21654. (a) Notwithstanding the prima facie speed limits, any vehicle proceeding upon a highway at a speed less than the normal speed of traffic moving in the same direction at such time shall be driven in the right-hand lane for traffic or as close as practicable to the right-hand edge or curb, except when overtaking and passing another vehicle proceeding in the same direction or when preparing for a left turn at an intersection or into a private road or driveway.
Let us take "the normal speed of traffic" to mean the median speed. If you're among the slower 50% of the drivers on the road, then according to the law I quoted and linked to above, you must drive in the rightmost lane.
Some enlightened states (CT, MA, NJ, RI, TX) take it even further by prohibiting passing on the right in some cases, thereby giving authority to ticket motorists driving slowly in the left lane because they are obstructing traffic.
Instead they impose unreasonably low speed limits that ensure there will be a greater discrepancy in vehicle speed on the highway.
That wouldn't be a safety problem if they were to start enforcing "keep right except to pass" laws. This is one reason why the Autobahn is safe despite the lack of speed limits.
The humble Ford Model T cost about 1 cent a mile to operate --- in an era when a streetcar ticket cost 5 cents.
Operating costs include not just gasoline but also maintenance, insurance, registration, and parking.
Other costs of owning a car include depreciation, loan servicing, and the opportunity cost of capital.
And then there are hidden costs such as air pollution, carbon emissions, the urban heat island effect, sales and property taxes to build and maintain the roads, and the loss of freedom (and loss of capital utility) to own a home or business without the government forcing you to overbuild your parking lot.
Far fewer people would drive if not for all of these government incentives and coercion to drive.
Our regular-speed rail is subsidized, but the closest thing we have to high speed rail, Amtrak's Acela Express, made a profit of about $41 per passenger in 2008.
Because of inflation, $33 billion in 2008 is the same as $35.2 billion in 2013 dollars. And $68.4 billion in YOE dollars is the same as $54.5 billion in 2013. So yes, the estimated price has increased somewhat, even after accounting for inflation, but it hasn't really doubled.
And if 220 mph from Palmdale to San Jose (this is the Initial Operating Section which is scheduled to be operational in 2022) isn't high speed, then what is?
So many billions would probably pay for an extra/improved airport or two.
The alternative to building California's HSR is spending $38.6 to $41.0 billion on 115 new airport gates and 4 new runways, plus $119.0 to $145.5 billion building 4,295 to 4,652 new lane-miles of highway, all just to move the same number of people as $98.1 billion spent on HSR.
It's neither going to be "high speed" nor actually in the cities that it is supposedly to linking.
The above statement is only partially true. In 2022, the Initial Operating Section will run at full speed (220 mph or 350 km/h) from San Jose to Palmdale, requiring a transfer to Caltrain in the north and Metrolink in the south.
Later in 2026 (Bay to Basin), the bookend from San Francisco to San Jose will run on electrified Caltrain tracks, eliminating a transfer at San Jose. And in 2029 (Phase 1 Blended), this bookend will run on dedicated HSR tracks.
The other bookend from Palmdale to Los Angeles will also be complete in 2029, eliminating the need to transfer to Metrolink.
Google Fiber is already free for Grandma who only wants to email, Facebook and Netflix one FullHD stream at a time.
What if she wants to upload 100 photos to her Facebook album without waiting 15 minutes? Or what if she wants to watch a Netflix SuperHD stream without it periodically rebuffering?
Bandwidth is not precious.
If bandwidth is not scarce, then MC>MR and Google has overbuilt their network. This fiscal inefficiency costs them and/or their customers money.
Better yet, charge by the megabyte during prime hours, and make it free at other times. Then people would schedule their torrents to run in the wee hours when it won't disturb their neighbors. It would also make Google Fiber cheaper for grandma who only needs e-mail and Facebook.
So what if you think this is the greatest cordless drill ever and the battery just goes forever. How do I know you are not basing that on a comparison with some cheap crap drill you bought in the mid 90s with a battery that shit the bed after a handful of recharges?
