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Motorists have been stranded on a major interstate in Virginia since last night

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Re: Motorists have been stranded on a major interstate in Virginia since last night

#41

Post by gruez »

gumby wrote: post #27

Interesting to consider that the oil industry may have made a mistake by reframing “global warming” as “climate change”. Harder for people to see events like this as part of “global warning” while it is more understandable as a consequence of “climate change”

>the oil industry [...] reframing “global warming” as “climate change”.

source? The wikipedia section on it is surprisingly scant on this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_change#Terminology, and a search for "global warming climate change" on google doesn't reveal much either.

Re: Motorists have been stranded on a major interstate in Virginia since last night

#42

Post by frenchy »

rsj_hn wrote: post #30
gumby wrote: post #27

Interesting to consider that the oil industry may have made a mistake by reframing “global warming” as “climate change”. Harder for people to see events like this as part of “global warning” while it is more understandable as a consequence of “climate change”

It wasn't "the oil industry", but climate activists who, during a period when the earth wasn't warming starting around 1998, decided to reframe it as "climate change" in order to maintain the sense of crisis.

Both terms have been in use since the 80s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_change#Terminology

Re: Motorists have been stranded on a major interstate in Virginia since last night

#43

Post by steelframe »

vgel wrote: post #32
Spooky23 wrote: post #16

The ineptitude of the state governments in DC/VA/MD is amazing to me. Snow happens in these places?

I used to live in VA and how incredibly incompetent VDOT is baffles me. There's basically no public transport in the state, and the roads are still horrible. Where does the money go? They're building new lanes on the highways like SR66, but they're privately-funded hotlanes (toll lanes), not regular lanes. I live in Seattle now, public transport is infinitely better, and the roads are better (though they still kinda…

> I live in Seattle now, public transport is infinitely better

Perhaps it's because of the bias one always seems to have against the infrastruture where they live, but until at least half of the planned light rail expansion opens up, I'm not exactly inclined to sing praises about Seattle's public transport. Virginia must be downright miserable.

Re: Motorists have been stranded on a major interstate in Virginia since last night

#44

Post by dwater »

dragontamer wrote: post #13
jdavis703 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> there are no alternative roads to take if this one road closes. US Route 1 basically parallels I-95 in most of VA. I was once detoured on it after a military HAZMAT incident. It’s slow going, but it works.

Route 1 seems like a local-road to me with lots of traffic lights though. I-95 works really well as long as its clear. But as soon as an emergency happens, the spillover traffic is too massive for Route 1 to ever hope to handle. An interstate-highway can't rely upon a traffic-light laden local road to handle the traffic from a 4-lane interstate. EDIT: In the case of the 2017 eclipse, the traffic was so heavy that tru…

US Route 1 is already an interstate highway with 4+ lanes through the area you're talking about. Development was encouraged down the I95 corridor since its creation and the density that has resulted pretty much makes this unavoidable. There was a similar situation with the Woodrow Wilson Bridge on 495 outside of DC in 1998 when it was closed due to a jumper during afternoon rush hour, and the traffic jam lasted overnight despite there being alternate major routes in every direction. The problem is that the bridge carried more traffic than all of the alternate routes put together (I'm assuming based on my experience).

https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/local/longterm/wilson/...

Re: Motorists have been stranded on a major interstate in Virginia since last night

#45

Post by azylman »

dragontamer wrote: post #5

I'm not surprised. I've taken this road before during the 2017 Eclipse. Its a path that connects major parts of the country together, but there are no alternative roads to take if this one road closes. Other locations have "Backup" highways to lighten the load or otherwise take up the slack if the main road closes. Not so here. I've been told that Virginia once had plans to build additional highways / alternative roa…

No comments on emergency situations, but wanted to call out one thing:

> You need additional highways (aka: additional offramps) to truly scale day-to-day traffic

Additional highways are at-best a stop-gap for day-to-day traffic, never a solution, due to induced demand [1]. You really need large-scale investments in public transportation for this.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Induced_demand#Effect_in_trans...

Re: Motorists have been stranded on a major interstate in Virginia since last night

#46

Post by whimsicalism »

Bud wrote: post #33
Spooky23 wrote: post #16

The ineptitude of the state governments in DC/VA/MD is amazing to me. Snow happens in these places?

Snow actually didn't use to happen in those places. Not in this way. That's why the word "change" is in "climate change". DC, btw, is not a state, and has no "state government".

> Snow actually didn't use to happen in those places. Not in this way. That's why the word "change" is in "climate change".

Grew up in DC, this is wrong. Large snowfall happens irregularly, but it absolutely happens.

The 2009-10 Nor'easters had substantially more snow than this.

See the charts here: https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2021/01/14/washington...

Re: Motorists have been stranded on a major interstate in Virginia since last night

#47

Post by kbutler »

Animats wrote: post #29

14 inches of snow at Fredricksburg, VA. All at once. The annual average is 13 inches. This seems to be an unexpected consequence of climate change. Slower moving storms, with huge amounts of rain or snow in a short period.

Does climate change also explain the larger storms in the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries?

https://www.novec.com/About_NOVEC/Virginias-Historic-Snowsto...

Re: Motorists have been stranded on a major interstate in Virginia since last night

#48

Post by epistasis »

ceejayoz wrote: post #15
julianh95 wrote: post #12

Some _fast_ and reliable mass transit like the trains in Japan/Europe sure would be nice to help alleviate situations like this and general traffic.

It happens to trains, too. https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2018/01/12/national/heavy-... > Around 430 passengers in Niigata Prefecture were forced to spend the night on a packed four-car train after it got stranded Thursday evening by heavy snow along the Sea of Japan coast. https://www.scmp.com/news/asia/east-asia/article/1904881/jap... > About 110 passengers on a Sanyo Shinkansen bullet train bound for Shin-Osaka…

Agreed, being stuck on a train in a winter storm is far far less terrifying to me than being stuck in a small car, running out of gas (or battery charge), without water or food or access to bathrooms.

Re: Motorists have been stranded on a major interstate in Virginia since last night

#50

Post by rsj_hn »

frenchy wrote: post #42
rsj_hn wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It wasn't "the oil industry", but climate activists who, during a period when the earth wasn't warming starting around 1998, decided to reframe it as "climate change" in order to maintain the sense of crisis.

Both terms have been in use since the 80s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_change#Terminology

Yes, both terms existed since the 19th Century, but the concerted push on branding dates to the late 90s by green groups which began to discourage the phrase "global warming" and replace it with "climate change".

https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=%22climate+cha...

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