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The ongoing build-up of highway mileage in the US is under the direction of our various governments, from local to national. Commercial gain in construction doesn't come into the picture until it is time to bid out the building contracts. The only real area for speculation has been in the economic potential of land in proximity to the proposed public thoroughfare.

By contrast, the century-ago boom in railroad construction really was that if-you-build-it-they-will-come type of speculation by private moneyed interests. Eventually, consolidation followed the boom, as smaller and over-extended lines failed, or were snapped up by the larger, better managed, or just plain more politically powerful lines. Redundant lines were closed. Unprofitable areas were abandoned.

I can think of only one freeway that has been torn down because the municipality thought it was a mistake that didn't serve the public's needs. With few exceptions, are no "dark" highways. Despite what your local politicians may say, roads aren't widened to relieve congestion. They are built to increase capacity. Congestion just means that they haven't been widening them fast enough.

You want to see dark fiber light up, socialize the network and make access to it free to the individual, just like the US highway system. Latency may increase, but only because the volume has exploded. And underexploited resources will NEVER be a problem again.

But as things are going now, we'll soon be needing a something like Rails to Trails for glass wire.

If this brings us closer to movie clips of computers slamming into barriers, I'm all for it.

I don't know what study you have been looking at but in the US most accidents occur under 15MPH! There is a nice paper here about the number of fatal traffic accidents in Montana and the the speed limits active at the time. Most traffic accidents also occur at intersections and parking lots. The situation defines the accident more than the speed. This makes a lot of sense when you really think about it. Rather than some bogus claims about speed vs accident rates. In fact what your claiming is accually opposite of the real truth because at these intersection accidents there was usually a pretty significant speed diffrence.

You should take a closer look at those studies your thinking about because I suspect that they only measured small diffrences in speeds around the median speed. For example they might have taken traffic at 50 mph and then checked 5 mph faster and 5mph slower. If your doing 30 in a 50 your pretty much an obstruction rather than part of the traffic flow. You can tell if you are an obstruction because cars comming up behind you will be comming up on you faster than they can merge into another lane. The result will be 1 or more cars following you waiting for a break in traffic so that they can pass.

Lets see, of the 4 accidents my mother has been in (3 rear ends while sitting at a light, and 1 related to a driver not paying attention and running a light) all were at an intersection, 3 involving my mothers vehicle while it was not moving, and one involving it while it was doing less than 5mph. In the case of the three rear ends the cars were under 15mph, in the case of the run light the other auto was doing about 20mph. In my case I have been involved in 4 accidents, two while my car was parked and someone hit it in a parking lot, 1 where where I backed into someone in a parking lot and one where I was tee boned at an intersection of two streets with stop signs.

Sure 'speed kills' but the truth is that its not really 'speed' but accidents and therefore rapid deceleration at speed. The accident rates are much higher in situations where the speeds are significantly lower. The equation is far more complicated than greater speed equals more death. Safe roads are a combination of proper design, skilled drivers and appropriate speeds. Harder driving tests which are more skill oriented than 'law' oriented would do more to save lives and lower accident rates than lowering the speed limits.

I can also recall two cases of 'near misses' which occurred on higher speed roads (50mph or so) one was due to a slow car on a limited sight road in the slow lane causing a driver to dangerously evade into my lane which caused me to have to evade into on coming traffic. The second was a recent wreck in a limited sight situation which was stopped in the slow lane causing me to have to evade quite dangerously. The moral of the story is that the slower drivers where causing massive danger for the people who were going the speed limit. It was all a choice of hitting the slower moving vehicle or possibly hitting a faster moving one. In both cases the gamble paid off, I avoided an accident. The results could have been much different. If everyone is traveling the same speed in the same direction than the danger is significantly less. HItting a guard rail at 50MPH is much safer than hitting an on coming truck doing 30MPH when you are doing 30MPH. Its the relative speeds (and crunchability of the target). 35 on an unsafe road is much more dangerous than 80 on a big wide divided highway.

Like this?

Once we start sacrificing safety, things will get cheaper. All regulated US transportation industries are much safter than those that are not. Compare airplanes and trains to cars, or even to semis. But, if space has a fatality rate close to the 41,800 per year in the US (1.6 per 100 million vehicle miles), I don't think many people would want to go.

Here in Boston (and many other cities), the commuter rail is run by AMTRAK. So not riding AMTRAK means not going to work for a lot of people.