That's one reason why star ratings need to be replaced with a ranked voting system. In order for your vote to have meaning, you should have to rank it in comparison to competing products. Maybe you rank this new drill higher than the old one. Then the voting software would use the Condorcet method to rank everything from best to worst. Knowing that the drill ranks first out of 28 is more useful than knowing that it has a 5 star rating.
In this city, and many others, if you allow a proper distance between yourself and the car in front of you, people will just merge ahead of you until you're now tailgating.
If they merge without properly signaling and giving you time to brake to a safe distance, it would be an unsafe lane change, and you aren't liable if they suddenly brake. A reasonable course of action is to lift your foot off the gas for a few seconds to recreate your safe following buffer. Don't worry, you'll still be moving forward and making progress to your destination.
In fact, if the collision is partially elastic, the vehicle you're following could actually reverse its direction in a near-instantaneous manner.
If you're stopped and the vehicle in front reverses into you, then you aren't liable for the collision.
I at least hope you're not one of those left lane dicks that find some kind of sadistic pleasure in maintaining a "safe following distance" in the passing lane.
As long as I'm keeping up with the flow of traffic in that lane, why shouldn't I keep a safe following distance? "Safe following distance" is a linear measurement, not a velocity.
Captcha fulfills a need - it is, as the name implies, a test to completely automatically tell computers and humans apart. It's necessary to keep spambots from registering accounts and spamming the hell out of us.
I hardly ever see spam. My mail provider decided that the content of e-mail is its own Turing test. So why do we need Captcha anymore?
Where I live, poor people live in denser areas that have a lower infrastructure cost per dwelling unit than where wealthy people live, and that are close to taxpaying businesses. So I think you'll find that prioritizing repairs by ROI would keep tax revenue from leaving poor areas and subsidizing wealthy neighborhoods.
What incentive would a city or state have to fix anything?
Tax revenue. If you let a neighborhood fall into disrepair, property values plummet and so does property tax revenue. Therefore, cities should prioritize repairs based on ROI (the cost of the repair versus the increased tax revenue to the city), just like people do when they fix up their homes for resale.
In fact, I'd say it's fiscally irresponsible of cities not to use ROI to prioritize infrastructure projects.
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Let us take "the normal speed of traffic" to mean the median speed. If you're among the slower 50% of the drivers on the road, then according to the law I quoted and linked to above, you must drive in the rightmost lane.
Some enlightened states (CT, MA, NJ, RI, TX) take it even further by prohibiting passing on the right in some cases, thereby giving authority to ticket motorists driving slowly in the left lane because they are obstructing traffic.
That wouldn't be a safety problem if they were to start enforcing "keep right except to pass" laws. This is one reason why the Autobahn is safe despite the lack of speed limits.
Storing the data is pretty easy with cloud storage.
Crowdsourcing the license plate scanning would require a little creativity, but it could be done.
Operating costs include not just gasoline but also maintenance, insurance, registration, and parking.
Other costs of owning a car include depreciation, loan servicing, and the opportunity cost of capital.
And then there are hidden costs such as air pollution, carbon emissions, the urban heat island effect, sales and property taxes to build and maintain the roads, and the loss of freedom (and loss of capital utility) to own a home or business without the government forcing you to overbuild your parking lot.
Far fewer people would drive if not for all of these government incentives and coercion to drive.
It's easy for them to be financially sustainable because they were built with public money. Only one airport in the USA was ever financed privately.
They aren't profitable. Even if gas tax funds "were fully devoted to highways, total user fee revenue accounted for only 65 percent of all funds set aside for highways in 2007."
Our regular-speed rail is subsidized, but the closest thing we have to high speed rail, Amtrak's Acela Express, made a profit of about $41 per passenger in 2008.
The experience in other countries is the same. High speed rail subsidizes slower intercity lines.
Only Taiwan continued to lose money on HSR after their line became operational. But since then they refinanced the debt and the line is now making a profit.
High speed rail lines always break even operationally.
Because of inflation, $33 billion in 2008 is the same as $35.2 billion in 2013 dollars. And $68.4 billion in YOE dollars is the same as $54.5 billion in 2013. So yes, the estimated price has increased somewhat, even after accounting for inflation, but it hasn't really doubled.
