How would electric cars hold up under this situation?
Motorists have been stranded on a major interstate in Virginia since last night
421–430 of 770 posts
Re: Motorists have been stranded on a major interstate in Virginia since last night
#422A 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…
> 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
Just a note for varying geographical locations: If you do this in Australia, you will most likely die from exposure.
Re: Motorists have been stranded on a major interstate in Virginia since last night
#423There 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…
Sounds like DC needs to be made a state.
Better: retroceded back into Maryland.
Re: Motorists have been stranded on a major interstate in Virginia since last night
#424There 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…
This may be an explanation for why the metro isn't better in DC, but not the source of the area's problems. Outside the city, most of the area is set up below the intensity of viable urban fabric and is entirely focused on cars. In that system, transit is just an attempt to set up satellite traffic jams where people then spend extra time commuting afterward. You can't have successful transit while favoring cars. And…
> And if people cant get around at both the origin and destination
This was my big hope about the scooters when they first showed up in LA, but it didn't really pan out, for a spectrum of reasons. For a minute there it was nice, and I definitely used the LA Metro much more.
Re: Motorists have been stranded on a major interstate in Virginia since last night
#425Earlier quoted context omitted.
The way that public transit scales to meet higher demand is different than roads. Whereas roads require more lanes, public transit such as trains can scale by either adding more train cars to existing trains or adding more frequent service. More frequent service, in addition to improving throughput, also helps everyone else using the system by making it more convenient. And, if it "induces" people to move from roads…
Increasing service is very difficult to do. For example, before the pandemic I would take the red line in LA which would be packed to the brim by the time it rolled into downtown LA, not enough room to even turn around while standing. During my commuting I would do a lot of reading about transit and about the redline in particular. To increase the capacity of the red line would take a lot of work that would not be ch…
That may be the case for LA, I'm not familiar enough with their situation to speak to it, but it isn't the case generally. There are lots of rail lines in the US and globally that have not come anywhere close to maxing track capacity. One such example is BART in SF, which could just add more cars to existing trains and see 60% increase in capacity [1]. The tracks and stations support trains up to 10 cars long, but very few are actually that long enough because they don't have enough cars in the fleet.
Re: Motorists have been stranded on a major interstate in Virginia since last night
#426Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
Up is expensive and rather unpleasant for those walking nearby on the surface. Down is even more expensive.
Don't forget that no matter how many lanes you add to a highway heading into a city, eventually that highway ends up... in the city. Too many cars in a city makes for a loud and dangerous-to-navigate environment for those who live there.
Re: Motorists have been stranded on a major interstate in Virginia since last night
#427Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why in the world would "get more people driving" be a measure of success? For industries that directly benefit from that, sure, but I can't imagine how that could be a societal goal.
Transportation is directly related to how much your local cities are doing. When you order goods from Amazon, that gets delivered to you. It might be a road, sea, rail, or plane, but its transportation. The more of packages ordered / delivered, the more things are happening in the city. The more jobs being created, the more people will need to transport to-and-from work. The more homes built, the more transportation…
Cars don't have an individual latency advantage. If you want to travel somewhere during rush hour, you still have an hour of latency, even if the trip would ordinarily be 15 minutes.
What they do have an advantage on is not having to synchronize with a schedule. If you need to travel 15 minutes by light rail, but the train only comes around once an hour, then missing the train adds an hour to your trip. It doesn't matter if the train never breaks down and has separated right-of-way - running on time is useless if you're not.
The way you work around that is by running more trains so that they can come more frequently. My rule of thumb is that if a transit line has a frequency of 15 minutes or less, I don't need to worry about the schedule because the time spent waiting for the train or bus is less than the time of the overall trip.
However, this is expensive; it only makes economic sense if you actually have that many riders that need to travel along that line. In other words, demand needs to be aggregated. The problem is that cars work the opposite way: they exist specifically to segregate demand. This occurs both directly and indirectly. The direct effect is the ability to immediately depart, which I already mentioned; but the indirect effect is the result of all the infrastructure that cars need in order to work at all. Things like wide highways and parking lots spread out where people need to go and make it far more dangerous to walk from a train or bus stop to your final destination.
In other words, cars cheat - they don't make your commute better, they make anyone who does not own a car have a worse one.
Re: Motorists have been stranded on a major interstate in Virginia since last night
#428Earlier quoted context omitted.
How does this logic work with electric cars; just cut the range in half?
Electric cars are apparently much better in these situations than gas-powered cars, because you can keep the heat on for hours and hours without using up much charge (or creating any CO). Don't personally know if that's true but it's what I've read.
It won't use that much charge compared to just driving around - we use so much power moving a multi-ton vehicle at highway speeds it's insane.
If you are lucky enough to have a vehicle that has a heat pump and not just a resistive heater and you use it just enough to stave off the cold, you are probably going to be in a very good shape. If you happen to have a vehicle with seat warmers, even better - heating oneself is better than heating the cabin air. ICE also have those, but you'll have to be sure to run the alternator from time to time, generally EVs will figure out when to charge the 12v system from the traction battery.
Will an EV like that outlast an ICE car? Based on the figures I'm seeing from a brief search(around 30 hours with a full tank of fuel), I think it's likely, on average. But there are too many variables.
You are completely right about the CO emissions. Can leave the heater running without worrying about poisoning.
Re: Motorists have been stranded on a major interstate in Virginia since last night
#429Earlier quoted context omitted.
The way that public transit scales to meet higher demand is different than roads. Whereas roads require more lanes, public transit such as trains can scale by either adding more train cars to existing trains or adding more frequent service. More frequent service, in addition to improving throughput, also helps everyone else using the system by making it more convenient. And, if it "induces" people to move from roads…
I don't buy the lower travel time thing, not unless your trains or whatever are running every five minutes. In practice public transit has always at least doubled my travel time. Waiting at stops (a) introduces substantial latency that (b) is unpredictable, forcing me to pad my travel times further. I mainly use it to avoid parking at the destination. Mostly DC metro rail and a bit of LA buses, FWIW.
DC and LA are both infamous for having bad public transit systems, so don't base all your decisions on your experience there. Within the USA, Chicago is really good - taking the L is way faster than cars because you get to skip road traffic and the trains come very frequently. I've heard mixed things about NYC (some very positive, some very negative, likely depending on where you're traveling from/to), but have no experience there myself. Outside of the USA, there are lots of countries with fantastic train systems (e.g. Hong Kong) that are way better than driving.
Re: Motorists have been stranded on a major interstate in Virginia since last night
#430Earlier 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 spent a night in the woods with a Mylar foil blanket. It blocks wind and reflects the heat back to you. When it came loose I would immediately wake up cold and reposition the blanket. The thermal effect was instant on and off.