Motorists have been stranded on a major interstate in Virginia since last night
lite.cnn.com
lite.cnn.com
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 cities are not part of counties so for instance Arlington is it’s own political entity. Plus DC doesn't have control over a large part of its own tax base because the biggest landholder in the city is the federal government, which is exempt from local property taxes. And because unlike everywhere else in the US DC workers who live in Virginia or Maryland don't pay DC taxes, because the Virginia and Maryland Congressional delegations have warped the DC tax code such that all that money stays in their own states.
Any area-wide public transit project thus has to politically negotiate two Congressional delegations, one city that is in theory represented by the entirety of Congress, and 10+ local governments, any of which effectively has veto power over a project; and the primary beneficiary of the project, DC, is de facto not going contribute financially in proportion to how much it benefits because it’s budget won't allow it to do so.
Similarities to e.g. Hong Kong or Europe fail on those grounds. DC area public transit fails because the DC area is a living example of how federalism fails.
I don't think that's the case. In my experience as a remote worker you always pay where you live, not where you work.
There are exceptions to that rule of thumb. E.g., NY taxes workers who live out of state.
So if you commute interstate for your job, you'll sometimes find yourself filing income tax forms for multiple states.
If you work and live in two states, they will both do their best to get a cut of your paycheck.
You can't have successful transit while favoring cars. And if people cant get around at both the origin and destination of the trip without a car, then it's a system designed for cars.
And DC can’t pay for public transit in DC because it’s tax base isn’t big enough.
It isn't so much “favoring cars” as it is favoring tax money staying local, which is defined very oddly in the DC area.
It's sort of miraculous that the DC Metro exists at all, tbh.
How does DC pay for roads?
Virginia and Maryland both pay significant funds to subsidize the DC metro system, as does the federal government.
Incompetence at WMATA fritters away the money.
Moreover, metro has little to do with this road disaster anyway as Metro isn’t going to run between DC and Richmond. Amtrak does that and it’s already subsidized by Virginia and the Feds.
There is incompetence everywhere. Why is it any worse at WMATA than Maryland State Highway Administration or literally anywhere else?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Washington_Metro#History
But the Metro also was politically inevitable, given the position of DC as the political center of the very powerful 20th Century USA. It was a semiotic embarrassment not to have a prestigious functioning subway system in DC in the late 20th Century. Urban Europeans would stick their tongues out and make fun of the DC residents, and the Feds fixed that with the Metro. (Note that DC types still have a lingering inferiority complex with other European cities. The rest of the US, excepting maybe NYC and Boston, couldn’t have cared less.)
But the Metro does makes it easier to see the sights if/when the rest of the US visits DC as tourists.
DC, again, doesn't have the tax base one would otherwise expect, for reasons outside its control. The people who control the money that would otherwise be paid to DC do not represent DC. They represent Virginia and Maryland, and also New York and California and Alaska. New York and California and Alaska voters don't particularly want the money to go to DC. They don't see DC as an actual city where real people live, they see it only as the resented center of a distant federal government, only populated by politicians and jackets.
The fact that over a million "regular" people live in DC never enters the equation.
Meanwhile there's nobody in a position of authority representing DC. So those "real people" DC residents don't get a say.
This was my big hope about the scooters when they first showed up in LA, but it didn't really pan out, for a spectrum of reasons. For a minute there it was nice, and I definitely used the LA Metro much more.
As a counter-example, the European Parliament is being moved EVERY MONTH between Bruxelles and Strassbourg, because France wanted to have the capitol on their ground at least partially. A neutral city built from scratch at the border would have made more sense in the 1990s just like 200 years ago.
Many things in the US political system don't make sense in 2022, especially from an European point of view - mining and water rights, inequality of rural and urban votes because of unproportional representation in the Senate, Presidential votes in "stronghold" states being effectively wasted thanks to the Electoral College, the effective two-party system caused by the effects of FPTP, the fact that the US votes on Tuesday because of farmers going to church on Sunday in Ye Olde Days, the entire gun rights complex (it was reasonable and made sense back in Ye Olde Days that everyone could own a handgun and a hunting rifle, it was not anticipated that civilians would be able to own weapons of war), the fact that "gerrymandering" is not only a thing but actively and maliciously used, the general lack of federal protections for voters, that "union busting" is legal, the weirdness that is how DC and the US Territories are set up... the list is endless, that's just what came up in my mind in five minutes.
The problem is, the US and the UK are the only geopolitically relevant (sorry, Australia and Canada) countries in the Western sphere that haven't had a revolution and/or WW1/2 in the last century to re-set and modernize their constitution, power balance and judicial precedence - and that lack is really, really showing. It's no coincidence that the US and the UK are the Western countries hit the hardest by the rise of populist demagogues.
That was in fact the entire point (https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/10/246).
> (a) The militia of the United States consists of all able-bodied males at least 17 years of age and, except as provided in section 313 of title 32, under 45 years of age who are, or who have made a declaration of intention to become, citizens of the United States and of female citizens of the United States who are members of the National Guard. (b) The classes of the militia are— (1) the organized militia, which consists of the National Guard and the Naval Militia; and (2) the unorganized militia, which consists of the members of the militia who are not members of the National Guard or the Naval Militia.
> The problem is, the US and the UK are the only countries in the Western sphere that haven't had a revolution and/or WW1/2 in the last century to re-set and modernize their constitution, power balance and judicial precedence - and that lack is really, really showing. It's no coincidence that the US and the UK are the Western countries hit the hardest by the rise of populist demagogues.
Australia, New Zealand, Canada, Switzerland, Sweden, and likely a few others I'm forgetting all seem to be doing fine.
They are distinctly not. Switzerland has a massive problem with the right-wing populist SVP, they are slowly breaking apart from the EU [1] as a result of their specific brand of obstructionism involving the direct-democracy voting mechanism, and in Sweden the right-wing populist SD (which stands for Sweden Democrats, not Social Democrats) has been growing and growing, to a point the established parties are seriously considering cooperating with them [2].
As for Australia, NZ and Canada, there have been enough other replies in this thread.
[1]: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-57251681
[2]: https://taz.de/Mitte-Rechts-Buendnis-in-Schweden/!5765511/
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 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/or have a second tier of justices which are appointed unanimously by the politically appointed justices.
The Electoral College needs to be removed entirely, the President should be elected by the people directly. The method of voting should be mandated NOT to be first-past-the-post.
In other words, our national government is fundamentally broken in its representation of the people of this country, and broken in how its members are chosen. At this point, we need a bit of a revolution, though the less blood the better.
The fact that the Electoral college allowed the previous President to take office is is an example of its failings from its supposed original intention, as is the fact that most citizens of any party or educational background expect that the President should be democratically elected.
Of all the things we might possibly ever do to improve the function of government, that alone is not one.
But yes, there are other things in my incomplete list which need addressed as well - I think the one most critical thing I would do above all others is switch every Single-Member District election from first-past-the-post to ranked choice voting or approval voting.
E.g. for the European Parliament, each country has a different level of representation (MPs per capita). Germany has the least representation and Malta has the highest. This way smaller countries also have a voice.
There are other mechanisms as well(agencies HQs, comisioners etc.), but in the end Germany and France still have a lot of weighg in all the major decisions. If it wasn't for at least the current provisions it would have been even worse and probably the EU would have dissolved by now.
US has a similar system of propping up smaller states: for senate and president elections. I don't see this anachronistic at all, the more I learn about it the more impressed I am with the wisdom of the american forefathers. E.g. The Senate does not represent the people, they represent the states. This is very similar to how EU "council of ministers" has one from each state, regardless how large that state is.
I should read the details on the implementation of the EU parliament, but I wonder if this "minority voice" equivalent in the EU is able to block essentially any progress or legislation.
I also wonder why the states in the US should have nearly as much say as they have in 2021. We aren't a small band of ragtag cultures stretched across have the universe as we were in 1789.
A lot of legislation is blocked in the EU, yes. The modus operandi of the EU is to compromise until every state is satisfied.
And the US is far from being blocked out of any progress. The gay rights is more advanced than in Europe, infrastructure bills are passing with bipartisan support, COVID relief bills are passing with flying colors and with a much more consistent amount than in Europe. EU struggled to get 700 billions out after a year and a half! And it's still not distributed.
I would say the US now is more diverse than in the 1700s. More diverse states, more diverse ethnicity (80% were white people in 1776, mostly English) and a HUGE population compared to 3 million back then.
The existence of amendments requires bi-partisan cooperation - something that is completely unfeasible for the near future, with Republicans running unprecedented, pure obstructionism going so far as Mitch McConnell filibustering his own fucking bill - and that was in 2012, when the Republicans had moderate people in their ranks. Now, ten years later, half the Republican voter base and more than enough representatives or candidates openly rally behind QAnon.
I can't see a reasonable way for the US to get out of that mess, as all measures that would help bring politics back to reasonable standards (particularly tackling the PAC/Super PAC problem, voter suppression and reintroducing the Fairness Doctrine) would require Congressional majorities.
Most Americans want the feds to make minor policy tweaks that will make their lives better, more healthcare, federally, minor financial tweaks, fund some things a little more, fund others a little less, minor procedural tweaks on certain government things.
Reagan and Bush Sr. had none of eight / four years, Clinton two of eight years, Bush Jr. four of eight, Obama two of eight, Trump two of four and Biden at least two of four. And even when the respective Presidents had a majority in Congress, they would usually require not just ordinary majority but filibuster-proof majority in the Senate - and the last president to enjoy that one was Jimmy Carter in 1977-1979.
Every Western country except the US and UK has a system in place that the leader of the government usually has the majority to pass laws in parliament, at least a budget law, without depending on the opposition - we do have some countries that love their minority governments, but even they manage to do just fine. Something like "government shutdowns" resulting out of the legislative chambers being unwilling to do their most basic job of ensuring the government is actually funded is completely unheard of here - and you Americans have had ten of these since 1980 that resulted in furloughs and eight more that did not [1].
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_federal_...
Having said that, our system is like the US in that our parties are strictly oppositional and have no real history of collaboration. So when there is a 'hung parliament' with no majority (like in the run up to 1979, and during the second May administration from 2017-2019) then you tend to get a disintegrating administration rather than the kind of stable coalitions that are the norm in other European countries.
This allows coalitions to form around shared interests, and results in 1) politics being more representative of what voters want, 2) more moderate politics avoiding wild policy swings, and 3) politics being more constructive.
It really gives a huge quality improvement of politics moving from a binary to a plural system.
I mean, neither does creating a large metropolitan area with no representation after just winning a war over not having representation. Here we are, though.
We're far removed from it historically, but this country was created by groups of people coming together to decide they want to form a state and then joining up with other states. It's literally right there in the name: United States. It's kind of, like, our whole deal as a country.
The land was set aside for federal use, living in it and then complaining you don't live in a state seems insane.
Kind of like complaining about not getting a vote on taxes imposed on you when you choose to live in North American colonies rather than Britain proper. Whiners.
Also note that US citizens who live overseas can vote in state elections for federal office under federal law (and in most states can also do so for local/state offices under state law.) Inside the US but not within the boundaries of a state is the only place US citizens are systematically disenfranchised by geography.
People have been living in it since the beginning. The land that they live on is not owned by the Federal government. It's owned by the people who live there (or their landlords). They paid for it. They pay property taxes on it. If the Federal government wants them to move, the government can pay them whatever amount is necessary to entice them to move. Otherwise, they deserve the same right to a voice in Congress that every other US citizen has.
Sounds like a non-starter for the rest of the States who implicitly take on the burden of the undesirable area through direct support via the Federal, rather than the original State(s) system.
In the case of DC, also sounds like a blatant political ploy by the Democratic Party. We also remember Marion Berry.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marion_Barry
Now, if DC wants to become a US Territory, that might get more traction. Also a chance to prove it is worthy of Statehood, like most of the other Western States had to.
Yeah, it does benefit the Democrats. I'm not particularly happy about that. But maybe the Republican party could try supporting policies that appeal to people who live in DC? When you have prominent Republicans declare that they want to cause a recession in DC it's not hard to figure out why people there don't support them.
The rest is, I guess a slippery slope argument? There's no other "undesirable" areas in the country that aren't already a part of a state. Some hypothetical state shell-game that you imagined is not a valid reason to continue depriving hundreds of thousands of US citizens of their rights.
DC would have the absolutely essential Federal jobs
Today, with secure communications, we should be able to achieve it?
https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2011/08/arlingt...
Also the DC metro system is in fact organized across state lines and receives generous federal subsidies....DC Metro spends $4.7 billion a year. There's also interstate light rail from MD and VA to DC that's billions more. There are probably few cities in the world that have public transport more heavily subsidized than DC.
Commuter income tax reciprocity in DC metro is no different than most other regions.
The primary issue this week is that this section of Virginia rarely sees snowstorms of this magnitude and further most DC residents have no idea how to drive in it (or know when to stay home).
I hesitate to publish studies from think tanks with explicit political leanings on HN, but Brookings has the most cogent summary I can find of why this is incorrect.
https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/chapter...
That's not really it. We get snowstorms of this size once every 2 or 3 years, sometimes more. The problem is that somehow they didn't keep up with plowing and salting on that stretch of I-95, and that led to back-ups, and once that happened, there was no way to prevent ice from forming on the road. An exacerbating factor was that it was raining before the snow event, so they weren't able to pre-salt/brine the roads.
Notice that the major traffic jam was on I-95 South outside of the beltway, it wasn't on the outer loop, inside DC, or in Maryland even though the storm blanketed the area.
This is a good point and I think people are concluding too much from a single stretch of highway. Generally the chaos is more widespread, like in the original Carmageddon [0] and all if its sequels where I'd drive past abandoned cars the next day wherever I went.
