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DOT Warns of Dystopian Future For Transportation
An anonymous reader writes The U.S. Department of Transportation has issued a 300-page PDF outlining the grim future of transportation infrastructure in North America over the next thirty years, and inviting debate on the issue. The report presents a vision of 2045 with LA-style traffic jams in Nebraska, trains too full to pick up any more passengers and airports underwater due to climate change — all in a climate of chronic under-investment, even at levels needed to maintain existing transport infrastructure. Among possible solutions outlined are self-driving cars using vehicle-to-vehicle (V2I) crash-avoidance technologies, such as those currently in development by Google — and in fact transportation secretary Anthony Foxx was joined by Google CEO Eric Schmidt at the launch of DOT's "Beyond Traffic" initiative.
Use the money you earn through infrastructure and transportation taxes to actually pay for maintaining the infrastructure.
They want more funding. As do most governmental departments that release these gloom and doom scenarios.
Car Control Grid Planned For A Decade
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FMhd1zSQCSA
Gimme FUD! I need more FUD.
Does the report suggest any ways to eliminate journeys? I expect not. That's the problem - they assume that journeys are always necessary, and increasingly so. How about putting in place policies that incentivise people to live near their workplaces, don't have to drive to go to a shopping mall, reduce the need for long-distance business travel, etc. Not only would that improve "traffic", but actually make people's lives easier and better as a bonus. Worth a thought, eh?
It's best to say this to sell taxpayers and big business on why we should give the government more money.
1) Raise the Gas Tax $.25 / gal. On a 20 gal fill-up that's $5.
2) Get rid of the DOT as it exists now. It should be a coordinating organization and encourage investment, not making investments.
3) Return 90% of Gax Taxes collected to the States where they were collected for transportation infrastructure projects, ending the bait and switch tactics used to re-allocate funds based on unfunded mandates. If California wants to invest billions in High Speed Rail, here's the money. This would also stop using fuel taxes for funding other federal projects.
4) Privatize Amtrak, get rid of interstate rail services where it's not profitable.
5) Re-establish the rules whereby railroads were required to have passenger service. This was part of the deal in return for vast land grants and rights of way that all the major railroads benefit from today.
6) Stop federal subsidies for airports, this includes smaller run airports.
Harrison's Postulate - "For every action there is an equal and opposite criticism"
US Department of Transportation writes 300 page paper about why it should get more money.
30 years and airports will be underwater? I'm willing to believe man has an effect on the climate, but alarmist crap like this doesn't help your cause. Did John Kerry start working for the dot?
...and the only solution is a mileage tax and a much larger budget for the Department of Transportation.
You should be building trains, not cars...
that's the only way to not have traffic jams in the future.
government agency explains why the taxpayers must sacrifice more..
Hopefully people will stop traveling so much so we won't need as much transportation infrastructure in 30 years. It has already dramatically decreased because of teleconferencing. Conventions have taken a huge hit because of this.
Hopefully products will stop traveling so much so we won't need as much transportation infrastructure in 30 years. We already have rudimentary 3D printing. In 30 years I hope we can print everything we need where its needed instead of wasting time, money, fuel, packaging and other resources moving stuff around. Then when you're done with that item you throw it in the de-constructor which recycles the parts. Need more raw materials? Shovel in a few scoops of dirt. Sure, occasionally you'll need to add some essential elements you might have but think of all those local landfills to be mined!
No, in 2045 we should not need much of DOT. The world will change.
I can't read it. The political self interest is so strong it made my eyes water.
Population control.
Seriously. If we get the planet back down below 1 billion humans think how many more resources per capita there would be to go around.
Proposal: create a reproduction limit of 0.5 per capita for two generations, then gradually increase it to 1 as we achieve the target.
Create a legal market for rights, hold lotteries, there are several options to achieve it without "Divergent"-like or "Ender's Game"-like results.
Article about California's multi-billion $ high speed rail and with lots of comments criticizing the program. A reply to one of them was, "Believe me my short sighted friend, ten years from now when gas is 8 dollars a gallon and rent is 3,000 dollars per month for a studio in Fremont, you'll thank every moonbeam you see for the money you save."
mfwright@batnet.com
Self driving cars are not a solution to the problem, and can't be the solution to the problem. If passenger trains are too full to carry people, then mass transit needs to be expanded. You know, the system we should have been investing in for half a century and ignored because it hurt someone's net worth.
