I've also noticed that, for some reason, NJ drivers on the Skyway go faster when it's raining. It's like they think "This is dangerous, so the faster I get through it the safer I'll be."
NJ drivers just go faster on the Skyway, period. The speed limit there is 40, IIRC, and it's one of the speed limits that I actually agree with. The actual speed seems closer to 70 or 75 (no place for cops to hide, and photo radar is illegal in NJ thank God).
Sure, you *could* move tanks on the Interstates across the country, but you would never want to, given that tanks make Hummers look fuel efficient.
Not to mention that the treads on tanks only last a few hundred miles, especially on hard asphalt surfaces. *Driving* the tanks would be a really wasteful and pointless way of moving them outside of a battle zone. Far better to load them onto flatbed tractor/trailers.
This isn't even mentioning that tanks need a lot of spare parts (treads, etc) to keep working reliably - it's not like you can just hop in an M1A1 and drive it cross country...
Sprawl and Suburbia: Now we are faced with sprawl and suburbia. While some may find this a good thing, I personally prefer the European lifestyle in large built-up cities. Suburbia is not self-sustaining. A public transportation system is not feasible in surubria. Do you know of a suburb that is not next to a city? If so, it's not called a suburb, but a rural area.
Wasn't sprawl and suburbia considered a good thing in the 50s? After all, that was the age of nuclear fear. If people and industry were more spread out, it would be more difficult for the Soviets to hit the US with a crippling nuclear attack...
For example, the new Accela trains can go fast but the track isn't good enough for most stretches. (Also I think the towns they go through don't allow the trains to run at full speed). In addition the track is shared with slower trains. In the end, for the stretch from Boston to NY, there's only a short stretch where the trains run at full speed.
Several reasons for that:
(1) The trains are overweight due to unrealistic Federal crash protection regulations. It would be far better to focus more on crash prevention rather than setting stupid standards for crash strength. The excess pork limits their max acceleration, so they might not be able to reach their top speed, even on a stretch of track that can support it.
(2) The trains' tilting ability is limited by their being 4 inches too wide to tilt to their full extent. Not sure if that's a problem with the track construction being incorrect, or the specs for the trains changing during construction.
(3) Track quality, as said before.
A far better solution in the US would be lighter electric or diesel multiple-unit trains that can run as 80-100 mph, but do so more consistently and have good acceleration when starting out from a station. Something like the IC3 FlexLiner would be great, IMHO.
4. Cars are not a luxury anymore, but rather a necessity.
That's a *benefit*?! Yes, driving is fun. As I said before, *having* to drive sucks royally for a variety of reasons.
5. American teens can break out of their shell when they turn 16.
Even if they weren't able to drive, they'd still break out of their shells. If fewer people drove, more people would live in denser conditions, where it's possible to walk or bicycle to places worth going to. Being able to drive is a sign of coming of age. It does not in itself make you come of age...
Someone else has already squished (2), so allow me to reference information pertaining to the use of highways as landing strips.
Only sort of squished. Basically, trains are better at moving some things than highways - tanks are wide and a transport of tanks on the highway would be slow, unwieldly, and block traffic. Not to mention requiring a driver for each truck, rather than a train crew of 3 or 4 for a freight train carrying, say, 20 tanks (plus military guards if needed).
All this being said, wide highways have one important advantage over railways - their ability to withstand damage. It's a lot easier to cause steel rails to be bent or broken enough to cause a derailment. It's somewhat more difficult to render a concrete and asphalt road completely impassable, especially by an all-wheel-driven military 1-tonner. You can even route *around* damage on local roads if a bridge is blown up or something. Try that with a freight train...
I can attest to the fact that it is not uncommon to take 3 hours to transit across 5-10mi of city (non-insterstate) traffic in Chicago.
Then there's nothing wrong with putting an exit every mile or so in a city. Unfortunately, urban exits seem to be spaced even closer together - it seems that I-676 in Philly has one every 1/4 mile or so. By "populated areas", I was talking about urban *and* suburban areas - there's no need for every town of 30,000 people to have 4 or 5 expressway exits dedicated to it when 1 or 2 (for redundancy) will do.
That's one thing that the designers of the NJ Turnpike did right - outside of the immediate NYC area, exits are generally 5 to 10 miles apart and closer to 20 miles on the last southern stretch. (The 5-10 mi. interval actually used to be longer before they added exits 7A and 8A). As much as people complain about Turnpike traffic, it's not half as bad as places liek the DC area, where people jump on and off the highway every mile.
I can't see how that would be possible unless you're talking about people with $100,000 cars and studio apartments, or people with moderst homes, multiple SUVs, and 50-mile commutes.
Let's say 3 cars, and you're making payments on all at $250/month. That's $9000/yr. Assuming each is driven 10,000 miles/yr and all 3 get 25 mpg. That's 30,000 miles / 25 mpg = 1200 gallons of gas @ $3/gal = $3600/yr. Add to that insurance at $2000/yr. Oil changes and misc stuff that isn't under warranty - say another $1000.