It just seems like VDOT or whoever's contracted to take care of 95 screwed up. There's sand on the roads nearby me, and it rained before snowing here, too. Maybe it being 60 degrees the day before didn't help.
[0] https://wtop.com/weather-news/2015/01/history-disastrous-sno...
As for the plowing and salting - in general it's pretty bad, and this year has been no exception. Fairfax County was, as of the day before this storm, putting up flyers in 24 hour laundromats and outside of grocery stores looking for anyone who had a license to drive a plow truck. The problem is that, while we get hit with bad snow once every 2-3 years, that's not often enough for the local governments to need to do something about it. They don't want to spend the money, only to not need it until the next big storm, which might not come until someone else is in office.
The Swiss public transport (TPG) bus service made a bilateral agreement with the French authorities to set up a cross-border bus. A tram service is being built too, next to CERN. It can be done.
Possibly as a result of that, the bus ticket machines now accept Euros and Swiss Francs, even on the Swiss side. Quite how this works financially is remarkable to me.
Is diplomacy difficult? Of course! Does it take time? Yes! And were there many compromises? Absolutely. But even the little bit that did get finished is very heavily used, and has brought great economic, social, and environmental improvements to the Pays de Gex.
So take heart, it can be done.
Legal tender is a currency that has to be accepted (and returns given in) by all merchants in a jurisdictional area. There is no law that prevents merchants from accepting payment in other currencies, which was why the good old Deutsche Mark was widespread in former Yugoslavia and the US Dollar is accepted in a lot of countries without a stable currency or somewhat sane politics, or even outdated currencies - the Deutsche Mark is still convertible at the German Federal Bank, and retailers have been known to run "pay with D-Mark" offerings for ages.
If you were referring on the financial workings of the bus line itself, that one is considered a non-issue in Europe - we are a densely packed continent and there are lots of cross-border transportation networks. Usually, operators count how many people use which segments of a line and divide operating expenses, profit/loss and public subsidies by the actual share of passenger-kilometers.
Perhaps digitally? I see a lot of businesses that no longer accept cash in physical locations.
There's decades of deferred maintenance. This is probably due to funding problems because of what you're talking about, but the Metro is in a hole that it might not be able to dig itself out of unless someone takes it seriously and commits a lot of money and effort.
The WMATA is incompetent. I don't know how else to put it. Like, why are you even running 6-car trains at all during rush hour? The system is treated like a jobs program to give make-work jobs for people who would otherwise be unemployed. I'm sure some of the workers are dedicated and care, but many don't seem to. Try asking a station attendant to use the bathroom that's supposed to be publicly available and watch the annoyance that you have dared to inconvenience them.
The collision in 2009 caused them to switch to manual braking and they just...never switched back. Whatever problem there was with the automatic braking system, they decided to just give up on it instead of fixing it. It's minor, but it slows things down.
It's not like public transit in DC is impossible. It used to work, if not perfectly, much much better than it does today.
DC needs to be a state. It's unconscionable that it isn't and the rights of 680,000+ US citizens are ignored because it isn't politically expedient to give them the representation they're due. That would help a lot. DC could control its own budget and negotiate on equal footing with MD and VA.
Giving residents of Wyoming 70× the Senate voting power of any Californian is a joke.
(Land ownership shouldn't matter in a democratic republic, people should.)
Land ownership has nothing to do with anything. Everyone gets to vote for their Senators (except people in DC). We did away with the requirement to own land a long time ago.
If California broke up into 200 states, would they need 2 Senators each to protect themselves from being steamrolled? If so, then why don't Californians already need 200 Senators?
The intent of a bunch of folks who kept people chained up in barns is irrelevant, the intent of the 1700s circumstances is irrelevant. We're heading to 30% of Americans controlling 68% of Senate in '40, minority rule by rural white folks. This veneration of the parchment as a religious text is just an excuse to not use our brains to solve present-day problems.
If there are imbalances in the design of the government, that's a separate problem that we fix on its own. Depriving some subset of citizens of their rights is not the answer.
This is just not true. Partial control was restored years ago [0], and my understanding is they still want this capability on other lines. But WMATA has probably been busy addressing numerous other NTSB complaints that impact the ability to provide basic service (see the 7000 series recall), so smooth braking just isn’t that important.
0: https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/trafficandcommuting/com...
Clearly it's still not back 100%, even 12 years later. I mean, if they cared about fixing it, they'd fix it by now. Any halfway competent system should be able to figure out something like that after more than a decade.
Alternatively, give back all of the residential parts back to Maryland (like Arlington was given back to VA). For a long time this wasn't politically feasible because DC was rough and MD would not have wanted it, but by now the tax base has to be high enough for it to be a net positive for MD. Of course, the democrats will lose 3 "safe" electoral votes but you could amend the constitution to give them over to Maryland and then take the extra three away over the course of 30 years, or something.
> Moreover, anacostia residents probably have more in common with residents of pg county than residents of palisades, who have more in common with bethesda residents than anacostia residents.
Sure, and residents of Manhattan probably have more in common with people in northern New Jersey than they do with people in Buffalo, but New York still gets to be a state. So what?
The most sensible solution is to give DC back to Maryland (which is where it came from) and thereby give the residents representation, which is your end goal. If you want some other end goal, it has to be weighed against the other absurdities of making DC a state.
Uhh, yeah there is, if you move beyond happy hour with the other transplants whose dads got them internships in their representative's office and talk to people who actually grew up there.
And who cares how long people live there? If I move to VA for 2 years I still get to vote for a representative if there's an election while I'm there. Why should we have a void area in the country where like "ah ah aha, gotcha! you stepped in the your-vote-doesn't-count zone, so your vote doesn't count! Too bad!" This is the government that impacts our lives not some children's board game.
But they damn sure don’t think they’re from Maryland.
This idea doesn't get enough application. NYC should be its own state. LA should be its own state. Most big cities should be their own states. They are not similar to the area around them.
It gets far too much application. We literally put down a rebellion and rewrote the Constitution over this. It didn't work before and it won't work now.
If you want rural America to rise up in rebellion again, I mean, I guess go for it. But there's a specific reason the vast majority of state capitals are in comparatively rural areas: to prevent exactly the kind of division you're advocating for. This was a hard-won lesson in the aftermath of Shay's Rebellion.
I guess you could call this true, but only in the sense that there has never been any system of any kind that didn't end in rebellion, bloodshed, and/or collapse.
The normal pattern historically is that the city's hinterlands are subject to the city's rule. You never see the hinterlands ruling the city.
Totally incorrect. Berlin and Hamburg are states right now.
But it escapes me how torstenvl thinks it's related to cities constituting their own governmental units.
"The economy during the American Revolutionary War was largely subsistence agriculture.... Some residents in these areas had few assets beyond their land, and they bartered.... In contrast, there was a market economy in the more economically developed coastal areas of Massachusetts Bay.... The state government was dominated by this merchant class.... European business partners ... insisted that they pay for goods with hard currency, despite the country-wide shortage of such currency. Merchants began to demand the same from... those operating in the market towns in the state's interior.... The rural farming population was generally unable to meet the demands... and some began to lose their land and other possessions when they were unable to fulfill their debt and tax obligations."
You didn't actually give an account. But the quote you pulled describes farmers being taxed at a level they are incapable of paying. It appears that you would like to use that to support the claim "it had nothing to do with the level of taxes", somehow. You'd need to explain how.
Compare what the farmers said their problem was:
> A farmer identified as "Plough Jogger" summarized the situation at a meeting convened by aggrieved commoners:
>> I have been greatly abused, have been obliged to do more than my part in the war, been loaded with class rates, town rates, province rates, Continental rates, and all rates ... been pulled and hauled by sheriffs, constables, and collectors, and had my cattle sold for less than they were worth ... The great men are going to get all we have and I think it is time for us to rise and put a stop to it, and have no more courts, nor sheriffs, nor collectors nor lawyers.
And yeah, is bet they would bear more resentment towards someone who lives in the Palisades than someone on the other side of eastern avenue.
Moreover, last I checked 10 years ago a good chunk of anacostia is transitioning into middle-income/federal employee Hispanic neighborhood and that process is bleeding over into pg county, because the boundaries don't really matter all that much.
Edit: southern Ave, not eastern ave; it's been a long time.
I personally would expect they would want to be their own state, but who knows? If on the other hand people feel the choose their own state is very likely and Maryland unlikely it would probably save money to just go with become their own state.
To give your idea credence, though: probably it would be fair to let arbitrary groups of people vote for statehood without congressional approval if, hypothetically, there were a flat user fee to be a state, say, $50 billion/yr. Can't pay it? Sorry you get demoted to territory, your senators are booted, and your representatives become delegates, unless you merge with another state.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Admission_to_the_Union
Article IV, Section 3, Clause 1:
New States may be admitted by the Congress into this Union; but no new State shall be formed or erected within the Jurisdiction of any other State; nor any State be formed by the Junction of two or more States, or Parts of States, without the Consent of the Legislatures of the States concerned as well as of the Congress.
The Northwest ordinance sets the minimum population size of a state to be 6000 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northwest_Ordinance therefore I doubt your household has the requisite number of people living in it, even if you combine with the households of two or three of your neighbors, to succeed.
>Congress has to approve it because becoming a state incurs an externality on the other states
I did not say that they should become a state automatically when they voted for it, but rather that they should not be forced to become a part of Maryland if that is against their wishes. The obviously still need to follow the process required to become a state.
>To give your idea credence,
My idea should be quite easy to understand, and it was not the one you outlined here.
Generally speaking, the lifecycle for a transit system's components look like 40-50 years. That puts the expiry date of the first DC Metro lines at 2016 and beyond, which roughly lines up with when things started falling apart.
Basically, the entire system has always run on fumes. That only recently stopped cutting it.
> It's not like public transit in DC is impossible. It used to work, if not perfectly, much much better than it does today.
> DC needs to be a state. It's unconscionable that it isn't and the rights of 680,000+ US citizens are ignored because it isn't politically expedient to give them the representation they're due. That would help a lot.
Wasn't DC also not a state for the last 20 years, and in the 70s?
I hope this doesn't sound like a lecture, but whenever a question about fundamental rights emerges, it's often useful to turn to the Constitution and Federalist Papers to understand the rationale and intent behind the system that was created. While it's certainly possible to disagree and change things over time, there's usually a valid historical reasoning behind why things were made the way they were that is lost.
As far as I understand the history (I'm open to fact-checking as I'm not a historian and never lived in DC) Washington D.C. was intentionally never supposed to be a state so that no single state would have extra power and influence over the operation of the central government. This makes a lot of sense when you think of this in terms of bureaucracy and power creep that the Founders were trying to avoid. If Washington D.C. was a state from the beginning, its interests and issues would inevitably begin to take precedence over those of other states because the Capitol would be on land it controlled. The Capitol was intended to be completely neutral ground when it came to favoring any state over any other.
Now you might ask, were the people of that area supposed to have no representation at all? Not exactly. As far as I understand the intent, Washington D.C. was actually never supposed to have a large permanent residential population. DC was intended for whatever government buildings that needed to exist and that's basically it. I'm not 100% sure how that changed and what historical factors led to DC growing into a larger city, but that seems to be a key mistake.
The question now becomes what do you do with these people to ensure that they're represented? I think most people are on the same page here with wanting all Americans represented, but is making them a state the right solution? I'd argue no and I'd like to give a slightly different reason why.
A lot of the commenters here are thinking in terms of balance when it comes down to Black/White or Democratic/Republican when it comes to adding states, but I'd argue that the key division in the nation that needs to be balanced is Urban/Rural. A lot of the ways that people in this country think differently come down to whether they're more Urban or Rural-minded. How people think about self-responsibility and living with neighbors comes down to this divide: you can easily see this viewpoint encapsulated when it comes to gun rights and education and how the Urban/Rural divide works there. One big issue with DC that I see (as far as I understand the area) is that it's so small that there's no substantial rural influence possible. Even the bluest of blue states that are dominated by urban politics like New York have some kind of rural areas and constituencies that they have to pay attention to and who hold some influence and mindshare in a state legislature. As far as I understand the area, Washington D.C. can never have any kind of rural influence just due to the density and size. I think adding a state without even a theoretical influence of one factor possible is very questionable and likely going to be incredibly divisive.
That said, the issue in this case isn’t any of that. It’s that we didn’t have enough snow plows in those areas for what ever reason.
I’ve taken the dc metro. It’s easy to do, works great. Don’t really get the complaints. Sure it could be expanded. But this was a highway. Issue here is lack of proper planning. By the drivers and the state.
The metro is great for tourists. If you're relying on it to get to work every day it's a different story.
Train companies own land/real-estate around each station. They open grocery stores, shopping centers, office buildings, hotels at many of their own stations. This seems to lead to a virtuous cycle. It's in their best interest to get people to use their trains.
Further, there's at least some competition as there are often 2-4 paths to get from one place to another. For example, you can go from Shibuya to Yokohama either by JR East or by Tokyu (different companies). You can go from Tokyo to Yokohama either via JR East or by Keikyu (again, different companies). You can go from Osaka to Kyoto either by JR West or by Hankyu. You can get from Ogikubo to Shinjuku either by Eiden or JR East. You can get to Haneda airport by Tokyo Monorail, or Keikyu. You can get to Narita by JR or by Keisei and for both of those there's a regular, and an express.
I'm sure it's not perfect but it's arguably better than many public transportation systems where the politicians underfund things and have hardly any incentive to make each station as useful and nice as possible.
The point is, there are other solutions than DC area has to have government run the transportation and all the problems come with that, at least in the USA.
