About

The Yellow Light hosts articles and a podcast on the built environment. I am the principal author, and my name is Jonathan J. Chiarella. Counterintuitive points pique my interest.

Learning about the built environment has upended how I understand the things we take for granted. Several facts went against every reasonable assumption.

Take the wide, flat, and straight road (but not a highway). This poses a greater danger than does a narrow road. On the wider road, you feel safer if you drive fast, but higher speeds result in more frequent and deadlier crashes.

Most city streets would also do better if we removed the double-yellow line in the middle. The line does not help much because no one needs a stripe to tell her to not drive into oncoming cars. That line, however, does hurt. It encourages drivers to stay in the lane. Drivers who stay in the lane at all times will not give breathing space to anyone who is walking on the side. They begin to assume that all the other people also stay perfectly within their painted lanes.

After living abroad, I look differently at the North American drive-through. The drive-through at a bank had once seemed to be as normal as a bird with wings. But the drive-through ATM was no fact of nature. We chose to make the space around banks blacktop in order to make room for this. To anyone who walked to the bank or who has disabilities, we sent a message that we would make life much harder for them in exchange for some convenience for others.

Even the perks are dubious. Anyone walking past the entrance to a bank must be careful of cars coming in and out at all hours. Banks, restaurants, houses, and more all sit further apart.

Would you rather walk at your own leisure from building to building in the plaza of Siena, Italy, or do the same on the Las Vegas Strip? Picture the experience of rolling a wheelchair through the parking lot of a Wal-Mart in Ohio in July.

“Duh.”

I think that the lessons are the hardest for those who only know one way of designing towns.

Someone in Japan may say, “Yes, of course, those shopping zones and izakaya alleys need to be narrow and pedestrianized, and the occasional delivery vehicle needs to be a slim van or a Kei truck. Obvious flaws exist with the way that Americans have been designing towns since the 1950s.”

Even if everything where you live is great, you may not see what Americans lack, or you may understand the good parts as sensible and natural conclusions. Nothing about a great situation, however, is inevitable and never was.

In New Hampshire, a person may say, “It would be nice to have more grassy area by the playground, but if we don’t sacrifice half of the space for blacktop, then where will everyone park? Sure, things look nice in Europe, but you can’t compare a young country like the USA with an old country like the Netherlands.”

The truth is that Amsterdam was not a biking paradise before the 2000s and that American cities became car-centric after major destruction and re-creation in the 1900s.

“The Yellow Light”?

The reference to the yellow light hearkens to an obvious contradiction in the infrastructure we made. Most of us see a traffic light every day.

It has three colors: green, yellow, and red. Red means “Stop.” Green means “Go.” Easy, right? Children can play the game of red-light-green-light.

What about yellow? It supposedly means that you should slow down and prepare for a red light. If aliens watched what we actually do, then what would they say that a yellow light means?

Everyone sees the yellow light and knows that a red light is coming soon. No one wants to get stuck at a red light and wait for three minutes. Every motorist wants to avoid the red light.

As a result, we race against time as we try to “beat” the red light. The aliens would watch our behavior and conclude that the yellow light means to go very fast.

Accessibility

An open and fair world needs to account for accessibility throughout society. We must make reasonable accommodations before conditions become so bad that we are forced to do something.

If every hotel manager waited until the first blind visitor before putting up braille on doors and elevator buttons, then no group for the blind would register for a hotel conference room.

When people with disabilities stay out of public life, other people won’t ever meet them. Many people would wrongly believe that disabilities are as rare as the Australian drop bear.

Then we would fall into the trap of the chicken and the egg. (Which came first?) Someone would say, “The tourists we get don’t use wheelchairs. Therefore, we don’t need a wheelchair ramp at this monument.” Because the monument doesn’t have a ramp, no tourist who uses a wheelchair comes to town. Because no tourist who uses a wheelchair comes to town, nobody sees a tourists who uses a wheelchair. Because nobody sees a tourist who uses a wheelchair, the monument doesn’t have a ramp. Because the monument doesn’t have a ramp . . .

Accommodations don’t have to be luxuries, niceties, or pointless expenses. Thanks to the “curb cut effect,” accommodations help everybody.

At the entrance of a building, a ramp instead of a step will be a game-changer for those who use wheelchairs. It also makes life easier for the person who is moving heavy furniture, the man pushing a stroller, and the injured woman who uses crutches.

