Yeah, I'm under-impressed with the site's rigorousness as well. Everything the author talks about is something that's been talked about endlessly in the public literature. With the claims made, I kept thinking there was at least a rumor-mongering hint about something new and different.
This is fairly similar to the APAS docking adapter they created for the Apollo-Soyuz test program in the 70s.
Now... why the ISS doesn't use APAS for all links and why the ISPRs (international standard payload racks) that everything in the US section is contained within won't fit inside an APAS docking tunnel... well... heh heh.
Well, notice that there are two Falcon 9 cores listed. There's the one with a single Merlin 2.
Given the systems approach that SpaceX has, I suspect that the Falcon X Heavy is slotted the same as the Falcon 9 Heavy -- there if you need it to attract NASA or some customer before the Falcon XX is ready. I'm assuming that the Falcon X's core diameter is sized around some constraint (factory size, transportation, etc) and the Falcon XX is designed under the assumption that funding to exceed said constraint was provided.
I think it's all about options and incremental development. They don't have to qualify the heavy configs until they need them and that's the hard part.
It turns out that in business school classes on running defense contractors teach a fairly simple concept:
If your project isn't far enough along to survive cancellation when the power shifts in the white house, you fucked up.
Thus, NASA's problem isn't changing political whims, it's that the Constellation program was so far behind, overbudget, and mismanaged in 2009 that it got canned by the incoming administration.
I'm thinking this is worse with Windows CE...
on
Cross With the Platform
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· Score: 0, Redundant
As far as I can remember from when I did some Windows CE hacking, that's actually worse than the difference between Windows CE and standard Windows.
Hindsight is 20/20. NASA was figuring that, if the shuttle was a booming success and drove down the cost of upmass, procuring the necessary bits for a new set of moon missions would be easier. NASA had planned for reduced budgets, it's just that their creative plan to work around that didn't work out.
Actually, the ISS is bigger than Skylab at this point.
The problem with the shuttle building the ISS is that it's really the worst of both worlds. You spend billions of dollars a year on the shuttle and build the American part of the ISS on that set of constraints and then wonder why it cost so much. Whereas, If you were to have lofted the American part of the ISS on commercially available boosters, even after the additional hardware to make each module contain a tug, you'd have built it for a lot less.
Especially if you also consider that most everything gets cheaper in bulk and, if you were to place a guaranteed order for a hundred medium lift boosters, you'd get them at a much more reasonable price than the equivalent upmass in ten heavy lift boosters. Especially given that medium lift boosters are the right size for commercial missions and heavy lift boosters are not yet.
The problem is the sunk costs fallacy. NASA had the design and hardware for Freedom and modified it instead of taking a giant step back when they had a chance. The shuttle was there and it worked, even though we might have done much better to have sent it to the museums after the first time we lost one.
Um, I think you are ascribing far too much engineering expertise to the folks who work in the bike industry. The bike industry spends a lot of money on marketing and throws a few pennies at engineering. And the cyclists of the world eat it up.
There's something to be said for not knowing that what you are doing is something that engineering textbooks teach you not to do. This can lead to great things. But this also leads to carbon fiber parts that fail in all sorts of catastrophic ways. Or tires with colored bits of tread that gets squirley in the rain. Or brake designs that every other brake-using industry (cars, airplanes, etc) rejected as unsafe being sold as the next great thing.
Personally, I'm glad that the transfer of knowledge goes only one way, albeit poorly. I would not want to fly cross-country on an airplane with a Shimano HollowTech Carbon Fiber wing spar that's super light and has the occasional habit of snapping mid-flight leaving the aircraft wingless. You can get away with all sorts of design sins with bikes because most people who can afford high-end carbon fiber bikes don't actually ride them very often and, if they do, gingerly descend only on smooth roads at 15 mph.
The shuttle is the way it is because nuclear launch systems are really messy on a populated planet.
A wide variety of nuclear propulsion systems are available and have even been vaguely tested on Earth. Like Project Pluto's nuclear ramjet. Nobody to piss off next door on any of the gas giants.
Actually a nuclear powered rocket will do just fine. Nobody there to get pissed off if you pressurize some of the abundant hydrogen into a tank and run it past a fission reactor.
The possibilities of exploring the outer "ice giants" is massive. I think, at least. I may not even make the pun because I think the idea of exploring them is so interesting.
