Motorists have been stranded on a major interstate in Virginia since last night • Hacker News Board

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

#111

Post by mrfusion » Tue, Jan 04, 2022, 8:04 PM UTC

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 love how people think induced demand is an iron clad argument against any road building.

What about the induced demand of going from 0 lanes to 1 lane?

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

#112

Post by vjust » Tue, Jan 04, 2022, 8:04 PM UTC

rayiner wrote: post #92

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 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 disappo…

Right on.

I lived literally next to Dulles International Airport - ~8 miles. Yet, to get to Dulles (or Reston/Herndon) by Public transit, would've taken me 2 hours perhaps, or more.

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

#113

Post by mrfusion » Tue, Jan 04, 2022, 8:05 PM UTC

azylman wrote: post #58

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.

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.

But those extra people are choosing to be there so there must be some benefit.

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

#114

Post by asoneth » Tue, Jan 04, 2022, 8:05 PM UTC

andrewflnr wrote: post #61

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 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.

Increasing public transit capacity does induce demand. In areas with excellent public transit people choose to live further away from work, take more discretionary trips by transit, etc. (That's one reason I would be wary of making transit free as some politicians have proposed.)

One reason many people are more concerned about inducing driving demand is that private vehicle travel generally emits more carbon, uses more valuable land (e.g. parking, highways), and results in more fatalities per person per mile than comparable forms of transportation.

Another problem with inducing driving demand is the degree to which those costs are subsidized by taxpayers (roads, highways), other shoppers (required/subsidized parking), or left as externalities (carbon, noise). Tolls, gas taxes, per-mile fees, and parking fees would have to be quite a bit higher in most places to cover those costs.

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

#115

Post by chasd00 » Tue, Jan 04, 2022, 8:05 PM UTC

I've been stuck on closed interstates because of snow ( I-40 between Amarillo TX and Santa Fe NM ). It sucks, i've never had to spend the night though. We were re-routed in the middle of the night off I-40 during a storm and spent about 5hrs navigating pretty bad conditions way out in the middle of nowhere. I remember slowly creeping up on a dark figure in the middle of the road to go around, it turned out to be a giant boat that had fallen off a trailer! It was pretty surreal to see out in the middle of the desert in a snow storm.

Thankfully we were with a ton of other traffic, if we were by ourselves it would have been scary.

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

#116

Post by mrfusion » Tue, Jan 04, 2022, 8:06 PM UTC

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.

But more people wouldn’t drive if there wasn’t a benefit to it. So you’re benefiting more people.

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

#117

Post by vjust » Tue, Jan 04, 2022, 8:06 PM UTC

VDOT (Virginia Dept. of Transportation) had such a bad reputation for delayed/costly projects (among lawmakers/funders) that they once decided only fixing patches/potholes (basically minor stuff like that) would be given to VDOT - it was too risky to fund VDOT projects for new road infrastructure.

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

#118

Post by seanmcdirmid » Tue, Jan 04, 2022, 8:06 PM UTC

rayiner wrote: post #92

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 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 disappo…

> But when the jobs are spread out all over the spokes, that model breaks down.

So don't spread the jobs out all over the spokes? Is some urban planning really hard to do here?

> 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.

That isn't true at all in much of the world. Rail transit still works in many non-dysfunctional countries.

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

#119

Post by tshaddox » Tue, Jan 04, 2022, 8:06 PM UTC

andrewflnr wrote: post #61

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 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.

I think that technically the same problem exists with public transit. It's just that the constant factor people-moving density difference of multiple orders of magnitude gives you a lot of headroom.

Of course, there are also other potential advantages of public transit unrelated to induced demand, like pollution, safety, cost, impact on the design of living spaces, etc.

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

#120

Post by wiredfool » Tue, Jan 04, 2022, 8:07 PM UTC

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".

Grew up outside of DC. Snow absolutely happened then, and it was a standing joke that the Russians were investing in weather control so they could cause an inch of snow to shut down the city.

I still remember Feb 1979, when we got 2 feet of snow overnight and school was closed for a week.