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After 60 Years, I-95 Is Complete

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Re: After 60 Years, I-95 Is Complete

#51

Post by lotsofpulp »

swebs wrote: post #26
toomuchtodo wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

User fees are the most "fair" way to pair for infrastructure. It's not economically efficient to collect taxes on fuel in the aggregate, and then piecemeal out highway funding by any other metric than usage (although it makes for great politics).

Could you go into more detail? I always wondered why public roads would opt for awful toll plaza back-ups over increasing the gas tax.

Gas tax wouldn’t solve congestion on a specific piece of the road. Also, there is no need for toll plazas with the new high speed camera setups. They’re not even really new, Canada has had them for decade(s).

Re: After 60 Years, I-95 Is Complete

#52

Post by icebraining »

Someguywhatever wrote: post #45
untog wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

After witnessing 2008, I'm not sure that even another Great Depression would get America back to the New Deal mindset. Politicians would just blame welfare recipients, or something.

It was the government forcing banks to lend to people who would normally not qualify for mortgage loans that caused the crisis in the first place. The people who the banks accurately predicted couldn't pay and were normally denied loans were instead actually given loans, subsequently couldn't pay, aaaand everything collapsed. I think that the securitization and sell off of these mortgage backed securities were the ba…

"Several candidates made the argument at the debate that the government forced mortgage lenders to make bad loans. But in reality, most subprime loans were made by companies that were not subject to any kind of federal regulation."

"No executive of a major mortgage company said at the time that the government was forcing them to make subprime loans. They said they did it because they thought they would make money. And even now, after the crash of the housing market, with all the temptation to point fingers, it is awfully hard to find a mortgage executive who echoes the argument"

https://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/10/us/politics/the-role-of-r...

Re: After 60 Years, I-95 Is Complete

#53

Post by melling »

geezerjay wrote: post #44
dcole2929 wrote: post #9

Stuff like this is why I have exactly zero faith in the US ever building the type of high speed rail systems that other countries have and we clearly need. These projects are simply to expensive for private entities to undertake alone and federal and local governments can't stay aligned long enough to see anything that last longer than an election period through to it's finish. Unless someone invents teleportation, w…

> These projects are simply to expensive for private entities to undertake The problem is not how expensive high-speed railway projects are. The problem is that in general, with a couple of notable exceptiobs, high-speed railway services are massive money drains with absolutely no viable business model. If their natural unprofitability is compounded with infrastructure costs then the problem is further compounded. Th…

The North East Corridor is profitable.

“the most traveled highway in America, spanning 1,900 miles from Miami to Maine.”

Who pays for all the roads? The gas tax doesn’t cover it.

I’d think that between Boston and at least DC, there’s a need to travel by train at 225 mph. With a little vision, it could go to Miami.

Re: After 60 Years, I-95 Is Complete

#54

Post by Dylan16807 »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #22
Simulacra wrote: post #20

Tolls. Oh yippee

User fees are the most "fair" way to pair for infrastructure. It's not economically efficient to collect taxes on fuel in the aggregate, and then piecemeal out highway funding by any other metric than usage (although it makes for great politics).

They can be a good allocation method, but often you get 'premium' roads and weird routing because of splitting things up.

Now if there was a toll on all major roads of 2c a mile for cars and ten times that for trucks, then I'd be all for it.

Re: After 60 Years, I-95 Is Complete

#55

Post by jcranmer »

dcole2929 wrote: post #9

Stuff like this is why I have exactly zero faith in the US ever building the type of high speed rail systems that other countries have and we clearly need. These projects are simply to expensive for private entities to undertake alone and federal and local governments can't stay aligned long enough to see anything that last longer than an election period through to it's finish. Unless someone invents teleportation, w…

In the US, true HSR (by which I mean 220mph/350km/h service) is not viable outside of the Northeast (where Acela already exists), California, and maybe Texas. Medium-speed rail, running around 125mph, could probably be viable in a Midwest network centered on Chicago, but the needs of Chicago's commuter rail and freight rail networks likely preclude mixing higher speed intercity trains with generally slower local and freight trains on a reliable schedule, and there's insufficient demand to warrant dedicating track for higher speed transit.

It's a shame that the NEC hasn't been brought up to higher speeds than 125mph, but that's largely a function of the remediation needed to do that costing serious money [1] and the politics of infrastructure disbursement not favoring doling out cash to favor largely the NYC area.

[1] You need, at a minimum, new track with less curves in most of suburban of CT; new Hudson River tunnels; new Portal Bridge; at least a third track in the MD-DE stretch (including a new bridge on the Susquehanna); and replacement of the B&P tunnel, whose condition was "this needs to be replaced" when Amtrak was started and has degraded to "how hasn't this failed yet?"

