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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

#671

Post by rayiner »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #577
rayiner wrote: post #447

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All civilizations in decline because they can’t accommodate the basic human function of conveniently raising 2.1 new humans per couple. What’s the point of technology that doesn’t serve human needs? Go to Dallas and look at all the families with 3-4 kids. That’s what the future looks like. (Except the minivans and pickup trucks are probably electric.)

Texas is 1.8-1.9 child per family, the same as California. If you want to see four kid families, you need to go to SLC, not Dallas.

California is a big place. Just 13% of San Francisco’s population is under 18; and Hong Kong is about the same. Garland and Bakersfield are double that. Public transit apparently kills a civilization’s desire to perpetuate itself.

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

#672

Post by FooBarBizBazz »

MathCodeLove wrote: post #540
Bud wrote: post #536

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quoted post unavailable.

Not everything is racially motivated. Eventually speculation like yours crosses a boundary from legitimate social concern to conspiracy and seeing racist boogeymen in every shadow.

It's a little of both.

Nowadays, opposition to DC statehood tends to come from Republicans, who are motivated purely by electoral considerations, and who know that DC, now being a largely Black city, will vote Democrat. (Not considered: adjusting the Republican platform to be more appealing to Black voters. I digress.)

But when it was originally decided that DC would not be a state, this had nothing to do with race. First of all, DC's demographics were different at the time; second, enslaved people couldn't vote anyway; and third, the founders were concerned that a national elite would form in DC that would tyrannize the rest of the country, so the point was to weaken that (hypothetical) faction.

So it's ahistorical to blame DC's original non-statehood on racism -- it was a reasonably principled choice -- but the current reality (going back at least to, say, the '20s -- sometime post-Civil-War) does contain a lot of racial motivation.

Ironically, the current situation is the inverse of what the Founders worried about: They thought a powerful elite would settle in DC and rule the rest of the country in an unrepresentative way. Instead, the people who live in DC are largely from an underclass in need of representation. So DC statehood now makes sense. But they couldn't have known that when they were setting things up.

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

#673

Post by rayiner »

aidenn0 wrote: post #613
rayiner wrote: post #454

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If we could build rail miles as cheaply and quickly as Western Europe, everyone in Fairfax Co could commute via rail except perhaps those work west of there. I agree. But we can’t. It’s a cluster fuck even when it’s just one state. Maryland spent $7 billion building the Purple line, which is what Western European countries spent for similar amounts of fully automated underground heavy rail. At some point we have to…

> At some point we have to treat our infrastructure costs as realities to be planned around rather than solvable problems. I think this is the main point of disagreement in this thread; if we have to spend $500M/mile for light rail in the US, it's fairly obvious that rail is not an option. If there is a large learning-factor for building rail that would bring costs down significantly with more miles built, then rail…

Yes—I think it’s a difference between people who accept that light rail costs us $500 million/mile and subways cost us $5 billion/mile and those who don’t. Also, those who think we can run reliable, efficient public transit even with good funding, and those who accept that we can’t.

I used to be a rail fan. Then I rode Amtrak to work for a couple of years. I saw the DC Metro, which is well funded, so badly maintained that automated train control, a core feature when the system was built 1970s, had to be turned off. (That was a decade ago and there is no sign of it ever being reenabled.) I came to the conclusion that Americans running transit projects like the Europeans or Japanese is just wishful thinking. A camel cannot be a bird no matter how much it wants.

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

#674

Post by [deleted] »

worstestes wrote: post #185
rayiner wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I grew up in Northern VA. Public transit here is a solution looking for a problem. The job centers and commercial are too spread out for public transit to make any sense. Most of the population and jobs in the DC metro area aren’t in DC but spread around in Tysons, Loudoun, Reston, Arlington, Bethesda, etc. The state spent billions building the Silver line out to Tysons, Reston, and Loudoun, and ridership was disappo…

The future is Dallas suburbs? Let’s just call a quits now and save America the trouble

[deleted]

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

#675

Post by madengr »

imgabe wrote: post #473
GlenTheMachine wrote: post #396

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…

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…

No post body was provided.

