531–540 of 770 posts
There are a lot of comments here about why public transit in the DC area doesn't work, but nobody that I've seen has put their finger on it. The biggest issue is that the area covers two states, at least ten counties depending on what you count as the “DC area”, plus the District of Columbia, which isn't a state, doesn't have control over its own budget, and has no representation in Congress. Oh, and in Virginia citi…
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There was an article[1] posted here a while back which changed my perspective on this issue. Indeed, there's nothing wrong with induced demand on its own. In any other market, more demand induced by lower costs (whether those costs be monetary or in the form of commute times) would almost certainly be a good thing . The only reason it's a potential issue for roads is that road use is an externality. Building and main…
> Indeed, there's nothing wrong with induced demand on its own. In any other market, more demand induced by lower costs (whether those costs be monetary or in the form of commute times) would almost certainly be a good thing. The "purpose" of expanding lanes and building alterntae highways is to improve efficiency. For people living in a given area, reduce their time spent commuting. There is large economic cost to h…
That's still an improvement over the previous status quo. Commute times are not the only, or even necessarily the most important factor in a transportation system. Your new equilibrium transports a larger number of people than the previous equilibrium. In isolation, that's purely a good thing.
In a world where road users paid for those improvements directly in proportion to their use of the road we could just keep expanding capacity indefinitely until either all the latent demand were met, or until rising construction costs drove demand down to a level where the roads were no longer congested. Since roads are funded by income taxes though, a crucial half of that feedback loop is missing. We can't just keep expanding because there's nothing to stop road users from demanding more and more capacity even after adding that capacity becomes cost-prohibitive.
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> Just to be clear, the "induced demand" that concerns me is not the latent demand of a few deferred trips being taken in the days/weeks/months/year after the road is widened, it's the long-term generated demand of people choosing to move further into the suburbs because they can commute more miles in the same number of minutes. The cumulative result is that property values on the periphery of the commuting zone incr…
> but the people who already live in the suburbs still get a 30 minute commute instead of a 60 minute commute because of the wider road That is true for several years after the highway widening. Which is good for politicians who operate one election cycle at a time. But the population doesn't just sit back and enjoy shorter commutes after a highway widening project. The towns that used to be two hours outside the cit…
Notice that this is true of anything that relieves the highway congestion in any way whatsoever. As soon as the road is clear, no matter why, the commute is shorter and it becomes more attractive to live further away in distance.
> Eventually (over the span of decades) this results in a new equilibrium in which the highway is nearly as congested as it was before the widening and everyone is once again living at about the time-limit of how far they are willing to commute.
The way out of this is to make some alternative to increasing sprawl more attractive than increasing sprawl. Relaxing zoning rules to allow higher density is an obvious one, because people would rather have a 15 minute commute than a 30 minute commute, so they'll prefer to build housing where it's a 15 minute commute unless that's prohibited by law. When it is, they have to build further away and you get more sprawl.
But also notice that you're assuming population growth.
If the population was stable, and you built a road which is sufficient now, it'll probably stay sufficient as long as the population remains stable, because who is building enough new housing to move the needle on traffic in a city that isn't growing?
If the city's population is growing, continued population growth will require you to expand highways and such over time in proportion to the population. What else would you expect? The only alternative is intentional scarcity.
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Yes. We had a family incident a number of years back. Stuck on a mountain pass in the cold for the better part of a day. We've also seen a breakdown in the desert, and that one was a couple days. We always refuel before entering a risky part of travel. Never count on getting there. Make sure. And in a scenario like this that refuel could provide a days worth of heat, depending. No matter what, it's a lot more heat th…
> Rough metric is you get 1 hour of engine idle per gallon. From personal experience that seems extremely conservative, although that may be the point. According to [1], a semi truck or city bus use a little less than a gallon per hour idling. [1] https://www.energy.gov/eere/vehicles/fact-861-february-23-20...
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I lived in the DC area for 20 years (1999-2019) and commuted daily on the Metro for many of those years. The things you say are true, but they were also true 15-20 years ago when the Metro was leaps and bounds better than it is today. They were true in the 1970s when the Metro was first built. So it can't be the whole story. There's much more to it. It's not just that the Metro is bad, it's that it keeps getting wors…
DC shouldn't be a state, it would give that "state" too much power and also make politicians there outsized politically powerful and we have enough of that already with states like rhode island, wyoming, and the dakotas
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> Rough metric is you get 1 hour of engine idle per gallon. From personal experience that seems extremely conservative, although that may be the point. According to [1], a semi truck or city bus use a little less than a gallon per hour idling. [1] https://www.energy.gov/eere/vehicles/fact-861-february-23-20...
Diesels use less fuel when idling.
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Back when the Constitution was written there were private citizens who owned weapons of war. Specifically they owned large artillery pieces that were used both on land and on sailing vessels. The lack of a recent revolution in the US is a feature, not a bug. Our Constitution isn't perfect, but it can be amended and has been many times.
The Senate is entirely vestigial and needs to be dissolved or other wise made to be proportional to population, if we are going to keep an upper house at all. The House needs to be rid of single member districts, ideally, and move to a multimember party system. Barring that, first-past-the-post should be completely replaced as a voting mechanism. The Supreme Court should be reformed with term limits of some kind, and…
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DC shouldn't be a state, it would give that "state" too much power and also make politicians there outsized politically powerful and we have enough of that already with states like rhode island, wyoming, and the dakotas
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