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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

#11

Post by toomuchtodo »

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 with a transfer pump.

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

#13

Post by dragontamer »

jdavis703 wrote: post #7
dragontamer wrote: post #5

I'm not surprised. I've taken this road before during the 2017 Eclipse. Its a path that connects major parts of the country together, but there are no alternative roads to take if this one road closes. Other locations have "Backup" highways to lighten the load or otherwise take up the slack if the main road closes. Not so here. I've been told that Virginia once had plans to build additional highways / alternative roa…

> there are no alternative roads to take if this one road closes. US Route 1 basically parallels I-95 in most of VA. I was once detoured on it after a military HAZMAT incident. It’s slow going, but it works.

Route 1 seems like a local-road to me with lots of traffic lights though.

I-95 works really well as long as its clear. But as soon as an emergency happens, the spillover traffic is too massive for Route 1 to ever hope to handle. An interstate-highway can't rely upon a traffic-light laden local road to handle the traffic from a 4-lane interstate.

EDIT: In the case of the 2017 eclipse, the traffic was so heavy that truckers started to pile up on the side of the roads (allegedly due to the laws stating that they could only drive for X hours at a time). Losing a few lanes slowed down traffic dramatically, causing even more truckers to just pull over due to legal requirements. I don't think the GPS / Waze ever recommended for us to leave I-95 during this time, so Rt. 1 was never a consideration.

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A 2-lane highway without traffic lights that runs parallel would help a lot. I don't know the lay of the land in Virginia (ideally such a road would be coordinated with local suburbs / local cities to lessen day-to-day traffic as well).

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

#14

Post by 58x14 »

It's remarkable how quickly our vehicles and roads succumb to such conditions. I used to drive that route on I95, and in the winter I would always pack a blanket and bottled water. I can only imagine having children with me.

From an infrastructure perspective, realistically, I suppose it isn't feasible to account for more extreme snowfall.

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

#15

Post by ceejayoz »

julianh95 wrote: post #12

Some _fast_ and reliable mass transit like the trains in Japan/Europe sure would be nice to help alleviate situations like this and general traffic.

It happens to trains, too.

https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2018/01/12/national/heavy-...

> Around 430 passengers in Niigata Prefecture were forced to spend the night on a packed four-car train after it got stranded Thursday evening by heavy snow along the Sea of Japan coast.

https://www.scmp.com/news/asia/east-asia/article/1904881/jap...

> About 110 passengers on a Sanyo Shinkansen bullet train bound for Shin-Osaka Station stayed overnight on the train at Okayama Station, western Japan, after the train arrived around 2am on Monday.

> The train had been stranded en route for about two hours due to a breakdown of railway equipment, apparently caused by snow.

(I'd rather be stuck in a train, that said.)

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

#17

Post by javagram »

julianh95 wrote: post #12

Some _fast_ and reliable mass transit like the trains in Japan/Europe sure would be nice to help alleviate situations like this and general traffic.

http://longbridgeproject.com/

Virginia is working to double rail capacity between DC and Richmond by 2030.

People will still drive cars though.

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

#18

Post by jeffbee »

julianh95 wrote: post #12

Some _fast_ and reliable mass transit like the trains in Japan/Europe sure would be nice to help alleviate situations like this and general traffic.

Right? Imagine a mode of travel which does not suffer from emergent collapse, which is managed by professionals with expertise and specialized heavy equipment, which in any case is not normally troubled by snowfalls of less than 2 meters in depth, and which in clear weather is dramatically faster and cheaper than driving, and which, as a bonus, is systematically cheaper than cars and highways and which will not destroy the atmosphere!

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

#19

Post by PopeUrbanX »

guntars wrote: post #3

Link for people that DO want megabytes of tracking Javascript and, you know, media: https://www.cnn.com/2022/01/04/weather/winter-weather-tuesda...

Thanks, I hate having to resize my browser window just to make 100% width paragraphs readable.

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

#20

Post by kube-system »

julianh95 wrote: post #12

Some _fast_ and reliable mass transit like the trains in Japan/Europe sure would be nice to help alleviate situations like this and general traffic.

People are also stuck on Amtrak in VA

https://www.upmatters.com/news/national/snow-stalls-amtrak-i...

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