Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

lite.cnn.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 770 posts

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

#101

Post by jonpurdy »

dangrossman wrote: post #70
epistasis wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I ran a similar calculation for my Spark EV with 14 kWh capacity remaining. I can run my router and two wifi APs for around 15 days (at least) if needed. So I picked up a small inverter and will manually fail over from my UPS if a power outage goes beyond an hour or so. (Of course, if there's no power for 15 days there are likely bigger problems than internet access.)

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

#102

Post by oneplane »

BeefWellington wrote: post #93
exhilaration wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

So in essence, if you're stuck for a day you're going to be screwed regardless, except for some edge cases like a large full tank and an ICE that doesn't consume a lot of fuel when idle, or a heat pump driven EV with a full charge in a decently sized pack.

There will always be older or less efficient cars, smaller gas tanks, smaller battery packs, resistive heaters, and people not rationing the energy available to them.

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

#103

Post by chasd00 »

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

road's closed. maybe airdrop with drones?

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

#104

Post by AnthonyMouse »

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...

> Additional highways are at-best a stop-gap for day-to-day traffic, never a solution, due to induced demand

This continues to be wrong every time someone brings it up.

If you have insufficient road capacity, you have congestion, and congestion suppresses demand. If you increase capacity, some of the congestion goes away, and then some of the demand comes back.

What this looks like is that you currently have enough cars to require three lanes but have two lanes, so you build a third lane. The reduction in congestion causes you to have enough cars to require four lanes, leading to the fool's conclusion that adding enough lanes is impossible. But that's not it. It's that you needed four from the beginning to handle the amount of traffic that occurs there in the absence of congestion, but you only had three, or two.

Sometimes building a four (or five or six) lane highway isn't the best solution. Sometimes it's better to build more housing near the jobs so people have shorter commutes, or build mass transit etc.

Sometimes you just need a wider road. Pretending that's never the case is preposterous. If that was true then why do we keep multi-lane highways open instead of closing all but one of the lanes? Wouldn't that improve traffic, under this theory?

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

#105

Post by tshaddox »

njarboe wrote: post #88
azylman wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It depends what your success criteria is. It's true, you've successfully increased the throughput of the transit network, but you haven't done anything to improve transit times - you just have more people stuck in traffic now. There are other ways you could have spent that same amount of money (public transit) that both increase the throughput of the network _and_ improve transit times.

Not if you build enough roads. This argument just does not hold up. There was less time wasted stuck in traffic in the past. Go with tunnels underground so as not the create the large problems with having surface roads. If your idea theory is right, why don't we just stop maintaining all roads, shut them down, and save a lot of money, if new roads are useless.

In some cases it might be theoretically possible to just outspend the problem. But in most cases the roads have to be going somewhere, and you don't have significant control over where and how big that somewhere is (i.e. you can't easily move a whole urban center, or slice it into chunks and move all the chunks apart from each other a little to fit more roads). If all the roads are ending at the same place, making wider and longer roads to that place will (often) just induce more people to drive to that place from further away.

The reason "just shutting down all roads" doesn't make sense is that it doesn't solve the actual problem, which is that people want to both work in places with good jobs (traditionally often dense urban centers) while living in cheaper places that are far away and not spend significant chunks of their lives stuck in traffic. Shutting down all the roads only "solves" the traffic problem in a deliberately ridiculous sense (same as "just kill all humans").

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

#106

Post by mrfusion »

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.

You’re spot on. Plus the argument doesn’t hold water since there are a finite number of potential drivers.

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

#107

Post by whoopdedo »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #11
arberx wrote: post #6

How do electric vechicles hold up in something like this?

If they’re not moving and have a heat pump, well, but like a combustion vehicle will exhaust their energy storage eventually. Resistive heat or suboptimal battery architecture? Poorly. Jerrycans for some, tows to Fast DC chargers for others. Class 8 semis should have sufficient diesel reserves for long loiters, even with truckers using auxiliary power units for heat. If not, it is trivial to refuel them on the road w…

Aren't EVs programmed to hold a reserve charge for emergencies? To avoid the cost and inconvenience of a tow, shut off power before you lose the ability to drive yourself to the nearest charger. (Bonus points for adjusting the threshold based on the distance to known stations.)

But in the case that a car does drain the battery, how difficult is it to get a portable charger to someone? Have roadside mechanics started carrying generators in their trucks now? They probably should, with the appropriate cables.

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

#108

Post by tshaddox »

shkkmo wrote: post #65
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.

> 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.

Why in the world would "get more people driving" be a measure of success? For industries that directly benefit from that, sure, but I can't imagine how that could be a societal goal.

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

#109

Post by Animats »

kbutler wrote: post #47
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...

UN: "In the period 2000 to 2019, there were 7,348 major recorded disaster events claiming 1.23 million lives, affecting 4.2 billion people (many on more than one occasion) resulting in approximately US$2.97 trillion in global economic losses.

This is a sharp increase over the previous twenty years. Between 1980 and 1999, 4,212 disasters were linked to natural hazards worldwide claiming approximately 1.19 million lives and affecting 3.25 billion people resulting in approximately US$1.63 trillion in economic losses.

Much of the difference is explained by a rise in climate-related disasters including extreme weather events: from 3,656 climate-related events (1980-1999) to 6,681 climate-related disasters in the period 2000-2019.

The last twenty years have seen the number of major floods more than double, from 1,389 to 3,254, while the incidence of storms grew from 1,457 to 2,034. Floods and storms were the most prevalent events."

[1] https://www.undrr.org/publication/human-cost-disasters-overv...

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

#110

Post by robcohen »

nostromo wrote: post #87
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.

Yeah, they're shifting the goal posts. Here in city (Seattle) most people drive because transit tends to be spotty and slow for most people. So, what's the solution? Make driving worse of course. Speedbumps everywhere . Change 4-lane roads to 2-lanes. Remove parking. Lower speed limits to absurd levels. Make through streets dead ends. Transit still mostly sucks, but now driving sucks too. Success! I love transit and…

> I love transit and want more of it, but the transit folks realized it's hard to compete with driving, so they've just given up entirely on making transit great. It's easier to ruin driving.

Wow. You just crystalized exactly what I felt was wrong with the argument that induced demand is bad. Thanks.

Post reply on HN