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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

#371

Unprecedented? This happens all the time. It is called a major winter storm and they happen every year. It is also a cautionary tale. If you rely on cell phones for communication, you may find yourself in big trouble when the cell phones no longer work. Get a two way radio. At least a FRS or CB radio, but better off with an amateur radio license so you can use the many repeater sites and HF if you are truly stuck som…

A satellite phone seems a simpler solution which is more reliable than Ham radio?

Satellite phone subscriptions aren't cheap, but chucking a Baofeng in the car pre-programmed with some repeaters along your route (CHIRP can do this) is free.

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

#372
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.

Fascinating that this has generated so many answers, from so many different perspectives.

Induced demand is a terrible name for the real issue here. Perhaps the "one more lane fallacy" would be better. The "one more lane fallacy" is not universal, it only applies in cities and other densely populated areas.

Imagine you are sitting in a suburban traffic jam, getting slowly more and more annoyed. It's easy to imagine adding marginally more road capacity would put an end to traffic jam. That thought is the 'one more lane fallacy'. That, admittedly attractive, idea is wrong because adding more capacity leaves the traffic jam exactly the same, with more lanes and more cars in them - because of induced demand.

The kicker is that in a densely populated area, there is often no realistic prospect of adding enough road capacity to end traffic jams, simply because of there is not enough space. I suspect that in most cases, road building achieves political support through the expectation of ending traffic jams. Nearly always, this expectation will not be met. This is the essence of the induced demand problem - it is not as obvious as is sometimes made out.

So, even if you are die hard driver, if you want to reduce traffic jams, you should advocate for other people to use transport methods that are more space efficient than driving. Of course, you might want to live in an area dominated by constantly congested roads, in which case, induced demand isn't a problem.

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

#373

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One storm is not a trend.

I'm almost willing to bet that storms will get progressively worse in the next few years.

I think we all are willing to bet on your side.

People will kitt out their cars after this, but having lived in PA, NY and DC I can firmly say that in PA and NY I owned a brush, had water in the car and the like.In DC I legit brushed it off with my gloves.

6" was enough to just not go to work.

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

#374

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…

Regardless of how well prepared you are to comfortably hunker down in your vehicle, unless you're truly in no mans land without any reachable alternatives for shelter, it's best to lock up the vehicle with a note on the dash and make your way to a shelter out of harms way. Preferably by way of a route that is not along the road, even if it's more difficult.

It's never safe to be arbitrarily stopped on a road, even if you're on the shoulder. Even if you're under the impression no other vehicles will be going fast enough to not see your vehicle or cause an energetic crash. The last thing you want is to be sleeping in your stuck vehicle when a jack-knifed semi takes the roof off.

Unless I know I'm going to be in extremely isolated/rural areas, I prefer to be equipped for a hiking excursion more than a prolonged unplanned car-camping scenario. A stuck car on a thoroughfare is a very unsafe place to be, especially in slippery/poor-vis. conditions.

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

#375

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, they're shifting the goal posts. Here in city (Seattle) most people drive because transit tends to be spotty and slow for most people. So, what's the solution? Make driving worse of course. Speedbumps everywhere . Change 4-lane roads to 2-lanes. Remove parking. Lower speed limits to absurd levels. Make through streets dead ends. Transit still mostly sucks, but now driving sucks too. Success! I love transit and…

> Here in city (Seattle) most people drive because transit tends to be spotty and slow for most people...So, what's the solution? Make driving worse of course. Speedbumps everywhere. Change 4-lane roads to 2-lanes. Remove parking. Lower speed limits to absurd levels. Make through streets dead ends. This is obviously not the solution that anyone is proposing. You're arguing in bad faith against a strawman. The solutio…

You mentioned that induced demand is bad; someone pointed out that induced demand is not bad, but actually evidence of increased efficiency; someone else elaborated that the contrapositive is equally insane- if induced demand through efficiency is bad, then reduced demand through inefficiency is good- along with an example of the implementation of what you are asserting noone is proposing.

Caution against the short-sighted pursuit of easily-quantifiable goals at the expense of actual value is not 'arguing in bad faith'.

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

#376

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Only if town bar isn't a place people want to be. I call it a good thing is bad towns die.

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

#377
post #322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Building an entirely new bridge isn't going to be cheaper than adding more cars to BART. Even assuming it was (which it wasn't), it's not going to help as much as you think it is. Not sure if you've ever commuted on the San Mateo bridge, but it's basically fully backed up from the exits onto 101, because 101 is also grid-locked. So in addition to building an entirely new bridge (which, again, more expensive than adding more cars to BART), you also need to add more lanes to 101.

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

#378

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You can go up and down though.

Again, I'm not making a value judgement here. Transit is a valid option that could be better

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

#379
post #50
post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Both terms have been in use since the 80s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_change#Terminology

Yes, both terms existed since the 19th Century, but the concerted push on branding dates to the late 90s by green groups which began to discourage the phrase "global warming" and replace it with "climate change". https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=%22climate+cha...

Obviously when you realize that there is critical mass of dense people you want to use phrase that is more clear.

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

#380

Update: Tim Kaine is apparently still out there after 27 hrs? https://twitter.com/timkaine/status/1478462778834833408?s=20

He got to DC a hour after that tweet. (context: Tim Kaine is a US senator for Virginia) https://twitter.com/timkaine/status/1478476547552169987
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