[PLUG-TALK] [PLUG] Trimet schedule script

Keith Lofstrom keithl at gate.kl-ic.com
Tue Jul 7 21:54:05 UTC 2015


On Mon, Jul 06, 2015 at 10:54:31PM -0700, Russell Johnson wrote:
> So, personal modes of transport (which have been around for
> thousands of years. the automobile is just the latest
> incarnation) will go away?

At least three people have interpreted my offering of a script
to easily download trimet schedules as an attack on automobiles.

PAY ATTENTION.  PAY ATTENTION.  PAY ATTENTION.  PAY ATTENTION. 

Making something easier (downloading publically available 
documents to a folder with a single customizable shell script)
is NOT AN ATTACK on your preferred means of transport.  If I
wanted to do that, I would use an awl to poke a small hole in
your radiator hose so that it leaks coolant under pressure and
your engine melts.  Perhaps someday anti-car fanatics will make
a habit of that, but that would be wrong, wrong, wrong, like
the anti-bicycle fanatics who slash or let the air of my
bicycle tires or smear gunk on the seat, or the idiot vandals
who smash bottles in the street to puncture everyone's tires.

I use cars, rideshare, bicycles, shoes, hiking boots, buses,
trolleys, commercial & small airplanes, riding mowers, trains,
stairways, ladders, elevators, escalators, people-movers, sleds,
horses, elephants, carriages, rickshaws, tuk-tuks, canoes, kayaks,
ships, ferries, rafts, and powerboats to get around.  I avoid prams,
skateboards, scooters, roller coasters,  hang gliders, parachutes,
zip lines, motorcycles,  jet-skis,  amphibious assault vehicles,
and tanks.  Someday: telepresence, teleportation, submarines,
gliders, spacecraft, and steam-powered unicycles!!!!  YMMV.

I prefer to read on a bus, not behind a wheel, and when I travel
downtown for more than a few hours I use transit because it is
cheaper and safer and a better use of my time.  Right now, the
air conditioning is out on my car, and I have better uses for
the $700 it would cost to fix it.  But I will use the car where
it makes the most sense - like transporting lumber, or six bags
of groceries, or heading to a beach on the Columbia like I did
last weekend; it feels SOOO good to escape a baking car to a
cool river!  I drive about 2000 miles a year, which puts me on
both the pro- and anti-car-fanatic death lists.

----

The travel innovation I would really really like is wifi on
buses and MAX, which I would pay for (by the hour, NOT per
day or week) as long as it is encrypted and anonymized.

Imagine trimet employing Personal Telco and other local
programmers to tweak and redeploy the old Metro-Fi access
points along MAX lines to talk encrypted to the trains,
which rebroadcast inside the cars with WPA encryption. 
Users could buy double-price tickets at the fare machines,
which provide both transit and a temporary, personal WPA
encryption key.  Trimet aggregates packets and anonymizes
them through a few common gateways before they enter the
public network.  Want privacy and anonymity inside a
Faraday cage?  Use trimet! 

When they get that working on MAX, then the streetcars,
they can expand the network to feed the buses. 

Keith

-- 
Keith Lofstrom          keithl at keithl.com



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