Submarines are designed to handle a test depth of maybe 1600 ft which means maybe 50 bar of pressure. At that pressure, the atmosphere of Uranus is a little below freezing. The gravity is less than Earth. I suspect that with correct ballasting you could make a metal sphere float in the atmosphere for quite some time by keeping the insides pressurized to a convenient atmospheric pressure. So sticking around for a while isn't hard.
I can't find any good information on the radiation environment there and if you could put humans in the little bubble circling Uranus.. um.. yeah, I lied above.
Eg, D + He 3 -> He 4 + p vs. D + T -> He 4 + n. The first, deuterium and helium-3 produces helium 4 and a proton. No neutrons. But deuterium and tritium produces helium 4 and a neutron.
The problem is, not perfect. With the deuterium hanging around in a reactor, you'd get some degree of neutron-producing reactions anyway.
You do realize that iron would become brittle as steel from the neutron flux if you built your reactor vessel out of it, right? It's a vague problem with fission reactors that required some procedural adjustments once neutron embrittlement was better understood, but with orders of magnitude greater neutron flux...
Nor can you rely on a isotope chart of a single element to predict what's going to occur in a high neutron flux environment.
For example, Fe 58 is stable. Capture a neutron it becomes Fe 59, with a 44 day halflife to Co 59. If Co 59 captures a neutron, it becomes Co 60, which is a long-lived radioisotope.
So I guess you do get a reactor vessel with a certain amount of cobalt isotopes, no?
I wouldn't classify this as an "unsolvable problem" but you can't magically wave your hands and make them go away.
For all the "oh my god radioactivity" crap that's going around, the simple fact of the matter is that you can access the core of a fission reactor while it's online whereas you cannot access the core of a fusion reactor while it's online.
Look up neutron activation. When neutrons are flying around in a nuclear (of any type) reactor core, some of them hit the material in the walls, causing the atoms to absorb a neutron and change isotopes. Which tends to result in a reactor core that is radioactive, even though it wasn't made of radioactive materials and didn't absorb any isotopes.
Fusion reactors put off a hell of a lot more neutrons than fission reactors. You can do aneutronic fission, but not with the sort of reactions people have been talking about....
Point one: Not spending money on fusion research is incredibly dumb. It's not likely to pan out in the near-term future, but there's plenty of ancillary science to be done on the subject. For example, the VASMIR space drive built on fusion research, it's just not hot enough to provoke fusion
Point two: Relying on fusion power to make for a short-term fix is also dumb. Especially if you think it's going to be safe and clean. The problem with fusion is how many neutrons it emits. Even when you use one of the fusion chains designed not to produce neutrons, you produce a good amount. The reactor core is going to be even more radioactive than a fission reactor core. And even if you get to a "Breakeven" point, that doesn't mean that you'll be price-competitive with other forms of power.
Fusion is easy. Just take a GIANT ball of gas, let it collapse into a star, and put solar panels around the star.
Point three: Calling it the Ultimate Green Energy Source is a cover story. A 2007 report by the National Research Council's Plasma Science Committee concluded that "NIF is crucial to the NNSA Stockpile Stewardship Program because it will be able to create the extreme conditions of temperature and pressure that exist on Earth only in exploding nuclear weapons and that are therefore relevant to understanding the operation of our modern nuclear weapons."
In other words, the NIF will be used, at least some of the time, to re-create the conditions inside of an exploding nuclear warhead so we can design new nukes without testing them and therefore violating the test ban treaties.
I did not chose home & job based on bikeability, actually. It's just that if you plot all of the places that I have lived and all of the places I have worked, I've always been no more than a single mass transit trip and no more than 5-6 miles of cycling between me and work.
This includes living in Cincinnati, which is not known for having much in terms of mass transit or bike routes.
I think the only time I've declined an interview solely on the basis of transportation concerns it was neither drivable nor bikeable.
I was worried at one point that I might be suffering from a myopia because I somehow accidentally stumbled into a series of easy-to-bike jobs, but I checked the transportation statistics and discovered random statistics like that 60% of all car trips are under 5 miles.
And yes, I have biked at -20F and windy as well as 100F and humid. In order for me to be here today, my ancestors likely needed to run many miles in both conditions to outrun tigers, chase buffalo off cliffs, and other such tasks. Without the benefits of modern technology.
