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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

#601

Post by aidenn0 »

0_____0 wrote: post #167
vjust wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right on. I lived literally next to Dulles International Airport - ~8 miles. Yet, to get to Dulles (or Reston/Herndon) by Public transit, would've taken me 2 hours perhaps, or more.

8 miles in 2 hours? That's a brisk walk!

Except (unless they've built new paths since I last checked) you can't realistically walk to the airport either. The only non-limited-access highway entrance is on the north side of the airport, so unless GP lives in Ashburn, you'll have to walk around the airport first (and if you're east, that means finding a decent crossing for Route 28...). Then you have such pedestrian friendly places as this[1].

1: https://www.google.com/maps/@38.9768706,-77.4451826,3a,75y,2...

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

#602

Post by Aloha »

dnautics wrote: post #573
lmm wrote: post #571

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the only state with no ports Huh? What about, IDK, Idaho?

https://itd.idaho.gov/poe-locations/

If you want to make an argument about what a port is, picking land "points of entry" isn't a good argument.

Airports are a better yardstick.

A new Capitol State could easily establish both a port and points of entry if it so chose, the Potomac is somewhat in practice (and legally) a navigable river and there are US highways and interstates that go thru Washington DC.

Furthermore the WMAA would likely come under the control of the city.

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

#603

Post by onecommentman »

azylman wrote: post #395
ufmace wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Not precisely to discourage unsafe driving. Simply to slow vehicles for any one of several reasons, safety often being an important one. Traffic calming has other benefits, such as more livable residential neighborhoods, and less congested residential side streets, especially during rush hours.

That does have the result of increasing trip times by cars, and thus motivating use of public transit.

Guessing intent is a fool’s game, and can’t really be true or false per se. It does antagonize automobile drivers and, from their valid but particular perspective, makes their life worse in (what would seem to them) a gratuitous fashion. Americans don’t like arbitrary and capricious as a whole.

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

#604

Post by rsj_hn »

oh_sigh wrote: post #285
rsj_hn wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

That's my recollection as well. There was a conservative meme in the late 90s/early 2000s about "Huh...it's cold during summer...how's that for global warming?", and I feel like "climate change" is a result of climate activist groups realizing global warming is a bad/confusing descriptor. I also recall in the early 2000s there was an attempt to get "global weirding" to replace "global warming" among activist communit…

That's correct. The idea that a Republican pollster like Frank Luntz is actually in control of climate messaging is not a serious claim, and I'm really confused why people are clinging to the idea that either the Republicans or "Oil Companies" are the ones responsible for the switch. That's bad history.

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

#605

Post by Aloha »

dnautics wrote: post #591
lmm wrote: post #579

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think those are weigh stations, not ports in the usual sense of the word.

Ports of entry are surprisingly important regulatory entities at the state level, and DC doesn't have any. Don't deflect from your ignorance.

Doing what?

I'm a former truck driver - they levy no substantive taxes, they perform at most a cursory vehicle safety function.

Like I was unaware that oversized and overweight truck permits were an important regulatory function.

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

#606

Post by josephcsible »

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"...

For some reason, we only get told to make this distinction when the weather in question is exceptionally cold, never when it's exceptionally warm.

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

#607

Post by bobthepanda »

imgabe wrote: post #473
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…

I lived in the DC area for 20 years (1999-2019) and commuted daily on the Metro for many of those years. The things you say are true, but they were also true 15-20 years ago when the Metro was leaps and bounds better than it is today. They were true in the 1970s when the Metro was first built. So it can't be the whole story. There's much more to it. It's not just that the Metro is bad, it's that it keeps getting wors…

The difference is that in 1990, the system was still in kind of new shape.

Generally speaking, the lifecycle for a transit system's components look like 40-50 years. That puts the expiry date of the first DC Metro lines at 2016 and beyond, which roughly lines up with when things started falling apart.

Basically, the entire system has always run on fumes. That only recently stopped cutting it.

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

#608

Post by trompetenaccoun »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #11
arberx wrote: post #6

How do electric vechicles hold up in something like this?

If they’re not moving and have a heat pump, well, but like a combustion vehicle will exhaust their energy storage eventually. Resistive heat or suboptimal battery architecture? Poorly. Jerrycans for some, tows to Fast DC chargers for others. Class 8 semis should have sufficient diesel reserves for long loiters, even with truckers using auxiliary power units for heat. If not, it is trivial to refuel them on the road w…

This is a misconception. Heat pumps can improve things a little but often far from as much as people expect. The problem is that in cold conditions most of the loss is from reduced battery performance right from the start. In really cold conditions it can be 50% and more reduction in battery performance. This is energy you're not getting back, heat pump or not. In addition the performance depends on the temperature. There is a sweet spot and the colder it gets from there the less effective it becomes. At around -20 degrees C and below it's effectively useless.

There are already vehicles that have been tested in real world conditions. Tesla Model 3s exist with and without heat pump. The difference isn't that large, around 10% more range with the pump in perfect conditions. I've seen people doing tests sleeping in their cars all night and in cold North American winters it's not pretty. With a fully charged battery you will get enough heat for a comfy good nights sleep, 8 hours or so. So lets say in an emergency situation you can stretch it to 12 or so by reducing the temperature. But that's on a full charge! Most cars getting stuck in traffic are not going to have fully charged batteries. It absolutely is a problem with EVs even more than with ICE cars.

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

#609

Post by bobthepanda »

ravel-bar-foo wrote: post #500
efxhoy wrote: post #399

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

We already have this in the form of gas taxes. However, increasing them is politically untenable.

Gas taxes are becoming less of this, though, partially because cars have become more fuel efficient, partially because some cars don't even use gas, and partially because the gas tax has not been raised since 1993 and so has not covered full road spending for a long time.

The most "fair" way to do it would be to charge according to road wear and tear, which would look something like axle load ^2 * miles driven, but this would be hard to implement and also widely unpopular with huge swathes of the population (truck driver is the most common profession in many states)

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

#610

Post by joejerryronnie »

dnautics wrote: post #565
imgabe wrote: post #560

Earlier quoted context omitted.

MD doesn't want that and neither does DC. DC is not Maryland. It's its own place with its own identity.

I hear this all the time from clueless rich DC residents who get wrapped up in all sorts of granfalloons. You don't think "Arlington" is its own place with its own identity separate from the rest of Virgina? Moreover, anacostia residents probably have more in common with residents of pg county than residents of palisades, who have more in common with bethesda residents than anacostia residents.

The only people who say this are Democrats who want another (presumably) safe democratic state in DC. My city doesn’t share the same “identity” as the city next to me, but nobody’s clamoring to break up the state.
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