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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

#151

Post by dragontamer »

bluGill wrote: post #142
NikolaeVarius wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

That means you didn't add enough lanes. You need to get ahead of induced demand, otherwise you city isn't meeting the needs of the people who live there. If you don't want to have many places you can reach in a reasonable amount of time can you can move to a rural area. The point of cities is to give people options to reach lots of places quickly. Get busying being a good city. Note, it can be better to add transit o…

> You need to get ahead of induced demand, otherwise you city isn't meeting the needs of the people who live there.

Well, there's an annoying edge case that must be considered as well. In some cases, "induced demand" is "stealing demand from somewhere else".

Lets say you have Town Foo and Town Bar. If you build a highway to Foo, all the additional traffic might be "stealing" traffic from Town Bar and benefiting Town Foo. Especially if people emigrate out of Town Bar for closer housing to Town Foo, you didn't really improve the lives of anyone. You just caused everyone to migrate over.

---------

Ideally, you want to build highways / roads / transportation in ways that benefits people, and causes the least inconvenience to other towns.

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

#152

Post by twoodfin »

mjmahone17 wrote: post #136
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.

Road usage isn’t necessarily success. For a political region, economic activity is usually considered a success. If by building a larger road through your city, you induce people to live outside of your city instead of in it, then you’ve added costs while reducing your economic activity, while creating more total wasted hours in traffic in the process. Are the trade offs worth it? Sometimes! But induced traffic deman…

I’m not sure that tracks: If a new road allows me to build a home where I would not have built a home before, that’s economic activity enabled by the new road.

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

#153

Post by toomuchtodo »

whoopdedo wrote: post #107
toomuchtodo wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

To your first paragraph, yes, but battery charge can decline rapidly in the cold at low states of charge. You may exhaust the reserve depending on your circumstances.

To your second paragraph, AAA (the tow service) piloted mobile generators for stranded EVs. There was no demand, and the service was discontinued.

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

#154

Post by AnthonyMouse »

azylman wrote: post #134
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 c…

> 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? You're setting up this strawman where the argument is "improve roads" vs. "do nothing". That's obviously not the case. The argument is "improve roads" vs. "improve public tr…

> Your setting up this strawman where the argument is "improve roads" vs. "do nothing".

Your claim is this:

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

That claim is false and is not a straw man because you actually claim it.

Improving mass transit might work as an alternate solution, sometimes, in specific contexts.

That doesn't prove that adding more lanes wouldn't also work, and it's also not universally true.

A large fraction of the traffic on I-95 is trucks. How many semi truck drivers and their loads can you fit on a public bus?

Many highways are congested at a specific choke point. You could make a completely free thousand mile an hour bullet train to transport people from one side of the choke point to the other and solve nothing because people would get to the other side without a car and be unable to get the last ten miles to their destination. But once you get past the choke point, the traffic diverges in every direction and there is no longer enough density to justify a mass transit route.

Sometimes you just need a wider road.

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

#155

Post by bluGill »

njarboe wrote: post #79
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...

Most people prefer individual transport systems for many good reasons. "Induced demand" is just more people using new roads because they get to do what they need/want to do. If we build enough roads (maybe using tunnels underground, a la The Boring Company) for everyone to go where they want, when they want, with up to 40 tons of cargo with them, there won't be any traffic congestion. This happened when the interstat…

individual transport vs shared is a matter of compromise. Human drivers only go fast (when there is no congestion the autobahn with no speed limit doesn't in practice move any faster than US freeways for the majority of users of each). Trains today have the ability to go faster than human drivers. Trains carry far more people than cars. Thus replacing most trips with train trips would be faster and cheaper for most people.

Note that I said most trips there. If you don't have a system useful enough that most people use it most of the time then people still need cars to get around and that changes the calculation. it can be very hard to get there.

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

#156

Post by kaesar14 »

mardifoufs wrote: post #148
seanmcdirmid wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 no…

Yes, it's hard to literally relocate hundreds of thousands of jobs according to some urban planners dreams. We aren't talking about intra city planning, but about state wide job markets. I guess Canada is dysfunctional too because there is absolutely no way to get rail service working beyond the big cities. Maybe it has something to do with north America not being Europe so trying to just force a European model here…

The context of this thread is about Virginia which is part of the I-95 corridor, the most densely populated area in the country, with a population density comparable to many Western European countries[1].

This is like the one region of the country you actually could scale up intercity/state transport, and it sucks so bad that Amtrak is terrible.

1: https://tetcoalition.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/2040_Vis....

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

#157

Post by Nition »

sbierwagen wrote: post #59
Maxburn wrote: post #28

I had no idea CNN had a "lite" mode.

Many news sites from the dial up era have legacy low bandwidth modes. There's a text-only npr.org, for instance. https://text.npr.org/

Similarly if a Reddit link on mobile ever harasses you to get the app or whatever, just change the www to i. i.reddit.com is the low-bandwidth mobile site.

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

#158

Post by asoneth »

mrfusion wrote: post #106
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.

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

"Induced demand" doesn't just mean increasing the number of drivers, it means increasing the number of miles driven.

In a metro area housing prices are generally correlated with how many minutes it takes to get to a city center. If you add highway capacity then people will choose to move further out to the suburbs. (Though that is great for property values, especially around the periphery of the commuting range.)

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

#159

Post by enragedcacti »

trhway wrote: post #98
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...

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

they can still drive?

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

#160

Post by tshaddox »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #104
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...

> 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 c…

But there is some limit to the number of lanes you can add, even theoretically from a topological perspective, but more imminently from a practical standpoint of limited budgets and ability to tear down existing non-road infrastructure.
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