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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

#321

Post by jcranmer »

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…

> Other locations have "Backup" highways to lighten the load or otherwise take up the slack if the main road closes. Not so here.

Well... not really. Taking the 95 corridor in the Northeast as an example, the only places with alternative highways are 95/295 between DC and Baltimore, 295/NJT in lower New Jersey, and Merritt Parkway/95 in Connecticut to New Haven. In all of the other segments, 95 doesn't have a close-ish parallel highway to take off traffic.

And when you dig deeper into traffic statistics, the traffic tends to be heavy on both segments at the same time. That is, there are two highways there because the traffic needs require there to be two highways; the second highway isn't just "merely" a there-for-when-the-first-one-is-full kind of highway. And induced demand basically says that it's impossible to have that kind of highway setup.

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

#322

Post by dekhn »

azylman wrote: post #100
njarboe wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Before COVID, BART in the Bay Area was completely full during peak hours. You had to wait for multiple trains to finally pack into the car. That, or take the train the opposite direction for a few stops from downtown and then get back on in the other direction. They are starting to remove more and more seats to pack in more people, but eventually if use keeps increasing you will have to build a new subway and who kno…

Yup, this is a big reason why I said "in most cases" and not "in all cases". When your trains have to go underground and underwater and your highways go over roads and over bridges, that dramatically changes the numbers. Of course, none of those are a requirement of rail systems - just how the BART is built. There are plenty of trains that go over roads (e.g. the L in Chicago) or over bridges over water. By the way,…

Bay Bridge 260K ppl/day + San Mateo Bridge 93K ppl/day is within spitting distance of BART (411K ppl). If there was another whole bridge across the bay (well, maybe two or three) it would alleviate the Bay Bridge and the traffic around it.

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

#323

Post by massysett »

cure wrote: post #223
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…

Good advice. I also keep a "Portable Car Jump Starter" in the trunk. These days they are basically big batteries (mine is ~3100mAh at 12V apparently) and they come with USB plugs and a built-in flashlight... Handy if you need to recharge your phone in a pinch.

Is possible battery damage or malfunction due to the heat in a car a concern?

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

#324

Post by jwagenet »

TedShiller wrote: post #307
bix6 wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Emergency (foil) blanket saved my life one night when I was freezing. I carry one more often than not now. Minor space/weight penalty to avoid hypothermia. Camelbak 3L comes with me on all road trips but I’m considering a permanent water tank in my car.

How do foil blankets work actually? Doesn’t metal foil transmit heat very well which would make them a bad blanket to trap heat?

I believe besides acting as a wind barrier, the foil reflects heat internally. They would not be effective in direct contact with skin and another surface.

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

#325

Post by twoodfin »

crowbahr wrote: post #278
robcohen wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. Wow. You just crystalized exactly what I felt was wrong with the argument that induced demand is bad. Thanks.

It's an entirely bad faith and shallow argument. You should probably reconsider what you're thinking is. The goal of transit first infrastructure is to make the majority of trips unnecessary. You shouldn't be required to own a car to participate in American society. This means we need to rezone our residential sprawl to allow for more frequent, smaller grocery stores. We need to increase the amount of mixed zoning, i…

If the federal government stopped taking 90% of the cost of every road in the US and you had to pay gas tax to support it all do you think you'd still be driving? Do you think you'd support billion dollar bridge extensions and lane additions when it means gas is an extra $5/gallon?

The Federal Highway Trust Fund was fully funded by the gas tax and other user fees until 2008, all while a significant percentage of revenue was allocated not to roads but to mass transit. Congress has topped it up with general revenue since, but the gas tax hike required to eliminate that need would be measured in cents, not dollars.

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

#326

Post by s1artibartfast »

Animats wrote: post #109
kbutler wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does climate change also explain the larger storms in the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries? https://www.novec.com/About_NOVEC/Virginias-Historic-Snowsto...

UN: "In the period 2000 to 2019, there were 7,348 major recorded disaster events claiming 1.23 million lives, affecting 4.2 billion people (many on more than one occasion) resulting in approximately US$2.97 trillion in global economic losses. This is a sharp increase over the previous twenty years. Between 1980 and 1999, 4,212 disasters were linked to natural hazards worldwide claiming approximately 1.19 million live…

I believe in climate change, but hate when people trot out these poor arguments every time a weather event occurs.

Not every storm is or can be caused by climate change, and average weather occurs in a minuscule amount of the time. even without climate change, 50% of the times it will be more than the average, or 50% it will be less.

Similarly, your data shows a doubling of events in 20 years, which is completely outside the range of predictions and models from actual climate scientists. I get that the intention is good, but poor arguments only pollute discourse.

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

#327

Post by globalise83 »

SauciestGNU wrote: post #308
globalise83 wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why didn't you just take a pee by the side of the road?

Believe it or not, in some parts of the USA that can get you labeled a sex offender for life.

Wow, didn't know that! In the UK and most of Europe it's standard practice.

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

#328

Post by asdff »

ninefathom wrote: post #262

I'm getting a bit of a chuckle over these suggestions of "backup roads" and "alternative routes." NoVa is just as strapped for housing as it is for transportation. Mass transit in this area doesn't and won't work, no matter how much money is poured in, because much of it is not a "city" in the usual sense, but rather endless miles of suburban sprawl stretching from one horizon to the opposite. The only viable solutio…

Where would they possibly move it? St. Louis and everywhere else you could imagine that isn't a corn field or a feedlot in the central U.S. also has suburbs sprawling to the horizon and suburban office parks. Constructing a new capital in the middle of nowhere is like corrupt dictator tier stuff.

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

#329

Post by s1artibartfast »

kbutler wrote: post #47
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.

Does climate change also explain the larger storms in the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries? https://www.novec.com/About_NOVEC/Virginias-Historic-Snowsto...

>Jan. 16-18, 1857: The Great Blizzard’s foot of snow and wind wrecked ships at sea and almost buried Norfolk under 20-foot snowdrifts. Virginia’s rivers froze. At the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay, one could walk from the lighthouse 100 yards on the frozen Atlantic.

Amazing... It really puts a 14 inch snowstorm into perspective.

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

#330

Post by Ajedi32 »

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.

There was an article[1] posted here a while back which changed my perspective on this issue.

Indeed, there's nothing wrong with induced demand on its own. In any other market, more demand induced by lower costs (whether those costs be monetary or in the form of commute times) would almost certainly be a good thing. The only reason it's a potential issue for roads is that road use is an externality.

Building and maintaining efficient roadways comes at a significant cost, but our current system of road construction funded primarily by income taxes means road users don't pay that cost in a manner proportional to their use of those roads. Road construction is "free" from their perspective, so there's no incentive to use alternative means of transportation even if those alternatives would be superior overall once road construction and maintenance costs were factored in.

Because of this it's hard to be sure whether the demand induced by increased supply of roadways is worth the cost in any particular instance. It could be a worthwhile increase in utility, or it could just be a waste of money.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28320834

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