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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

#611

Post by bobthepanda »

nostromo wrote: post #87
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.

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…

The speeds were not reduced because the transit needed to put more people in.

The speeds were reduced because people keep dying when getting hit by speeding cars. And this problem has gotten worse with Americans shifting to SUVs and crossovers that hit humans higher up and toss them under the wheels.

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

#612

Post by joejerryronnie »

jaybrendansmith wrote: post #542
imgabe wrote: post #473

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

So ... do any of you follow politics? One of the two major parties has given up on governing the country, and has not done so for ten years. This 'grand' old party seems to be toying with the idea of giving up on Democracy next. And we are confused as to why the DC Metro system cannot be fixed?? Here's a tip: Fix that party, and you will find that suddenly the DC Metro has money to fix the automatic braking system.

[flagged]

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

#613

Post by aidenn0 »

rayiner wrote: post #454
aidenn0 wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I also grew up in Northern VA. Biggest issue there is how hard it is to build public transit. The silver-line was such a clusterfuck largely because of fights over who should pay[1], how much it should cost and how to balance construction-induced disruption and costs with long-term TCO. If we could build rail miles as cheaply and quickly as Western Europe, everyone in Fairfax Co could commute via rail except perhaps…

> If we could build rail miles as cheaply and quickly as Western Europe, everyone in Fairfax Co could commute via rail except perhaps those work west of there. I agree. But we can’t. It’s a cluster fuck even when it’s just one state. Maryland spent $7 billion building the Purple line, which is what Western European countries spent for similar amounts of fully automated underground heavy rail. At some point we have to…

> At some point we have to treat our infrastructure costs as realities to be planned around rather than solvable problems.

I think this is the main point of disagreement in this thread; if we have to spend $500M/mile for light rail in the US, it's fairly obvious that rail is not an option. If there is a large learning-factor for building rail that would bring costs down significantly with more miles built, then rail is certainly an option for the northeast US.

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

#614

Post by vkou »

joejerryronnie wrote: post #610
dnautics wrote: post #565

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Your city's votes get counted during election years. DC is one of the poster children for taxation without representation.

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

#615

Post by vkou »

joejerryronnie wrote: post #612
jaybrendansmith wrote: post #542

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So ... do any of you follow politics? One of the two major parties has given up on governing the country, and has not done so for ten years. This 'grand' old party seems to be toying with the idea of giving up on Democracy next. And we are confused as to why the DC Metro system cannot be fixed?? Here's a tip: Fix that party, and you will find that suddenly the DC Metro has money to fix the automatic braking system.

[flagged]

I'm not sure one can have a productive discussion if they believe that the democratic party of 2021 is anywhere near Karl Marx.

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

#616

Post by actually_a_dog »

joejerryronnie wrote: post #612
jaybrendansmith wrote: post #542

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So ... do any of you follow politics? One of the two major parties has given up on governing the country, and has not done so for ten years. This 'grand' old party seems to be toying with the idea of giving up on Democracy next. And we are confused as to why the DC Metro system cannot be fixed?? Here's a tip: Fix that party, and you will find that suddenly the DC Metro has money to fix the automatic braking system.

[flagged]

> ...ramming through a purely partisan agenda via reconciliation and changing the rules when they don’t like the outcome of the game.

You can say this regardless of which party you consider to be the "other" party, except that one party started it a long time ago. Because obstructionism has been the name of the game for so long, these tactics have become necessary in order to get anything done. It's a perfectly rational response to how the rules of the game have changed, IMO.

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

#617

Post by flavius29663 »

unethical_ban wrote: post #497
nradov wrote: post #490

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Back when the Constitution was written there were private citizens who owned weapons of war. Specifically they owned large artillery pieces that were used both on land and on sailing vessels. The lack of a recent revolution in the US is a feature, not a bug. Our Constitution isn't perfect, but it can be amended and has been many times.

The Senate is entirely vestigial and needs to be dissolved or other wise made to be proportional to population, if we are going to keep an upper house at all. The House needs to be rid of single member districts, ideally, and move to a multimember party system. Barring that, first-past-the-post should be completely replaced as a voting mechanism. The Supreme Court should be reformed with term limits of some kind, and…

EU was founded quite recently. It too has mechanisms to avoid concentrating all the power in the hands of the big ones: Germany and France.

E.g. for the European Parliament, each country has a different level of representation (MPs per capita). Germany has the least representation and Malta has the highest. This way smaller countries also have a voice.

There are other mechanisms as well(agencies HQs, comisioners etc.), but in the end Germany and France still have a lot of weighg in all the major decisions. If it wasn't for at least the current provisions it would have been even worse and probably the EU would have dissolved by now.

US has a similar system of propping up smaller states: for senate and president elections. I don't see this anachronistic at all, the more I learn about it the more impressed I am with the wisdom of the american forefathers. E.g. The Senate does not represent the people, they represent the states. This is very similar to how EU "council of ministers" has one from each state, regardless how large that state is.

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

#618

Post by flavius29663 »

mschuster91 wrote: post #474
micromacrofoot wrote: post #466

Earlier quoted context omitted.

does the establishment of washington dc as an unrepresented area make sense today in 2022? it has over 700,000 residents and its own school system… since its inception it has struggled time and time again due to its awkward status… the people living there want it overwhelmingly!

> does the establishment of washington dc as an unrepresented area make sense today in 2022? Many things in the US political system don't make sense in 2022, especially from an European point of view - mining and water rights, inequality of rural and urban votes because of unproportional representation in the Senate, Presidential votes in "stronghold" states being effectively wasted thanks to the Electoral College, t…

As a European, we could have used a neutral zone like the Americans...rather than having the parliament move every week between Bruxelles and Strassbourg because France could not conceive not being the home of the EU capitol. Which one is more absurd? How would it sound if the US congress would move every week between Boston and Philadelphia?

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

#619

Post by joejerryronnie »

vkou wrote: post #614
joejerryronnie wrote: post #610

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Your city's votes get counted during election years. DC is one of the poster children for taxation without representation.

That’s why they should consider annexation by Maryland.

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

#620

Post by vkou »

dnautics wrote: post #559
Bud wrote: post #536

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quoted post unavailable.

It would be the only state with no agricultural interests, the only state with no ports, the only state where the majority of the residents work for the federal government... The last one alone is pretty scary and a bit of a conflict of interest.

> the only state where the majority of the residents work for the federal government... The last one alone is pretty scary and a bit of a conflict of interest.

You can quite literally say this about any group of people. I don't like landlords, I find it scary that landlords can vote and contribute to political campaigns. Imagine the awful and self-serving things that landlords would do if they ever turned the powers of our political machine to their own ends! I don't like resource industries, I find it scary that Texas and North Dakota get the vote. I don't like techies, California should lose a few seats in Congress, etc, etc, etc.

Oh, and your numbers aren't even right, there are 140,000 federal government employees in DC, and many of them commute in. That's not 'the majority' of the residents by any stretch of the imagination.

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