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

Dolly Parton's Dollywood Express

thetransitguy.substack.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 218 posts

Re: Dolly Parton's Dollywood Express

#101

Post by xp84 »

hollywood_court wrote: post #83
shortformblog wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We know how to change a damn tire. We just couldn’t easily buy one because Gatlinburg didn’t have any garages open on Sunday morning.

Where do you live that has garages open on a Sunday morning? I don't think I've ever seen a tire shop or auto repair place (other than the big box and wholesale warehouse places) that's open on a Sunday.

I decided to take a very non-representative sample, and found that in many (but not all) parts of northern California, locations of the chain tire shop that I use are closed on Sundays, but most locations in the LA area are open 7 days a week. This chain has a lot of locations. It could be that they're responding to what their competitors do in both cases. So maybe getting tires on Sunday is a so-cal thing? TBH, I personally am more used to expecting the tire shop to be open 7 days a week, unless it was a small, locally-owned place.

Re: Dolly Parton's Dollywood Express

#102

Post by hollywood_court »

ethbr1 wrote: post #100
hollywood_court wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

15 miles is nothing on a spare tire. I'm not sure how many poor people you've spent time around, but I regularly see Nissan sedans driving around with multiple spare donuts on them. For some reason, it's always a Nissan.

Nissan's been making minimum cost models for awhile*, that are just reliable enough to stay rolling. Ergo, if you want the cheapest car you can get, it'll probably be a Nissan. * Before the late-10s Renault–Nissan–Mitsubishi insanity

Oh I know. Carlos Ghosn got them to focus more on the fleet market. I'll always be a Toyota/Lexus man, but I owned a Datsun wagon for a while and I followed the industry closely when I ran an import repair shop (which was never open on a Saturday or Sunday).

It's wild how that one man managed to change the entire path of a once great brand.

Re: Dolly Parton's Dollywood Express

#103

Post by ethbr1 »

sandworm101 wrote: post #85
shortformblog wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We know how to change a damn tire. We just couldn’t easily buy one because Gatlinburg didn’t have any garages open on Sunday morning.

But it does sound like you didn't know how to repair a flat. Any hardware store and most gas stations will have either a plug kit, or some of that horrible blow-in sealant in a can. Either will get you back on the within an hour. (Fyi, if anyone reading this does ever use that sealant stuff, when you get to a proper repair shop TELL THEM about the sealant before I pop the bead and spray it all over the shop.)

Ref for anyone reading, plug kits + a DC-powered inflator should live in all your cars. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=_ocVkYAAaVg

Turns an "omg" problem into "eh, hold my beer..." for 99% of tire punctures.

Re: Dolly Parton's Dollywood Express

#104

Post by absurdo »

> As I’ve written before, there are few institutions, or people, with a higher approval rating than Dolly Parton. While I love her for her music and the feeling of joy she gives us, I also love that Dollywood Express, the heritage steam train that operates within Dollywood, has a higher rail ridership than 27 states.

Oh I’d ride that, alright!

Re: Dolly Parton's Dollywood Express

#105

Post by ethbr1 »

hollywood_court wrote: post #102
ethbr1 wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nissan's been making minimum cost models for awhile*, that are just reliable enough to stay rolling. Ergo, if you want the cheapest car you can get, it'll probably be a Nissan. * Before the late-10s Renault–Nissan–Mitsubishi insanity

Oh I know. Carlos Ghosn got them to focus more on the fleet market. I'll always be a Toyota/Lexus man, but I owned a Datsun wagon for a while and I followed the industry closely when I ran an import repair shop (which was never open on a Saturday or Sunday). It's wild how that one man managed to change the entire path of a once great brand.

I think of it as one too many levels of management. At some point, your nearest understanding of the business is powerpoints about powerpoints about powerpoints... and then dumb ideas start to seem reasonable.

Re: Dolly Parton's Dollywood Express

#106

Post by Spooky23 »

pizzathyme wrote: post #49
shortformblog wrote: post #39

The irony being, of course, that it is surrounded by an area where it is basically impossible to get by without a car. My wife and I once left Gatlinburg after a week there and our tire blew out on the way out of town. It was a Sunday morning. Literally our only option to get it replaced that day was a Walmart location 15 miles away. So we had to wait for AAA for an hour and a half to tell us we were stuck using a do…

Exactly, more rails would not be useful because there is lower density in the US. Denmark is 141 persons/km^2, whereas the U.S. is about 36 persons/km^2 (census data). Even if you built train lines everywhere outside urban areas, any stop you step off at would still require a 20 minute drive to get to where you are going. (Or in your case 15!)