Virtually zero US cities have a functional mass transit system. The most populated areas in the west are prime examples, and lets take San Francisco Bay as our example (since I live here and have first hand knowledge and experience). VTA handles "some" of the South Bay, but limited to North San Jose and Mountain View. Caltrain handles a single strip running North to south from North San Jose to South (not the city) San Francisco. Bart handles SF -> Oakland, and a straight line down to Fremont. These systems don't connect, use different payment systems, have different rates, and are _MORE_ expensive than driving. Example: I can take Caltrain from Mountain View to SF for 8.00 one way, so 16.00 round trip. Then I have to find another commute service to get from Caltrain to my destination, which is more money and time. Taking our "cheap" (said with a hearty chuckle) mass transit is extremely expensive and time consuming.
Lets not bullshit anyone, this is not our only problem. Industrial pollution is a much bigger problem. Generating electricity is a dirty task and a bigger problem. Plastic is a problem, and cheap "disposable" products are a problem. None of those get addressed by making "self driving cars" and some problems such as vehicle exhaust get worse.
Yet instead of addressing the problems with mass transit, California is dumping many billions into a train from Fresno to Sacramento. Go figure..
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
The current rate of sea water rise is around 0.12 inches per year since 1992 according to the most alarming estimates found to date (and those were adjusted because previous measurements we showing only 0.04 inches per year, which of course was not nearly scary enough to it's back to the data "correction" engine!)
Let's say the politically revised figures are correct. That means in 30 years (2045 being only 30 years away now) sea level rise will have been 3.6 *inches*.
Which airport is that going to put "underwater"? Please explain.
You warming alarmists are worse than the anti-vaccers in terms of just chucking reality out the window, even when you get to make up your own rules!
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
BUILD 53 NOW!
Let's piggyback our wifi on there to get the Great Mesh up and running. Truth is the lack of security makes these cars scary as shit. Networked computers are not ready for prime time. Neither is any other machine with an input device.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
We have to pay the pension programs for the people who built the road 50 years ago.
Current worst-case rate of sea level rise is 0.12 inches/year (according to NOAA), so for 200 years that's 24 inches (two feet, not quite 2/3 of a meter).
Even airports at sea level are built at two meters are more above sea level, it just means a little more barricading around them to protect against abnormally high tides or surges.
Perhaps around 500 years from now, we might have to actually re-work some airports to raise them a few feet. As you say, it may be tough to have "only" 500 years to combat the inrushing waters of doom...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
By 2045 we'll be down the other side of the slope, most citizens of the USA and elsewhere will not be able to afford to own and operate a vehicle and a good chunk of the expected population growth will have died off due to measles and other preventable diseases. Boom, problem solved. You're welcome.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
In 1894, it was realized by 1945 the streets of London would be under NINE FEET of horse manure, and no solution was in sight. There was the very first international urban planning convention four years later in NYC, that had to give up as unsolvable problem of how and where to transport and put all that horse shit!
That way we live like maggots now in the big cities, burrowing through equine feces packed a hundred feet deep....oh wait, something changed everything.
It points out that Louis Armstrong airport in New Orleans is almost two feet below sea level
Oh no! We've already lost one!
What's that? It's been under sea level since construction?
focuses on the increasing frequency of storms
Why would it focus on the opposite of what is occurring? If you believe we are in fact warming over the last decade or so then you must also believe warming causes a reduction in the severity of storms.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Because, What's good for Google is good for the country! .
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
...are already here. Ever seen the Boston MBTA at rush hour? Seriously, after half a century of disinvestment and abandonment, people are moving back in to cities en masse. Transportation infrastructure was cut back over the entirety of the second half of the 20th century to cope with dwindling tax revenues. What's left is already past crush loading in Boston, and in NY and SF, too, I'm sure.
'The U.S. Department of Transportation has issued a 300-page PDF outlining the grim future of transportation infrastructure in America over the next thirty years'
There, I've fixed that. Because DOT has no idea what transportation here in Canada will be like over the next 30 years!
Michael
http://s1.sfgame.us/index.php?rec=58163
No, seriously, I don't know what it's like in the empty states but in the growing GDP powerhouses that are the tech cities, people are just not using cars at all.
They might rent a car once in a while, but most of them use transit, bike, walk, take Bolt, take the High Speed train (if it exists), and maybe fly to a place that's far away.
People are already adapting. You're confused because the deadenders aren't adapting.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Similarly, Forbes relies on the Heartland Institute's James Taylor (also not a scientist) to report on climate change. How bad is the Forbes reporting? Well, in an August 2012 interview, I correctly stated that in a warming world, hurricane intensity can increase and these increases are being observed. Also, rainfall, storm surge, and storm size can be affected.