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

#676

Post by crowbahr »

pbourke wrote: post #626
crowbahr wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's an entirely bad faith and shallow argument. You should probably reconsider what you're thinking is. The goal of transit first infrastructure is to make the majority of trips unnecessary. You shouldn't be required to own a car to participate in American society. This means we need to rezone our residential sprawl to allow for more frequent, smaller grocery stores. We need to increase the amount of mixed zoning, i…

> The Netherlands was fully capable of transitioning from a nation of car dependent choked cities to a bike first micromobility haven in 30 years. The only thing stopping the USA from doing the same is the enormous government subsidies paid to car owners to keep the roads paved. The Netherlands is smaller than New Jersey and has twice its population - its one of the most densely populated countries. Comparing it to t…

The Netherlands cities are significantly smaller than American cities in terms of population.

NYC doesn't even have good bike infrastructure.

Every major city in America could transition to bike infrastructure and the quality of life would improve across the US. We don't have to cross the great plains on a bike: We're talking micromobility here. Who cares if they're smaller? We have enormous cities choked to death with cars.

Death to cars: cars bring death. Cities are for humans, not cars.

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

#677

Post by [deleted] »

pseudo0 wrote: post #629
Mandatum wrote: post #570

Earlier quoted context omitted.

New Zealand is not doing fine. Populism has fucked over a generation, and the chickens have started coming home to roost.

Isn't Arden's government considered fairly neoliberal? Her and Trudeau are the two that seem to be most frequently praised in legacy media for winning reelection despite the recent surge in populism.

[deleted]

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

#678

Post by dotancohen »

rootusrootus wrote: post #388
Animats wrote: post #29

14 inches of snow at Fredricksburg, VA. All at once. The annual average is 13 inches. This seems to be an unexpected consequence of climate change. Slower moving storms, with huge amounts of rain or snow in a short period.

I'm firmly on the side of science with regards to climate change, and I don't think this type of commentary helps convince anyone. When there's a heatwave, it's climate change. A cold snap, also climate change. Tornado? Climate change. We would rightly ridicule a climate change denier if they equated weather events with climate, we shouldn't do it either.

Then I'll give you the sciencey answer. Global warming was so called not because of higher expected temperatures, but rather because there is more energy in the atmosphere. For scientists, broadly, when talking about a system energy is almost equivalent to temperature.

The excess energy is manifested is more extreme weather - including more extreme cold. This is especially true for the US, as the changes in weather patterns move the Gulfstream further north. This pushes the colder, polar air right onto Canada and then the US. For the past decade there has been a trend when the US has these cold snaps, the polar regions are a few tens of degrees (pick your scale, doesn't matter) hotter than what is generally expected historically for that time of year.

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

#679

Post by Ajedi32 »

BoiledCabbage wrote: post #592
Ajedi32 wrote: post #533

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The problem with induced demand is that yes you increase capacity and more people then move clogging up the roads until a similar equilibrum is reached as before. 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…

Yes, but that's conveniently ignoring all of the negative externalities produced by it. So adding roads gets half the benefits (as it doesn't gain any efficiency benefits), and comes with a ton of externalities when compared to mass transit.

What externalities, other than the one I already explained?

Only one I can think of is pollution, but that's not even caused by roads, it's caused by burning gasoline.

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

#680

Post by cure »

colanderman wrote: post #368
cure wrote: post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mind you that's 3100mAh at 12V. That's roughly 7400mAh at 5V (USB voltage).

That is assuming a DC-DC converter. 3100 mAh is 3100 mAh regardless of voltage if the charging functionality uses a cheaper/simpler linear regulator.

Indeed! That's a good point. If it uses a linear regulator, I guess the thing would produce quite a bit of heat when drawing power from the USB ports - the extra energy would just be converted into heat.
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