Of course you have to get the incentives right. Get them wrong and it will probably be just as bad.
#1 it's second, not first.
#2 there are at least 10 different train/subway companies in Tokyo so it's 1 of 10 (JR, Eiden, Toei, Tokyu, Keisei, Keikyu, Keio, Odakyu, Tobu, Seibu)
#3 the government gets to pick the best spots via eminent domain
#4 lots of conflict of interest when government, via #3, decides who gets what
#5 It's not just Tokyo. Other big Japanese cities also have multiple train companies. Kyoto has at least 4 (JR West, Hankyu, Keihan, Keifuku), I'm sure Osaka has several too (haven't spent as much time there so not as familar)
#6 The fact that the gov trains exist does not in any way suggest that they couldn't rely on private companies completely, especially given the 9 other companies doing just fine
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verkehrsverbund_Berlin-Branden...
The current Johnson govt didn't like this so decided not to continue with it.
Water is harder to store in the winter since it will freeze and burst containers if full, but snow can be melted given a container to put it in.
Also a good to refuel often. I try treat 1/2 a tank as empty and stop accordingly. On longer trips it lines up well with bathroom breaks.
I keep a Harbor Freight moving blanket in my trunk. It's thick for insulation, and also cheap in case you need to protect your seats after a muddy activity. I also wouldn't feel torn up about laying it down on ice if I need some traction.
True or not, when I lived in the midwest, I -always- kept a huge blanket in my vehicle.
This site lists most major winter weather events in the DC region over the past decades... https://www.weather.gov/lwx/winter_DC-Winters
People will kitt out their cars after this, but having lived in PA, NY and DC I can firmly say that in PA and NY I owned a brush, had water in the car and the like.In DC I legit brushed it off with my gloves.
6" was enough to just not go to work.
That also was my experience in Richmond, VA, somewhat further south.
A good idea to have just in case. :)
Insisting on changing 15k mAh to 15 Ah is the same as insisting on changing 15000 mAh to 15 Ah - which seems to be a matter of personal preference more than anything.
OP mentioned his mAh rating in 12 V but you’re comparing it to Ah ratings in 5 V. OP’s battery should be able to charge a full smartphone fine.
Also, most of those 10-20k battery packs won’t be able to jump start your car because they have greater capacity but cannot provide power quickly. There are high capacity battery packs that do jump start but they’re over $100 from the last time I looked.
Caveat - unlike a standard battery booster pack (lead acid), lithium battery does not take kindly to freezing temps, so it is useless to keep it in the car over winter. I wouldn’t expect to be able to start anything in the middle of winter up here unless it was kept indoors at room temp.
I use a lithium booster battery pack for an old car I use, and have used the battery pack to jump-start my car multiple times on a freezing-cold day (sub 10f) while trying to locate a store with a new car-battery in stock.
Jumping a car doesn’t take a lot of energy. But it does take a lot of power (and therefore current). Small Li-ion car jumpers can be surprisingly capable.
Sleeping bag: https://www.walmart.com/ip/Coleman-0-F-Rectangular-Sleeping-...
Warm gloves: https://www.amazon.com/1927KW-L-1-Premium-pigskin-polyester-...
Warm hat: https://www.amazon.com/Minus33-Merino-Wool-Ridge-Beanie/dp/B...
Headlamp: https://www.amazon.com/Vont-Flashlight-Batteries-Headlight-H...
Camelbak 3L comes with me on all road trips but I’m considering a permanent water tank in my car.
There are local bylaws.
And there are more serious laws for sexual behaviour etc.
It's incredibly misleading to say that peeing on the side of the road in an emergency could put you on the sex offenders' registry.
I'd be interested in an example of someone getting on the registry for public peeing without egregious extenuating circumstances (repeated offence next to a daycare, or something)
1. https://www.hrw.org/report/2007/09/11/no-easy-answers/sex-of...
> At least 13 states require registration for public urination; of those, two limit registration to those who committed the act in view of a minor;
https://www.hrw.org/report/2007/09/11/no-easy-answers/sex-of...
Now, it's probably unlikely (considering a normal person is also not generally trying to be purposely seen), but not out of the realm of possibility.
https://vistacriminallaw.com/public-urination-laws-and-sex-o...
This also helps limit the amount of water that can condense on the walls of the gas tank and wind up freezing in the pump or fuel line.
It’s possible modern cars have some countermeasures for this because it has been years since I’ve seen it happen, but an additional (potential) benefit.
These pieces of advice are technically correct but catering for edge cases that won't affect 99% of drivers/vehicle owners. Modern cars are designed for the way people use them; people run their tanks to empty all the time.
With the average used car on US roads now over 12 years old, having the pump go bad could mechanically total some vehicles (the repair cost would exceed the vehicle's worth), so you're going to want to prolong it's life however you can.
Another commenter already pointed out the heat issue since the fluid acts as coolant.
If you are lucky enough to have a vehicle that has a heat pump and not just a resistive heater and you use it just enough to stave off the cold, you are probably going to be in a very good shape. If you happen to have a vehicle with seat warmers, even better - heating oneself is better than heating the cabin air. ICE also have those, but you'll have to be sure to run the alternator from time to time, generally EVs will figure out when to charge the 12v system from the traction battery.
Will an EV like that outlast an ICE car? Based on the figures I'm seeing from a brief search(around 30 hours with a full tank of fuel), I think it's likely, on average. But there are too many variables.
You are completely right about the CO emissions. Can leave the heater running without worrying about poisoning.
Google translated a recent P4 article:
The snow weather over southern and western Sweden has had a major impact on traffic and people have been sitting in traffic jams for several hours*, reports P4 Gothenburg.
A major problem has also been electric cars abandoned on the E6 by their drivers. The battery runs out when there is so much heat in the car.
- We will be able to salvage(tow) a lot of electric cars that were on the E6 during the night, says the Swedish Transport Administration's road traffic manager Mikael Salo and believes that this is one of the shortcomings with the new cars.
But to you point, from that day on, my father kept an emergency kit in the trunk. Food, water, cash, space blankets, sweaters, etc.
I should do that too.
Very true. I live in a hot climate and often freeze water bottles to take with me in the summer. A full sealed bottle, even a solid one like a Nalgene, will easily break when frozen. But I've found that leaving 10-15% of space empty and cracking the top ever so slightly prevents any sort of breaks.
Leaving the bottle cracked open might not work so well for car storage though, unless it's secured upright.
It's never safe to be arbitrarily stopped on a road, even if you're on the shoulder. Even if you're under the impression no other vehicles will be going fast enough to not see your vehicle or cause an energetic crash. The last thing you want is to be sleeping in your stuck vehicle when a jack-knifed semi takes the roof off.
Unless I know I'm going to be in extremely isolated/rural areas, I prefer to be equipped for a hiking excursion more than a prolonged unplanned car-camping scenario. A stuck car on a thoroughfare is a very unsafe place to be, especially in slippery/poor-vis. conditions.
That’s relevant to a car breaking down, but not so much in the middle of a long line of stuck traffic. The cars behind you are going to prevent anything from hitting your car at high speeds. Meanwhile getting out early can be quite dangerous.
Just a note for varying geographical locations: If you do this in Australia, you will most likely die from exposure.
i.e. If you're stuck on the shoulder of a snowy/icy highway and there's a walking distance Motel 6 visible, go straight to the hotel and make your phone calls there. A road is a terrible place to camp, your occupancy has zero influence on the probability of the vehicle getting hit, though it may feel like the right/responsible thing to do - to not abandon your vehicle, it's rarely the safe choice when the stop was unplanned.
Now we even have the pleasure of anticipating Tesla Autopilot to plow into us while stopped on the shoulder, apparently made even more likely if there's an emergency vehicle present.
> unless you're truly in no mans land without any reachable alternatives for shelter, it's best to lock up the vehicle with a note on the dash and make your way to a shelter out of harms way
The presence of anecdotes that conflict each other is evidence that it is hard to make blanket statements like the above although I would still argue that the default should be stay in or near your vehicle during winter weather related emergencies. Also any anecdotes about AI related disasters are off topic ;)
a more thorough study needs to be done by the Feds or
a better job communicating what definitive study results recommend, with easy rules of thumb like “if you can see the lights of a shelter on the road from your vehicle and you haven’t seen a vehicle on the road in the last hour, then walk to the shelter’.
For what it's worth, every time I've seen first responders talk about adverse weather conditions, they say to stay with the vehicle if possible. Obviously if you're on the interstate outside of Los Angeles, you probably want to get the heck off the roadway no matter what. But if you're lost or trapped, a vehicle is much easier to spot than a pedestrian. If you're lucky enough that there's helicopters looking for you, being near the vehicle is going to drastically reduce the time it takes to find you.
Yes, getting off the highway makes sense if you are in a disabled vehicle on an active highway, assuming there is something solid to shield you from the vehicles/debris that goes flying when your car is hit.
No, getting out of your car in a winter storm when all traffic is halted due to the conditions does not make sense at all.
https://www.iihs.org/news/detail/stopped-vehicle-crashes-res...
UK: It’s usually safest to get out of your car (using the doors facing away from passing traffic) and wait behind a barrier. https://www.theaa.com/breakdown-cover/advice/what-to-do-moto...
France: Any passengers should get out of the car on the side away from traffic and take shelter behind safety rails at the side of the road, if there are any. https://www.thelocal.fr/20210820/breakdowns-crashes-and-poli...
I'm interested in this part from your link:
>However, more than half the deaths and almost 1 in 5 serious injuries occur when a vehicle strikes a pedestrian who is leaving, working on, or returning to a stopped vehicle.
Is a breakdown of the different groups available?
• Leaving
• Working on
• Returning to
I agree that groups 2 and 3 are to be strongly encouraged against.
Group 1, choosing to leave your vehicle and stand off the road, behind solid infrastructure, is actively reducing their risk, albeit at the tradeoff of being briefly exposed to traffic.
I wouldn't recommend anyone exit a vehicle into fast moving traffic. For my comment above, I condsidered adding "if a suitable break in the traffic appears", but I decided it was overly wordy and to some extent self-evident.
You are much safer sitting in a car on the highway shoulder than getting out of your car to walk to safety. https://www.iihs.org/news/detail/stopped-vehicle-crashes-res...
Nah, cars have climate control and can generate DC power for electronics for many hours at idle. Best to stay in the vehicle.
Emergency drinking water that comes in foil pouches seems to survive freezing; I’m not sure if it’s a requirement of the ISO standard they have to conform to for use on survival craft (I don’t want to pay $250 for the ISO standard just to find out).
I keep an emergency supply of these in my car through Colorado winter and summer, without any issues:
https://www.datrex.com/product/datrex-emergency-water-ration...
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 than driving at reduced capacity would have yielded.
Rough metric is you get 1 hour of engine idle per gallon. Some cars do better than that. And you can pulse it, warm vehicle up, make sure everything gets charged, fluids able to flow, etc... and then shut down for 1/2 hour or so in order to stretch the resource.
We carry:
-2 gallons of water
-Car road trouble kit, flairs, compressor, various tools, tape, things...
-First Aid
-Some food
And this is usually our road munchies, pet food, etc...
-Weather related stuff
I have a non-plug in hybrid, that gets almost 50 mpg consistently; I've got to experiment and extrapolate to see if it's much better. I would like to believe so.
I recently learned of the existence of:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gasoline_heater
and wonder how efficient they are.
These seem to be mostly outdated, but I guess that they are particularly useful with air cooled engines, where a conventional heating system doesn't have coolant to work with.
Mine does shut off, if the vehicle isn't moving and the interior temperature matches the climate control setting.
So I would think/hope it could use a fraction of the fuel by running intermittently.
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...
But, when planning like this it pays to be ultra conservative. Shit happens.
Basically it has to do with a diesel throttling the fuel and never having any restriction on the air vs a gas engine throttling the air.
1. Go check the pressure in your spare this week. You’ll thank me later.
2. Put a fire extinguisher in your car.
3. Get some road flares. They’re cheap and keep for a long time. They make you vastly more visible than someone holding up a phone light towards oncoming traffic.
In my experience, filling a PET bottle to the brim with tap water and freezing it is fine. The bottle won’t burst, but, I guess, be stretched a bit. Some water will be forced out when you open it, but that’s all.
I use this on hot summer days. Freeze water overnight, take it with you, and you’ll still have cool water in the afternoon.
Warning: I haven’t tried this in outside temperatures. Those can get a lot lower than you garden variety freezer unit inside a fridge.
Other locations have "Backup" highways to lighten the load or otherwise take up the slack if the main road closes. Not so here.
I've been told that Virginia once had plans to build additional highways / alternative roads in cases of these emergencies, where the main road gets closed off for some reason. To do this, Virginia was planning to sell some coast-space to oil rigs and fund the new infrastructure.
Alas: the Deepwater Horizon spill of 2010 killed that funding plan, and with it, the plans for new highways.
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Instead, the state of Virginia focused on building additional lanes to the already existing highways. Which... doesn't help in these times of emergency, and still doesn't help in terms of day-to-day traffic either (most day-to-day traffic is bottlenecked at the offramps, where highways turn into traffic-light controlled, slower local roads).
You need additional highways (aka: additional offramps) to truly scale day-to-day traffic. And you also need "backup highways" to handle emergency situations, such as a jack-knifed semi-truck blocking all lanes due to some snow-accident.
US Route 1 basically parallels I-95 in most of VA. I was once detoured on it after a military HAZMAT incident. It’s slow going, but it works.
I-95 works really well as long as its clear. But as soon as an emergency happens, the spillover traffic is too massive for Route 1 to ever hope to handle. An interstate-highway can't rely upon a traffic-light laden local road to handle the traffic from a 4-lane interstate.
