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You'll be happy to know that your wonderful local governments were hard at work with NIMBY. Here is one case where full blown planned freeways were reduced to small signaled intersections. I had heard that the DC area until the late 60s or early 70s had 12 major highway rights of ways on the books, but all were eventually sold off because no one wanted a highway near them.

The idea that you may not need more roads is... completely foreign.

Perhaps the hamburger analogy will help:

Let's give everyone free McDonald's hamburgers. Let's put 10,000 hamburgers a day on a table in front of the Capitol (or wherever).

What would happen? People would take and eat the hamburgers, and once word got out, all 10,000 hamburgers would be taken very quickly every day. We may thus infer that because people need food and they really seemed to like those burgers, McDonald's hamburgers are an important public good.

A city planner might notice a problem: those 10,000 hamburgers just aren't enough. They get taken very early in the morning, so not everybody has a chance to get a hamburger. The obvious solution -- because burgers are a highly-valued public good -- is to provide more free burgers. So the city planner starts to provide 20,000 hamburgers a day.

You can see where this is going. People start going out of their way to get the free hamburgers, and planning their day around that trip. The city has to keep providing more and more free burgers -- eventually millions a day -- to keep satisfying the demand for free hamburgers. The competing food markets crater, because who would pay $2/lb for apples when you can get as many free burgers as you want (although maybe you have to wait in a 30-minute line). Public health goes to hell, because everybody's eating six burgers a day. And yet, everybody likes their free burgers and the Hamburger Department is an untouchable political powerhouse. Proposals for a 10-cent hamburger fee to cover the huge costs of hamburger provision get shot down by public outrage.

What's the problem here? The problem is that food is indeed a necessity, and yes, people seem to like McDonald's hamburgers -- but the fact that people will take free burgers does not prove that they are "highly valued" by the market. We are not seeing actual demand for burgers. We are seeing induced demand for a good which is being provided at artificially low prices.

But for some reason, replace hamburgers with roads and everybody goes nuts.

In short, the fact that a new lane or road immediately fills up with traffic does not "prove" that there was a high demand for that road -- it proves that people will use way too much of something that's free.

So you're arguing that it's not going Mach 1 because it's designed to only go Mach .99868593955. Apparently you don't believe in rounding to significant digits. As for typical Jet Speeds, those are below Mach .9, and typically in the Mach 0.8 range. Mach 0.15-0.2 is a pretty significant difference.

Moreover you are talking about a different G-Force measurement then either me or the standard Musk has designed. When taking turns the relevant measure is the lateral G-Force measure, and Coasters don't go too high on that because if they did 6 Gs laterally a 200 lb dude would be exerting 1200 pounds of pressure on the side of their roller-coaster, and it probably can't handle that. They top out at 0.5 Gs lateral. Aircraft don't do a lot of lateral Gs either, partly because they have to go straight really fast or fall from the sky, partly because they have even less structural strength to resist extra pressure on the fuselage, but mostly because people start throwing the fuck up once you break 0.2 lateral. They try to stay below 0.15 laterally unless something has gone horribly wrong.

The whole plan is vintage Musk -- equal parts brilliant engineering, pooh-poohing the standards literally everyone else uses (0.2 Gs laterally is what everything in transportation, except Hyperloop, does), unwarranted financial optimism (his $700 Million tunneling budget won't get him all the way through a single mountain, and Cali has a couple ranges of the damn things), and excellent spin (for example, his planned route technically does not go from LA to San Fran, it goes from 30 miles from LA to the San Francisco Bay, which reduces his costs by roughly 75%, but nobody calls him on it). Given some development the engineering could be very interesting, but you really need a lot of that development.

Uber and Lyft is NOT Rideshare!

Rideshare is transportation by carpool, vanpool, and, in many implementations, bus, train, bike, and walking. The term "Rideshare" has been in use for DECADES to describe the use of low-emissions/fuel consumption transportation! (http://goo.gl/DXTYul)

Uber and Lyft are taxi companies who try to use the term rideshare to get around taxi regulations and to convey a veneer of sustainability. Even the Associated Press has edited their Stylebook so as to instruct media agencies to cease calling them rideshare and start calling them "ride-hailing" services.

http://greatergreaterwashingto...
http://www.buzzfeed.com/charli...

For example, do you know what the salary is for a DC metro subway driver? I had no clue until I saw a job posting on one of the govt. job boards. It's in the 6 figures. I'd sure like to know why a $100,000/yr. plus salary is necessary to get someone to operate a metrorail train!

False. Their salary is not in 6 figures. The only way they are going to get into six figures is to do a lot of overtime.

http://greatergreaterwashingto...

The people cry out: "Make the road wider, so traffic will flow better!"

Here's another parable: the hamburger analogy:

Let's give everyone free McDonald's hamburgers. Let's put 10,000 hamburgers a day on a table in front of the Capitol (or wherever).

What would happen? People would take and eat the hamburgers, and once word got out, all 10,000 hamburgers would be taken very quickly every day. We may thus infer that because people need food and they really seemed to like those burgers, McDonald's hamburgers are an important public good.

A city planner might notice a problem: those 10,000 hamburgers just aren't enough. They get taken very early in the morning, so not everybody has a chance to get a hamburger. The obvious solution -- because burgers are a highly-valued public good -- is to provide more free burgers. So the city planner starts to provide 20,000 hamburgers a day.

You can see where this is going. People start going out of their way to get the free hamburgers, and planning their day around that trip. The city has to keep providing more and more free burgers -- eventually millions a day -- to keep satisfying the demand for free hamburgers. The competing food markets crater, because who would pay $2/lb for apples when you can get as many free burgers as you want (although maybe you have to wait in a 30-minute line). Public health goes to hell, because everybody's eating six burgers a day. And yet, everybody likes their free burgers and the Hamburger Department is an untouchable political powerhouse. Proposals for a 10-cent hamburger fee to cover the huge costs of hamburger provision get shot down by public outrage.

