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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

#61

Post by andrewflnr »

azylman wrote: post #45
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...

I don't understand why public transit doesn't have exactly the same induced demand problem as highways. If there's enough people to fill up new highways, they'll also fill up the public transit... Unless the plan is to make public transit miserable enough that only outside with no better options will use it, in which case it seems like it's all going according to plan already.

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

#62

Post by kaesar14 »

whatshisface wrote: post #51
azylman wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

I've never understood how inducing demand doesn't count as success. That means people want to use the road, doesn't it? It's almost like saying that releasing new software doesn't do anything to help users, because it increases the demand for software by the virtue of its own utility more than it reduces the demand for software by keeping people busy.

Because the metric people care about is traffic on the roads, not how many motorists are able to use the road in a given day. The Big Dig by this metric was a resounding success in Boston, able to dramatically scale up the amount of commuters in and out of the city, but driving still absolutely sucks because of traffic. To the person on the road, the Big Dig solved nothing.

Parent comment is saying the only way to scale with higher demand of transportation in a way that feels like an actual improvement to people is public transit, because public transit scales so much better with higher numbers of people commuting.

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

#63

Post by animal_spirits »

whatshisface wrote: post #51
azylman wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

I've never understood how inducing demand doesn't count as success. That means people want to use the road, doesn't it? It's almost like saying that releasing new software doesn't do anything to help users, because it increases the demand for software by the virtue of its own utility more than it reduces the demand for software by keeping people busy.

The less you invest in public transportation, the more people will drive. The more people that drive, the slower traffic gets. If you just widen the road, all you do is increase the amount of cars that drive. If people can't get to where they are going via public transportation, then they are going to drive instead, increasing congestion. Would recommend watching this video on it:

https://youtu.be/RQY6WGOoYis

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

#64

Post by ratboy666 »

outside1234 wrote: post #36
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.

And it scientifically makes sense to call it this. While the planet overall is warming, the extra energy in the system can actually make colder in some places. For example, by enabling stronger storm systems to push arctic air farther south than previously.

What about the snow in Miami then? (Jan 19, 1977)

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

#65

Post by shkkmo »

whatshisface wrote: post #51
azylman wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

I've never understood how inducing demand doesn't count as success. That means people want to use the road, doesn't it? It's almost like saying that releasing new software doesn't do anything to help users, because it increases the demand for software by the virtue of its own utility more than it reduces the demand for software by keeping people busy.

> I've never understood how inducing demand doesn't count as success.

That depends on what you see as the goal. If the goal is reducing congestion, then induced demand means that particular goal is harder to achieve. If the goal is to get more people driving then induced demand is a clear success.

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

#66

Post by dragontamer »

NikolaeVarius wrote: post #60
whatshisface wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've never understood how inducing demand doesn't count as success. That means people want to use the road, doesn't it? It's almost like saying that releasing new software doesn't do anything to help users, because it increases the demand for software by the virtue of its own utility more than it reduces the demand for software by keeping people busy.

If the point of adding lanes is to reduce delays, and induced demand prevents that, you have failed in the task.

The point of roads, from the city's perspective, is to support additional transportation, which causes growth of the city.

More transportation means more trade, more services, and better life for all who live near the roads. It might be in the form of easier-to-get deliveries (Amazon goods), or new jobs that have popped up close by, or new housing developments (aka: homes that previously weren't possible due to the time of transportation, but are now possible thanks to sped up transportation times).

-----

It turns out that "individualism" is a crappy reason to do anything. The individual argument must be made because we live in a democracy, and its impossible to get the people to agree to something unless you sell them a story regarding individualism.

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

#67

Post by rsj_hn »

gumby wrote: post #39
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.

Err, no, though I wasn’t completely accurate either, as Luntz came up with it after he’d stopped being a lobbyist for a while in order to join the Bush White House: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Luntz There are various articles and interviews with him on this topic. Layoff has an excellent discussion of the topic too.

Luntz did not "come up" with it. By 2003 -- when Luntz started pushing for this term, all the green groups were already using it. The inflection was point was 1998. You can see this in the google n-gram data or just do a time-boxed google search. Every single green group switched to "climate change" by 2001, two years before Luntz started talking about it.

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

#69

Post by Larrikin »

admiral33 wrote: post #9

Hey doordash here is your marketing opportunity. Bring them food, water, handwarmers, etc on a bunch of snow mobiles. Some people get helped and you get a super bowl ad

Being profitable and showing their value during a time period where most of the world was locked in their homes and restaurants couldn't seat anyone would have been a better marketing opportunity.

But they couldn't even do that and had to race to an IPO.

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

#70

Post by dangrossman »

epistasis wrote: post #48
ceejayoz wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If you're in the middle of Virginia on I95 in an electric car, you'd be fine.

To get from Fredericksburg to Richmond or vice versa, you have at least 60 miles of charge in your tank or you were never going to make it. At highway speeds, that's at least 20 kWh of battery power. It won't take more than 300-500 watts to heat the cabin continuously even in the middle of a blizzard. That means your battery will last 44 to 66 hours at minimum. So you've got multiple days of heat, water is falling from the sky, and the bathroom is immediately outside your doors.

This is one of the nice things about electric cars: the motor uses no energy while idling, and moving the car requires so much energy that you'll never run out if you're stationary. Most new EVs today have 60-80 kWh batteries. It would take several weeks to drain a full battery just running A/C or heat along with the radio and screens.

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