Re: After 60 Years, I-95 Is Complete

#56

Post by nostrademons »

geezerjay wrote: post #46
nostrademons wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wartime. The interstate highway system got built because Eisenhower saw firsthand how effective having a national road network is for logistics in times of war, and so it became a national security concern. The transcontinental railroad was financed by the Department of War and greatly accelerated when the Southern states seceded - Congress had been denying funding for a decade before, but the first season after the…

> It'll likely be the same for high-speed rail, hyperloops, and under-city tunnels. Please don't make the mistake of equating the hyperloop scheme with reputable and tried-and-true railway services. Hyperloop is at best a marketing gimmick based on naive and ill-informed notions of what it takes to run a vehicle in a track, while real railway services are mundane technologies which have been proven to work for at lea…

Railroads were very far from reputable services when they were first being built. The history of these is fascinating; you think tech scams are bad today, you should've seen the machinations of Jay Gould [1] or Thomas Durant [2]. Many early railroads failed to get completed at all, or if they did, the trains would blow up on the tracks and kill a bunch of passengers.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jay_Gould

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Transcontinental_Railroa...

Re: After 60 Years, I-95 Is Complete

#57

Post by dsfyu404ed »

Retric wrote: post #36
toomuchtodo wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

User fees are the most "fair" way to pair for infrastructure. It's not economically efficient to collect taxes on fuel in the aggregate, and then piecemeal out highway funding by any other metric than usage (although it makes for great politics).

Far from it, toll roads reduce congestion on non toll roads so non toll payers also benefit from them. If you want an improvement then paying by weight and mileage would be more fair unlike our current system which discounts trucks which do far more damage than their fuel usage accounts for. But, tolls are on net an even worse system than we already have.

>so non toll payers also benefit from them.

That's just a glass half full way of saying that tolls keep poor people from taking trips that would involve those roads so the roads are less busy. $5 or $10 isn't much when your lunch is an overpriced $15 bagel at some trendy authentic restaurant. People who are packing PB&J to the job side avoid the toll road even if it takes longer

Road tolls are just another regressive tax. If the state senators don't want to sit in the same gridlock as the plebes they should take the train, not tax the plebes off the road. If the train is also too crowded they should increase infrastructure spending on one/both counts until the clusterfuck is reduced to a point they're ok with.

Tolls never go away. The best the poor people can hope for is that they don't get inflation adjusted so that there's a 10-20yr run where it's affordable to use the road before the politicians realize that the toll is low and raise it again.

Re: After 60 Years, I-95 Is Complete

#58

Post by [deleted] »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #54
toomuchtodo wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

User fees are the most "fair" way to pair for infrastructure. It's not economically efficient to collect taxes on fuel in the aggregate, and then piecemeal out highway funding by any other metric than usage (although it makes for great politics).

They can be a good allocation method, but often you get 'premium' roads and weird routing because of splitting things up. Now if there was a toll on all major roads of 2c a mile for cars and ten times that for trucks, then I'd be all for it.

[deleted]

Re: After 60 Years, I-95 Is Complete

#59

Post by dsfyu404ed »

jasonlotito wrote: post #37
swebs wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could you go into more detail? I always wondered why public roads would opt for awful toll plaza back-ups over increasing the gas tax.

It's not really an issue these days. In this area, EZ-Pass is pushed hard, and makes toll plazas a non-issue for the most part. There is very little need to slow down as most can just capture your license plate number and charge you that way, making the entire experience easy. This ensures that the roads that actually get used get the money from people using them, something that doesn't happen with a gas tax.

>In this area, EZ-Pass is pushed hard

Because it has the side benefit of being an easier/cheaper way to track people than license plate cameras. They could just do pay by plate and give people a paperless discount if they only wanted to save money. I bet EZpass gets a cut too so that adds yet another dimension to it.

>There is very little need to slow down

Yet morons still feel the need to do so creating the same traffic jams that high speed tolling was supposed to solve...

>This ensures that the roads that actually get used get the money from people using them

This is what they said about I90 in MA "the tolls will just stick around long enough to pay for the cost of construction." The it was "it'll only be used to pay for maintenance". Famous last words. We all know how that turned out, just another revenue stream it's impossible to take away or account for the use of.

Re: After 60 Years, I-95 Is Complete

#60

Post by icebraining »

nadermx wrote: post #8
GavinMcG wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you think the article is clearly wrong to use a certain word, consider the possibility that they're using a different definition than you are. I, for one, would never identify "requiring less commutes" as a key facet of mobility. To me, it means that it is easier to get around – and on a large scale, that's absolutely the (successful) goal of the interstate system.

The interstate system was responsible for decimating entire down towns, completely reducing any sense of mobility for all parties involved. Uprooting trolly systems that spanned across large parts of the country. It's not a specific issue with the word, it's a issue with what the overall view of highways portrayed by the article, and the reason it was done to begin with.

I'm not an American, so wholly ignorant on this, but how was the uprooting of the trolly systems the result of the interstate system?
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