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

#121

Post by seanmcdirmid » Tue, Jan 04, 2022, 8:08 PM UTC

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…

> Here in city (Seattle) most people drive because transit tends to be spotty and slow for most people.

I don't drive and I live in Ballard. Driving has always sucked in Seattle since I can remember from the late 1970s. My dad, who lived in Seattle after coming back from Vietnam said the same thing.

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

#122

Post by kaesar14 » Tue, Jan 04, 2022, 8:08 PM UTC

bagacrap wrote: post #86

kaesar14 wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, I don't see how that's really a fair response to saying what people care about is traffic. Yeah, ability to use the road, sure. I don't think people want a new highway to be built and then told they can't use it because they don't have a new car or something. I as a motorist could not give less of a shit if I'm stuck in traffic for 3 hours a day but the road is able to move hundreds of thousands of cars a day…

why would you count that as a win? you almost certainly wouldn't be one of those 20 people allowed on the road

The example was clearly intended to include the motorist in question, being allowed to be on the road. As long as the motorist got to use the road, it wouldn't matter to said motorist how large the capacity of the road was, if they weren't able to clear through it quickly without traffic. It wouldn't matter if the road in question was servicing large amounts of people, it's only visible impact to the motorists time on the road that matters.

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

#123

Post by ThrustVectoring » Tue, Jan 04, 2022, 8:09 PM UTC

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.

Taking a trip is a cost, not a benefit. It's evidence that the cost of the trip is considered worth taking and that there's some advantage being gained, but more trips in and of itself is a terrible metric.

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

#124

Post by alphabettsy » Tue, Jan 04, 2022, 8:09 PM UTC

jackson1442 wrote: post #90

dangrossman wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Also of note- in a snowstorm situation there are no exhaust pipes that can be clogged with snow on an EV. It’s self-contained!

I’ve never heard of exhaust pipes getting clogged with snow, the gas coming out is hot. I’d be surprised if this has ever happened unintentionally.

If what you mean is that the exhaust can linger too long or be redirected in ways that aren’t ideal then yea.

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

#125

Post by dragontamer » Tue, Jan 04, 2022, 8:09 PM UTC

tshaddox wrote: post #108

shkkmo wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Transportation is directly related to how much your local cities are doing.

When you order goods from Amazon, that gets delivered to you. It might be a road, sea, rail, or plane, but its transportation. The more of packages ordered / delivered, the more things are happening in the city.

The more jobs being created, the more people will need to transport to-and-from work. The more homes built, the more transportation is needed. Etc. etc.

Its a crude measurement with flaws, but generally speaking, the more transportation that's happening, the bigger and better the city is functioning. People wouldn't travel unless they needed to (travel always sucks: traffic accidents, getting stuck, dealing with others on planes/trains/busses, etc. etc.). But we deal with it because without transit, we couldn't do our daily business.

Be it a meeting for work, going to school, delivering goods or other such need.

-------

Mass transit options, like Rail, get more things done with far less money. But there's a latency issue: rail can be slower for the individual... but its cheaper and more-bandwidth for the city.

This conflicts with individual options like roads: it costs a gross amount of money for an individual to buy a car / use it on the highways (plus the cost of highways themselves: rubber tires wear out faster than steel wheels on trains. Asphalt roads need replacing more often than steel rail lines. Gasoline costs much more than the electricity used to move a train). But the individual latency is such an advantage, that the individual will typically prefer car travel.

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

#126

Post by kaesar14 » Tue, Jan 04, 2022, 8:09 PM UTC

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.

It's way more like the driving folks have absolutely ruined transit in almost every single city in the country.

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

#127

Post by tshaddox » Tue, Jan 04, 2022, 8:10 PM UTC

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.

In some sense I understand what you're saying, but that mode of argument has limitations. Like, you certainly wouldn't say "I don't understand how increasing medical costs doesn't count as success, that means people want to spend their money on medical care, doesn't it?"

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

#128

Post by seanmcdirmid » Tue, Jan 04, 2022, 8:10 PM UTC

mrfusion wrote: post #113

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.

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

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

As long as your roads are saturated, they have less throughput, not more. It is kind of like a clog in your toilet: more things are there in your pipes, but not much is getting through.

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

#129

Post by selimthegrim » Tue, Jan 04, 2022, 8:12 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…

>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.

Dallas should probably get some better research universities if this is going to be a thing.

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

#130

Post by kaesar14 » Tue, Jan 04, 2022, 8:12 PM UTC

sokoloff wrote: post #96

kaesar14 wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'd rather the T be functional and get me to where I need to be, and a better commuter rail system, then having to drive to and fro on Storrow at rush hour. There's no amount of bridges or expansions to the roads that would make it better short of leveling the city to build a giant highway, which I'm sure some percentage of Massachusetts drivers would be in favor of.