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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

#161

Post by mardifoufs »

dublinben wrote: post #80
sbierwagen wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/

These sites aren't a legacy of the dial up era. They were relatively recently introduced (circa 2017) to more efficiently deliver vital information during natural disasters. They're a reaction to the bloated nature of their primary homepages. https://www.poynter.org/tech-tools/2017/text-only-news-sites...

Wow. I've just used text.npr.org and I've realized that I forgot just how fast a website can be. Even on a current gen S21+ Ultra I've had the habit of "zoning" out for the few moments that I'm expecting a news website to load for. Thanks for the link!

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

#162

Post by tshaddox »

twoodfin wrote: post #140
tshaddox wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?"

If you doubled the number of hospital beds, doctors, nurses, diagnostic equipment, labs … and demand was high enough to keep prices constant, you’ve doubled healthcare access at a rate patients were already willing to pay. “Induced demand” in every other industry is described as “latent demand”.

No one is against increasing access to healthcare. But I deliberately chose the example of healthcare costs to be analogous with people experiencing traffic congestion.

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

#163

Post by AnthonyMouse »

tshaddox wrote: post #160
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…

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.

The theoretical limit is irrelevant. It's like saying you can't always improve emergency response time because of the speed of light. Nobody is really up against the theoretical limit.

The practical limits are all trade offs. How much does it cost to add two lanes? How much does it cost to maintain low ridership bus service to low density suburbs? There are circumstances in which adding more lanes is the best available alternative.

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

#164

Post by IdoRA »

Spooky23 wrote: post #16

The ineptitude of the state governments in DC/VA/MD is amazing to me. Snow happens in these places?

In this case, a major issue was that the weather was rain transitioning to heavy snowfall. VDOT couldn’t pre-treat the roads because the rain would wash it away, and they couldn’t clear the roads of snow fast enough to prevent ice formation. Similar to the Atlanta “snowmageddon” in 2014, once you have enough 18-wheelers stopped, they can’t start moving again on ice, and they (plus the normal car traffic) clog the roads enough that the snow trucks can’t operate. I am having difficulty envisioning how a hypercompetent northeastern DOT could do better in these circumstances, other than improved communication.

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

#165

Post by seanmcdirmid »

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…

> Again, not talking about public transit in cities (which is amazing and should be scaled up) but about intercity/state/province transport. The distances, and spread are just not comparable to almost anywhere else in the world and you can't just magically make everyone move.

This problem has been solved for awhile now, at least since the 1960s when the first intra-city/province shinkansen came online. Just because some other countries suck as badly as the USA at it doesn't mean it is an unsolved problem.

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

#166

Post by azylman »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #154
azylman wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Maybe try quoting the entirety of what I said?

> 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.

Clearly "improve roads" vs. "improve public transit"...

> How many semi truck drivers and their loads can you fit on a public bus?

You're again arguing against something no one ever said. No one suggested that we should just remove all semi-trucks and replace them with buses. Again, we're discussing where to allocate incremental improvements to existing systems. No one is suggesting doing nothing or, worse, shutting down existing systems.

Using your specific example of semi-trucks, moving more traffic (such as daily commute) to rail lines or buses can actually help semi-trucks as well, by freeing up road capacity for things that actually need it. And additionally, freight trains already make up a fairly large percentage of our freight network (~30%) so rail is actually a great alternative to semi-trucks in many cases.

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

#167

Post by 0_____0 »

vjust wrote: post #112
rayiner wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

8 miles in 2 hours? That's a brisk walk!

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

#168

Post by IdoRA »

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.

The average doesn’t tell the whole story. F’burg weather is strange, it never seems to line up with Richmond nor DC. We’ve gotten these sorts of snowfalls every 5–10 years since the 80s, give or take: https://fredericksburg.com/lifestyles/johnston-a-look-back-a...

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

#169

Post by R0b0t1 »

emptybottle wrote: post #73

A good reminder to keep some warm blankets/coats/gloves/hats in your trunk, along with some non-perishable snacks and a first-aid kit & flashlight. Water is harder to store in the winter since it will freeze and burst containers if full, but snow can be melted given a container to put it in. Also a good to refuel often. I try treat 1/2 a tank as empty and stop accordingly. On longer trips it lines up well with bathro…

If I really kept kitted out for an incident like this I use up all my grocery room or most of the back seats. I was in my last car, but because I usually didn't take passengers.
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