EDIT: In the case of the 2017 eclipse, the traffic was so heavy that truckers started to pile up on the side of the roads (allegedly due to the laws stating that they could only drive for X hours at a time). Losing a few lanes slowed down traffic dramatically, causing even more truckers to just pull over due to legal requirements. I don't think the GPS / Waze ever recommended for us to leave I-95 during this time, so Rt. 1 was never a consideration.
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A 2-lane highway without traffic lights that runs parallel would help a lot. I don't know the lay of the land in Virginia (ideally such a road would be coordinated with local suburbs / local cities to lessen day-to-day traffic as well).
https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/local/longterm/wilson/...
And I don't imagine it would be much use in a sudden-onset winter storm, since it's right next to I-95; it's going to get blanketed about as fast as I-95 will, and most of it lacks enough shoulder for plows to get along it if it gets jammed with traffic.
> You need additional highways (aka: additional offramps) to truly scale day-to-day traffic
Additional highways are at-best a stop-gap for day-to-day traffic, never a solution, due to induced demand [1]. You really need large-scale investments in public transportation for this.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Induced_demand#Effect_in_trans...
The reason "just shutting down all roads" doesn't make sense is that it doesn't solve the actual problem, which is that people want to both work in places with good jobs (traditionally often dense urban centers) while living in cheaper places that are far away and not spend significant chunks of their lives stuck in traffic. Shutting down all the roads only "solves" the traffic problem in a deliberately ridiculous sense (same as "just kill all humans").
I work for a big central business district employer. You can pay $150-250 a month to park or $75/week to take a motor coach bus from your suburban town. Those numbers drive behavior, and make for a better solution as folks who need flexibility can pay for it.
As long as your roads are saturated, they have less throughput, not more. It is kind of like a clog in your toilet: more things are there in your pipes, but not much is getting through.
Fluid analogies are crappy because fluids flow more when you add pressure and traffic doesn't.
Well, traffic can flow when pressure is added, just not in a way that is very safe.
More transportation means more trade, more services, and better life for all who live near the roads. It might be in the form of easier-to-get deliveries (Amazon goods), or new jobs that have popped up close by, or new housing developments (aka: homes that previously weren't possible due to the time of transportation, but are now possible thanks to sped up transportation times).
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It turns out that "individualism" is a crappy reason to do anything. The individual argument must be made because we live in a democracy, and its impossible to get the people to agree to something unless you sell them a story regarding individualism.
The purpose of adding lanes was to REDUCE DELAYS. Not support additional transportation. Your entire post hinges on an incorrect premise
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.
Well, there's an annoying edge case that must be considered as well. In some cases, "induced demand" is "stealing demand from somewhere else".
Lets say you have Town Foo and Town Bar. If you build a highway to Foo, all the additional traffic might be "stealing" traffic from Town Bar and benefiting Town Foo. Especially if people emigrate out of Town Bar for closer housing to Town Foo, you didn't really improve the lives of anyone. You just caused everyone to migrate over.
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Ideally, you want to build highways / roads / transportation in ways that benefits people, and causes the least inconvenience to other towns.
Again, I'm not making a value judgement here. Transit is a valid option that could be better
Don't forget that no matter how many lanes you add to a highway heading into a city, eventually that highway ends up... in the city. Too many cars in a city makes for a loud and dangerous-to-navigate environment for those who live there.
Parent comment is saying the only way to scale with higher demand of transportation in a way that feels like an actual improvement to people is public transit, because public transit scales so much better with higher numbers of people commuting.
I as a motorist could not give less of a shit if I'm stuck in traffic for 3 hours a day but the road is able to move hundreds of thousands of cars a day. I'd prefer a road that could only move 20 people a day with 0 traffic. It's the only thing I care about.
They tried this in Beijing. People would just buy second cars so they could drive on both days. Eventually they had to restrict new license plates as well.
Is there still some traffic? Yes. Is it better than it was 30 years ago, even as the roads handle way more traffic? Absolutely.
That depends on what you see as the goal. If the goal is reducing congestion, then induced demand means that particular goal is harder to achieve. If the goal is to get more people driving then induced demand is a clear success.
When you order goods from Amazon, that gets delivered to you. It might be a road, sea, rail, or plane, but its transportation. The more of packages ordered / delivered, the more things are happening in the city.
The more jobs being created, the more people will need to transport to-and-from work. The more homes built, the more transportation is needed. Etc. etc.
Its a crude measurement with flaws, but generally speaking, the more transportation that's happening, the bigger and better the city is functioning. People wouldn't travel unless they needed to (travel always sucks: traffic accidents, getting stuck, dealing with others on planes/trains/busses, etc. etc.). But we deal with it because without transit, we couldn't do our daily business.
Be it a meeting for work, going to school, delivering goods or other such need.
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Mass transit options, like Rail, get more things done with far less money. But there's a latency issue: rail can be slower for the individual... but its cheaper and more-bandwidth for the city.
This conflicts with individual options like roads: it costs a gross amount of money for an individual to buy a car / use it on the highways (plus the cost of highways themselves: rubber tires wear out faster than steel wheels on trains. Asphalt roads need replacing more often than steel rail lines. Gasoline costs much more than the electricity used to move a train). But the individual latency is such an advantage, that the individual will typically prefer car travel.
What they do have an advantage on is not having to synchronize with a schedule. If you need to travel 15 minutes by light rail, but the train only comes around once an hour, then missing the train adds an hour to your trip. It doesn't matter if the train never breaks down and has separated right-of-way - running on time is useless if you're not.
The way you work around that is by running more trains so that they can come more frequently. My rule of thumb is that if a transit line has a frequency of 15 minutes or less, I don't need to worry about the schedule because the time spent waiting for the train or bus is less than the time of the overall trip.
However, this is expensive; it only makes economic sense if you actually have that many riders that need to travel along that line. In other words, demand needs to be aggregated. The problem is that cars work the opposite way: they exist specifically to segregate demand. This occurs both directly and indirectly. The direct effect is the ability to immediately depart, which I already mentioned; but the indirect effect is the result of all the infrastructure that cars need in order to work at all. Things like wide highways and parking lots spread out where people need to go and make it far more dangerous to walk from a train or bus stop to your final destination.
In other words, cars cheat - they don't make your commute better, they make anyone who does not own a car have a worse one.
Here in city (Seattle) most people drive because transit tends to be spotty and slow for most people.
So, what's the solution? Make driving worse of course. Speedbumps everywhere. Change 4-lane roads to 2-lanes. Remove parking. Lower speed limits to absurd levels. Make through streets dead ends.
Transit still mostly sucks, but now driving sucks too. Success!
I love transit and want more of it, but the transit folks realized it's hard to compete with driving, so they've just given up entirely on making transit great. It's easier to ruin driving.
Wow. You just crystalized exactly what I felt was wrong with the argument that induced demand is bad. Thanks.
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, increase density, decrease the insane quantity of land dedicated solely to the movement and storage of privately owned heavy machinery (automobiles) and focus on easily accessible areas of bike & bus friendly infrastructure.
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.
If the federal government stopped taking 90% of the cost of every road in the US and you had to pay gas tax to support it all do you think you'd still be driving? Do you think you'd support billion dollar bridge extensions and lane additions when it means gas is an extra $5/gallon?
The Federal Highway Trust Fund was fully funded by the gas tax and other user fees until 2008, all while a significant percentage of revenue was allocated not to roads but to mass transit. Congress has topped it up with general revenue since, but the gas tax hike required to eliminate that need would be measured in cents, not dollars.
The Netherlands is smaller than New Jersey and has twice its population - its one of the most densely populated countries. Comparing it to the 3rd largest country on earth is risible.
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.
I don't drive and I live in Ballard. Driving has always sucked in Seattle since I can remember from the late 1970s. My dad, who lived in Seattle after coming back from Vietnam said the same thing.
It's way more like the driving folks have absolutely ruined transit in almost every single city in the country.
This is obviously not the solution that anyone is proposing. You're arguing in bad faith against a strawman. The solution to bad public transit is to make public transit better.
The claim was that they put up speed bumps (and other measures) _with the intent of_ making driving worse to encourage public transit. That's obviously false. Speed bumps get put up to discourage unsafe driving.
If, when forced to drive safely, people would rather take public transit, that's kind of scary, but also a good thing I guess to get unsafe drivers off the road? However, that's not what the claim was (and in reality is unlikely to be true, though I have no data to back that up).
That does have the result of increasing trip times by cars, and thus motivating use of public transit.
Guessing intent is a fool’s game, and can’t really be true or false per se. It does antagonize automobile drivers and, from their valid but particular perspective, makes their life worse in (what would seem to them) a gratuitous fashion. Americans don’t like arbitrary and capricious as a whole.
Caution against the short-sighted pursuit of easily-quantifiable goals at the expense of actual value is not 'arguing in bad faith'.
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.
The DC metro deteriorated markedly, and has continued to. A lot of it is a combination of bad initial designs (lack of surplus tunnel capacity to ease maintenance) along with the aggressive, powerful, and corrupt WMATA employees union. (I was on a project to analyze WMATA's staffing issues, and within the first hour, my team identified that there was a huge incentive to understaff the maintenance/technician teams to allow existing employees to collect massive amounts of overtime. Many would simply hide and sleep during the time they claimed to be "working". Hiring more mechanics/techs was foot-dragged, because it reduced the overtime pay for the existing workers who would interview them.). 2 mechanics working normal hours cost the same as 1 mechanic pulling tons of overtime, but the gap in productivity is huge. The WMATA union doesn't care. The rudeness of the staff is pretty legendary amongst locals as well.
Anyway, all of that is a long winded and detailed way of saying that WMATA gradually became a significantly less reliable means of transportation. My brother was on a car that got stuck in a tunnel that started filling with smoke. He stopped riding. And the buses need the metro to be running well. Without that, the buses become far less reliable. It's a shit show. And it's deteriorated markedly since I last lived there.
Do you use public transit in the Denver area at all? I find myself biking to most places because the public transit routes don't really get me where I want to go, but a lot of folks I know in the area used to use the buses and light rail in the before times. Seems like it had a pretty good rep before covid.
Regarding public transit in Denver, I avoid it like the plague. If I'm by myself, I'm a lot more tolerant of it. But I can't take my kids to public places in downtown Denver anymore, including the transit. When my daughter was 4, I had her on my shoulders on Mother's Day while we walked the 16th Street Mall. As we approached the Capitol, a violent altercation occurred within 30 feet of between two chronic drug addicts. One of them had a hiking pole, and he started beating and stabbing the other one. My daughter was terrified. That's just one incident, there are far more like it.
It blows my mind how the current crop of homeless (unhoused, or whatever moronically Orweillian term has been created to signal pious, virtuous sensitivity to ingroup members) activists have pushed the utterly failed policies of San Francisco in other cities. They result is what you and I are complaining about: public spaces that are decidedly unwelcoming and unsafe to children, elderly, and women. The policies seem to do nothing but funnel money to the non-profits that employ the nutbag activists. They certainly don't accomplish anything else. It's the equivalent of the neighborhood cat lady who puts bowls of food out for strays claiming she's a wildlife rehabilitation specialist.
As a concrete example, I grew up near Seattle and regularly drove on East Lake Sammamish Parkway. This road was built and designed to efficiently carry traffic between Redmond and Issaquah at a speed of 45 miles per hour. It has smooth gentle curves, good sightlines, few driveways and intersections, etc. Sometime in the 90s or 00s people built a ton of really expensive lakefront houses between the parkway and the lake, and the new homeowners got the city to lower the speed limit to 35 (presumably to make it easier to get onto the road)
People generally drive 45 on it anyways. It is a road that practically screams "45 mph is safe" at you, and 35 feels downright glacial. If you lowered the limit to 25 people would probably still regularly do 40 on it - you need some kind of traffic calming as park of a major overhaul of the road to get speeds that are safe for pedestrians there. (And even if you could do this, most households in Sammamish travel to or through either Redmond or Issaquah anyhow, so they need some thoroughfare to do so - at best you're overloading and overstressing the other roads in the network)
We petitioned to put speed bumps in. Yes, we were hostile to the way at least some people were driving. But also note that we, the people who asked for the bumps, also drove there every day. We weren't hostile to drivers as a class. We were hostile to people trying to drive excessive speeds on suburban side streets.
The real solution is to make transit at least as good as driving (measured roughly by time to get from A-B). Not easy to do in some cities - Seattle has some unique geography to work around. But for someplace like Houston or Dallas? Making transit work shouldn't be that hard (other than the cost to build it out and getting people to agree it can work).
And now bicycling and walking suck just a little less. That is a success.
Seattle just opened light rail from Northgate to the U-District to Downtown this year. We will also have light rail from Downtown Seattle to Bellevue opening next year, and light rail to Redmond the year after that.
And the opening of light rail from Downtown to Capitol Hill to Husky Stadium a few years ago drove some pretty big changes in transit in Seattle.
For cars to be good you need lots of space for parking lots and highways. Otherwise, the car is getting you nowhere fast, and there won't be anywhere to park it when you get there. But that also means those parking lots and highways need space. In all but the densest urban metros, that space is two-dimensional, which means all that car infrastructure is spreading out all the buildings.
Transit needs the exact opposite to happen: buildings need to be close-together so that a single line can aggregate more demand, and riders have to walk less when they arrive at their destinations. This is actually how pretty much all cities used to be built, because cars didn't exist yet, so you had to give that space to pedestrian infrastructure. Not coincidentally, those are also the cities with the best transit, and the absolute worst to drive in. You can't have both cars and people sharing the same space.
