111–120 of 146 posts
I've always thought that total vehicle miles are capped by the availability of gas. Since fracking has expanded that supply, at least in the short term, I'd expect those mileage charts to start upticking again.
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Show me another nation /of our geographical size/ with active well used long distance passenger rail outside of a few highly dense corridors - a hint, it doesn't exist - people will nearly always choose speed. There are very few passenger rail systems with higher than 90% farebox recovery - and none in a country of our geographical size. That said, I'm in favor of keeping amtrak for strategic reasons (a trained pool…
What kind of emergencies? Ones where we suddenly have to run a lot of passenger trains?
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The problem with gravel roads is that after a heavy rain a lot of potholes appear and some of them can be pretty big, it's relatively ok during the day travel, but driving at night will most certainly cause a lot of car damage and accidents in a long run.
Yeh gravel shifts significantly once you get pools of water forming. Gravel roads need annual levelling work even for low traffic routes.
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It's merely a question of how heavily we subsidize their lifestyle with infrastructure & other spending from the state/federal purse, which ultimately comes from economically productive cities. One of the things we currently do, through differential housing prices, is send retirees to small towns with dead economies. They get a pension, Social Security, and Medicare, and that income is often the sole thing keeping th…
Isn't Berlin a net-taker compared to other major German cities?
It'd be interesting to see if perhaps it's better for the feds if they're in rural towns but not the states.
In Albany, NY where I'm from I used to live right near a major hospital and college Albany Medical Center. And there were helicopters flying to it three or four times a day. I'm sure some of those helicopter rides out to taxi those requiring medical assistance are being borne by tax payers. It's a pretty complex question to wrap your head around when there are so many variables. Does an elderly person living in NYC produce a small drag on the economy because they're not contributing as much as the average young professional and increase the cost of rent for those people?
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Huge chunks of the midwest are a paved checkerboard of roads spaced at 1 mile intervals. Many of these get 3-5 cars passing a day, if that. There is no need for a lot of these to be paved, as they serve as field access roads. The houses off these roads are farm houses, and most of the farmers I know don't mind either way if it's a gravel or paved road. Some actually prefer gravel, as in the winter, when it is icy, th…
That's a bit of an exaggeration - there are definitely roads checkerboarded at 1 mile intervals, but most are gravel in between some paved ones.
By 2010- 2012 or so, actual fuel use was ~50% of year 2000 forecast estimates.
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Yeh gravel shifts significantly once you get pools of water forming. Gravel roads need annual levelling work even for low traffic routes.
But that cost is cheaper than repaving right?
It's merely hot and dusty work, it doesn't stink at all.
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What kind of emergencies? Ones where we suddenly have to run a lot of passenger trains?
Ones where for a variety of reasons airspace is closed - WWII would not have been possible for us without railroads - the railroads moves huge numbers of men and materiel cross country faster than aircraft could - railroads also use much less fuel to do it than nearly any method of transport. While I cant think of a tactical situation where we couldn't airlift troops inside the continental US - the skills pool is wor…
But that's freight. If there's really a situation where we need to move vast numbers of /people/ around the country, the few dozen passenger consists that Amtrak owns or leases are just not gonna do the job. It would need to be the highways (probably pressing transit and school buses into service) or nothing.
It's possible that the NE corridor services could be helpful in an emergency, but for the vast majority of the country, the idea that Amtrak could be pressed into service as anything other than a minor sideline during a major evacuation or emergency is a just a weird fantasy.
I'm from Iowa. There are a handful of population centers, and a sprinkling of homes and small communities between miles and miles and miles of farmland. The thing is, most people don't travel between the small communities - most driving takes people to or from town. If they're not going to town, they're going to visit neighbors or their fields, in which case gravel roads work great. Gravel roads work better than dete…
I'm from Iowa. There are a handful of population centers, and a sprinkling of homes and small communities between miles and miles and miles of farmland. The thing is, most people don't travel between the small communities - most driving takes people to or from town. If they're not going to town, they're going to visit neighbors or their fields, in which case gravel roads work great. Gravel roads work better than dete…
When it snows, how effective is it to shovel the gravel roads?
If given a choice, I think I prefer driving on poorly plowed gravel roads over well plowed paved roads in snow storms. Gravel roads don't seem to ice up as easily, and the gravel and dirt helps with traction.