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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

#91

Post by dave_aiello »

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...

HOV lanes, special toll lanes, driverless vehicles, new alternative means of transportation that never quite materialize, etc., don’t cut it and never did.

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

#92

Post by rayiner »

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 grew up in Northern VA. Public transit here is a solution looking for a problem. The job centers and commercial are too spread out for public transit to make any sense. Most of the population and jobs in the DC metro area aren’t in DC but spread around in Tysons, Loudoun, Reston, Arlington, Bethesda, etc. The state spent billions building the Silver line out to Tysons, Reston, and Loudoun, and ridership was disappointing even before COVID. (And it’s approximately zero now.) In a traditional hub-and-spoke city like Chicago, heavy rail can bring tons of commuters down to where the jobs are in the core. But when the jobs are spread out all over the spokes, that model breaks down. It’s impossible to take Metro to Reston from most of the surrounding residential areas (all the ones except the narrow slice on the Silver line itself). And it’s a huge pain in the ass to do the spoke-hub-spoke commute and take Metro from a different suburb to Reston. And for married couples, it’s a real roll of the dice whether both your jobs will be easily accessible via Metro.

Rail transit is an anachronism, best suited for the 1950s when life involved a woman staying home with the kids while dad took the train into the city for work. I did that for a year before my wife started her job and it was lovely (took Metro North down from Westchester to Manhattan every day). But in a modern family with two jobs in two locations, plus kids with daycare and school and after school activities, it’s not scalable.

My wife and I are “city people.” We really tried to scale the transit lifestyle. We lived in downtown Baltimore for two years and took Amtrak to work each day. We lived in downtown DC and took Metro. We’ve commutes in the Silver line, Orange line, Blue line, MARC, etc. And every year the service got worse, and every time we had another kid the equation got harder to balance. Eventually we threw in the towel, moved to a red county, and bought an SUV that gets 13 mpg. And we’ve never looked back.

You want to know what the future of America looks like? Go to the Dallas suburbs. That’s where all the immigrants with kids are, and where the next generation of Americans are being raised. It’s a glorious place. And it doesn’t involve public transit.

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

#93

Post by BeefWellington »

exhilaration wrote: post #34
arberx wrote: post #6

How do electric vechicles hold up in something like this?

A stranded ICE vehicle will exhaust its gas tank in 8 hours, max. You can turn it on an off to stretch it out but I wonder if you'll just burn more gas that way. Google (and Quora) suggests that a Tesla will last 36-72 hours, "or less" if it's very cold. I think EVs win in this case, assuming a full tank versus a full charge. Regardless if you're in a place where this could happen you should have a box of chemical ha…

> A stranded ICE vehicle will exhaust its gas tank in 8 hours, max. You can turn it on an off to stretch it out but I wonder if you'll just burn more gas that way.

Idling consumes little gas compared with actually moving the vehicle: https://www.energy.gov/eere/vehicles/fact-861-february-23-20...

A 4.2L engine burns 0.39gal/hr under no-load conditions according to the study there for a large sedan. Let's assume that the load of putting the blower and heater on equate to even 1 gal/hr (an absurdly high value, the rule of thumb I can find quoted in a few places tends to be add 10-20% depending on interior size and conditions outside). Let's also assume a fuel tank size on the lower end (~15gal) for this sedan.

This means in the absolute worst case conditions (you're blasting maximum heat the entire time) around 15 hours of operation for a full tank, 7.5 if you had half a tank.

Comparatively, the Tesla, depending on Model, could use as much as 4.8kWh[0][1] under similar worst-case conditions. Modern versions of Tesla and other electrics have or are moving to heat pump heaters, which is encouraging as it will likely be better generally (though this comes with the caveat that they don't work as well in lower temperatures and I believe are supplemented by coil heaters under those conditions).

At any rate, the worst-case electric scenario gives a full-charge length of 18.75 (90kWh useable out of a 95kWh pack in the largest long-range models) or 9.38 at half. Note, this is giving the Tesla an enormous advantage here as I'm going with the largest battery pack possible. With the long range pack available in the Model 3 those numbers drop to basically the same as the smaller-tanked gasoline sedans.

If you have better sources for those numbers on the Tesla idling with the heaters on, these were all I could find quickly.

[0]: https://insideevs.com/news/340327/lets-look-at-energy-consum... [1]: https://teslamotorsclub.com/tmc/threads/idling.139235/

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

#94

Post by njarboe »

azylman wrote: post #76
andrewflnr wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The way that public transit scales to meet higher demand is different than roads. Whereas roads require more lanes, public transit such as trains can scale by either adding more train cars to existing trains or adding more frequent service. More frequent service, in addition to improving throughput, also helps everyone else using the system by making it more convenient. And, if it "induces" people to move from roads…

Before COVID, BART in the Bay Area was completely full during peak hours. You had to wait for multiple trains to finally pack into the car. That, or take the train the opposite direction for a few stops from downtown and then get back on in the other direction. They are starting to remove more and more seats to pack in more people, but eventually if use keeps increasing you will have to build a new subway and who knows how much that will cost or how long it will take. It is probably not really possible right now. See the failure of California's bullet train.

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

#95

Post by oneplane »

guntars wrote: post #3

Link for people that DO want megabytes of tracking Javascript and, you know, media: https://www.cnn.com/2022/01/04/weather/winter-weather-tuesda...

I was actually about to comment that I had forgotten about the light (or 'lite' as they like to commercially re-spell it since the 1950's) version and was pleasantly surprised that it works as expected.

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

#96

Post by sokoloff »

kaesar14 wrote: post #62
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.

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 sc…

Having lived through it all and seeing the outcome, the Big Dig was a pain while it was happening, but a smashing success now that it’s done. A later removal of some of the toll booths in favor of automated tolling has made the road network even more effective.

Is there still some traffic? Yes. Is it better than it was 30 years ago, even as the roads handle way more traffic? Absolutely.

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

#97

Post by drewcoo »

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…

Sounds peaceful. If it were of military importance, that would not be the case.

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

#98

Post by trhway »

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...

public transportation doesn't work for people with pets, in many situations for people with children, people with various health issues.

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

#99

Post by nostromo »

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 adding lanes is to increase throughput.

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

#100

Post by azylman »

njarboe wrote: post #94
azylman wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The way that public transit scales to meet higher demand is different than roads. Whereas roads require more lanes, public transit such as trains can scale by either adding more train cars to existing trains or adding more frequent service. More frequent service, in addition to improving throughput, also helps everyone else using the system by making it more convenient. And, if it "induces" people to move from roads…

Before COVID, BART in the Bay Area was completely full during peak hours. You had to wait for multiple trains to finally pack into the car. That, or take the train the opposite direction for a few stops from downtown and then get back on in the other direction. They are starting to remove more and more seats to pack in more people, but eventually if use keeps increasing you will have to build a new subway and who kno…

Yup, this is a big reason why I said "in most cases" and not "in all cases". When your trains have to go underground and underwater and your highways go over roads and over bridges, that dramatically changes the numbers. Of course, none of those are a requirement of rail systems - just how the BART is built. There are plenty of trains that go over roads (e.g. the L in Chicago) or over bridges over water.

By the way, even BART could increase throughput today without adding more lines. Not all trains are 10-car trains, because they don't have enough cars in the fleet. Adding more cars to their trains is a significantly cheaper prospect than adding a new lane to the Bay Bridge (which was also basically fully maxed out on throughput during peak traffic times, pre-COVID). And BART carries substantially more people across the Bay than the Bay Bridge does.

So, certainly the BART needs more capacity, both now and in the future - but so do the highways.

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