In response, Mr. Taylor attacked me and discussed the frequency of landfalling U.S. hurricanes, as if the two were the same. Obviously, he either misunderstood my comments or does not have the knowledge to interpret them. When I asked for the right to rebut Mr. Taylor, what did I hear? Crickets. Did Forbes feel even a bit embarrassed when just over a month later, Superstorm Sandy hit the U.S. coast, causing approximately $65 billion in damage? Do they feel embarrassed now that the newly released IPCC report supports me, not their non-scientist Mr. Taylor? Perhaps we will never know. - http://www.theguardian.com/env...
What's actually going to happen is automated roads. It's inevitable. You enter the road and your autopilot takes over, running all traffic without stop and go, bumper to bumper, at the highest speed practical for the response characterics and safety margins of the vehicles. Like a train. No autopilot, no drive on road (you can take the back roads). This will increase throughput under load by a multiple.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
Seriously. Split into 7-12 smaller countries (with a single central gov't, on the order of the EU) and so many social funding problems would solve themselves.
There's no way this is not some kind of false flag comment.
Yep, and it's nothing I can't adjust to my liking with a drill motor (mechanical gauges) or a 555 timer circuit (for the electrical ones). CAN makes those electrical ones even easier!
You know nothing, Tom Paulco
While millions of Americans starve.
While our roads go to complete shit.
Always money for wars in foreign nations and propping up puppet government's the USA controls, but no money for helping actual Americans who pay for these wars.
Fuck the USA
In many states, the overwhelming majority of the money collected from gas taxes goes to pay interest on debt. Very little of it it used for road construction and maintenance. If we stopped borrowing to build bridges to nowhere, we'd have plenty of money for maintenance and new roads as needed.
http://www.wsj.com/articles/st...
When greenland's cap drops, you'll get more sea level rise. Ice movement is increasing quickly so within the next 30 years we WILL have a large volume of ice falling into the sea which was never there.
What happens when you put ice into a nearly full glass?
That's right: the water levels rise.
My solution to the problem would be to repeal the federal gasoline tax and shut down DOT. No more 300 page reports on why they need more money.
In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.
Some government hack got dazzled by the fancy talk of a billionaire CEO and is convinced in the future, as seen by a billionaire CEO, and oddly including technology being developed by that billionaire CEO.
All of these futurists talking about their uber fancy high tech world of the future are kidding themselves if they think there is enough money to pay for this shit.
In which case we'll get the dystopian future alright -- the one in which we spend zillions of dollars for a separate infrastructure for the wealthy with all the cool stuff ... and we'll leave the rotting husk of everything else to the rest of us.
There's no truth to any of this crap. It's "blah blah blah, give us lots of money to build something cool".
This is children who grew up reading Popular Science and dreaming of flying cars trying to sell us their vision of the future.
And other than being swindled by Google and Uber ... there's nothing to say this is good, meaningful, true, or even possible.
Eric Schmidt wants a fucking pony. Let's not pretend this has any bearing to reality.
In fact, let's assume this entire thing is a waste of resources based on the pie eyed fantasies of a billionaire CEO.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Given an average age in their fifties...
Land and resources are finite. We will get nowhere until we abandon the fantasy that everyone is entitled to a car and a house in the suburbs.
Europe and China have already taken steps to acknowledge this reality.
Why can't these people talk to an economist. An entire country's population isn't going to sit around waving their hands while they sit in traffic all day, unable to work.
When the loss to the economy due to wasted time in traffic exceeds the cost of doing something about it, we will do something about it.
A real dystopia would be if the economy ended up full of policy analysts and lawyers trying to solve problems that require building shit by writing papers and finding other lawyers to blame and sue.
You ever attend a meeting at work where the presenter's entire point is "I do an important job so you shouldn't fire me"? Yeah this is one of those.
The problem is the incredible amount of semi-trailer truck traffic. It's bumper-to-bumper. One gets behind one semi- passing another on a two lane highway east or west bound with the passing truck doing ~0.1 MPH faster than the passed truck at 65 MPH. It can take 10 minutes to accomplish this and traffic backs up behind this blockage. And passing through Omaha is an LA scenario.
In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act. George Orwell
Obviously, I haven't read a 300 page PDF before posting.
But self driving cars don't fundamentally change the traffic problem. And what is needed _today_ in dense urban areas is a fundamental change.
One of the easiest ways to think about this is the impact that cars _necessarily_ have on density. Christopher Alexander explained this simply by thinking about how many square meters of surface different transportation systems take up per person.