I disagree. Regardless of your preferred mode of transit, look at the hours just before and after peak. Roads flow smoothly. Trains run at tight intervals and aren't too crowded. It's great for everyone.
Peak demand time will always be a clusterfuck but with enough infrastructure (ignoring petty ideological bickering about which mode should have what market share) we can probably have a system that's pretty damn decent the other 22hr of the day.
The speeds were reduced because people keep dying when getting hit by speeding cars. And this problem has gotten worse with Americans shifting to SUVs and crossovers that hit humans higher up and toss them under the wheels.
In a metro area housing prices are generally correlated with how many minutes it takes to get to a city center. If you add highway capacity then people will choose to move further out to the suburbs. (Though that is great for property values, especially around the periphery of the commuting range.)
“Induced demand” in every other industry is described as “latent demand”.
This is such an oddball perspective: EDGE, 3G, LTE mobile networks all became increasingly congested as demand rose to meet supply. But nobody thought building out 5G was therefore pointless.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8057171/
The situation with roads is not that different: building more road capacity incentivizes sprawl, leaving the entire network more congested than it was when you started.
Roads just don't scale. The daily commute is like a distributed shuffle: time to complete the shuffle scales superlinearly, probably quadratically given the limited topologies possible with roads. It's not like you can build a hypercube road network.
If by building a larger road through your city, you induce people to live outside of your city instead of in it, then you’ve added costs while reducing your economic activity, while creating more total wasted hours in traffic in the process.
Are the trade offs worth it? Sometimes! But induced traffic demand is not by itself a success criteria for regions: it’s only a success if it means more people are able to work and have higher productivity in a region, as opposed to just spreading out the existing workers and reducing their productivity through increased commute times.
Take DC and NoVA, typical large suburb next to a large city. If DC wants to increase economic activity, does it want to invest in a new bridge that allows more people to live in NoVA (where most of their retail/commercial activity will occur)? Or, would DC be better off spending that money on redeveloping run-down neighborhoods and adding some light rail (or other transit improvements)?
But I have no idea how much DC “needs” the vertical space for development. It isn’t nearly as dense as NYC - plenty of infill (re)development to be done, I would guess.
More lanes generally improves throughput. However, more lanes often increases latency.
City planners may prefer this, but individuals may not.
I drive 2-3 times a year from NY to South Carolina or Florida for years, always timing crossing through DC around 5AM. Traffic 15-20 years ago coming into DC extended down to Potomac Mills. When I passed though in 2019 it extended almost 60 miles, well past Fredericksburg!
More demand drives more sprawl that drives more demand for roads. Eventually metastasizes into a nightmare like LA or Long Island!
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 maintaining efficient roadways comes at a significant cost, but our current system of road construction funded primarily by income taxes means road users don't pay that cost in a manner proportional to their use of those roads. Road construction is "free" from their perspective, so there's no incentive to use alternative means of transportation even if those alternatives would be superior overall once road construction and maintenance costs were factored in.
Because of this it's hard to be sure whether the demand induced by increased supply of roadways is worth the cost in any particular instance. It could be a worthwhile increase in utility, or it could just be a waste of money.
The most "fair" way to do it would be to charge according to road wear and tear, which would look something like axle load ^2 * miles driven, but this would be hard to implement and also widely unpopular with huge swathes of the population (truck driver is the most common profession in many states)
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 having large portions of your population spent 10+ of their waking time commuting to and from work each weekday.
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. A much better option is both expanding the number of people that can commute by living further out, and reducing the per individual commute time by mass transit. That's the true goal.
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.
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.
Only one I can think of is pollution, but that's not even caused by roads, it's caused by burning gasoline.
It does result in growth for an area, but quality of life stagnates. The traffic in northern Virginia/DC/Maryland is at a point where it noticeably affects the mood of a bulk of the people who live there. Spending 90 minutes each way day after day after day fucks people's heads up.
However, what expanding highways actually accomplishes is incentivizing people to move out of the city because they can have a commute which is longer in miles but shorter in minutes. That lasts until enough people move to the suburb that the commute is now longer in miles AND equal time or longer in minutes. You haven't made traffic any better, you've just made sprawl worse and you've increased the vehicle miles traveled to accomplish the same result of getting people where they want to be.
The message of the New Urbanists is that we should make our cities more livable and build/allow more housing units within the cities so that more people can live where their commutes are short (in terms of miles) and the increase in density will make providing transit more cost-effective.
Induced demand is a terrible name for the real issue here. Perhaps the "one more lane fallacy" would be better. The "one more lane fallacy" is not universal, it only applies in cities and other densely populated areas.
Imagine you are sitting in a suburban traffic jam, getting slowly more and more annoyed. It's easy to imagine adding marginally more road capacity would put an end to traffic jam. That thought is the 'one more lane fallacy'. That, admittedly attractive, idea is wrong because adding more capacity leaves the traffic jam exactly the same, with more lanes and more cars in them - because of induced demand.
The kicker is that in a densely populated area, there is often no realistic prospect of adding enough road capacity to end traffic jams, simply because of there is not enough space. I suspect that in most cases, road building achieves political support through the expectation of ending traffic jams. Nearly always, this expectation will not be met. This is the essence of the induced demand problem - it is not as obvious as is sometimes made out.
So, even if you are die hard driver, if you want to reduce traffic jams, you should advocate for other people to use transport methods that are more space efficient than driving. Of course, you might want to live in an area dominated by constantly congested roads, in which case, induced demand isn't a problem.
If you build a new road and it gets just as congested and it takes just as long to travel from A to B, then what did you accomplish?
The number of people who want to use a road is not the metric we're trying to optimize here. If we wanted to do that we should build as few roads as possible. Then there would be tons and tons of people who want to use each road. Hooray! Success!
> the equilibrium speed of car traffic on a road network is determined by the average door-to-door speed of equivalent journeys taken by public transport.
NotJustBikes has a good introduction to it [2]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Downs%E2%80%93Thomson_paradox
It’s just inducing demand on an already overused system like private cars doesn’t fix the system being overused unless you can get beyond the desired capacity.
If induced demand is high enough even that, too, may not be enough - but then building a new rail line is at least no harder than adding a new highway lane (in most cases), and can support substantially more throughput with equal or lower travel times.
By the way, even BART could increase throughput today without adding more lines. Not all trains are 10-car trains, because they don't have enough cars in the fleet. Adding more cars to their trains is a significantly cheaper prospect than adding a new lane to the Bay Bridge (which was also basically fully maxed out on throughput during peak traffic times, pre-COVID). And BART carries substantially more people across the Bay than the Bay Bridge does.
So, certainly the BART needs more capacity, both now and in the future - but so do the highways.
Note that I didn't make my point to say that we should build another bridge, just the pedantic detail that BART traffic isn't that much larger than Bay Bridge + San Mateo Bridge, which is a more apt comparison. I think actually you'd want to add in the Golden Gate Bridge, another 110K. So basically, there are more people commuting into SF driving over bridges than taking BART in.
To increase the capacity of the red line would take a lot of work that would not be cheap. For instance, the length of the trains could be increased, but to do that you have to construct new stations, since the train is already the length of the entire platform, at least the ones used for rush hour. LA has actually lengthened platforms that are on the surface before to accomodate longer light rail trains, but underground this is so much more difficult.
You could lower headways from the 10 minutes they are currently at, but this becomes a physics problem fast. One issue is a lack of turnback stations at the ends of the line so the train has to come to a stop then 'reverse' at the end. Another issue is a subway with a train works like a pneumatic tube, there is a volume of air moving that needs sufficient ventilation, which is why you see these big ventilation grates on sidewalks where subways run below, and to run more frequent trains would require significant upgrades to the ventilation systems along the entire line.
Of course, you need to invest in the infrastructure to make it work, but it's very possible.
A quick Google suggests that in Tokyo they even hit 50 trains per hour, so one every 1m20s, which is insanely impressive.
Mostly DC metro rail and a bit of LA buses, FWIW.
Lots of places talk about the importance of walkability and mass transit but if you actually look at most transportation budgets the vast majority goes to automobile infrastructure. Even what passes for "pedestrian infrastructure" in many places is there for the benefit of drivers[1]. I mean, it makes sense because everyone in the US drives everywhere, but it's a chicken-and-egg problem.
[1] https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2021/1/29/pedestrian-inf...
One reason many people are more concerned about inducing driving demand is that private vehicle travel generally emits more carbon, uses more valuable land (e.g. parking, highways), and results in more fatalities per person per mile than comparable forms of transportation.
Another problem with inducing driving demand is the degree to which those costs are subsidized by taxpayers (roads, highways), other shoppers (required/subsidized parking), or left as externalities (carbon, noise). Tolls, gas taxes, per-mile fees, and parking fees would have to be quite a bit higher in most places to cover those costs.
Of course, there are also other potential advantages of public transit unrelated to induced demand, like pollution, safety, cost, impact on the design of living spaces, etc.
Note that I said most trips there. If you don't have a system useful enough that most people use it most of the time then people still need cars to get around and that changes the calculation. it can be very hard to get there.
That's false. The mistake universally made by people repeating that claim is a failure to account for the fact that vehicles and population are finite. In the US there isn't much population growth, except for in a select few urban areas. It's baffling that it gets repeated so often as though it's always true, when it's not. You can swamp the amount of induced demand with additional roads, it all depends on the number of vehicles you're dealing with. Which is to say, it depends on context and it's incorrect to suggest matter-of-fact that induced demand defeats additional roads.
You'd need to run a study on the traffic potential and local + regional population growth to know one way or another what additional roads might do as it pertains to inducing demand over time and whether you can overcome the expected increased demand. The demand doesn't just keep rising forever as you build more roads.
Do you realize just how extravagantly expensive that would be?
Rail transit is an anachronism, best suited for the 1950s when life involved a woman staying home with the kids while dad took the train into the city for work. I did that for a year before my wife started her job and it was lovely (took Metro North down from Westchester to Manhattan every day). But in a modern family with two jobs in two locations, plus kids with daycare and school and after school activities, it’s not scalable.
My wife and I are “city people.” We really tried to scale the transit lifestyle. We lived in downtown Baltimore for two years and took Amtrak to work each day. We lived in downtown DC and took Metro. We’ve commutes in the Silver line, Orange line, Blue line, MARC, etc. And every year the service got worse, and every time we had another kid the equation got harder to balance. Eventually we threw in the towel, moved to a red county, and bought an SUV that gets 13 mpg. And we’ve never looked back.
You want to know what the future of America looks like? Go to the Dallas suburbs. That’s where all the immigrants with kids are, and where the next generation of Americans are being raised. It’s a glorious place. And it doesn’t involve public transit.
I lived literally next to Dulles International Airport - ~8 miles. Yet, to get to Dulles (or Reston/Herndon) by Public transit, would've taken me 2 hours perhaps, or more.
1: https://www.google.com/maps/@38.9768706,-77.4451826,3a,75y,2...
I have considered cycling to the airport in my area before, and basically run into the same issue you raise.
Home to IAD by car: 5 miles, 9 minutes
Home to IAD by transit: 40+ minutes across 2 bus lines
Home to IAD by foot: 10.9 miles, 3+ hours
Home to WAS by car: 24 miles, 29 minutes
Home to WAS by transit: 90+ minutes across 1 bus line, 2 Metro lines, and a few walking segments to link them.
It's sad that walking to the airport is twice as far than driving. It's also sad that I can drive to a airport further away than I can access my closest airport by transit.
So don't spread the jobs out all over the spokes? Is some urban planning really hard to do here?
> Rail transit is an anachronism, best suited for the 1950s when life involved a woman staying home with the kids while dad took the train into the city for work.
That isn't true at all in much of the world. Rail transit still works in many non-dysfunctional countries.
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.
This is like the one region of the country you actually could scale up intercity/state transport, and it sucks so bad that Amtrak is terrible.
1: https://tetcoalition.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/2040_Vis....
Even here in montreal, while the metro is pretty good and we are currently building a pretty nice light rail system you still can't really depend on the rail system if your job isn't in montreal itself. The whole transit system is based on feeding the big city, not move people in between smaller cities. (Also, It's a bit tiring then to hear about just how dysfunctional the US is and how good they have it everywhere else when it's just not true. The American self loathing just get repetitive honestly)
I think public transit is amazing for city transit but does not scale very well when there's something else than the usual suburb->city->suburb pattern of movement. You can't really interconnect every single medium-small ish city at a north American scale
This problem has been solved for awhile now, at least since the 1960s when the first intra-city/province shinkansen came online. Just because some other countries suck as badly as the USA at it doesn't mean it is an unsolved problem.
This is just rehashing pop-urban planning buzzwords. Like I'm not sure where the trend of just handwaving every problem as easily solvable by "rail! Shinkansen! City public transit even out of cities!" came from but it particularly does not make sense in this situation considering the commenter you replied to specified he talked about spread out, smaller cities with frequent stops. Which is the opposite of what the shinkansen is for.
Have you ever tried taking these lines before? They have high speed rail between big cities, and tons and tons of small branch/feeder routes out to small towns with the most frequent stops ever imaginable. Getting from huge Tokyo to small Gifu actually works.
It did take some planning however. The USA's model of just "build that office complex wherever you want!" wouldn't work.
Which is exactly my point! That's already the current situation on the ground in the USA. So yes, it wouldn't work there. Unless you'd literally move around millions of jobs, offices etc which is absolutely not feasible. Trying to build public transit around that structure just to fit an idealized vision of somewhere else is weird. Japan built the system that fit their needs and their situation and the USA should do the same.
