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In Colorado, an ambitious new highway policy is not building them

nytimes.com

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Re: In Colorado, an ambitious new highway policy is not building them

#121

Post by someguydave »

more_corn wrote: post #117
someguydave wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Motorcyles have a roughly 30 times higher fatality rate per mile driven compared to cars

That sounds about right. Rode a motorcycle in SF traffic for years. About twice a day people would do something that could have killed me. Changing lanes without looking, blowing a stop sign, just generally not paying attention. I had a woman pull up while I was waiting to pull out of a gas station. She somehow thought that I should back up, up hill and let her in. I don’t think she realized that motorcycles don’t ha…

This thread is full of people happy that people are wasting so much time in traffic because it will force them to change their desires

Re: In Colorado, an ambitious new highway policy is not building them

#122

Post by infecto »

rufus_foreman wrote: post #43
infecto wrote: post #15

Sounds like the Bay Area. We don't like cars but we refuse to build comprehensive transit. To build transit that works you cannot value everyone's opinion equally and have to just make it happen. Some of the worst localized pollution I have experienced in my life was while living in the Bay Area with the massive traffic jams.

>> you cannot value everyone's opinion equally and have to just make it happen You live in a country with the wrong type of political system for that. Valuing everyone's opinion equally is called democracy.

Disagree. I could have done a better job describing it though. In the current paradigm, the N houses/people negatively impacted by a given transit project will be given the same weighting as the N*Y people positively impacted by the project. You cannot have progressive transit projects that work when you allow those N individuals to stop the project. Nothing to do with democracy, different states and local governments handle it differently.

Re: In Colorado, an ambitious new highway policy is not building them

#123

Post by infecto »

SSJPython wrote: post #82
rufus_foreman wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> you cannot value everyone's opinion equally and have to just make it happen You live in a country with the wrong type of political system for that. Valuing everyone's opinion equally is called democracy.

> You live in a country with the wrong type of political system for that. Valuing everyone's opinion equally is called democracy. Infrastructure should not be subject to peoples' opinions. Like utilities and defense, infrastructure is crucial for security and commerce. People simply don't know better.

Totally agree on this one. I am a free market proponent but when it comes to infrastructure projects, often its hard for even the free market to get it right and its often better for a central plan to work off of (roads, electrical transmission lines, etc)

Re: In Colorado, an ambitious new highway policy is not building them

#124

Post by infecto »

ambyra wrote: post #36
infecto wrote: post #15

Sounds like the Bay Area. We don't like cars but we refuse to build comprehensive transit. To build transit that works you cannot value everyone's opinion equally and have to just make it happen. Some of the worst localized pollution I have experienced in my life was while living in the Bay Area with the massive traffic jams.

Here's a nice study: https://newatlas.com/motorcycles-reduce-congestion/21420/ They say 10% of traffic being replaced by motorcycles reduces congestion by 40%. California has pretty good weather so it's probably feasible to commute by motorbike almost every day.

That is not a solution to not having public transit.

Re: In Colorado, an ambitious new highway policy is not building them

#125

Post by infecto »

ambyra wrote: post #24
infecto wrote: post #15

Sounds like the Bay Area. We don't like cars but we refuse to build comprehensive transit. To build transit that works you cannot value everyone's opinion equally and have to just make it happen. Some of the worst localized pollution I have experienced in my life was while living in the Bay Area with the massive traffic jams.

Try a motorcycle! The laws for lane splitting are the best in the country. You could probably fit 6 motorcycles in the space of one car.

Nope and this does nothing to the problem of not having public transit.

Re: In Colorado, an ambitious new highway policy is not building them

#126

Post by someguydave »

ElevenLathe wrote: post #59
fastball wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What science is being ignored? Traffic expanding to fill capacity is not a bad thing, that is efficient use of capacity?

Fossil energy is artificially cheap (the price its consumers pay does not even begin to pay for the negative externalities of producing and burning it -- and most of it goes into private hands that don't intend to use it for any kind of mitigation anyway). This causes all kinds of problems, has all kinds of causes, and is generally a disaster all around, but at the very least we shouldn't deliberately make it worse b…

If the real problem is fossil fuels then leave traffic engineering out of it

Re: In Colorado, an ambitious new highway policy is not building them

#127

Post by infecto »

theodorejb wrote: post #11
aqme28 wrote: post #3

> If every car on the road were battery-powered and those batteries were charged entirely by renewable energy, transportation emissions would be close to zero. This is entirely false. I'm surprised to see it in the NYTimes. They're only 0 when you factor out the cost of building the car and maintaining the highway, and those are still pretty high

Not to mention greater wear on the road and increased particle emissions from brakes and tires due to heavy batteries in EVs. https://nypost.com/2024/03/05/business/evs-release-more-toxi...

Road wear is not an issue for 99% of consumer vehicles. Roads are impacted by loaded semis, not a 3-6k lb vehicle. Same goes for brakes as most EVs implement regen braking.

Re: In Colorado, an ambitious new highway policy is not building them

#128

Post by id00 »

ambyra wrote: post #24
infecto wrote: post #15

Sounds like the Bay Area. We don't like cars but we refuse to build comprehensive transit. To build transit that works you cannot value everyone's opinion equally and have to just make it happen. Some of the worst localized pollution I have experienced in my life was while living in the Bay Area with the massive traffic jams.

Try a motorcycle! The laws for lane splitting are the best in the country. You could probably fit 6 motorcycles in the space of one car.

Where should I put my toddler?

Re: In Colorado, an ambitious new highway policy is not building them

#129

Post by nradov »

duxup wrote: post #17

I'd rather see efforts to make mass transit more attractive and encourage its use in a POSITIVE way, rather than using a stick of clogging the roads and punishing people into using mass transit. Win the market, don't just quash what you don't like. I can imagine this easily being responded to negatively in the end and the political response is to give in and the pendulum swings wildly in the other direction. In the e…

In order to make mass transit more attractive we will have to do something about the other riders. A lot of people that I know in the SF Bay Area simply don't feel safe on buses and light rail (although Caltrain seems to be fine). Our failures in housing and mental health public policy have turned mass transit into ersatz homeless shelters. Plus there are plenty of regular antisocial assholes playing loud music, yelling, littering, sometimes begging. Rules are not enforced.

Punishing drivers isn't a solution. We need comprehensive solutions that make regular people feel welcome on public transit. Otherwise those people won't support public transit funding.

Re: In Colorado, an ambitious new highway policy is not building them

#130

Post by lotsofpulp »

duxup wrote: post #17

I'd rather see efforts to make mass transit more attractive and encourage its use in a POSITIVE way, rather than using a stick of clogging the roads and punishing people into using mass transit. Win the market, don't just quash what you don't like. I can imagine this easily being responded to negatively in the end and the political response is to give in and the pendulum swings wildly in the other direction. In the e…

>I'd rather see efforts to make mass transit more attractive and encourage its use in a POSITIVE way, rather than using a stick of clogging the roads and punishing people into using mass transit. Win the market, don't just quash what you don't like.

Impossible. Mass transit, walking, and non motorized bicycling do not mesh with individual motorized traffic. It’s just physics.

The classic individualist vs collectivist dilemma that nature presents. You have to sacrifice one for the other.

As proof, simply look at all the best places for mass transit. Individual car usage is painful in all of them. The more painful using a car is, the better the public transit can be.

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