Walking is relatively efficient - a person walking only needs perhaps 1 square meter to walk as fast as they like; if they are careful and are going slower, multiple walkers need even less space.
Now consider the personal car. Standing completely still, an automobile needs several meters of ground space. If it is moving in a stream of other vehicles, there must be buffers in front and behind it. It is not unreasonble to think of the ground footprint needed for a moving car as 3 meters of width and 4 meters of length, plus multiples of 4 meters ahead and behind, as speed increases.
So a car - even standing still - takes an order of magnitude more surface space than a human who is walking.
This is the fundamental problem with the individual vehicle. For each person you add, you need 10x that many meters of available surface area to the sub-segments of your road network that that person's automobile will be using.
I very much love the automobile and the driving experience. I do my own vehicle maintenance and i have a dedicated trackday car for when I can get away for a weekend of lapping. I live on a farmstead and there are 6 road legal vehicles parked on my property.
However, cars completely destroy urban density, and it doesn't matter how clean you make them, how self-driving you make them, and, how much safety buffer space you strip away. They simply use space too inefficiently for there to be any meaningful density.
Dense urban areas should have pervasive rail coverage, and that rail coverage should largely be in ugly spaces - like underground, or along the perimeter of industrial districts. On average, someone should be able to get to a subway station after a couple blocks of walking.
In urban areas, the roads as we have them today should largely be repurposed for use by busses for trunk routes that are somehow not well served by rail, and for point to point trips in cabs/ubers/lyfts. Private, single vehicle use of the roadways should be exceptionally expensive, and thus, a rarity undertaken only when financially justifiable by the end user. Electric mini-trucks (as seen in Asia) should be responsible for delivery of larger-than-human cargoes, both personal and business related.
At some point, intermodal containers that are human-scale make sense for moving goods within cities, e.g. imagine a standardized container that was about 1 meter cube; this could be loaded into a special cargo car on most current subway lines, and loading/unloading the containers from that car could be done rapidly and automatically... a half meter intermodal cube could be reasonably carried by a person, through door ways, up stairs, etc, and 8 of them could stack next to or on top of the 1 meter cube...
Many new yorkers already live without cars and take deliveries; bringing efficiencies of scale and uniformity to the delivery system would be a good idea. Democratizing it so that, for instance, at the airport you put your luggage into intermodal cubes (or, depending on where you travelled from, your luggage actually IS intermodal cubes...) and ship them off to your neighborhood, and this is largely done automatically, means that you are not carrying heavy things across a 45 minute subway ride, and you do not feel the need to take a cab ride, and yet you and your things still get to the destination at the same time..
Once cabs and cars are not gridlocking every inch of pavement, some roads should get turned into pedestrian areas; outdoor marketplaces, greenspaces, etc.
For anyone that hasn't had the pleasure of doing so, I really recommend spending some tourist time in the city of Munich. They have an exceptional rail system. You may not have any idea how nice urban life can be.
My opinions are my own, and do not necessarily represent those of my employer.
will be irrelvant.
Autonomous Cars, Airplanes, Boats is a big answer.
Autonomous deliveries of goods, services, food (Japan's self serving robots for the elderly come to mind)
Intelligent systems (much like IoT and current Internet management) that will manage this autonomous world. It's coming and it will make orgs like DOT obsolete aside from certifying and testing something. It will come. DOT should be preparing for that vs. calling the end of the world--or are they preparing?
The lemmings are worried about a shortage of paths as they converge on the cliff of climate change and over population.
when George Bush's title "the last US President" should be the more permanent "The Last US President"? Yeah, yeah, flamebait me into oblivious, but no matter how leftist you are, you know Obama doesn't even bother with the law even if you agree with his goals. At least, Bush hired lawyers before deciding on where to walk the fine line between legal and illegal. Obama's more of a "law shmoe" kind of executive. So his DOT puts out SciFi as prediction for the future. Sure. Why not. He can't say we are in a recession because that would mean that we are. He can't say that Romney's plan for solving the national health care problems was better than his plan (and than Romney's plan for solving MA health care problems), he can't say that Russia is waging war in the Middle East (and winning) in order to divert attention from its war in Europe. Never mind that he can't say that the only way he could figure out how to solve the housing crises was to inflate the prices of everything else until they kept up with the prices of inflated housing market. So he puts out SciFi from DOT. Why not?
Any guest worker system is indistinguishable from indentured servitude.
If overcrowding is going to be such a big problem in the future, why do we need to build up more infrastructure? Why don't we just focus policy on reducing population growth?