They did this for a variety of reasons some noble (grand visions of urban renewal based on cars instead of public transit) and some odious (breaking up non-machine voting wards, enforcing de facto redlining post the Supreme Court decisions, etc). They were able to make sections of the city, specifically the near south and south west places you commuted through instead of to. Similar things were done with tearing out el tracks, trolleys and the removal of commuter rail from further south neighborhoods that had been alternate business districts to the loop. These were conscious urban planning decisions to reinforce the pattern of outward/in commutes.
American Pharoah is a not particularly good biography of Richard Daley that happens to include a good book on Chicago urban planning in the late 40s to late 60s era.
Define "works". Sure it can move millions of people each day, but those people live miserable lives most of the time. Have you lived in a city where commuting one hour each way by train is considered "very good" ? And some of the worse are around 1.30-1.45 hours each way, each day? Even if for a while the train is fine, if the city is growing it will become unbearably crowded, smelly, hot and just a nightmare to deal with when you're tired and want to get home at 6 PM.
A truly regrettable existence that no human should have to endure. We mourn the lack of a reason to own a second car. My husband’s bike ride to work is an even worse torture.
Yes, impossible actually to prevent this from happening. Corporations always want a good deal for office space, so they will literally shop around different cities looking at who will give them the biggest tax advantages and the most developable land. City councilmembers literally make careers out of wooing corporations into building suburban office parks, and why wouldn't they? They just injected a thousand white collar workers who will be paying taxes into their school district and another 5 thousand workers who will be driving in every morning and spending money on local sales tax when they get starbucks from the drive through. It's a race to the bottom as long as local governments have local control over their planning processes, and it would probably still continue if planning were done regionally or nationally since it is very easy to bribe American politicians.
“Just completely restructure every single place 80% of the population in one of the country’s largest metro areas lives and works in.”
Yes, there is an argument that Reston, Vienna, etc., shouldn’t exist in their present form (or anything close to it). But that ship sailed long ago.
Efforts to gloss over that reality end badly. The Silver Line and all the adjacent development are monstrosities. Stations are huge concrete edifices in the middle of freeways that are nerve wracking to navigate with a squirrelly three year old. Billions were spent making places that are nice for just a handful of people who can afford $4,000/month for a two bedroom near the McLean Metro so they can take the Silver Line to their job at Google in Reston.
> That isn't true at all in much of the world. Rail transit still works in many non-dysfunctional countries.
Those countries are dysfunctional. Birth rates in these transit-oriented metro areas are well below replacement, meaning that their form of civilization is literally sustainable.
Dallas should probably get some better research universities if this is going to be a thing.
Because every year we refuse to fund public transport at an appropriate level to prevent it from getting worse let alone improving.
If your idea of public transport is confined to only what the US has to offer currently, then you have already stopped having a conversation in good faith and instead are being myopic in the realm of solutions.
I say this as a member of a two car family who routinely ferries children to places and hates every minute of it that could be spent paying attention to something other than the road.
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.
1: Fairfax county is rather centrally planned compared to everywhere else in the US I've lived since then, but the DC Metro is funded by MD, VA, DC, and the federal government. The difficulty of building infrastructure seems to scale super-linearly with the number of people paying for the infrastructure...
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 treat our infrastructure costs as realities to be planned around rather than solvable problems. This is a keen insight Lee Kuan Yew had in building Singapore. He admired many aspects of Anglo culture, but realized that not all of them would work in an Asian country: https://web.colby.edu/eas150/files/2017/11/Zakaria_LeeKuanYe.... America is a decentralized, low cohesion society built around having plenty of space for a bunch of different groups to leave each other alone. America is continually replenished by the people who are antisocial enough to leave their kin and homelands to start new lives thousands of miles away.[1] We aren’t Germans or Swedes or Japanese and shouldn’t beat our selves up trying to be them. Our future is electric cars and freeways, not trains.
[1] Asians are the biggest immigrant group in the US, but when polled, under 10% of people in Asia said they would immigrate to another country if they had the chance. Guess what kind of people end up making the journey?
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 is certainly an option for the northeast US.
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.
So prove it with more than your ridiculous anecdotes and metaphors. You do a lot of claiming and literally no sourcing. Try again, this time with data.
>You want to know what the future of America looks like? Go to the Dallas suburbs.
Can I point out the irony that you're posting this in a thread about a natural disaster exacerbated by suburban development patterns, and your example of Dallas suffered a similar disaster less than a year ago, made worse by the thermal inefficiency of the same development patterns? Is that the future we should want?
It's sad, but without a car in the DC area, your options are very minimal and you pretty much have to live in the city.
I lived in the DC area for nearly 30 years and moved out right as Covid hit, and have tried to use public transit at various points in my adult life. Unless you live super close to a metro stop and/or need to go to a metro stop the system will barely work for you, and even then you'll be hamstrung with where you can go and how long it will take you to get there.
I read your comments downthread, which I think are pretty insightful; it may be the case that the ship has sailed and we're not going back (and it may even be the case that there's something in our national DNA that prevents us from competently building and operating transit). But it should at least be acknowledged that the status quo isn't the result of personal choice or revealed preference; it was quite literally a big-government social engineering project.
Do you mean the millions of people who do this every day don't exist? You might personally prefer that and it's certainly an opinion which has been lavishly subsidized in the U.S. but this is a lifestyle choice, not a truth.
> people with various health issues.
How many of the people who cannot take transit are capable of safely driving cars? Public transportation — whether bus/rail mass transit or on-demand access services — is key for a large number of people who cannot drive themselves and a large number of people who could but are not affluent enough to afford the $10K/year or more that personal car ownership (considerably more if you need a vehicle customized with assistive technologies).
Again, you obviously have an opinion on this issue but that doesn't make such blanket statements less incorrect.
>How many of the people who cannot take transit are capable of safely driving cars?
It doesn't matter how many (though a lot of people for example develop back issues by mid age and beyond so prolonged walking/standing is much harder than sitting in the car especially after a workday). The point is you just dismiss them. And this is why those tone-deaf public transportation proponents like you aren't going anywhere - you dismiss all those supposedly small groups and thus as a result left with pretty much no support.
And just a bit of meta to illustrate the point - notice that i'm telling you about the issues with your approach and instead of addressing them, you're dismissing them outright as supposedly just "my preferences".
This is pure projection: I was pointing out that millions of people's daily life contradicted the absolute statement you made. If you'd said “doesn't work for many people” I would have agreed: it's no secret that the U.S. has heavily subsidized car-centric design for the last century and there are many people living in neighborhoods which don't even have sidewalks, much less transit or bike paths.
This has also encouraged many people to think that they must drive even if it's not a great choice: in the city I live in, it's not uncommon for people to cling to the habits they acquired growing up and trying to drive everywhere even though it means they're paying considerably more to sit in traffic while their friends who biked or took the train wonder why they're late.
There isn't a single answer here but the important thing is remembering that these are choices. Giving private car owners exclusive use of public land might be a popular choice but it's not a law of nature, and when it doesn't work well it's reasonable to question whether it's the right design for the context. There's no reason to think that the same answers will be true in rural areas, suburbs, and dense urban cores.
This continues to be wrong every time someone brings it up.
If you have insufficient road capacity, you have congestion, and congestion suppresses demand. If you increase capacity, some of the congestion goes away, and then some of the demand comes back.
What this looks like is that you currently have enough cars to require three lanes but have two lanes, so you build a third lane. The reduction in congestion causes you to have enough cars to require four lanes, leading to the fool's conclusion that adding enough lanes is impossible. But that's not it. It's that you needed four from the beginning to handle the amount of traffic that occurs there in the absence of congestion, but you only had three, or two.
Sometimes building a four (or five or six) lane highway isn't the best solution. Sometimes it's better to build more housing near the jobs so people have shorter commutes, or build mass transit etc.
Sometimes you just need a wider road. Pretending that's never the case is preposterous. If that was true then why do we keep multi-lane highways open instead of closing all but one of the lanes? Wouldn't that improve traffic, under this theory?
You're setting up this strawman where the argument is "improve roads" vs. "do nothing". That's obviously not the case. The argument is "improve roads" vs. "improve public transit". Demonstrably, improving roads is worse than improving public transit. You refer to this as a "fool's conclusion" yet this has been a well-known fact in the field for almost a century. The wikipedia article I linked has some good information on this if you'd like to learn more.
Your claim is this:
> Additional highways are at-best a stop-gap for day-to-day traffic, never a solution, due to induced demand
That claim is false and is not a straw man because you actually claim it.
Improving mass transit might work as an alternate solution, sometimes, in specific contexts.
That doesn't prove that adding more lanes wouldn't also work, and it's also not universally true.
A large fraction of the traffic on I-95 is trucks. How many semi truck drivers and their loads can you fit on a public bus?
Many highways are congested at a specific choke point. You could make a completely free thousand mile an hour bullet train to transport people from one side of the choke point to the other and solve nothing because people would get to the other side without a car and be unable to get the last ten miles to their destination. But once you get past the choke point, the traffic diverges in every direction and there is no longer enough density to justify a mass transit route.
Sometimes you just need a wider road.
> Additional highways are at-best a stop-gap for day-to-day traffic, never a solution, due to induced demand [1]. You really need large-scale investments in public transportation for this.
Clearly "improve roads" vs. "improve public transit"...
> How many semi truck drivers and their loads can you fit on a public bus?
You're again arguing against something no one ever said. No one suggested that we should just remove all semi-trucks and replace them with buses. Again, we're discussing where to allocate incremental improvements to existing systems. No one is suggesting doing nothing or, worse, shutting down existing systems.
Using your specific example of semi-trucks, moving more traffic (such as daily commute) to rail lines or buses can actually help semi-trucks as well, by freeing up road capacity for things that actually need it. And additionally, freight trains already make up a fairly large percentage of our freight network (~30%) so rail is actually a great alternative to semi-trucks in many cases.
You: Cars are never a solution because they can't go faster than 15 MPH. You really need horses for this.
Me: Cars can go faster than 15 MPH in many cases. Horses can't be used to transport industrial boilers and such.
You: Clearly you missed the part about the horses.
> No one suggested that we should just remove all semi-trucks and replace them with buses.
You have a two lane road that needs to be a four lane road to handle the amount of traffic it would have without congestion.
If more than half of the traffic that would occur without congestion is trucks, you physically cannot relieve the congestion with mass transit, because relieving the congestion would require removing more than 100% of the non-truck traffic.
> Moving more traffic to rail lines or buses can actually help semi-trucks as well, by freeing up road capacity for things that actually need it.
This the other stupidity with induced demand. It's not induced, it's suppressed by congestion, which means that any alternative means of relieving the congestion will also restore the demand.
Suppose you actually built mass transit and removed the equivalent of one lane worth of traffic from the road. Now you still need to add the other lane because the reduction in traffic congestion restored demand for the road and offset what was removed by the improved mass transit.
The practical limits are all trade offs. How much does it cost to add two lanes? How much does it cost to maintain low ridership bus service to low density suburbs? There are circumstances in which adding more lanes is the best available alternative.
Some regions have concluded that adding a lane per decade is sustainable and already have highways more than a dozen lanes wide. I'm curious to see where the upper bound is.
(Personally I think dynamic pricing to maintain optimal highway capacity is a more sustainable approach.)
Property values increasing there actually offsets the problem by making it less desirable to live there.
The real trouble is that people build more houses there. But the reason people build more houses there, and suffer a 30 minute commute (which more congestion might have turned into a 60 minute commute), is that they can't afford to live in the place with a 15 minute commute. Typically because zoning prohibits building more housing there.
Now let's see what our choices are here.
We can do nothing at all. Well, now people are screwed. They still need somewhere to live, the place that now has a 60 minute commute is the only place housing can be built, so the housing still gets built there, but now the commute is longer. That's just horrible and helps no one.
Second, we could widen the road and that's it. The new housing still gets built in the suburbs but at least now people waste less time in their cars.
Third, we could loosen the zoning so higher density housing can be built closer to the city, but not widen the road. This is pretty good, because now the people who live in the new housing get the 15 minute commute. But the people who already live in the suburbs are still stuck with the 60 minute commute.
Fourth, we could loosen the zoning and widen the road. Then new housing gets built in the city instead of the suburbs, because people prefer a 15 minute commute to a 30 minute commute, 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. And it stays that way because the new housing is getting built in the city instead of the suburbs. This is pretty obviously the one that we want.
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 city are now only an hour drive away and commuters looking for a deal start to move there. The towns that used to be an hour away are now only a half-hour drive to the city and are now hotter as well. Some of that is due to a game of musical chairs in which people expand out of the city to the suburbs, some of that is new residents choosing to live further out than they would have if they arrived before the highway widening. All of this increases the number of vehicle miles traveled. 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.
It's not all bad of course because the new highway helps grow the metro area and it increases property values, especially in the suburbs that were on the periphery of the commuting zones. But to permanently eliminate congestion you'd either have to keep widening the road every decade or two to handle the growth (Houston, Dallas), allow the congestion itself to act as a natural limit (NJ), or institute tolls/congestion pricing (Singapore, London).
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.
Is that true if we charge an appropriate price for road use? Isn't that what we do to manage availability of every other scarce resource to ensure it is being used optimally?
If you increase the price of using the road at the busiest times then eventually you will arrive at a price that maintains the optimum flow rate. You may need to adjust the price occasionally to track shifts in inflation and population, it has equity issues, and (like most sustainable solutions) it is politically difficult. But I don't understand what would cause it to stop working. In the places it has been implemented (e.g. Singapore, London, Stockholm) it is generally unpopular at first and then extremely popular after a year or so. And administering it should become cheaper as technology improves which may make it feasible for smaller cities as well.
> 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?