We're up to $15600. Quite a chunk of change, and maybe more than some houses...
No thanks, I'll stick with my car. I couldn't even possibly imagine how people that take trains go grocery shopping.
You order the staples (milk, bread, veggies, etc), and they get delivered to you regularly. "Special" items can always get picked up when you need them - and it's surprising how much a bike with panniers can carry.
Not to mention the Normandy Road, which is a 15-mile military railroad from an inland naval station (NWS Earle) in NJ to the docks at Atlantic Highlands. They use it to transport ammunition and bulky ship components...
I'm going camping this weekend with my wife and kid. I don't see how I could bring all the gear we need onto a train - it surely wouldn't be allowed on an Amtrak ( I've ridden them before, I know ).
Well, that's due to the dumbass designs of Amtrak railcars, not to any inherent flaw in rail transport. When I took the train from London to Edinburgh in the 90s to go biking and camping in Scotland, a few of the cars had a baggage space in front where you could put heavy and bulky items.
Now, maybe this won't fly in the US today due to paranoia about terrorism... but maybe attitudes will change. After all, Britain 10 or 20 years ago had just as much to worry about, what with the IRA "troubles."
To further agitate the issue, law enforcement and insurance companies have too much forgiveness: four tickets/year allowed (in TX), defensive driving courses (what a joke).
Well, considering the amount of towns that set speed limits too low or put 4-way stop signs everywhere and then derive their revenue from this, 4 tickets/yr sounds just about right. Now, if some sort of uniform state standard for speed laws were established and speeding less than 25% over the limit didn't go on your record (fine only), I'd totally agree with you.
I wouldn't drive to work every day if I had an alternative.
Can't argue with that - I take the train into NYC (1/2 hr) and bike to the station. Driving is fun. *Having* to drive sucks.
The change "will" happen, and the more people drag their heels the less time we have to do it quickly and efficiently. It's time to put that mandate back into place and drag America into the 21st century. Yes it will cost money and yes people will bitch about speed limit signs changing for all of a month until they get used to it.
What's the actual advantage, apart from special speedometers for US use not having to be made anymore. People are used to it, and it works just fine. Why should everything in the world be exactly homogenized, standardized, and boredomized?
I kid, I kid! Actually, I live in PA. At least your roads get paved once in a while...
Heh. I used to live near Philly, and roads were either not paved in the last 50 yrs or under perpetual construction, so I hear 'ya.:-P
NJ isn't that bad - it's just that we have a lot of really *old* infrastructure that needs replacement more than anything else. (The Pulaski Skyway aka Rt. 1&9 was the first freeway in the US - built in the 1920s with left-hand entrance ramps about 2 inches long.) Newer roads like Rt. 78 are actually pretty good and well maintained.
Compare the population density of Germany to that of the US!
Right, except the Northeast is practically as dense, and thus could use a decent transit system. Unfortunately, what we have is a bunch of not-too-well-connected systems run by local authorities (there are no local direct trains between NYC and Philly, for example) and Amtrak, which is a sorry excuse for a joke.
I don't think that "high-speed rail" is the answer yet, either. What we need is, first of all, a reform of Federal railroad regulations to place more emphasis on crash avoidance and less on crash mitigation. The strength regs for railcars in the US nowadays result in trains that are heavy, inefficient, and expensive to run.
After that is done, we need trains (electric or self-powered diesel cars) that are capable of accelerating quickly after stops and running consistently quickly (80-100 mph) on *existing* trackage. In addition, the cars need to be designed efficiently (3 doors per side?) to minimize stop times. Believe it or not, a significant portion of time in rail schedules is lost by just stopping and then accelerating back up to track speed.
The current state of things is disgraceful - Amtrak from NYC to DC takes about 3hr. Krakow to Warsaw, Poland is about the same distance, and took about 2 1/2 hr (with one stop) when I was there in 1997. This wasn't a high-speed train - this was with old electric (and steam still, in some cases) engines, and cars that looked like they were built in the 50ies.
Well, let's be a little fair here. Yes, the autobahn is way better than the interstate system.
Is it? The ones that I've seen seemed to be twistier and narrower than US rural expressways. Not to mention the odd mix of slow trucks keeping right combined with cars barreling down the hammer lane. I think the fact that the Autobahns are as safe as US interstates is due to (a) higher standards of driver education in Germany, (b) stricter enforcement of laws that actually *matter*, like prohibiting use of the left lanes by vehicles that aren't passing, and (c) the fact that a lower percentage of Germans drive, and there is a good public transit system that is an alternative to driving - something that is sorely lacking in most of the US.
Without those exits though, the roads would be much less useful. Whats the point of having an interstate if it takes you 3 hours just to get to it?