So, yeah. I don't expect every single person to be able to easily bike all of their trips. One of my co-workers used to live atop a mountain, for example. And sometimes I carry cargo that doesn't fit on my bike. (although in those cases I usually wish for a bakfiets) But I do see that there is a fairly large bunch of people who can bike at least some of their trips with no infrastructure improvements. It's just that most of them are still stuck thinking that it's actually hard to do.
The problem is that just because it's paraffin and an oxidizer doesn't mean it's that much simpler or that much safer than a liquid fueled rocket. Instead of two sets of plumbing, you have one set, but that's still rocket plumbing and it's still awfully troublesome.
Consider how Scaled Composites made a big deal about how safe their rubber+nitrous oxide hybrid engines were.... and then killed a few people in a nitrous oxide plumbing accident while working on SpaceShipTwo.
See, this is what fascinates me the most. Even among people who claim to be atheist, cars are a religious thing, afforded faith beyond logic or rational thought that even mystical things are denied.
So, tell me, how was my wife supposed to avoid the driver who was on their cellphone who ran into my car from behind, totaling it? Your argument that you haven't had an accident in 20 years because you are driving carefully has about as much reality as the person who lived to 100 while smoking a pack a day saying that they smoked carefully. It's irrational and a perfect example of how your religious fervor for the Car as your Savior.
Nor was I telling you to get rid of your car. There is not a magical anti-car field preventing you from driving to a train station. Or riding a bike, where you can travel at least four times faster without breaking a sweat.
Mostly, after examining transportation statistics and applying them to my personal habits, I realized that if you avoid driving a car unless forced, you can burn the same amount of gasoline than a hybrid driver. Except that I come out ahead fiscally and actually discovered that I've got more time than before.
Nor do you understand that rail is a more efficient use of space. Four lanes in each direction with the accompanying noise and pollution as compared to a pair of rail lines that can be buried or surrounded by trees or otherwise gotten out of the way.
Nor do you realize that there is not a magical anti-train field preventing them from building a closer rail line. See, the same network effects that make the Internet work better when more people are on it also apply to the trains.
The problem is that there are a lot of people in America who refuse to consider that there might be a more efficient way to run things. Because you may not whisper incantations to it every morning or spend a good hour attending to it every Sunday, but you worship your car with the fervor of the most annoying televangelist.
You know, my shelter-from-bad-weather while biking is under a pound in weight and fits nicely in my bike bag. It's the latest in space age technology. It's called a waterproof jacket, a pair of waterproof pants, a pair of clear sunglasses, and a fender for the front tire. And a hood-like thing called a Balaclava.
Actually, I wish I'd realized how not-hard it all is at an earlier age. I stopped biking when I was in college when it was raining or snowing and there was no reason why I should have.
Going long distances is another matter... but it is a lot easier carrying a bike in a rail car, bus, aircraft, or other such form of transportation than it is to fit a car in the same sort of vehicle.
Insisting that one form of transportation must necessarily do all things that you can presently do with a car is poor reasoning.
If you elect me Wirehead, dictator of America, I could have my jack booted thugs march into every suitable factory of the land and produce an awesome inter/intracity rail system in short order so good that nobody would ever need a car again. Same way we produced Liberty Ships in WWII. And then my jack booted thugs would destroy every single car.
But, until people start signing my petition and stop calling the police and telling them that they had a meeting with Napoleon, different measures are required.
It is only when you stack the capabilities of several car-alternatives that you reach a tower of possibilities to match the car.
Consider a gridlocked 4-lane highway, loaded with cars, all carrying a single person.
Now, put all of those single people in a more appropriately sized vehicle that takes a quarter of the pavement space. Or put four people in each car, instead of one. Either way... that's the waste of pavement space.
There are plenty of ways to fix that (and other) wastes inherent in our present system of transportation. Electric cars may solve a few problems with the car the way we presently construct and use it, but they pretty much ignore a wide variety of other problems.
And, really... if there's enough transportation demand for 4-lanes of gridlock, there's enough demand for mass transportation.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, I'm under-impressed with the site's rigorousness as well. Everything the author talks about is something that's been talked about endlessly in the public literature. With the claims made, I kept thinking there was at least a rumor-mongering hint about something new and different.
It was.
This is fairly similar to the APAS docking adapter they created for the Apollo-Soyuz test program in the 70s.
