Edit disclaimer: Obviously don’t do protests such as these without proper consideration of the consequences. Some countries have facial recognition cameras and lots of them have laws against this. Even if I believe it’s less risky than the usual headline grabbing stuff (XR gluing themselves) you are still in danger of both being tagged and arrested or being attacked by civilians. This should only be done as part of an organisation that supports this idea and can help you understand and deal with whatever consequences arise, and should not be taken as an endorsement of “lone wolf protesting”. Change can only come through organised group effort.
A lot of the car people I’ve talked to in car cities usually cite cars being “individually convenient” as a reason why they use them. I randomly thought of a way to turn that around with very little effort.
Lots of car cities have these traffic sign buttons that operate on intervals of 30 to 60 seconds in their high traffic roads. It just so happens that some of those are where people are already waiting for the bus.
Just doing a minor experiment by triggering that button every time the sign went green for some 10 minutes it clearly caused some disturbance on a low traffic hour as an individual action. I bet even a very small group doing something like that during rush hour could cause traffic jams that XR could only dream of without having to glue yourself or risk arrests too much.
What do y’all think? It’s very likely others have thought of this and I’m late to the party.
in the cities I have been at the buttons ether trigger as if a car tripped a sensor, and start the count down to switch, or do nothing because the lights on on a timer anyway. I have most of them mapped out where I walk, and the ones that do not matter I no longer even try to press the button
There are special sensors in the asphalt in front of stoplights that do in fact activate when cars drive over them. They also have scanners on top of the stoplights themselves that detect cars and flip the light automatically.