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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

#191

Post by NikolaeVarius »

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…

Well sadly, roads have a bad habit of being confined by physical time and space and cannot just be arbitrarily widened.

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

#192

Post by alistairSH »

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.

Ha! I live in Reston and mapped out some options on Goole Maps...

Home to IAD by car: 5 miles, 9 minutes

Home to IAD by transit: 40+ minutes across 2 bus lines

Home to IAD by foot: 10.9 miles, 3+ hours

Home to WAS by car: 24 miles, 29 minutes

Home to WAS by transit: 90+ minutes across 1 bus line, 2 Metro lines, and a few walking segments to link them.

It's sad that walking to the airport is twice as far than driving. It's also sad that I can drive to a airport further away than I can access my closest airport by transit.

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

#193

Post by btgeekboy »

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…

I keep a few moving blankets in my trunk. Good for protecting my car/items in trips to the store, cheap enough I don't care if they're ruined, and they'll also come in handy if something like this scenario ever happens to me.

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

#194

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

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

#195

Post by silisili »

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…

+1. My father drilled this into our heads. He's been known to exaggerate, but always told us a story of when he worked for the Highway Dept, below zero weather, and his truck broke down in the middle of nowhere. Claims he would have died if a cop hadn't just happened along at the right time.

True or not, when I lived in the midwest, I -always- kept a huge blanket in my vehicle.

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

#196

Post by KerrAvon »

flavius29663 wrote: post #176
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…

> Rail transit still works in many non-dysfunctional countries. Define "works". Sure it can move millions of people each day, but those people live miserable lives most of the time. Have you lived in a city where commuting one hour each way by train is considered "very good" ? And some of the worse are around 1.30-1.45 hours each way, each day? Even if for a while the train is fine, if the city is growing it will bec…

Caltrain in the SF Bay peninsula is basically that and people do cope with it and manage to lead happy, fulfilling lives.

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

#197

Post by CountDrewku »

gumby wrote: post #27

Interesting to consider that the oil industry may have made a mistake by reframing “global warming” as “climate change”. Harder for people to see events like this as part of “global warning” while it is more understandable as a consequence of “climate change”

Where is the scientific proof that this isolated weather event is climate change?

Just like you cannot claim that one day of bad weather refutes global warming you also cannot claim that an isolated event is climate change. It takes time to prove that.

Getting tired of everyone spouting off about climate change every time bad weather occurs. It's just as anti-science as denial.

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

#198

Post by beezle »

IdoRA wrote: post #164
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 roa…

The major issue is that VA, for whatever reason, does not have plows and trucks to put them on (unlike say NYC that puts them on the garbage trucks when needed) - at least in numbers necessary to keep the highway relatively passable in the first place. As others have said, (relatively) heavy wet snow storms in VA/MA are not once in a century type events, more like every three to five years. Paying the consequences for failing to pay to be prepared.

The secondary issue is the stupidity of semi-drivers to have tried to keep driving in the storm. It wasn't like there was no warning at all. Reports I have read indicate disabled trucks are the largest impediment to getting things going again.

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

#199

Post by alistairSH »

twoodfin wrote: post #152
mjmahone17 wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

But it's activity somewhere other than where part of the road was built.

Take DC and NoVA, typical large suburb next to a large city. If DC wants to increase economic activity, does it want to invest in a new bridge that allows more people to live in NoVA (where most of their retail/commercial activity will occur)? Or, would DC be better off spending that money on redeveloping run-down neighborhoods and adding some light rail (or other transit improvements)?

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

#200

Post by AnthonyMouse »

azylman wrote: post #166
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 sa…

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

You: Cars are never a solution because they can't go faster than 15 MPH. You really need horses for this.

Me: Cars can go faster than 15 MPH in many cases. Horses can't be used to transport industrial boilers and such.

You: Clearly you missed the part about the horses.

> No one suggested that we should just remove all semi-trucks and replace them with buses.

You have a two lane road that needs to be a four lane road to handle the amount of traffic it would have without congestion.

If more than half of the traffic that would occur without congestion is trucks, you physically cannot relieve the congestion with mass transit, because relieving the congestion would require removing more than 100% of the non-truck traffic.

> Moving more traffic to rail lines or buses can actually help semi-trucks as well, by freeing up road capacity for things that actually need it.

This the other stupidity with induced demand. It's not induced, it's suppressed by congestion, which means that any alternative means of relieving the congestion will also restore the demand.

Suppose you actually built mass transit and removed the equivalent of one lane worth of traffic from the road. Now you still need to add the other lane because the reduction in traffic congestion restored demand for the road and offset what was removed by the improved mass transit.

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