Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

lite.cnn.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

391–400 of 770 posts

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

#391

Post by _dain_ »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #104
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...

> 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…

You're missing half the story; "demand" only makes sense with reference to a price. At the moment, that price is zero, but it needn't be. As we all know, market prices are an efficient mechanism to allocate scarce resources. People have a curious blindspot about this when it comes to roads.

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

#392

Post by animal_spirits »

massysett wrote: post #338
animal_spirits wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The less you invest in public transportation, the more people will drive. The more people that drive, the slower traffic gets. If you just widen the road, all you do is increase the amount of cars that drive. If people can't get to where they are going via public transportation, then they are going to drive instead, increasing congestion. Would recommend watching this video on it: https://youtu.be/RQY6WGOoYis

Yes, if you increase the amount of road and more cars get people to where they are going, the result is increased economic activity. The result also is increased well-being because more people are getting to places where they wish to go - destinations that are improving their lives. This is a success.

You actually see the opposite. Close nit places with more foot traffic and better public transport see higher economic activity and financial resilience. Places with long roads between where people live and where they shop/work/eat _drastically_ harms financial productivity due to higher infrastructure costs. Chuck Mahron makes this point in his TEDx talk. The infrastructure _maintenance_ costs of sprawl dramatically outweighs what a city makes in revenue from taxes they receive.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JPbfdcvv0to

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

#393

Post by alistairSH »

kevinmchugh wrote: post #343
alistairSH wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Yes, that’s a fairly unique rule. IIRC to protect the aesthetics of the downtown monument/lawn zone (which includes the WH and Capitol). Arlington across the river has all the tall office buildings.

But I have no idea how much DC “needs” the vertical space for development. It isn’t nearly as dense as NYC - plenty of infill (re)development to be done, I would guess.

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

#394

Post by gitgrump »

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…

works - verb. Moves millions of people efficiently and without the pollution or danger of driving an expensive, private vehicle.

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

#395

Post by azylman »

ufmace wrote: post #240
azylman wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

How is he arguing against a strawman? He's saying that's exactly what they actually did in his city.

> 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...Transit still mostly sucks, but now driving sucks too...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.

The claim was that they put up speed bumps (and other measures) _with the intent of_ making driving worse to encourage public transit. That's obviously false. Speed bumps get put up to discourage unsafe driving.

If, when forced to drive safely, people would rather take public transit, that's kind of scary, but also a good thing I guess to get unsafe drivers off the road? However, that's not what the claim was (and in reality is unlikely to be true, though I have no data to back that up).

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

#396

Post by GlenTheMachine »

There are a lot of comments here about why public transit in the DC area doesn't work, but nobody that I've seen has put their finger on it.

The biggest issue is that the area covers two states, at least ten counties depending on what you count as the “DC area”, plus the District of Columbia, which isn't a state, doesn't have control over its own budget, and has no representation in Congress. Oh, and in Virginia cities are not part of counties so for instance Arlington is it’s own political entity. Plus DC doesn't have control over a large part of its own tax base because the biggest landholder in the city is the federal government, which is exempt from local property taxes. And because unlike everywhere else in the US DC workers who live in Virginia or Maryland don't pay DC taxes, because the Virginia and Maryland Congressional delegations have warped the DC tax code such that all that money stays in their own states.

Any area-wide public transit project thus has to politically negotiate two Congressional delegations, one city that is in theory represented by the entirety of Congress, and 10+ local governments, any of which effectively has veto power over a project; and the primary beneficiary of the project, DC, is de facto not going contribute financially in proportion to how much it benefits because it’s budget won't allow it to do so.

Similarities to e.g. Hong Kong or Europe fail on those grounds. DC area public transit fails because the DC area is a living example of how federalism fails.

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

#397

Post by IdoRA »

asdff wrote: post #386
IdoRA wrote: post #363

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve lived here for decades, so I am very familiar with the weather here—I am of the opinion that it was an unusual volume of rain leading up to the snowfall, rain all night before transitioning to heavy snowfall early AM where I am. Closing the freeway feels like a good idea, but then you’d have ~130,000 cars/day traveling on surface streets? The Rappahannock doesn’t allow for many crossings other than 95.

What happens is you close the freeway, it makes the news that its a bad storm and the freeway is closed, you call your boss (or if they are any good they'd call you) and say you along with everyone else is not going in, your kids aren't going to school, and the truckers sleep in their trucks at the gas station for the night. Then by the next day, or whenever the storm is over, roadworks will have had enough time to c…

I don’t see how you can stop, for example, the flow of Rt. 17 truck traffic onto I-95 diverting to the surface streets. Something like 75% of the 95 traffic in the affected section is not local. How do you ensure that they not use 95 and also not use the surface streets (which in this area are absolutely not capable of handling their current traffic, let alone overflow from the highway)?

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

#398

Post by mardifoufs »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #211
mardifoufs wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's just absolutely no way to compare the shinkansen to what would be required in the DC/VA area. Yes the US should connect its big cities with high speed rail but that would still not do anything for small intercity transit for everyone else This is just rehashing pop-urban planning buzzwords. Like I'm not sure where the trend of just handwaving every problem as easily solvable by "rail! Shinkansen! City public…

> Yes the US should connect its big cities with high speed rail but that would still not do anything for small intercity transit for everyone else Have you ever tried taking these lines before? They have high speed rail between big cities, and tons and tons of small branch/feeder routes out to small towns with the most frequent stops ever imaginable. Getting from huge Tokyo to small Gifu actually works. It did take s…

>The USA's model of just "build that office complex wherever you want!" wouldn't work.

Which is exactly my point! That's already the current situation on the ground in the USA. So yes, it wouldn't work there. Unless you'd literally move around millions of jobs, offices etc which is absolutely not feasible. Trying to build public transit around that structure just to fit an idealized vision of somewhere else is weird. Japan built the system that fit their needs and their situation and the USA should do the same.

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

#399

Post by efxhoy »

Ajedi32 wrote: post #330
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.

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 main…

The canonical economist solution to this is to introduce road tolls. Make drivers pay at point of use to fund the road.

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

#400

Post by fallingknife »

GlenTheMachine wrote: post #396

There are a lot of comments here about why public transit in the DC area doesn't work, but nobody that I've seen has put their finger on it. The biggest issue is that the area covers two states, at least ten counties depending on what you count as the “DC area”, plus the District of Columbia, which isn't a state, doesn't have control over its own budget, and has no representation in Congress. Oh, and in Virginia citi…

> And because unlike everywhere else in the US DC workers who live in Virginia or Maryland don't pay DC taxes

I don't think that's the case. In my experience as a remote worker you always pay where you live, not where you work.

Post reply on HN