They are not as extreme, but you cannot realistically have a civilized discussion on their servers. Unfortunately they are much more established with several big communities which are hesitant to move to more reasonable servers so while hexbear was an easy insta-ban for me and most other Lemmy users, we’re stuck individually blocking ml users for now.
But hopefully because of the idiotic choice of the ml domain, they will eventually go the way of hexbear.
Sensors are cheap and have been around for a long time, but I’m going to guess the number one reason is the small part. Fewer cars = less traffic.
I’ve actually watched a city I visit regularly grow over about 20 years and it went from them having zero traffic to Los Angeles style traffic jams. This is despite their best efforts like making extra wide roads, using roundabouts, etc.