Now... why the ISS doesn't use APAS for all links and why the ISPRs (international standard payload racks) that everything in the US section is contained within won't fit inside an APAS docking tunnel... well... heh heh.
Well, notice that there are two Falcon 9 cores listed. There's the one with a single Merlin 2.
Given the systems approach that SpaceX has, I suspect that the Falcon X Heavy is slotted the same as the Falcon 9 Heavy -- there if you need it to attract NASA or some customer before the Falcon XX is ready. I'm assuming that the Falcon X's core diameter is sized around some constraint (factory size, transportation, etc) and the Falcon XX is designed under the assumption that funding to exceed said constraint was provided.
I think it's all about options and incremental development. They don't have to qualify the heavy configs until they need them and that's the hard part.
Hey, nobody likes a pocket rocket that comes apart after launch.
Doubly so. Notice there are two Falcon 9 boosters. One with 9 Merlin 1 engines, one with 1 Merlin 2 engine.
It turns out that in business school classes on running defense contractors teach a fairly simple concept:
If your project isn't far enough along to survive cancellation when the power shifts in the white house, you fucked up.
Thus, NASA's problem isn't changing political whims, it's that the Constellation program was so far behind, overbudget, and mismanaged in 2009 that it got canned by the incoming administration.
As far as I can remember from when I did some Windows CE hacking, that's actually worse than the difference between Windows CE and standard Windows.
Wow.
Hindsight is 20/20. NASA was figuring that, if the shuttle was a booming success and drove down the cost of upmass, procuring the necessary bits for a new set of moon missions would be easier. NASA had planned for reduced budgets, it's just that their creative plan to work around that didn't work out.
Actually, the ISS is bigger than Skylab at this point.
The problem with the shuttle building the ISS is that it's really the worst of both worlds. You spend billions of dollars a year on the shuttle and build the American part of the ISS on that set of constraints and then wonder why it cost so much. Whereas, If you were to have lofted the American part of the ISS on commercially available boosters, even after the additional hardware to make each module contain a tug, you'd have built it for a lot less.
Especially if you also consider that most everything gets cheaper in bulk and, if you were to place a guaranteed order for a hundred medium lift boosters, you'd get them at a much more reasonable price than the equivalent upmass in ten heavy lift boosters. Especially given that medium lift boosters are the right size for commercial missions and heavy lift boosters are not yet.
The problem is the sunk costs fallacy. NASA had the design and hardware for Freedom and modified it instead of taking a giant step back when they had a chance. The shuttle was there and it worked, even though we might have done much better to have sent it to the museums after the first time we lost one.
Um, I think you are ascribing far too much engineering expertise to the folks who work in the bike industry. The bike industry spends a lot of money on marketing and throws a few pennies at engineering. And the cyclists of the world eat it up.
There's something to be said for not knowing that what you are doing is something that engineering textbooks teach you not to do. This can lead to great things. But this also leads to carbon fiber parts that fail in all sorts of catastrophic ways. Or tires with colored bits of tread that gets squirley in the rain. Or brake designs that every other brake-using industry (cars, airplanes, etc) rejected as unsafe being sold as the next great thing.
Personally, I'm glad that the transfer of knowledge goes only one way, albeit poorly. I would not want to fly cross-country on an airplane with a Shimano HollowTech Carbon Fiber wing spar that's super light and has the occasional habit of snapping mid-flight leaving the aircraft wingless. You can get away with all sorts of design sins with bikes because most people who can afford high-end carbon fiber bikes don't actually ride them very often and, if they do, gingerly descend only on smooth roads at 15 mph.
The shuttle is the way it is because nuclear launch systems are really messy on a populated planet.
A wide variety of nuclear propulsion systems are available and have even been vaguely tested on Earth. Like Project Pluto's nuclear ramjet. Nobody to piss off next door on any of the gas giants.
Actually a nuclear powered rocket will do just fine. Nobody there to get pissed off if you pressurize some of the abundant hydrogen into a tank and run it past a fission reactor.
The possibilities of exploring the outer "ice giants" is massive. I think, at least. I may not even make the pun because I think the idea of exploring them is so interesting.