Birth rates in the USA are basically at replacement levels. Our population is growing because of high immigration rates (both legal and illegal), and because of much higher fertility rates of immigrants. If we greatly restricted immigration, maybe we wouldn't have to worry so much about overtaxing our infrastructure.
Infrastructure for Bikes costs a lot less to construct than infrastructure for cars.
Instead of designing infrastructure that assumes cars — design for bicycles — then there is no more oil crisis, people live longer and happier.
I commuted in a car every day for over 7 years — and going 113km x 2 = 226km day — and three hours a day wasted sitting stuck in traffic.
Sold the car, bought a bike and moved in to town — ten years later — still one of the best decisions of ever made.
A 10 year cyclist in from Toronto.
Bicycles are the key to a sustainable future.
Excuse me, I thought they meant that the raise of the autonomous vehicles is the cause of the dystopian future. All those people, bumping into cars are a threat to any autonomous transportation system of the future.
How do self-driving cars solve infrastructure deterioration?
Both of NYC's airports are at the water's edge, with elongated runways on piers. Newark is within sight of the water. Many of the major airports on both coasts will have problems.
My "teleport" ap solves all this shit. And as soon as Ubuntu releases its phone i'll put it in their store! LOL!
I got to the chocolate box before you, that's why the hard ones have teeth marks.
I think his point is that at a predicted rate of 0.12 inches per year, in 100 years the sea water will rise... 12 inches, worst case scenario every year.
At a measured rate of 0.04 inches per year, in 100 years the sea water will rise... 4 inches. In 100 years. 4 freaking inches.
I'm sure Newark is deathly worried that the average sea level is going to rise 4 inches... or even 12 inches.
We just need the courage to admit that traffic congestion is a type of shortage, and that chronic shortages are caused by price ceilings. Is holding prices below market equilibrium ever a wise long-term strategy?
Any sufficiently unpopular but cohesive argument is indistinguishable from trolling.
You are predicting the piers will sink then? Because the sea levels are not rising fast enough to get anywhere close to the runway for literally hundreds of years.
Unless you think we as a species can't adapt a few airports over a period of 200 years? Well I guess it is NYC, you may be right.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Not a thing
we won't need roads.
Thats not the projected rate.
The IPCC based on atmospheric and ocean science gives its best guess as 13 inches over the next 30 years assuming climate change isn't gotten under control. Worst case estimate goes as high as 6 foot by 2100, although thats probably unlikely and based on catastrophic run-away.
Excuse the Unicode crap in my posts. That's an apostrophe, and slashdot is busted.
You clearly do not get the mission:
If they follow YOUR silly "plan", the taxpayers will get vaule for their dollars, but there will be a bunch of problems for the government, including:
{a} lack of sufficient funding for the "pet projects" of various managers
{b} inability to blackmail the voters into thinking they must pay higher taxes to get the same level of quality their grandparents got for a LOT less cash
{c} inability to satisfy some of the politicians who demand certain "pork projects", which will in-turn make managers have to actually EARN their pay dealing with congress instead of just collecting their pay while travelling and/or golfing
{d} inability to satisfy another group of poiticians who demand that government subsidize trains and busses and bike lanes using money the govenment promised gasoline users would be only used for the roads when these people were targeted with those taxes in the first place.
{e} inability of managers to make their bosses in the administration happy by helping to evade congressional oversight and hide costs of some projects as a result of having some agencies spend resources on the projects of other agencies
Money is fungible.
ANY money given to a government agency and tagged for a specific use might well actually get spent as mandated, BUT it also enables the agency to take the money that WOULD have been spent on that thing and re-assign it to something completely different... resulting in no net increase in cash to what the taxpayers wanted, and fully-funding the very things the taxpayers rejected. This is standard operating procedure for government and happens in nearly EVERY state government with "education". States are always screaming that they need more money "for education", then getting middle class parents/voters to vote for more, only to use the new money on education AND then siphon-off the "old" education money for pet projects the voters would never have approved... thereby providing no increase in education spending and leaving problems that can be screamed about in the next appeal for yet another tax increase "for education"...
Watch his keynote address at the AltCars Expo and Conference recorded in Sept 19, 2014 for more information. http://youtu.be/RBkND76J91k
If you believe this, your stupid. Will traffic be heavier in 30 years? Yes. Will it be anywhere close to this extreme? No. You folk that live in major cities need to get out of the city and explore the rest of America and grab some prospective.