What's the problem here? The problem is that food is indeed a necessity, and yes, people seem to like McDonald's hamburgers -- but the fact that people will take free burgers does not prove that they are "highly valued" by the market. We are not seeing actual demand for burgers. We are seeing induced demand for a good which is being provided at artificially low prices.

But for some reason, replace hamburgers with roads and everybody goes nuts.

In short, the fact that a new lane or road immediately fills up with traffic does not "prove" that there was a high demand for that road -- it proves that people will use way too much of something that's free.

So making the road wider won't make traffic on the freeway flow better in the long run. On the other hand, express tolls (because they are priced at market equilibrium) permanently eliminate traffic congestion, at negative cost to the owners of the road (usually taxpayers) without overcharging anyone (except the types who complain of being overcharged whenever they win an eBay auction). Permanently eliminating traffic congestion and lowering our tax burden are both good things, right?

My question is, will Internet subscribers who don't need Netflix get the opportunity to lower their costs by refusing to pay for the "fast lane"? We all want a la carte cable, don't we?

I have an older version, but effectively the injury/death rate is mostly effected by poor decisions by the cyclist, not the car.

First off, "the car" doesn't do anything. The driver does. You're attributing behavior to an inanimate object, something I see people do constantly.

Second: several decades of research proves your claim wrong. Most collisions are due to the driver doing something illegal, sometimes simply failing to yield because they think they have right-of-way over someone on a bicycle.

Australian helmet cam study: http://news.smh.com.au/breaking-news-national/study-blames-drivers-for-bike-crashes-20101122-18330.html

London study: http://www.standard.co.uk/news/london/drivers-to-blame-for-twothirds-of-bicycle-collisions-in-westminster-8602166.html

UK-wide study: http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2009/dec/15/cycling-bike-accidents-study

Toronto study which found cyclists at fault in TEN PERCENT of crashes: http://www.examiner.com/article/study-claims-cyclists-at-fault-only-10-percent-of-crashes

The list goes on. Keep in mind that studies which are based off police reports that aren't carefully analyzed are typically faulty because police very often incorrectly side with motorists, don't interview cyclists, witness statements are wrong, etc. It's common to review a report, see obvious signs that the motorist did something illegal, and police do not cite them, and often cite the cyclist.

This guy was hit and two witnesses and the driver claimed he ran a red light; police tried to give him a ticket for running the light. He knew he hadn't. He found video from a traffic camera showing very clearly that he was cut off by the driver - what we call a "left cross": http://greatergreaterwashington.org/post/19284/it-must-have-been-your-fault-cmon-you-are-a-biker/

It should make you stop and think to consider that many cyclists ride with helmet cameras. There's a reason - drivers lie, police don't believe us (or very often we're incapacitated or otherwise unable to defend ourselves), and witnesses are discriminatory towards cyclists or simply don't understand traffic laws or think they saw what they didn't.

Yes, I did notice it. I'm not sure if you are familiar with police practices, but "assault on an officer" is often used as a blanket crime by police to arrest people in any situation where the police use force, especially if they use improper or excessive force. It is completely logical to me that both would drop by 60% because very often they are the same thing.

That is, often a police officer will aggress against a person for whatever reason and then later claim that the person they aggressed against was the agressor. It basically allows an officer to arrest or even beat anyone up for anything and is a much more common tactic than you think. When the citizen gets to court, do you think a judge or jury will believe the police officer or the citizen?

We hear a lot about the minority of cases where a bystander taped the scene and the police did something wrong, but you don't hear about the majority where nobody was there to video tape it.

Similarly, freeway congestion, another example of a shortage, can be prevented by eliminating the artificial price ceiling on freeway travel. In other words, by converting existing lanes to express toll lanes. And with no traffic congestion, the freeway would never need to be widened, ever again, at least not to eliminate traffic congestion. (Maybe to increase traffic throughput and increase economic activity, but that's not typically the justification given to widen a freeway.)

But for some reason, suggest that the market should determine the price of freeway travel, and everybody goes nuts.

The DC Metro system services DC. If you're trying to get into or out of DC, it's a great thing. However, the moment you want to go from Tyson's Corner in VA to Bethesda in MD, the hub-and-spoke architecture becomes a liability.

One of the biggest liabilities of public transportation in the US is that it's horribly biased toward local transportation. The DC Metro train will always stop at every station (I'll conveniently ignore the "express" trains that skip a couple of stations at peak hours, only because they really don't address the root-cause issue.) There is no practical method for bypassing Metro Center or Union Station if you want to move in a non-radial direction. Adding an outer loop that just connected the end terminus stations would radically alter the useful dynamic of the station. Such a proposal isn't a new thing. However, the WMATA isn't chartered with supporting the 'burbs with 'burb-convenient amenities. WMATA is concerned with public transportation within DC and the surrounding areas in VA and MD. Once you move beyond those boundaries, there's no coherency at all. For example, if you move the example destination from NASA Goddard to, say, Arundel Mills Mall in Hanover, MD, or possibly up to BWI Airport, the fun really begins. In addition to the busses and trains required to get you to Greenbelt, you now will cross from Prince George's County (WMATA jurisdiction) to Howard County. At the county line, you'll need to change busses because WMATA isn't chartered with providing service outside of PG county. In Howard County, you'll get a transfer bus to a transfer terminal in Laurel or Columbia, change busses once or twice, blooming the end-to-end transportation time to 4+ hours EACH WAY. Driving via the highways or back roads will take an hour to these locations, tops.