The Yellow Light’s Efforts

• Every episode on the podcast’s RSS feed will have a transcription in WebVTT.
• Every article image will have alternate text (“alt text”) to describe the images.
• Every article will have a voice-over file embedded as audio and also as a downloadable file (MP3, mono, 64 kbps, 48 kHz). This makes it easy for anyone to play these on any device* and download them at slow speeds.

* The sampling rate of 44.1 kHz only matches CD players and the analog video recorders that people used in the 1970s and 1980s in order to send and record data for CDs. Even the early iPods were natively 48 kHz.

Write It Out

Expect soft subtitles in RSS feeds and in video uploads, but don’t expect hard subtitles in videos.

Hard or “burned-in” subtitles hurt your ability to efficiently compress and deliver videos. In order to burn in subtitles while you keep the file the same size as it used to be, you have to lower the quality. If you want to keep the same quality, you need to make and send a bigger file.

With burned-in subtitles, you have no subtitle file that you can translate to other languages.

Nobody can turn off subtitles that are burned into the video. Motion and colorful effects on hard subtitles can distract people.

The fonts are stuck as is with hard subtitles, but soft subtitles are different. With soft subtitles, someone with dyslexia can set the display font to something that helps his ability to read.

People with low or blurry vision or color blindness may want to set different font colors and maximize contrast. You can’t adjust hard subtitles after you burn them into the video.

If you need to fix an error in burned-in subtitles, you have to remaster the whole video and redistribute the whole video. With soft subtitles, you can easily fix one line of text and just redistribute the subtitle file.

Burned-in subtitles are great for scrolling through many videos when your mobile device is on mute, but The Yellow Light does not focus on short-form videos.

Back when video players lacked great support for soft subtitles player and back when karaoke bars used video CDs, hard subtitles reigned. Today, however, the situation is different. Almost every web player and computer program from PeerTube to VLC can show soft subtitles.

Vendor Lock-In

I took steps to ensure that I would control the RSS feed of my podcast and my domain. I cared about choosing the best website software. I made it mandatory that hosting providers would allow me to deliver soft subtitles as well as voice-overs that I could master myself. The host must never re-encode anything. I upload compressed files, and that is fine, but re-encoding an encoded is like making a photocopy of a photocopy of a photocopy.

English language learners deserve clear audio.

All audio files are normalized to -16 dB LUFS for perceptual loudness. This is the same level as most podcasts. Listeners do not have to fiddle up and down with the volume control when the player software or streaming service doesn’t normalize the volume.

Let Freedom Ring

Freely licensed and open-source software makes the world go round. Anyone can inspect what these tools do. They cost nothing to “buy.” They invite collaboration, a win-win situation. They can run on cheaper hardware and don’t require the money or high-speed internet connections of a rich country.

The Apple company opposes several open standards (FLAC, Opus, Ogg) and steers people to wildly expensive products and walled gardens.

For the growth and accessibility of podcasting, however, Apple has been great. It has championed standards that benefit all of us, and it is the first major company to push for subtitles. Apple specifically promotes transcriptions in the WebVTT format so that its players can label who is talking.

I single out one company for hurting the podcasting ecosystem: Spotify. It has a lot of money to throw at buying up podcasts, but its large library locks up many of these series as “Spotify Exclusives.” Even worse than the monopolization problem, Spotify opposes the use of RSS feeds.

For freedom, we need RSS feeds. Anyone can use an RSS feed to get a podcast’s files and download them through any app.

The Yellow Light lists its material through Spotify for Creators, but I strongly urge you to use an app that is not Spotify.

If you need subtitles, however, Apple Podcasts is still the best option for smartphones. Spotify generates its subtitles through AI—with all of the implications.

For Android users, AntennaPod performs well and is open source.

Videos

Until video hosting is common, cheap, and decentralized enough that PeerTube is feasible, YouTube is tolerable. Please be aware, however, of the problems.

YouTube platform punishes you for swearing and the flagging of videos for adult content is arbitrary. You can refer to nudity in a film and censor everything, but you can’t predict how YouTube will react.

The platform also sides with those who claim copyright violations. If a creator appeals and loses three times, the platform deletes your account.

As a result, many creators censor themselves. They can never be sure of what is acceptable and what is not.

Surprisingly, YouTube will boost very harmful content. Misogynistic and racist diatribes and conspiracy theory crackpots litter the recommendations feed. If some movie studio writes a strong hero who happens to be a women or casts a non-Caucasian in a lead role, I find out because the trending videos on YouTube are angry rants about the news.

Please beware of YouTube’s suggestions. Ignore bad videos. Don’t leave negative comments on videos you don’t like. To the algorithm, engagement is engagement. Don’t feed the trolls. Yadda, yadda, yadda.