And if 220 mph from Palmdale to San Jose (this is the Initial Operating Section which is scheduled to be operational in 2022) isn't high speed, then what is?
The alternative to building California's HSR is spending $38.6 to $41.0 billion on 115 new airport gates and 4 new runways, plus $119.0 to $145.5 billion building 4,295 to 4,652 new lane-miles of highway, all just to move the same number of people as $98.1 billion spent on HSR.
High speed rail generally doesn't get the same thorough screening as airline boarding, with the exception of the line that goes through the Chunnel.
False. The Initial Operating Section (220 mph or 350 km/h from San Jose to Palmdale) is scheduled to be operational in 2022, just nine years from now.
You must be thinking of the full build-out, from San Diego and Anaheim to San Francisco and Sacramento.
The above statement is only partially true. In 2022, the Initial Operating Section will run at full speed (220 mph or 350 km/h) from San Jose to Palmdale, requiring a transfer to Caltrain in the north and Metrolink in the south.
Later in 2026 (Bay to Basin), the bookend from San Francisco to San Jose will run on electrified Caltrain tracks, eliminating a transfer at San Jose. And in 2029 (Phase 1 Blended), this bookend will run on dedicated HSR tracks.
The other bookend from Palmdale to Los Angeles will also be complete in 2029, eliminating the need to transfer to Metrolink.
So you're saying they didn't overbuild their network because they got it on sale?
What if she wants to upload 100 photos to her Facebook album without waiting 15 minutes? Or what if she wants to watch a Netflix SuperHD stream without it periodically rebuffering?
If bandwidth is not scarce, then MC>MR and Google has overbuilt their network. This fiscal inefficiency costs them and/or their customers money.
Better yet, charge by the megabyte during prime hours, and make it free at other times. Then people would schedule their torrents to run in the wee hours when it won't disturb their neighbors. It would also make Google Fiber cheaper for grandma who only needs e-mail and Facebook.
That's one reason why star ratings need to be replaced with a ranked voting system. In order for your vote to have meaning, you should have to rank it in comparison to competing products. Maybe you rank this new drill higher than the old one. Then the voting software would use the Condorcet method to rank everything from best to worst. Knowing that the drill ranks first out of 28 is more useful than knowing that it has a 5 star rating.
Right, it's much safer to blow through a red light at 9pm than it is at 7am or 4pm.
Don't worry, the problem of people trying to charge their mobile devices in the middle of the road will solve itself fairly quickly.
If they merge without properly signaling and giving you time to brake to a safe distance, it would be an unsafe lane change, and you aren't liable if they suddenly brake. A reasonable course of action is to lift your foot off the gas for a few seconds to recreate your safe following buffer. Don't worry, you'll still be moving forward and making progress to your destination.
If you're stopped and the vehicle in front reverses into you, then you aren't liable for the collision.
As long as I'm keeping up with the flow of traffic in that lane, why shouldn't I keep a safe following distance? "Safe following distance" is a linear measurement, not a velocity.
I hardly ever see spam. My mail provider decided that the content of e-mail is its own Turing test. So why do we need Captcha anymore?
If you hadn't been tailgating ("the practice of driving on a road too close to a frontward vehicle, at a distance which does not guarantee that stopping to avoid collision is possible"), you wouldn't have had to swerve.
It's like the Seven Minute Abs scene in There's Something About Mary (transcript).
These are all humorous examples of violating the Zero-One-Infinity rule.
Where I live, poor people live in denser areas that have a lower infrastructure cost per dwelling unit than where wealthy people live, and that are close to taxpaying businesses. So I think you'll find that prioritizing repairs by ROI would keep tax revenue from leaving poor areas and subsidizing wealthy neighborhoods.
Tax revenue. If you let a neighborhood fall into disrepair, property values plummet and so does property tax revenue. Therefore, cities should prioritize repairs based on ROI (the cost of the repair versus the increased tax revenue to the city), just like people do when they fix up their homes for resale.
In fact, I'd say it's fiscally irresponsible of cities not to use ROI to prioritize infrastructure projects.