Submarines are designed to handle a test depth of maybe 1600 ft which means maybe 50 bar of pressure. At that pressure, the atmosphere of Uranus is a little below freezing. The gravity is less than Earth. I suspect that with correct ballasting you could make a metal sphere float in the atmosphere for quite some time by keeping the insides pressurized to a convenient atmospheric pressure. So sticking around for a while isn't hard.
I can't find any good information on the radiation environment there and if you could put humans in the little bubble circling Uranus.. um.. yeah, I lied above.
Fusion that does not produce neutrons.
Eg, D + He 3 -> He 4 + p vs. D + T -> He 4 + n. The first, deuterium and helium-3 produces helium 4 and a proton. No neutrons. But deuterium and tritium produces helium 4 and a neutron.
The problem is, not perfect. With the deuterium hanging around in a reactor, you'd get some degree of neutron-producing reactions anyway.
You do realize that iron would become brittle as steel from the neutron flux if you built your reactor vessel out of it, right? It's a vague problem with fission reactors that required some procedural adjustments once neutron embrittlement was better understood, but with orders of magnitude greater neutron flux...
Nor can you rely on a isotope chart of a single element to predict what's going to occur in a high neutron flux environment.
For example, Fe 58 is stable. Capture a neutron it becomes Fe 59, with a 44 day halflife to Co 59. If Co 59 captures a neutron, it becomes Co 60, which is a long-lived radioisotope.
So I guess you do get a reactor vessel with a certain amount of cobalt isotopes, no?
I wouldn't classify this as an "unsolvable problem" but you can't magically wave your hands and make them go away.
For all the "oh my god radioactivity" crap that's going around, the simple fact of the matter is that you can access the core of a fission reactor while it's online whereas you cannot access the core of a fusion reactor while it's online.
You are clearly not educated enough.
Look up neutron activation. When neutrons are flying around in a nuclear (of any type) reactor core, some of them hit the material in the walls, causing the atoms to absorb a neutron and change isotopes. Which tends to result in a reactor core that is radioactive, even though it wasn't made of radioactive materials and didn't absorb any isotopes.
Fusion reactors put off a hell of a lot more neutrons than fission reactors. You can do aneutronic fission, but not with the sort of reactions people have been talking about....
Point one: Not spending money on fusion research is incredibly dumb. It's not likely to pan out in the near-term future, but there's plenty of ancillary science to be done on the subject. For example, the VASMIR space drive built on fusion research, it's just not hot enough to provoke fusion
Point two: Relying on fusion power to make for a short-term fix is also dumb. Especially if you think it's going to be safe and clean. The problem with fusion is how many neutrons it emits. Even when you use one of the fusion chains designed not to produce neutrons, you produce a good amount. The reactor core is going to be even more radioactive than a fission reactor core. And even if you get to a "Breakeven" point, that doesn't mean that you'll be price-competitive with other forms of power.
Fusion is easy. Just take a GIANT ball of gas, let it collapse into a star, and put solar panels around the star.
Point three: Calling it the Ultimate Green Energy Source is a cover story. A 2007 report by the National Research Council's Plasma Science Committee concluded that "NIF is crucial to the NNSA Stockpile Stewardship Program because it will be able to create the extreme conditions of temperature and pressure that exist on Earth only in exploding nuclear weapons and that are therefore relevant to understanding the operation of our modern nuclear weapons."
In other words, the NIF will be used, at least some of the time, to re-create the conditions inside of an exploding nuclear warhead so we can design new nukes without testing them and therefore violating the test ban treaties.
I did not chose home & job based on bikeability, actually. It's just that if you plot all of the places that I have lived and all of the places I have worked, I've always been no more than a single mass transit trip and no more than 5-6 miles of cycling between me and work.
This includes living in Cincinnati, which is not known for having much in terms of mass transit or bike routes.
I think the only time I've declined an interview solely on the basis of transportation concerns it was neither drivable nor bikeable.
I was worried at one point that I might be suffering from a myopia because I somehow accidentally stumbled into a series of easy-to-bike jobs, but I checked the transportation statistics and discovered random statistics like that 60% of all car trips are under 5 miles.
And yes, I have biked at -20F and windy as well as 100F and humid. In order for me to be here today, my ancestors likely needed to run many miles in both conditions to outrun tigers, chase buffalo off cliffs, and other such tasks. Without the benefits of modern technology.
