This semester I have been over committed on projects. One of them was to do some models of a re-design for the campus of a charter school in town. I belted out the models in Inkscape with some architect’s conceptual drawings of floorplans for the new buildings, the blueprints of the existing building, and Google Maps overhead satellite imaging of the plot.
Being able to step up the presentation quality was pretty nice. But I was left wishing I had a Glowforge, because my laser wasn’t able to make voting tokens that I wanted to include with this (I made ballot boxes for the students to also vote on their choice for the future campus, we will wind up using slips of paper since I couldn’t make nifty coins)
Since the back 1/3 of the lot doesn’t change, I built the full lot to snap together, this let me scale up beyond what would fit in my cutter (3 foot wide)
Yeah, 3D printed the cars and one building (too many small sections, and at the time I planned to make all of the roofs, and that roof would not have been fun). I also needed the cars to show how much better traffic flow would be (the main thing I personally am looking to improve on)
One of the egress routes from my shop goes past an elementary school. I have made the mistake of attempting that route around 3:00 when school is getting out. Parents parked and waiting for kids everywhere. Double- and triple-parked in front of fire hydrants, red zones, in the middle of intersections, totally blocking the bike lane, and partially blocking both directions of traffic. School buses trapped, in turn trapping more cars.
Safe, downtown neighborhood, temperate CA weather. Why aren’t these kids just walking home?
Oh, because with our crime rates down significantly in the past few decades… we now know that children walking home would be instantly abducted and disappear forever of course.
And that with our nosy neighbor rates higher than ever the parents would have CPS at their doorsteps in the blink of an eye.
School parking lots are the worst areas for parking/driving violations. People become amazingly self centered, and just turn their brains off (great example for the kids, eh?). When my daughter was still in school, this used to make me batspit crazy!
Once she got old enough to safely navigate traffic/crosswalks, I just had her meet me a block or two away from the school (we lived way too far away for her to walk all the way home).