You could make the same argument about highways if you didn’t have the massive federal funding. Maintenance of an interstate averages around $15,000 per lane/mile. Bridges are 7-12x.

We had a viable rail network all over the country as recently as the early 1950s. Federal policy blew it up because dispersing the population was seen as a civil defense priority for an atomic war, and cars and airplanes provided an economic engine to keep workers and returning soldiers employed.

Later, the shift to rural industry and trucking was a way to break unions. Meatpacking transformed from a good union gig back to an oppressive industry fueled by undocumented labor. If the workers acted up, the owners would realize they knew where a bunch of undocumented people lived and call in INS/ICE.

Re: Dolly Parton's Dollywood Express

#107

Post by [deleted] »

eesmith wrote: post #22
lisper wrote: post #7

The comparison of the Dollywood Express ridership to statewide railways is pretty unfair. The Dollywood Express is not really transportation, it's an amusement park ride, more comparable to the Disney Railway than Amtrack, and I'm pretty sure more people ride the Disney Railway than the Dollywood Express. The economics of amusement park rides and actual transportation systems are radically different. (Actually, the D…

The author both points that out, and links to his essay "How Disney Became One of the Largest Transit Agencies in North America' (What Does a Theme Park Operating the 10th Largest Transit Agency in the U.S. Say About Us?)" at https://thetransitguy.substack.com/p/how-disney-became-one-o...

[deleted]

Re: Dolly Parton's Dollywood Express

#108

Post by [deleted] »

tomjakubowski wrote: post #37
Spivak wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure but cars replaced horse ownership 1-1. The thing that's high is personal transportation. If whatever you propose as an alternative doesn't confer the benefits of personal transportation then adoption is likely to be quite low. Ride services took off even though busses were already there because it was personal transportation for hire. Even in countries that don't have the structural problems the US has that lead…

It was not a 1-1 replacement. The rate of private horse ownership was not nearly so high back in the day as the rate of private automobile ownership is today. Today in the United States there are 284 million registered vehicles. Almost one car for every person. The American horse population peaked at 25 million in 1920, when the human population was at 102 million. https://www.howardweinsteinbooks.com/single-post/201…

[deleted]

Re: Dolly Parton's Dollywood Express

#109

Post by bluGill »

esseph wrote: post #89
shortformblog wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We know how to change a damn tire. We just couldn’t easily buy one because Gatlinburg didn’t have any garages open on Sunday morning.

A very large portion of the country doesn't have garages open on Sunday.

Most mechanics charge double time for working Sunday, even if they had not work at all the previous week (which doesn't happen, but if it did). Retail is open weekend, but mechanics like just about everyone else wants to work their 9-5 monday-friday job so they get weekends off.

Re: Dolly Parton's Dollywood Express

#110

Post by chrisco255 »

tomjakubowski wrote: post #37
Spivak wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure but cars replaced horse ownership 1-1. The thing that's high is personal transportation. If whatever you propose as an alternative doesn't confer the benefits of personal transportation then adoption is likely to be quite low. Ride services took off even though busses were already there because it was personal transportation for hire. Even in countries that don't have the structural problems the US has that lead…

It was not a 1-1 replacement. The rate of private horse ownership was not nearly so high back in the day as the rate of private automobile ownership is today. Today in the United States there are 284 million registered vehicles. Almost one car for every person. The American horse population peaked at 25 million in 1920, when the human population was at 102 million. https://www.howardweinsteinbooks.com/single-post/201…

People also used oxen and mules for personal transport (we don't even have numbers for these and the equine count is probably less than accurate as well), back when the population was less than 70 million (and couples had upwards of 8 or 9 children frequently, so much of the population was younger) before mass migration at the turn of the century (itself made possible by advances in transportation with steam engines in use at sea and by rail). By 1920 cars were already commonplace, but either way, most of the population was doing subsistence farming in the late 1800s and went to town maybe once or twice a month for supplies. We were much poorer before cars, and raising and maintaining a horse requires land and resources.

You can see SF in 1906 as cars started to take the place of horse and buggy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sHkc83XA2dY. The early automobiles even fit the same profile as a buggy.

Post reply on HN