Road- and railway transport may become less important in the future, I think, at least in two areas, I imagine:
1. Commuting - what the Americans call tele-commuting could become much more widespread; perhaps in a hybrid form, where people go to work in an office facility shared with several other companies, and within walking or cycling distance from their homes.
2. Micromanufacturing, like eg. 3D printing, may replace manufacturing in large factories. If this trend continues, it is possible that all or most raw materials could be sourced locally as well, so that the only things that would need to be transported are the specifications for production.
This only leaves travel (as in going on holidays), and we may find better and easier ways of doing that, which don't need roads or the burning of large amounts of fuel. Airships, anyone? Not the fastest mode of transport, but it could be a lot faster than it is, if we worked on it. I'm only speculating, of course, but I don't think it needs to be all bad.
>Let's say the politically revised figures are correct. That means in 30 years (2045 being only 30 years away now) sea level rise will have been 3.6 *inches*.
You got many things plainly wrong..
First, the sea level grows at a non-linear rate. The formula level(time)=time*actual_rate is plain wrong. The rate is accelerating.
>Which airport is that going to put "underwater"? Please explain.
Second, the sea-level is an average. What about the variance? Higher tides, higher waves, ...
>You warming alarmists are worse than the anti-vaccers in terms of just chucking reality out the window, even when you get to make up your own rules!
Third, you are relying on ad hominen fallacious argument.
By 2045, 100% or the world's wealth will be concentrated among the 1% anyway. There will be no jobs to commute to and no money for vacations.
Private helicopters do not require infrastructure.
Here's something that seems incredible to me. We are currently in what most economists agree is not a great economy. And by that, they mean unemployment is still relatively high. We have plenty of wealth in the nation, although it is very poorly distributed, and most of that wealth goes increasingly towards financial transactions. So we have a massive amount of wealth ever-more concentrated into fewer hands, we have a large number of people who are willing and able to work (yet aren't being provided jobs), and we have tons of things that actually need to be done, such as fixing our transportation system.
The solution seems obvious, doesn't it? We MUST do something about that wealth distribution and how money is allocated, and I suggest we do it democratically this time, instead of letting the Greenspan's of the world dictate that we gamble it away.
Kill Iraqis or get to work on time?
self-driving cars using vehicle-to-vehicle (V2I) crash-avoidance technologies
I only have a passing knowledge of the space, but my understanding is that V2I is vehicle-to-infrastructure communication, and V2V is vehicle-to-vehicle communication.
Sarcasm? I've been through there every other month and don't see that problem; I-80 is 6 lanes, and most of the trailers are half a mile offset on the intermodal trains.
Ok, so here's part of the problem:
In Denver, CO the elevated portion of I-70 is falling down. Literally. If you ever looked at the underneath of the elevated portion of I-70, you would NEVER drive on it again. We're talking about basketball sized chunks of concrete falling out, exposed rebar, nightmare stuff. So let's fix it.
You can put a $50,000,000 band-aid on it to keep it from falling down for maybe 5 years, or you can pay $500,000,000 to fix it right. But that's for Today's traffic. To do it properly, you need to model traffic patterns out years in advance. To increase capacity and fix it properly, we easily get into $2,000,000,000.
Remember, C-470 was called "The Highway Colorado Doesn't Need" when it was first built, and now it has traffic jams on it on a daily basis (Seriously, I remember when County Line was a dirt road and Highlands Ranch was actually a Ranch).
*BUT* that's not the only problem. When you build roads and expand them, you need Right-of-Way. You have to buy people's houses to buy that ROW. People sometimes don't want to sell their houses and complain. One job we were expanding a backwater state highway (2 lane road) that was seeing a large increase in traffic into a 4 lane divided highway. Problem was, a neighborhood developed around the road. People complained, and sued the DOT, because they knew their 70-year-old houses existed before the road. The DOT pulled photos from the archives, engineers ($$$) went to court to show the houses were not only built after the road was there and paved, but that was why the houses were build (a road was there). That's the kind of crap that happens EVERY time you need to do a major build or upgrade.
Now on to the Odometer problem:
People drive in multiple states all the time. And your little commuter car isn't doing the major wear-and-tear on the roads anyway (Unless you drive a hummer, or another large truck that qualifies for the Heavy Equipment Tax by weighing more than a tank), that's commercial trucks, many of which are overloaded for road conditions (Truckers routinely ignore signs for height / weight restrictions).
Also, some states pull stupid crap and don't QA/QC their asphalt mix before putting it into production (MODOT, I'm looking at you), causing huge problems with roads that crumble too early.