Not really. Amtrak only's got your name if you had a reservation, and commuter trains are *NEVER* reserved (heaven forbid). You either have a ticket (which often you buy from a vending machine) or a monthly pass. In the latter case, the pass will carry your name, but the pass is *NEVER* for a particular time or date, so they'd be hard-pressed to find you out; all they'd know is that you can ride between Southbinghamdeadtown and Boston for a given month...

You can always pay your ticket cash and give a bogus name (unlike with the FAA, there is no FRA requirement that each passenger shall have it's name disclosed), or just board the train without a ticket and pay cash to the conductor.

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99 out of every 100 people injured in the U.S. transportation system are injured in motor vehicle crashes: approximately 5-6 million every year. Despite this fact, highway safety accounts for only one percent of the budget of the U.S. Department of Transportation.

Motor vehicle crashes cost society more than $150 billion every year in medical, rehabilitation and long-term care costs, lost productivity, lost tax revenue, property damage and police, judicial and social service costs. The health care portion is approximately $14 billion (of which Medicare and Medicaid pay $3.7 billion or almost 30 percent).

Motor vehicle crashes remain a major public health problem. They are the leading cause of death for Americans ages one to 34 and the leading cause of injury for all age groups. The numbers are so mind numbing that fatal accidents rarely get news coverage unless it involves more than 5 people yet it is news when an aircraft just skids off a runway and no one is hurt.

Why should we have cars that can go 200mph/320 kph when the maximum speed limit is 70/120?

Why are there places where the wearing of seatbelts is not mandatory?

Why do we confiscate a hunters weapon and take their truck for poaching a deer yet if they drive drunk and hurt someone they may just get off with a fine and a temporary suspension?

If you say you hate someone you can get 7 years in jail for the hate crime yet if you drive over them and kill them when drunk you might get as much as 2 years.

I say that we have to stop the highway slaughter and this proposal to limit speed is a good start. Something also has to be done about drinking and driving. In 1994 alcohol-related deaths were 16,900 or 42 percent of total traffic fatalities. Why not use technology to not allow drunk drivers to drive? Penalties don't work.

99 out of every 100 people injured in the U.S. transportation system are injured in motor vehicle crashes: approximately 5-6 million every year. Despite this fact, highway safety accounts for only one percent of the budget of the U.S. Department of Transportation.

Motor vehicle crashes cost society more than $150 billion every year in medical, rehabilitation and long-term care costs, lost productivity, lost tax revenue, property damage and police, judicial and social service costs. The health care portion is approximately $14 billion (of which Medicare and Medicaid pay $3.7 billion or almost 30 percent).

Motor vehicle crashes remain a major public health problem. They are the leading cause of death for Americans ages one to 34 and the leading cause of injury for all age groups. The numbers are so mind numbing that fatal accidents rarely get news coverage unless it involves more than 5 people yet it is news when an aircraft just skids off a runway and no one is hurt.

Why should we have cars that can go 200mph/320 kph when the maximum speed limit is 70/120?

Why are there places where the wearing of seatbelts is not mandatory?

Why do we confiscate a hunters weapon and take their truck for poaching a deer yet if they drive drunk and hurt someone they may just get off with a fine and a temporary suspension?

If you say you hate someone you can get 7 years in jail for the hate crime yet if you drive over them and kill them when drunk you might get as much as 2 years.

I say that we have to stop the highway slaughter and this proposal to limit speed is a good start. Something also has to be done about drinking and driving. In 1994 alcohol-related deaths were 16,900 or 42 percent of total traffic fatalities. Why not use technology to not allow drunk drivers to drive? Penalties don't work.

My primary source of transportation is a motorcycle (in the good months), nowhere does it say anything about them. Most new bikes are outfitted with a small computer but for things like fuel injection. I'm sure if such a thing was put into bikes I'd be in the garage fixing it.

By the looks of it though, the UK is really got it in for speeders. The January issue "Performance Bikes" was " Get smart on the street, Beat the Fuzz and evade the speeding Crackdown." Some unmarked cars and some cameras. That is quite a bit to hand out tickets. But is it really doing any good?

I'm still confused that the US spends millions a year on safer cars. Wouldn't be smarter to make safer drivers?

There is also evidence that "hands free" mic/headphone combinations make things worse, because they make the users feel that they are driving more responsibly, when in fact they are not.

More empirically, I can say that from my experience as pedestrian and cyclist in Boulder, CO, people driving and using the phone do not see you, even when you have right of way. The problem is worse with people in SUVs driving and using phones, because the higher driver position removes you from their already limited road attention even further.

fff

>a quarter of a million americans
>are killed in car accidents a year.

