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

That means you didn't add enough lanes. You need to get ahead of induced demand, otherwise you city isn't meeting the needs of the people who live there. If you don't want to have many places you can reach in a reasonable amount of time can you can move to a rural area. The point of cities is to give people options to reach lots of places quickly. Get busying being a good city.

Note, it can be better to add transit other than lanes of road. Even though I said add lanes, adding lanes is but one possible solution. Good transit may well be better. Figure out how to make your city serve the people who want to get around.

This is a really good point, but I also want to bring up a (small) counterargument:

I live in Denver, CO. Cars basically make it impossible to walk around most of the city, even in the more residential areas. Walking is an essential part of the public transit/non-car transportation experience because essentially everyone has to walk a few blocks from a bus stop, train station, bike rack, etc. to complete their trip on both ends. If walking those few blocks is unpleasant, unsafe, or impossible, people will (reasonably) prefer cars.

Unfortunately, car and pedestrian traffic are at odds in most cities. Situations that seem better for cars (turning lanes, right-on-red, faster speed limits, street parking) often make life hell for pedestrians who try to cross the road. Or make life very, very noisy for pedestrians who need to walk or live or work near those roads.

I agree wholeheartedly that we can't just make driving suck to encourage more people to walk or take public transit. But there are aspects of driving that need to be sacrificed to make public transit better. A great example: changing 4-lane roads to 2-lane roads -- if you can introduce a bike lane, bus lane, or both, those methods of transportation become significantly faster, safer, and better. Biking is basically a non-starter without lanes; busses can be so slow as to be not worth using when they get stuck in normal traffic. The same argument applies to parking removal -- instead of using an entire effective lane of traffic for parked cars, we can dedicate it to bikes or buses.

Lowering the speed limit reduces noise at street level, makes streets safer to cross for pedestrians, and allows bikes to peacefully coexist with cars in an environment where you don't need to go that fast anyway.

It would be interesting to hear what holds you back from using buses, walking, or bikes instead of your car to get around town. In Denver, the main issues I encounter are:

- bike theft

- literal crazy people shouting at me on buses/trains

- drivers who park/stop in crosswalks, or try to kill me on my bicycle

- the bus network is extremely slow to get around town

I think there's a fair argument that we should focus on solving these problems first, before we degrade car traffic. Bike theft is a really bike one in Seattle, too, iirc, and a huge blocker for folks trying to switch away from cars. But eventually you need to degrade car traffic to make public transit as good as it can be.

I95 in that section is only 3 lanes, when it should have been upgraded to 4 many years ago. Instead, they focused on adding 2 HOV lanes which change direction mid day. They could have added 3 lanes in EACH direction (6 total) given the space required for the HOV, and spent less money doing it.

In addition, NIMBY cancelled the eastern bypass (upgrade of US 301 to I97), which would have allowed interstate traffic to bypass this section of I95. So there is really only one major trunk route in this area. You have to go a couple of hours west to get to I81.

So, they essentially have 8 lanes worth of traffic trying to share 3 lanes. And they have both interstate and commuter traffic on the same route.

Many commuters have adapted as best they can to the situation (look up "slug lines", HOV, and a few other things). That plus rail is all maxed out. They need more roads and lanes.

Yes, it's hard to literally relocate hundreds of thousands of jobs according to some urban planners dreams. We aren't talking about intra city planning, but about state wide job markets. I guess Canada is dysfunctional too because there is absolutely no way to get rail service working beyond the big cities. Maybe it has something to do with north America not being Europe so trying to just force a European model here is a pure pipe dream.

Again, not talking about public transit in cities (which is amazing and should be scaled up) but about intercity/state/province transport. The distances, and spread are just not comparable to almost anywhere else in the world and you can't just magically make everyone move.

Doesn't Tesla recommend that users use the heat as little as possible, and use the seat warmers instead, to conserve battery? Or has that changed in more recent models?