Even in metro areas that have stable populations, heavily subsidizing transportation infrastructure (whether transit or highways) between the city and the suburbs often has the effect of slowly shifting the current metro population outward to those suburbs. By subsidizing suburban commuters you are making living in the suburbs more attractive than it would be otherwise. As you make it more attractive, more people who currently live in the city will rationally choose to move to the suburbs.
I'm not saying it's a bad idea to build more lanes, just that on it's own it is not a sustainable approach. As long as rent/land prices are largely set by the market and roadways are free or heavily subsidized then it's not surprising that people take advantage of that and you end up with a shortage of road space.
(I agree with your comments on zoning.)
It's not a blind spot. It's a characteristic of services with a high fixed cost and trivial variable cost.
To ask if we should price roads is to ask if the price needed to deter usage enough to relieve congestion without expanding the road would generate less revenue than it would take to expand the road. But this is basically never the case because most of the expansion cost is one-time (e.g. buying the land) whereas the congestion charge would have to be collected forever to continue deterring usage.
The strongest case for not expanding the road is if there is a more efficient way to relieve congestion, e.g. by relaxing zoning restrictions to allow higher density housing and reduce travel distances.
But if people value using the road at more than the cost of expanding it, and there are no higher efficiency alternatives, that implies the road should be expanded. And once it has been and there is no congestion even at zero unit price, there is no benefit in charging a unit price to deter congestion that isn't there anyway, and a detriment in deterring use of a public resource for which the same fixed cost has to be paid whether you use it or not.
Charging road tolls is also especially inefficient because the collections process has a high administrative overhead and a high privacy cost. Every dollar spent collecting tolls -- toll tags, gantries, billing, maintenance, customer service -- is a deadweight economic loss not incurred by any alternative that doesn't require them. The privacy cost is the same.
First of all, that just doesn't follow. You can take out a loan to pay for the up-front cost and pay it back using the revenue you collect from tolls. Second, roads cost a lot of money to maintain. There are the usual ongoing costs to fix potholes and so on, and then they have to be totally replaced after 25-30 years. This is far more than what local taxation can bear in many cases. Replacement costs are chronically underestimated.
(e.g. Winnipeg would have to raise taxes 95% to properly fund their existing road liabilities: https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2021/1/3/death-of-a-car-... )
>But if people value using the road at more than the cost of expanding it, and there are no higher efficiency alternatives, that implies the road should be expanded.
This is wrong, they are not valuing it properly because it is paid for by taxation and debt. A motorist pays exactly the same amount directly as a non-motorist: zero. The true costs are diffuse, invisible, and incomplete.
>And once it has been and there is no congestion even at zero unit price, there is no benefit in charging a unit price to deter congestion that isn't there anyway, and a detriment in deterring use of a public resource for which the same fixed cost has to be paid whether you use it or not.
This situation hardly ever happens. There is almost always more congestion after expansions than predicted by planners. If you wanted to overpower induced demand and get rid of all congestion the roads would have to be utterly gargantuan.
>Charging road tolls is also especially inefficient because the collections process has a high administrative overhead and a high privacy cost. Every dollar spent collecting tolls -- toll tags, gantries, billing, maintenance, customer service -- is a deadweight economic loss not incurred by any alternative that doesn't require them. The privacy cost is the same.
Time spent stuck in traffic is also deadweight loss, and it creates pollution.
The fact that you can do this is the point. It means the value of expanding the road is more than the cost of expanding the road, which implies it should be done absent some better non-toll alternative like increasing housing density.
But once you have enough capacity that there is no congestion without congestion charges, it's inefficient to deter use of the sunk cost road.
> There are the usual ongoing costs to fix potholes and so on, and then they have to be totally replaced after 25-30 years.
These costs aren't linear in the number of lanes. Resurfacing a four lane highway doesn't cost four times more than resurfacing a one lane highway (or your contractors are ripping you off).
Moreover, the initial cost is typically the highest, because you have to acquire land and possibly rebuild bridges and overpasses the first time.
> This is far more than what local taxation can bear in many cases. Replacement costs are chronically underestimated.
This applies to roads to nowhere that are under-utilized but still have to be maintained. Anything with traffic congestion is seeing more use than its cost.
You also have problems with corruption in government contracting inflating the cost of everything, but that's a separate problem and applies equally to mass transit etc.
> This is wrong, they are not valuing it properly because it is paid for by taxation and debt. A motorist pays exactly the same amount directly as a non-motorist: zero.
It's not a question of what they're actually paying, it's a question of what they would be willing to pay, i.e. the value they assign to the road. If you put a toll somewhere there is congestion, would the toll pay enough to expand the road? The answer is almost always yes, which implies that that the road should be expanded when congestion exists, unless there is some more efficient alternative to relieve the congestion.
It shows that expanding the road is more valuable than deterring usage with tolls. The possibility remains that some non-toll method of relieving congestion is still better than expanding the road, but it shows that expanding the road is better than deterring usage with tolls.
And whether to expand the road is a separate question from whether to actually fund the expansion from the tolls, because toll collection is inefficient and privacy invasive the deterrence function is undesired when the congestion can be relieved without it. The toll being able to fund the road proves that people value the road at more than its cost, but it's not the most efficient way to fund it.
> If you wanted to overpower induced demand and get rid of all congestion the roads would have to be utterly gargantuan.
This is only the case if you for some reason insist on using road expansion as the only solution to relieve congestion.
Mass transit can relieve congestion in higher density areas. Zoning that allows higher density housing to be built near jobs relieves congestion by both reducing the distances people have to travel and making mass transit more efficient.
Expanding roads works where those don't, or in combination with them. For example, if you have a growing city with restrictive zoning and a congested road between a large suburb and the city center, what you want to do is cause new housing to be built closer to the city instead of further expanding the suburbs, but the road to the suburbs still needs to be expanded because it is already too small for the existing traffic from housing which is already there and is not about to be removed.
This is politics. The most effective solution involves allowing higher density housing near urban areas, but this is not the solution desired by existing land owners, so they push inefficient alternatives like tolls. Because that increases rather than decreases property values closer to the city center by making it more expensive to live further away without increasing the supply of housing that isn't further away, so existing land owners collect higher rents to the detriment of residents.
> Time spent stuck in traffic is also deadweight loss, and it creates pollution.
Which is why we should relieve congestion by using the alternatives with fewer deadweight losses, like building higher density housing where that works and expanding roads where that works.
What about the induced demand of going from 0 lanes to 1 lane?
Making everyone ride busses and bicycles in a country with the geography of America is a fantasy, even if you buy the premise that this is otherwise desirable.
I don't even buy the premise, because things that are valuable to me include:
1. Expediency
2. Comfort
3. Not being subject to timetables decided by other people
4. Not having to deal with homeless or crazy people while transiting
5. Sanitation. Public transit and pandemic mitigation measures are mutually incompatible
While driving, I only have to deal with one network topology (the road system) instead of two (the bus network on top of the road network), leading to vastly shorter travel times in practice. My vehicles are customized to my comfort. I don't have to get permission or wait on someone else to use them. I don't have to share them with anyone. I can keep them as clean as I please.
I understand that induced demand is a thing in sprawling metropolis where transport is the bottleneck preventing growth in certain areas, but this feels like a different situation.
Back in I think 1995, somebody rolled a tanker full of sulphuric acid on I-95 southbound about Fredericksburg. It took a long time to get to the Acquia exit from just past the previous one, and Route 1 didn't move that well once we were there.
They do this because they get to turn the extras into toll/HOV lanes and rake in dough without making tons of people's lives worse and getting pressure put on them to not be jerks like that.
Follow the incentives.
Well... not really. Taking the 95 corridor in the Northeast as an example, the only places with alternative highways are 95/295 between DC and Baltimore, 295/NJT in lower New Jersey, and Merritt Parkway/95 in Connecticut to New Haven. In all of the other segments, 95 doesn't have a close-ish parallel highway to take off traffic.
And when you dig deeper into traffic statistics, the traffic tends to be heavy on both segments at the same time. That is, there are two highways there because the traffic needs require there to be two highways; the second highway isn't just "merely" a there-for-when-the-first-one-is-full kind of highway. And induced demand basically says that it's impossible to have that kind of highway setup.
We walked back to the car and waited, turning the engine on for 5 minutes every half hour to warm up. Fortunately we had warm clothes with us. What was most frustrating was that the road was clear of traffic and not too much snow in the other direction, but was blocked many miles further ahead. The radio kept saying they were air-dropping water and food, but we never saw any. Eventually a bunch of people just in front of us formed a plan and shuffled a few cars back and forward to make some space. Then they built a ramp out of snow up and over the crash barrier. A bunch of SUVs escaped that way. We debated whether it would be possible for us to get over in a normal car - we didn't think so. Eventually a few more SUVs got over, and there was just enough space for us to get a short run up. The car grounded in the middle, but we carried on over and down the other side. We checked under the car, and were surprised to see we hadn't done any damage. We drove the couple of miles back the service station, filled up and returned to Seoul after an 18 hour drive to nowhere.
We heard later that it took two days to free everyone, and that 10,000 cars had been stuck. We were very glad we hadn't waited. Since then I've always carried some spare warm clothing and never let the fuel run low when the weather looks doubtful.
https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/images/12846/south-korea-r...
It truly is in the middle of nowhere with most turnoffs going to farming/rural areas. In European terms it's similar to the stretch on the A4/A6 between Vienna and Bratislava, but about 2x as long and about half as populated. If you drive here you basically see nothing but highway and trees for a couple of hours, with the occasional turn-off into a stand of fast food restaurants and gas stations and really nothing else until you get nearer to Richmond or head a bit east towards Hampton Roads.
The local towns simply don't have the support infrastructure to clear the roads and wrecks and the state. This combined with a drop in temperature from over 60F to under 30F (15C to -0C) in a few hours and a massive snow drop caused the early falling snow to melt, then freeze into a solid layer of ice before road crews could salt the entire 110 mile stretch between DC and Richmond.
Predictably the result was a giant mess, and few areas for motorists to exit onto local roads to get around the affected area or get food, gas, or other provisions. There aren't even many hotels as options in the area given how rural much of this part of the state is. Google maps has simply marked the entire 110 mile stretch of the Interstate as black and provides directions around the entire thing on local farm roads.
Directions from New York City to Miami Fl (which typically use mostly I-95) simply route around that part of I-95 from Baltimore, Md to just North of Richmond using local roads, a distance of 152 miles (244 km) or about 3 hours driving, and includes crossing bridges over the Potomac River in incredibly more rural areas.
Another way to look at it is that D.C. is the southern-most tip of the heavily populated D.C. to Boston megalopolis mega-region and any further South is basically farms and wilderness until Richmond, the next distinct and different metro area from the North-East mega region. This problem has occurred in the gap between those two areas.
https://www.cnn.com/2022/01/04/weather/winter-weather-tuesda...
https://apnews.com/article/snow-storm-weather-195-virginia-6...
https://www.nbc12.com/2022/01/04/vdot-continues-clear-i-95-h...
https://www.foxnews.com/us/virginia-i-95-winter-storm-traffi...
https://wtop.com/traffic/2022/01/the-storm-paralyzed-traffic...
https://wjla.com/amp/news/local/drivers-stranded-stuck-for-h...
Thankfully we were with a ton of other traffic, if we were by ourselves it would have been scary.
Also many cars do come with sat system packages that are only emergency use and cheaper in this mode of operation.
This seems to be an unexpected consequence of climate change. Slower moving storms, with huge amounts of rain or snow in a short period.
https://www.novec.com/About_NOVEC/Virginias-Historic-Snowsto...
This is a sharp increase over the previous twenty years. Between 1980 and 1999, 4,212 disasters were linked to natural hazards worldwide claiming approximately 1.19 million lives and affecting 3.25 billion people resulting in approximately US$1.63 trillion in economic losses.
Much of the difference is explained by a rise in climate-related disasters including extreme weather events: from 3,656 climate-related events (1980-1999) to 6,681 climate-related disasters in the period 2000-2019.
The last twenty years have seen the number of major floods more than double, from 1,389 to 3,254, while the incidence of storms grew from 1,457 to 2,034. Floods and storms were the most prevalent events."
[1] https://www.undrr.org/publication/human-cost-disasters-overv...
If you look a bit deeper at the statistics, this database "records disasters which have killed ten or more people; affected 100 or more people; resulted in a declared state of emergency, or a call for international assistance."
What factors besides frequency and severity of weather events could affect these statistics?
Most obvious are population growth (doubled over that period) and increased urbanization (reversed from 60:40 primarily rural, to 60:40 primarily urban). This means that an event with the same severity is greatly more likely to be reported and included in this database. Similarly for economic effects - because of the growth in assets, infrastructure, and GDP, that doubling of economic losses, even if in constant dollars, represents a decrease in losses relative to total assets. So this data doesn't really represent a measure of change in the weather as much as change in human society (and the page is titled, "The human cost...")
The IPCC report is somewhat equivocal about change in the actual heavy precipitation events, stating "the frequency and intensity of heavy precipitation have likely increased...with increases in more regions than there are decreases". (with "likely" meaning > 2/3 probability)
Roger Pielke, Jr., has done a lot of work on extreme weather events: https://rogerpielkejr.substack.com/p/how-to-understand-the-n...
Not every storm is or can be caused by climate change, and average weather occurs in a minuscule amount of the time. even without climate change, 50% of the times it will be more than the average, or 50% it will be less.
Similarly, your data shows a doubling of events in 20 years, which is completely outside the range of predictions and models from actual climate scientists. I get that the intention is good, but poor arguments only pollute discourse.
Amazing... It really puts a 14 inch snowstorm into perspective.