No, 42,000 people are killed in car accidents in the US every year. Unless there's a lot of Americans being killed abroad, you're off by a factor of 6. 250,000 americans suffer serious injuries in crashes every year, but only 1 in 6 dies. Reference

Nah, I think people enjoy driving too much for it ever to go away.

Further, these "vessels" better at least segregate me from all the dregs of society. Speaking as one who once got scabies from a family of dirty people on a Toronto subway, I make enough money to afford a car. If the price of cars and fuel or highway congestion are inflated too much by idiotic tree-hugger ideals, rather than take transit, I'll just move to somewhere where I don't have to share a confined space with the city's effluence. And, as I move, I'll take my skills and my disposeable income with me.

Nope. I'm 26 years old; I've been on the Internet since 1988. (Remember ARPANET? This was long before Spry Mosaic came out, and a full 5 years before Yahoo registered their domain name.) And if you can judge how much I can do at once based on how many applications are currently open on my desktop, there are 10 currently going on my machine.

Wow! That's really cool. Yeah, you can watch a DVD while you drive. I hope you've at least had enough sense to set it up so that only the passengers get to watch the movies.

MP3s in the car are great; keep the volume low enough that you can hear the siren of the fire truck coming at you. And don't get distracted by choosing the tunes as you drive.

Ya know, for all your apparent engineering and hacking skills, I would have thought you'd have had enough taste to do this in a real car.

Sure. Right.

You probably spend a lot of time driving, and I do too. I'm in a familiar place, surrounded by familiar objects. I know where all the controls are, I know the dimensions of my vehicle, and I have the seat adjusted comfortably. I am at piece. I am in a comfortable space.

Familiarity breeds contempt. By being too comfortable, you start to forget that you're in a machine, that you're hurtling down the road at speeds sure to be deadly to your frail body. You are in mortal danger.

Now, having said that, I'm not advocating that everyone drive really slowly in the fast lane. That's sure to cause even more accidents as people try to swerve around you.

What people have to realize is that driving is a complex task, and it should take all your concentration. How complex is it? Well, let's keep in mind that the US Army, among other organizations, have been trying to build a vehicle that can drive on its own. And they've met with only very limited success.

My driving record is flawless. Zero accidents, zero speeding tickets, zero other moving violations. (Parking tickets are another matter.) I've got an air brake license, which allows me to drive up to 15 tons with air brakes. I used to have to go out on the road, driving large loads of professional audio, video and TV production equipment across the country, setting it up, working the show, then driving back. I've logged over 360,000 miles in diverse cities and massively different driving conditions. And I have yet to get a speeding ticket.

As the astute will note, my very nickname is evidence of one of my passions: "BigBlockMopar" refers to any member of the family of Chrysler-built "big-block" V8 engines. Chysler big-block engines were available from the late 1950s to the late 1970s, in displacements from 361 to 440 cubic inches. (For sake of reference, 440 cubic inches = 7.2L. Compare that to a Honda Civic's 1.5L engine.)

I own several cars, including a CASCAR Enduro class racecar. It's not streetable; I enjoy towing it out to Mosport and doing laps at 95+ MPH. In full race conditions.

83% of all drivers think they're better than average (source: California DMV). Both my insurance company and I agree that I am truly a skilled driver. And the reason? I concentrate on the road.

The US National Highway Traffic Safety Administration agrees with me: cellphones are dangerous when you're driving. Further, check out this link. Talking on the cellphone while you drive increases your chances of having an accident 400 times. That's worse than being drunk to twice the legal limit (0.16% B.A.C.). I can't imagine what the risks of driving and computing must be - I'll wait until I get home, rather than try it behind the wheel... My daily driver is a 4,500lb 1976 Dodge Ram with a 400CID (6.6L) big-block V8. I only hope that when you hit me, my truck kills you.

The Romans tried to stop christianity. Christianity became popular. Drugs were made illegal in this country. Drugs became popular. Rock music was chastized by the establishment as being "satanic". Rock becomes popular. Anyone starting to see a pattern here?

What else is illegal? Suicide is. The rates are rising, but I don't know if it is "popular" by any means. Bank robbery is illegal. I just got back from robbing one myself, actually. I think that Christianity, rock music and drugs all have other draws than just being forbidden.

I think the actual truth evidenced by these examples is this: You can't legislate morality. In other words, you can make something illegal and therefore (perhaps) deter people through the consequences they face. But that won't convince people it is wrong. I know it's naive but I believe that most people have a relatively well-balanced sense of morality, and they can sesne when someone else makes a law that contravenes it. They might obey such a law but they don't respect it.