The weather problem:
Some states in the U.S. have a horrible freeze-thaw cycle that demolishes roads. Water is bad for fiber (Internet Superhighway). Water is bad for concrete (Regular Superhighway). Water is bad for fire (Burning Superhighway). Water is good for fish (Not a Superhighway).
Look at the problems a state like Nebraska faces: 100 degree plus summers, -10 degree winters.
Then you go into the East Coast nightmare. The interstate highway system was formed in 1956 (June 29th, 1956). No biggie right? Well, a lot of these are now eligible for the National Register of Historic Places (or getting their quickly).
Don't even get me started on wetlands (irrigation ditches, you know, the places used to collect and store water. Yeah, they formed their own little ecosystems in 40 years and are now considered wetlands, gotta work around that).
My $0.03 /We need another president like Eisenhower that will force people to invest in infrastructure //And NOT use the DOT to Force policies on states ///Federal Highway Funds are not provided to states that don't follow DUI laws, FYI.
Lame ply to get more money to the construction mafia
Can't overpopulate and not expect consequences. The complications arrive on a hockey-stick curve, as geometric growth is *not* linear. The complexity of the structure to support that population builds slowly, then accelerates rapidly - and finally cannot be sustained. And as taxes don't expand geometrically, the lines cross and infrastructure failure commences. And that already happened; we can't - or won't- raise enough money to fix the aggregate and growing backlog of repair of structures our grandparents started. And perhaps shouldn't - open roads and suburbs made sense when there were a hundred million people. A half-billion people will grind the flow to a halt - and their very presence makes it nearly impossible to expand existing roads or train lines. We could: 1) keep pretending 1950 will last forever, and fail. 2) increase taxes and become ferocious about emminent domain and build the train lines we need whereever they need to be. 3) learn to tunnel cheaply and extensively and build out underground 4) fly 5) control population growth and the hell that comes with it when it achieves orbital velocity, as it is now - accept a slow rollback period while supporting a gigantic population of aging people for a few decades, then a stable, smaller population could be sustained at the level of expenditure we care to support (expenditure not being just money - we expend wildlife and ecologies to expand our numbers).
America declared overpopulation a solved problem - because it can't do math. Nothing can grow forever in a closed system.
On a somewhat related note, every time I read the slashdot.com url, I read it as "slash 'department of transportation'" -- like it's some right-wing group trying to defund the DOT.
That is the increase in the global sea level. Locally it can vary a great deal, depending on the specific weather systems and climate phenomena. If the prevailing winds change, for example, local sea levels can increase far greater than your 0.12 inches per year.
You ask for it to be explained to you, then launch an attack as if you were not even waiting for an answer - that is not being skeptical but being cynical - a trait that will only hamper your continuing education, not help.
It would help your cause to know what you're talking about before calling it nonsense, as the only damage your post did was to your reputation, not to climate change. The science still stands unscathed, but everyone who read your post now knows you aren't really interesting in learning or that you have assumed you know all there is to know, either of which isn't doing you any favors.
The scariest thing is you probably know all this anyway, as you seem otherwise intelligent...
1. Secure the borders and put strict limits on immigration. U.S. birth rates are barely at replacement level. Stabilizing the population will reduce wear and tear on existing infrastructure and lessen the need for new infrastructure. It would also be extremely beneficial in mitigatimng problems such as pollution and water shortages.
2. Make infrastructure self-funding. There are bad taxes, worse taxes and extremely bad taxes. The "use taxes" are the "least bad" of all. Contrary to the suggestions of the economic dunce in the White House, we should not tax income and profit to pay for infrastructure. Make the people who use it pay for it through tolls, fuel taxes etc.
I didn't read the report so maybe they already addressed this, but some problems are self-limiting.
Adding more roads to a congested city won't help unless you way-overdo it, because of the "build it and they will come" effect.
Likewise, NOT adding more roads will deter investment and growth in that city in favor of other cities or countries, which will mean less increase in total traffic than if current investment/growth rates continued.
Now, if you way-underinvest in infrastructure on a national basis, you will see more congestion because people have to live and work somewhere and we aren't likely to see the reductions in population growth fast enough to keep up with decreased infrastructure investments, at least not until people from other countries decide that America isn't worth moving to because its infrastructure is collapsing.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Unfortunately that's where you wnd up with ridiculously expensive rejects like Boston's Big Dig. While it was essential and did make a huge difference, trying to thread new tunnels through a spaghetti dish of old ones is one of the things that made the cost so excessive.
