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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

#341

Post by asdff »

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…

This sort of weather pattern is not unusual at all. This is how winter is for the most part in places that have winter. I'd go out to clear snow off my car and find that my car would regularly be coated in an inch thick layer of ice from rain-turned-ice before the storm progressed to snow like a dozen times a month in the winter when I lived in the east.

VDOT could just close the freeway section in advance of the storm if they knew they didn't have the capacity to keep up with the snowfall and have the road be drive able, like other state DOTs do for their freeways when bad weather is coming. I feel like this must have been a textbook whiff in transit department circles.

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

#342

Post by throwaway0a5e »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #128
mrfusion wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

A clogged toilet isn't flowing. More like dumping a 5-gal bucket into a sink . The drain is running at full capacity but any one drop may take a long time to actually clear the sink. The 5-gal bucket is peak demand. Total time to sink clear is how long rush "hour" lasts.

Fluid analogies are crappy because fluids flow more when you add pressure and traffic doesn't.

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

#343

Post by kevinmchugh »

alistairSH wrote: post #199
twoodfin wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 l…

Doesn't DC have a height limit on buildings? Seems like eliminating that would be a way for the city to increase economic activity without spending any money

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

#344

Post by JPKab »

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.

Just to be clear (I lived in DC/northern Virginia for 10 years, and witnessed induced demand over and over), if the goal of widening a highway is to ease traffic congestion, induced demand quickly makes this a failed strategy. In northern Virginia, every project to widen 66 or 95 has always been sold to taxpayers as a move to ease congestion. But the result of that is temporary. As soon as the congestion is eased, cheapish land opens up for new development and more affordable housing. People flock to these new developments, and the cycle repeats.

It does result in growth for an area, but quality of life stagnates. The traffic in northern Virginia/DC/Maryland is at a point where it noticeably affects the mood of a bulk of the people who live there. Spending 90 minutes each way day after day after day fucks people's heads up.

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

#345

Post by mhandley »

Back in 2004 a friend and I were driving from Seoul (Korea) to Daejeon when a huge snowstorm blew in. We were on a 56 mile stretch of expressway through the mountains with no exits when the traffic ground to a halt. After a couple of hours it was clear from the radio that the road would be struck for a long time (the jam was reported to be 50 miles long), so we walked a couple of miles back to a service station we'd passed and queued in a huge queue to buy some snacks. What was interesting was that everyone was very polite, and although there was a sense that maybe things could descend into anarchy with little provocation, no-one was buying more than they immediately needed and there was no arguing. If this had been Europe or the US, I suspect it would have been very different.

We walked back to the car and waited, turning the engine on for 5 minutes every half hour to warm up. Fortunately we had warm clothes with us. What was most frustrating was that the road was clear of traffic and not too much snow in the other direction, but was blocked many miles further ahead. The radio kept saying they were air-dropping water and food, but we never saw any. Eventually a bunch of people just in front of us formed a plan and shuffled a few cars back and forward to make some space. Then they built a ramp out of snow up and over the crash barrier. A bunch of SUVs escaped that way. We debated whether it would be possible for us to get over in a normal car - we didn't think so. Eventually a few more SUVs got over, and there was just enough space for us to get a short run up. The car grounded in the middle, but we carried on over and down the other side. We checked under the car, and were surprised to see we hadn't done any damage. We drove the couple of miles back the service station, filled up and returned to Seoul after an 18 hour drive to nowhere.

We heard later that it took two days to free everyone, and that 10,000 cars had been stuck. We were very glad we hadn't waited. Since then I've always carried some spare warm clothing and never let the fuel run low when the weather looks doubtful.

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

#346

Post by _moof »

cm2187 wrote: post #81
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”

I thought we were told to make a distinction between "climate" and "the weather"...

Only to entertain the delusion that most people have when they hear the word "weather": that it doesn't involve anything outside a 1 cm buffer around them. When you gain even a tiny understanding of how the atmosphere works at a planetary scale, that misapprehension vanishes.

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

#347

Post by throwaway0a5e »

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.

Realistically nobody is gonna give a crap unless you manage to be super distasteful about it.

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

#348

Post by asdff »

58x14 wrote: post #14

It's remarkable how quickly our vehicles and roads succumb to such conditions. I used to drive that route on I95, and in the winter I would always pack a blanket and bottled water. I can only imagine having children with me. From an infrastructure perspective, realistically, I suppose it isn't feasible to account for more extreme snowfall.

It's easy to account for extreme snowfall, you look at the weather report. Other states just close stretches of the freeways and focus their plows on keeping some local roads open. VDOT saw the weather report and failed to account for their plowing capacity and decided to keep this road open. These drivers wouldn't have even been on that road if this storm happened in another state.

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

#349

Post by VintageCool »

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.

Expanding highways is sold as "making traffic better", or "scaling to day-to-day traffic" as the grandparent poster put it.

However, what expanding highways actually accomplishes is incentivizing people to move out of the city because they can have a commute which is longer in miles but shorter in minutes. That lasts until enough people move to the suburb that the commute is now longer in miles AND equal time or longer in minutes. You haven't made traffic any better, you've just made sprawl worse and you've increased the vehicle miles traveled to accomplish the same result of getting people where they want to be.

The message of the New Urbanists is that we should make our cities more livable and build/allow more housing units within the cities so that more people can live where their commutes are short (in terms of miles) and the increase in density will make providing transit more cost-effective.

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

#350

Post by thrashh »

binaryblitz wrote: post #234
cure wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Those are great to have. I will say that 3100mAh is pretty low and wouldn't even fully charge most smartphones. 20kmAh batteries can be purchased for less than $100, and 10k-15k mAh for less than $50. A good idea to have just in case. :)

Someone already mentioned this but I want to clarify that mAh alone is not a full measure of capacity.

OP mentioned his mAh rating in 12 V but you’re comparing it to Ah ratings in 5 V. OP’s battery should be able to charge a full smartphone fine.

Also, most of those 10-20k battery packs won’t be able to jump start your car because they have greater capacity but cannot provide power quickly. There are high capacity battery packs that do jump start but they’re over $100 from the last time I looked.

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