In counterpoint, consider the experience with drunk driving in the USA. Although it's still a problem, the astonishing thing is, rates of DUI (for young drivers) have been falling for almost a decade. (See, for example, http://w ww.nhtsa.dot.gov/people/injury/alcohol/promdrunk/G ENERALFACTS.HTML for data on trends.) This has happened in part due to enhanced enforcement but largely due to education and a shift in perception. I teach high school and my kids are increasingly of the opinion that drinking and driving is more than illegal ... it's stupid. No amount of laws seem to reach them, because they don't take their moral bearing from laws. Insteasd, they evaluate laws based on interactions with their moral sense.

To bring this back to slashdot ground, I think the MPAA and RIAA and all the other evil acroynms are fighting a losing battle, because their methods don't deal with the morality of the issue. By relying on technological mechanisms (backed by draconian laws), they seem to be ceding the ground over the "rightness" of copying. And because they treat all digital distribution as morally equivalent to mass-producing bootlegs, they create an essential disconnect with their consumers.

(feel free to moderate 'offtopic', as this is, well, offtopic)

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I see "piracy" as about as serious a threat to the fabric of commerce and society as speeding on the road.
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FYI -

"In 1995, 644,000 people received minor injuries in speeding-related crashes. An additional 77,000 people received moderate injuries, and 42,000 received critical injuries in speeding-related crashes."

Apparently, there were 41,798 fatalities in total in the United States in that year.

Source: http://www.nhtsa.dot.go v/people/ncsa/FactPrev/spdfacts.html

...whether or not this is serious is left as an exercise to the reader.


- Jeff A. Campbell
- VelociNews (http://www.velocinews.com)

The "bunny suits" really are just to protect the electronics from the workers, not the other way around. They are typically made of very light material, like Tyveck, a cheap platicised paper product, or a bi-layer plastic film. Tri-cloroethylene, acetone, HF, HNO3 will all go through most of these materials in less than a second. Cloth suits offer no protection at all. A full facemask filter, a "gasmask", only offers a 50 to 100 times safety margin (if it fits and the person knows how to use it). For chemical exposure, that's nothing. A facemask might allow you a couple of minutes of exposure, rather than a second or two. Gasmasks are for escape, not for long-term use.

Level A spill response for a fab, the first-in people, calls for a full-body, sealed butyl-rubber suit (~1/4" thick) with a self-contained, overpressure air supply. The full suits with air give you a couple of hours in most environments. If there's radionuclear sources present, as there are in some fabs, all bets are off. In that case, you send in a robot. Alternatively, you cover the place with concrete and cross you fingers....

Workers generally vastly over-rate their protective equipment. Most employers provide the bare minimums (or less) and then these are usually only to be used for escape during an emergency, not (usually) for chronic exposure. Anybody in an environment that hasn't been trained and isn't properly paranoid about the chemicals they are using is a nutbar. Avoid them if you can. On the bright side, you usually don't have to plan retirement parties for these people either.

Some reference sites:
The US Govt. Hazmat site
and what should be every spill responder's bible:
The NIOSH Pocket Guide to Chemical Hazards

Kind Regards,

http://www.nhtsa.dot.gov/c ars/problems/recalls/recmmy1.cfm
Do a search for your car - maybe it's got more "bugs" than you think...

Your '93 Talon has a potentially fatal flaw in it's "programming"....I suggest you call the "programmers" and get a "patch".

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NHTSA CAMPAIGN ID Number: 98V069002 Component: POWER TRAIN:TRANSMISSION:AUTOMATIC Manufacturer: CHRYSLER CORPORATION Mfg. Campaign #: 780 Year: 1993 Make: EAGLE Model: TALON Potential Number of Units Affected: 42214 Manufactured From: MAY 1989 To: FEB 1998 Year of Recall: '98 Type of Report: Vehicle Summary: Vehicle Description: Passenger vehicles. Lockup of the transfer case can occur due to insufficient lubrication. This condition can cause a loss of vehicle control, increasing the risk of a crash. Dealers will inspect the vehicles for adequacy of the transfer case oil volume, transfer case oil leakage, and operational degradation of the transfer case mechanism. If oil volume is insufficient, the appropriate amount of oil will be added. If there is transfer case oil leakage, affected components will be replaced. If the transfer case shows operational degradation, the transfer case will be replaced. Owner notification began July 6, 1998. Owners who take their vehicles to an authorized dealer on an agreed upon service date and do not receive the free remedy within a reasonable time should contact Chrysler at 1-800-992-1997. Also contact the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration's Auto Safety Hotline at 1-888-DASH-2-DOT (1-888-327-4236).
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-Yert