Even worse, they chose not to spend money on including a rail link from North to South, which effectively rules out high speed rAil continuing past Boston. We're the end of the line for Acela, for better or worse.
An additional 3.6 inches may be alarming in the right circumstances.
Most areas have an abundance of drinking water. Why not, instead of tractor-trailering bottled water (and products that are mostly water) across our roadways, just transport water filters and juice concentrate. For that matter, read the ingredients of many food or household products, and you see water listed first. Water is pretty heavy and takes up a lot of space. Imagine if transporting it was reduced to nearly nothing.
Juice concentrate + filtered water from my tap = juice
Filtered tap water + a glass = tasty drinking water (a dare you to tell the difference from bottled)
Powdered detergent + water from my washer = clean clothes
Good point and I amend my statement to include, "Do NOT use the Big Dig model as your reference or as your influence. Also, don't be cheap, pay for proper studies, vet them, and use good engineers who have done this work before."
As for rail? I can now drive down to Portland and hop a train to Boston to catch a Bruins game. It is, by no means, high speed though. The Big Dig was a horrific project and, yeah, I suppose you may be right in that that's what government projects will result in. We *can* do better though.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
As with most other government reports, this one is also blown way out of perportion. The only thing it serves is a propaganda campaign to get us to accept orwellian like changes.
Many of these problems are already solved, just not implemented yet.
Ha! Although I can't read the pay-walled article the first paragraph says it's to service debt, which means paying interest and principle. So you statement is false. You're presumption the government is insanely stupid is insanely stupid. Sure there are inefficiencies, but the efficiency isn't 0% like you seem to believe.
> Although I can't read
if you could read, you'd read that it's mostly interest payments.
An agency releasing a report that says the agency needs more money. *That's* never happened before.
Locally it can vary a great deal,
Of course - Tides, storm surges, whatever.
But the point is the average raises the average of all those too.
What EXACTLY would you predict would happen to any SPECIFIC airport when the average sea level has risen a foot? Why will it be unusable?
that is not being skeptical but being cynical
Learn to recognize the difference between sarcasm and cynicism...
And reality.
Learning to see what is real, has served me very well indeed.
It would help your cause
My only "cause" at this point is correcting idiots, really on any topic. I am with the side of sanity in a world that skews to ignore reality.
The scariest thing is you probably know all this anyway, as you seem otherwise intelligent...
I used to think that of alarmists, but being so laughably unable to follow the most basic scientific principals or accept new observations has led me to conclude there is nothing salvageable of the intellect there, despite what reality brings forth.
Sorry but I'm not going to continue the conversation beyond this point, in 20 years you'll understand.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Hmm google newark airport elevation.... 5.5m or 18'.
That makes it 1.5m higher than YVR (Vancouver Airport which is actually in Richmond BC) which is 4.0m.
18' - 3.5" would seem to have a reasonable margin of safety......
In the history of rail development, not one single instance of rail development has ever achieved predictions of increased ridership. Neither will this. Never happen. Not unless we redefine a "train" as "a string of private vehicles on a highway temporarily navigating together for increased efficiency".
"s/Dystopian Future For Transportation/Atlas Shrugged/"
FTFY.
Sorry, no can do, gotta send more money to the Defense Dept so we can take on ISIS. And AQ. And whatever other bogeymen conveniently pop up for us to fight. Oh yeah, and tax cuts for the 1% cuz muh trickle-down, etc.
I cannot understand what the fuck you're going on about. Please retype your rant and use ALL of the words this time.
http://www.desertusa.com/sandh...
So stop complaining!
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
Federal gas tax pays for highways and the gas tax isn't enough to cover the cost, and hasn't been for years. Additionally, state gas taxes only pay for half of state and local roadway expenses.
The roadway users aren't paying for the cost of the roadways through fees -- they're covering more than half. There's absolutely no evidence that money intended for transportation is being spent outside of transportation, and at the state level in many states that would violate the state constitution.
We're underfunding transportation in America, both road and rail. The problem is that taxes, fees, and fares are not high enough, not that money is leaking into other areas of government.
Support a few technologists in Washington.
The solution is to invest more into railroads and make more of the rail network a federally funded infrastructure similar to Interstates. In fact, 3 years of funding for the Interstate system would allow Amtrak alone to pay for all projects planned and thought of for the next 20 years. Rail and especially local and regional links are the most sustainable and scalable means of transporting a huge amount of people and goods with the least amount of effort and energy. More and faster rail service will also take the pressure off air travel and build a symbiosis by connecting airports by high speed rail service.