏

somewhere between idgaf and vomiting from anxiety

Unfortunately, a significant part of Riga’s problem is political There are members of Riga City Council who do not actually live urban lives in Riga. Many of them live outside the city and treat Riga primarily as a place they need to drive into in the morning and escape from in the evening. As a result, their political priority is not the quality of life inside the city, but the fastest possible car commute from the suburbs This is why they consistently resist, delay, or water down projects that would improve cycling and pedestrian infrastructure, calm traffic, make streets safer, or transform dusty urban highways into proper city streets for people. Anything that slightly reduces car dominance is framed as an attack on drivers, even when the goal is simply to make Riga more liveable, safer, cleaner, and more European And the tactics are always the same. The moment a bike lane, a safer crossing, or any traffic-calming measure is proposed, they immediately start appealing to emotion and fear. They bring in the usual car-centric voices from emergency services, who reliably claim that if a bike lane is built here, ambulances will not be able to get through and people will die. Then come the fire trucks that supposedly will no longer be able to pass or turn around. Then come the children who allegedly cannot be driven right up to the school entrance. It is a whole catalogue of cheap emotional arguments What makes it even more absurd is that they completely ignore the fact that the very problems they describe are usually much worse elsewhere — and not because of bike lanes, but because of chaotic car parking, oversized traffic flows, and streets designed only around private vehicles. Ambulances and fire trucks are often blocked not by cyclists or pedestrian crossings, but by parked cars. Yet that part is somehow invisible to them The tragedy is that this keeps the city stuck. Riga is not merely developing slowly — it is visibly falling behind Tallinn and Vilnius. Those cities are already thinking in a much more contemporary European way: streets are public spaces, not just traffic corridors; mobility is not reduced to private cars; and city centres are being shaped around people, not suburban commuting patterns In Riga, however, too many decisions are still made through the logic of the 1990s: wider roads, faster car access, more parking, fewer “obstacles” for through-traffic. The result is a city that remains noisy, dusty, hostile to pedestrians, dangerous for cyclists, and emotionally exhausting to live in What makes this especially bitter is that the problem is not a lack of knowledge. The solutions are obvious. They have been tested across Europe for decades. Riga does not need to invent anything radical — it simply needs to stop sabotaging normal urban progress But as long as the city is governed by people whose main relationship with Riga is driving through it, every serious attempt to make it a better place to live will be treated as an inconvenience

GAY BIRDS BRO

not an early bird, nor a late night owl, but a secret third thing (permanently exhausted duck)

Reed 🦊❤️

happy transgender day of visibility🏳️‍⚧️

trying to find the balance between becoming more politically informed and not killing myself

amber glenn in this dress

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like what

i need her to step on me, preferably w/o the skates but that’s fine too she’s just soooo hot

amber glenn the woman that you are