So, yeah. I don't expect every single person to be able to easily bike all of their trips. One of my co-workers used to live atop a mountain, for example. And sometimes I carry cargo that doesn't fit on my bike. (although in those cases I usually wish for a bakfiets) But I do see that there is a fairly large bunch of people who can bike at least some of their trips with no infrastructure improvements. It's just that most of them are still stuck thinking that it's actually hard to do.
The problem is that just because it's paraffin and an oxidizer doesn't mean it's that much simpler or that much safer than a liquid fueled rocket. Instead of two sets of plumbing, you have one set, but that's still rocket plumbing and it's still awfully troublesome.
Consider how Scaled Composites made a big deal about how safe their rubber+nitrous oxide hybrid engines were.... and then killed a few people in a nitrous oxide plumbing accident while working on SpaceShipTwo.
Damn you for ruining my nerdy railgun fantasies.
I bet next you are going to tell me that girls don't like it when I talk nerdy to them? :D
See, this is what fascinates me the most. Even among people who claim to be atheist, cars are a religious thing, afforded faith beyond logic or rational thought that even mystical things are denied.
So, tell me, how was my wife supposed to avoid the driver who was on their cellphone who ran into my car from behind, totaling it? Your argument that you haven't had an accident in 20 years because you are driving carefully has about as much reality as the person who lived to 100 while smoking a pack a day saying that they smoked carefully. It's irrational and a perfect example of how your religious fervor for the Car as your Savior.
Nor was I telling you to get rid of your car. There is not a magical anti-car field preventing you from driving to a train station. Or riding a bike, where you can travel at least four times faster without breaking a sweat.
Mostly, after examining transportation statistics and applying them to my personal habits, I realized that if you avoid driving a car unless forced, you can burn the same amount of gasoline than a hybrid driver. Except that I come out ahead fiscally and actually discovered that I've got more time than before.
Nor do you understand that rail is a more efficient use of space. Four lanes in each direction with the accompanying noise and pollution as compared to a pair of rail lines that can be buried or surrounded by trees or otherwise gotten out of the way.
Nor do you realize that there is not a magical anti-train field preventing them from building a closer rail line. See, the same network effects that make the Internet work better when more people are on it also apply to the trains.
The problem is that there are a lot of people in America who refuse to consider that there might be a more efficient way to run things. Because you may not whisper incantations to it every morning or spend a good hour attending to it every Sunday, but you worship your car with the fervor of the most annoying televangelist.
You know, my shelter-from-bad-weather while biking is under a pound in weight and fits nicely in my bike bag. It's the latest in space age technology. It's called a waterproof jacket, a pair of waterproof pants, a pair of clear sunglasses, and a fender for the front tire. And a hood-like thing called a Balaclava.
Actually, I wish I'd realized how not-hard it all is at an earlier age. I stopped biking when I was in college when it was raining or snowing and there was no reason why I should have.
Going long distances is another matter... but it is a lot easier carrying a bike in a rail car, bus, aircraft, or other such form of transportation than it is to fit a car in the same sort of vehicle.
Insisting that one form of transportation must necessarily do all things that you can presently do with a car is poor reasoning.
Is there a magical light rail repulsion field around the residential or industrial parts of town?
Given that your tax money goes to fund infrastructure, you might as well ask that it be spent intelligently.
See, but you aren't seeing it as a system.
If you elect me Wirehead, dictator of America, I could have my jack booted thugs march into every suitable factory of the land and produce an awesome inter/intracity rail system in short order so good that nobody would ever need a car again. Same way we produced Liberty Ships in WWII. And then my jack booted thugs would destroy every single car.
But, until people start signing my petition and stop calling the police and telling them that they had a meeting with Napoleon, different measures are required.
It is only when you stack the capabilities of several car-alternatives that you reach a tower of possibilities to match the car.
But... ehrm... rail's awfully nice. :)
I don't think you understood what I said.
Consider a gridlocked 4-lane highway, loaded with cars, all carrying a single person.
Now, put all of those single people in a more appropriately sized vehicle that takes a quarter of the pavement space. Or put four people in each car, instead of one. Either way... that's the waste of pavement space.
There are plenty of ways to fix that (and other) wastes inherent in our present system of transportation. Electric cars may solve a few problems with the car the way we presently construct and use it, but they pretty much ignore a wide variety of other problems.
And, really... if there's enough transportation demand for 4-lanes of gridlock, there's enough demand for mass transportation.