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.
https://twitter.com/timkaine/status/1478462778834833408?s=20
I love hearing stories about the positive aspects of humanity. It's too easy to hear about the negative.
So the drivers could leave, but the cars would remain stranded.
Probably? https://www.yellowpages.com/search?search_terms=snowmobile+r...
For fun, let's just say those are evenly distributed amongst the states and there are 26,000 snowmobiles available in Virginia at DoorDash's disposal. I'd wager snowmobiles wouldn't be the limiting factor in this operation.
[0](https://www.snowmobile.org/snowmobiling-statistics-and-facts...)
I had presumed a somewhat more normal distribution of snowmobiles.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/420693/us-snowmobile-reg...
I'm adjusting my mental model to the reality that Virginia likely has less than 1000 registered snowmobiles.
But they couldn't even do that and had to race to an IPO.
Challenge accepted.
Now we need the money.
https://smallville.fandom.com/wiki/Metropolis
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27749590
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/01/yes-let...
What? You mean the middle of nowhere like some sparsely-populated riverbanks near the border between two states that happens to be near the geographic center of the nation at the time it's built, but hours away from the nearest metropolitan areas? Yeah that's a crazy idea - the United States would never do that.
Harder for people to see events like this as part of “global warning” while it is more understandable as a consequence of “climate change”
While the planet overall is warming, the extra energy in the system can actually make colder in some places.
For example, by enabling stronger storm systems to push arctic air farther south than previously.
There are various articles and interviews with him on this topic. Layoff has an excellent discussion of the topic too.
https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=%22climate+cha...
source? The wikipedia section on it is surprisingly scant on this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_change#Terminology, and a search for "global warming climate change" on google doesn't reveal much either.
Just like you cannot claim that one day of bad weather refutes global warming you also cannot claim that an isolated event is climate change. It takes time to prove that.
Getting tired of everyone spouting off about climate change every time bad weather occurs. It's just as anti-science as denial.
https://arstechnica.com/science/2021/07/pacific-northwest-he... https://arstechnica.com/science/2021/08/europes-july-floods-...
In this case, what I'd look at is whether this event is in line with what the climate scientists have been saying for decades, namely that we'd see more volatility and extreme weather events. This is especially compatible with predictions for the mid-Atlantic region which have called for more big snow events despite generally less snow on average. No, it's not definitive enough that you could use it in a criminal case but it tells anyone that cares to expect higher insurance rates, taxes, etc.
It's like the Swiss cheese theory of accidents: accidents don't happen because one guy wasn't paying attention, they happen because one guy wasn't paying attention AND because the guy who was supposed to supervise him was off AND because the manager hadn't thought to call someone else in AND because the system designers forgot to add a rule for this AND the regulators because they forgot to require ...
There's a fine line to thread here. On one side, you're lying if you say that global warming was the sole, isolated cause of this. On the other side, you're criminally irresponsible if you forget to mention the fact global warming certainly was an important contributory cause.
> Where is the scientific proof that this isolated weather event is climate change?
However, this is not an isolated event. Do you not remember Texas' snowstorm last year? These "freak, isolated" events are becoming more and more frequent. That is climate change.
The simplest version of this is the period-doubling bifuration:
X(n+1) = r * Xn * (1 - Xn)
The Lorenz attractor was described in a very similar way, related to turbulence and temperature gradients. It's not weather or climate, but I do find it a useful analogy.
While you are right about “not well”, the other option can often be “not at all”
The batteries used in most EV’s should always work to some degree, with regards to temperatures experienced on Earth - the batteries & other systems in most ICE can be completely crippled/not work at all under certain temps faced on Earth
Now, you can specifically go out of your way to ruggedize all systems in your ICE so it works to a much better degree than the EV, but the average person is definitely not doing that.
Jerrycans for some, tows to Fast DC chargers for others. Class 8 semis should have sufficient diesel reserves for long loiters, even with truckers using auxiliary power units for heat. If not, it is trivial to refuel them on the road with a transfer pump.
But in the case that a car does drain the battery, how difficult is it to get a portable charger to someone? Have roadside mechanics started carrying generators in their trucks now? They probably should, with the appropriate cables.
To your second paragraph, AAA (the tow service) piloted mobile generators for stranded EVs. There was no demand, and the service was discontinued.
There are already vehicles that have been tested in real world conditions. Tesla Model 3s exist with and without heat pump. The difference isn't that large, around 10% more range with the pump in perfect conditions. I've seen people doing tests sleeping in their cars all night and in cold North American winters it's not pretty. With a fully charged battery you will get enough heat for a comfy good nights sleep, 8 hours or so. So lets say in an emergency situation you can stretch it to 12 or so by reducing the temperature. But that's on a full charge! Most cars getting stuck in traffic are not going to have fully charged batteries. It absolutely is a problem with EVs even more than with ICE cars.
Doesn’t appear to be the case.
Regardless if you're in a place where this could happen you should have a box of chemical handwarmers, a heavy blanket, food, water, and other stuff in a box for emergencies.
Edit: looks like I'm wrong, much better answers below!
Idling consumes little gas compared with actually moving the vehicle: https://www.energy.gov/eere/vehicles/fact-861-february-23-20...
A 4.2L engine burns 0.39gal/hr under no-load conditions according to the study there for a large sedan. Let's assume that the load of putting the blower and heater on equate to even 1 gal/hr (an absurdly high value, the rule of thumb I can find quoted in a few places tends to be add 10-20% depending on interior size and conditions outside). Let's also assume a fuel tank size on the lower end (~15gal) for this sedan.
This means in the absolute worst case conditions (you're blasting maximum heat the entire time) around 15 hours of operation for a full tank, 7.5 if you had half a tank.
Comparatively, the Tesla, depending on Model, could use as much as 4.8kWh[0][1] under similar worst-case conditions. Modern versions of Tesla and other electrics have or are moving to heat pump heaters, which is encouraging as it will likely be better generally (though this comes with the caveat that they don't work as well in lower temperatures and I believe are supplemented by coil heaters under those conditions).
At any rate, the worst-case electric scenario gives a full-charge length of 18.75 (90kWh useable out of a 95kWh pack in the largest long-range models) or 9.38 at half. Note, this is giving the Tesla an enormous advantage here as I'm going with the largest battery pack possible. With the long range pack available in the Model 3 those numbers drop to basically the same as the smaller-tanked gasoline sedans.
If you have better sources for those numbers on the Tesla idling with the heaters on, these were all I could find quickly.
[0]: https://insideevs.com/news/340327/lets-look-at-energy-consum... [1]: https://teslamotorsclub.com/tmc/threads/idling.139235/
There will always be older or less efficient cars, smaller gas tanks, smaller battery packs, resistive heaters, and people not rationing the energy available to them.
Taking the worst case, and why not because it's cold, and people may be inclined to do more than idle their engine, means roughly an hour per gallon of fuel.
Some ICE cars may only idle for a few hours, others a lot more, depending on what's in the tank.
Best move is to pulse the engine. Start up, idle until the vehicle is really warm, shut down and repeat every other hour or so, depending on the cold and what people have to stay warm with.
I live in Seattle now, public transport is infinitely better, and the roads are better (though they still kinda suck). Baffles the mind.
Perhaps it's because of the bias one always seems to have against the infrastruture where they live, but until at least half of the planned light rail expansion opens up, I'm not exactly inclined to sing praises about Seattle's public transport. Virginia must be downright miserable.
My SIL can bus basically anywhere with enough patience. She goes to board game nights, college (pre-covid), etc.
My sister in VA can't go anywhere without getting a ride from my mom. She's actually only a few miles away from the one DC subway line that comes out in her direction, but despite having a disability that qualifies her for the public transport door-to-door vans, she's ever-so-slightly out of their service radius. Even if she could use that, that line is a commuter line that goes straight into DC, it's useless for anything else, and they heavily cut service due to covid + derailment incidents (inspectors were falsifying inspection reports) + car fires. She could use Uber or Lyft, but that's expensive and she's read about people getting assaulted and is scared to use it (I know it's rare, I've tried...)
So, yeah. I complain about Seattle PT too don't get me wrong, but thinking about other states does put it into perspective (even if thinking about Europe puts it into a different perspective...)
DC, btw, is not a state, and has no "state government".
Grew up in DC, this is wrong. Large snowfall happens irregularly, but it absolutely happens.
The 2009-10 Nor'easters had substantially more snow than this.
See the charts here: https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2021/01/14/washington...
I still remember Feb 1979, when we got 2 feet of snow overnight and school was closed for a week.
It used to be that shorts weather at Christmas was something to remember and retell to the next generation. (That would be the year of the roller skates, and the horrifically muddy ski trip) Now it’s just last week.
Snow has always happened. Large accumulations are atypical, but snow is a thing and Virginia is uniquely incompetent at handling it.
The secondary issue is the stupidity of semi-drivers to have tried to keep driving in the storm. It wasn't like there was no warning at all. Reports I have read indicate disabled trucks are the largest impediment to getting things going again.
The key thing is that they have equipment and close roads to trucks. VA express lanes gouge drivers avoiding traffic, there should be plenty of money to put plows on 2 1/2 ton trucks.
More plows in my opinion would definitely have helped as long as they were dispersing treated road salt. During snow storms, traffic on our interstates do not grind to a halt because there is a constant rotation of plows for every lane doing the best that they can to keep the priority routes clear.
VDOT could just close the freeway section in advance of the storm if they knew they didn't have the capacity to keep up with the snowfall and have the road be drive able, like other state DOTs do for their freeways when bad weather is coming. I feel like this must have been a textbook whiff in transit department circles.
Closing the freeway feels like a good idea, but then you’d have ~130,000 cars/day traveling on surface streets? The Rappahannock doesn’t allow for many crossings other than 95.
Lots of good pics here: https://www.boston.com/news/history/2018/01/29/photos-blizza...
I can't tell if this video is a deep fake or a modern compression algorithm but one of the guys stuck in the jam for 15 hours says he hasn't seen a single emergency or police vehicle https://twitter.com/DeFede/status/1478361020670394370 So I wouldn't be surprised if some political scandal comes out of this, similar to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fort_Lee_lane_closure_scandal
The function of government is mostly to do things like build roads, collect garbage, operate sewers, and segregate criminals. Roads aren't much good if the roads don't work. If the U.S. Government continues to fail at these kinds of core competencies then there'll likely be opportunities for truly revolutionary startups in the future.
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.
Can anyone recommend a navigation app that supports weather forecasts along the way?
It's designed for electric cars, but it does include weather info in its routes. I'm not 100% sure how it works, but it is there.
https://www.abc10.com/article/news/local/california/pge-pres...
From an infrastructure perspective, realistically, I suppose it isn't feasible to account for more extreme snowfall.
If people only put themselves at risk, fine. The issue is when trucks and people who felt compelled to drive on summer tires, in a snowstorm, during covid, block the roads and prevent the remaining population from getting home safely.
Every time this happens it is a chance for us to figure out how to avoid this. Due to climate change this will only get worse.
People shouldn't have to 'just buy more provisions and you'll be moderately more ok'.
https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2018/01/12/national/heavy-...
> Around 430 passengers in Niigata Prefecture were forced to spend the night on a packed four-car train after it got stranded Thursday evening by heavy snow along the Sea of Japan coast.
https://www.scmp.com/news/asia/east-asia/article/1904881/jap...
> About 110 passengers on a Sanyo Shinkansen bullet train bound for Shin-Osaka Station stayed overnight on the train at Okayama Station, western Japan, after the train arrived around 2am on Monday.
> The train had been stranded en route for about two hours due to a breakdown of railway equipment, apparently caused by snow.
(I'd rather be stuck in a train, that said.)
And if you have young kids.... yikes I can't even imagine the hell of that sort of situation.
It would be really nice to have an alternative to being forced to drive for every day tasks. Instead, we have forced car dependent through law and through federal spending.
To get from Fredericksburg to Richmond or vice versa, you have at least 60 miles of charge in your tank or you were never going to make it. At highway speeds, that's at least 20 kWh of battery power. It won't take more than 300-500 watts to heat the cabin continuously even in the middle of a blizzard. That means your battery will last 44 to 66 hours at minimum. So you've got multiple days of heat, water is falling from the sky, and the bathroom is immediately outside your doors.
This is one of the nice things about electric cars: the motor uses no energy while idling, and moving the car requires so much energy that you'll never run out if you're stationary. Most new EVs today have 60-80 kWh batteries. It would take several weeks to drain a full battery just running A/C or heat along with the radio and screens.
If what you mean is that the exhaust can linger too long or be redirected in ways that aren’t ideal then yea.
It definitely happens.
https://www.nbcwashington.com/news/local/carbon-monoxide-poi...
> In New Jersey, 23-year-old Sashalynn Rosa, of Passaic, and her 1-year-old son, Messiah Bonilla, died of carbon monoxide poisoning while sitting in a running car that had its tailpipe covered in snow. Rosa's 3-year-old daughter, Saniyah Bonilla, was hospitalized in critical condition and died on Jan. 27. The father of the children was just steps away shoveling snow from around the car.
> Angel Ginel of New York died in a similar way Monday afternoon. Police say Ginel was found inside his running, plowed-in car in Brooklyn. His relatives believe he got inside the car to warm up Sunday, and the car got buried.
These deaths were avoidable, and of course some thing that EV’s don’t have to deal with.
Virginia is working to double rail capacity between DC and Richmond by 2030.
People will still drive cars though.
https://www.upmatters.com/news/national/snow-stalls-amtrak-i...
Amtrak is not a great example of how trains should work.
https://www.nbcwashington.com/news/local/northern-virginia/t...
It'd be a good idea though.
https://www.poynter.org/tech-tools/2017/text-only-news-sites...