That's taking it to an extreme, IMHO. I think the parent poster is talking about spacing exits on expressways every 5-10 miles rather than every mile or two (or even less) as is often the case in populated areas in the US. Especially when the road is only two lanes each way, having cars constantly merging on and off really slows down traffic, and discourages use of the right lane. This clogs the *left* lane and defeats its primary purpose as a passing lane.
Florida and Georgia held out on sequential exit numbering for a long time - but as far as I know, everything is mile marked now.
The NJ Turnpike - I-95 north of exit 6 - is still sequential. Which means, as exits were added, you got exit numbers with an alphabet soup of letters afterwards, especially near NYC. You have 15E, 15W, 15X, etc... To add to the confusion, there are actually *two* routings of the Turnpike near the Lincoln Tunnel, spaced about 3 miles apart!
May I point out that, although totalitarian regimes _do_ violate human rights and mis-use laws against dissidents, sometimes they actually have to solve an actual problem? E.g., even Stalin's USSR and Mao's China at their darkest hour, while they did have a some of the most brutal suppression of dissidents, they also had laws to deal with plain old crimes like theft, embezzlement, murder, etc.
Except the differences between the penalties under the ordinary and 'political' laws in the USSR (and I am sure Mao's China) were grossly out of proportion. Kill someone? Get 10 years in the camps. Violate Article 58 (the catch-all law used for political crimes)? Get at least 10 years in the camps, or the death penalty. And section 58 also provided for the punishment of violators' families with up to 5 years' imprisonment.
This isn't even mentioning that political offenders were treated worse than 'normal' criminals in the prison camps.
. Is it good if China executes a spammer, but does so in it's new fleet of mobile lethal injection vans and harvests the organs for sale?
Ugh. Creepy. Not to invoke Godwin's Law, but as someone whose family was in Poland during the Holocaust (and quite a few of them were killed in the camps), this hits a bit close to home. State-sponsored killing is still killing, no matter how much we try to sugar-coat and medicalize it. Personally, I prefer the bullet to the back of the neck. At least it's honest - there's no doubt that someone's being slaugtered in cold blood rather than being subjected to a 'medical' procedure. Not to mention being quicker and more certain (easier to find the back of the neck rather than poking around for 5 min trying to find a good vein in a convict that's shaking with fear).
The fact that doctors (who should be healers, not killers) are involved in this perversion in China makes it that much more atrocious. The more I think about it, the more I think that the people running the show in China are the only ones who may deserve such 'treatment.'
harvesting organs from people to whom you've just given a lethal injection.. someone over there needs to retake Police State Governance 101.
Sadly, it is possible. At least in the US, the lethal injection is actually two injections in series. The first one is a fast-acting general anaesthetic and knocks the victim out. The second one is a poison that stops the heart. Between steps 1 and 2, harvesting the unconscious prisoner's organs is possible without poisoning the receipient.
Of course, knowing the Chinese, they might not go for such niceties as the first injection. Just tie the prisoner down in a soundproof room, harvest whatever can be removed, and then give whatever is left the second injection.
Surely, according to the religious nutcases, the min. age for seeing nekkid bewbage should be 0... since G-d meant for breastfeeding to happen and all that...:-P
s. Oklahoma makes Texas look like a liberal oasis.
Isn't Texas the place where possession of dildos with intent to sell is a felony?
A coupla years ago, some woman who was in the sex-toy-party business got nabbed for drunk driving. In the impound yard, they found a large quantity of sex toys in the car, so the police also charged her with a felony (iirc punishable by 10 or so years in prison).
Federal law required that internet access at public high schools (and, for that matter, at public libraries) to be filtered for inappropriate content.
Actually, Federal law does *not* require this across the board. It only requires it if the school or library applies for Federal funds. Kind of like the 55 mph speed limit - if you set a higher limit, you lost 10% of your highway funds or whatever.
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NJ drivers just go faster on the Skyway, period. The speed limit there is 40, IIRC, and it's one of the speed limits that I actually agree with. The actual speed seems closer to 70 or 75 (no place for cops to hide, and photo radar is illegal in NJ thank God).
-b.
Not to mention that the treads on tanks only last a few hundred miles, especially on hard asphalt surfaces. *Driving* the tanks would be a really wasteful and pointless way of moving them outside of a battle zone. Far better to load them onto flatbed tractor/trailers.
This isn't even mentioning that tanks need a lot of spare parts (treads, etc) to keep working reliably - it's not like you can just hop in an M1A1 and drive it cross country...
-b.
Wasn't sprawl and suburbia considered a good thing in the 50s? After all, that was the age of nuclear fear. If people and industry were more spread out, it would be more difficult for the Soviets to hit the US with a crippling nuclear attack...
-b.
Several reasons for that:
(1) The trains are overweight due to unrealistic Federal crash protection regulations. It would be far better to focus more on crash prevention rather than setting stupid standards for crash strength. The excess pork limits their max acceleration, so they might not be able to reach their top speed, even on a stretch of track that can support it.
(2) The trains' tilting ability is limited by their being 4 inches too wide to tilt to their full extent. Not sure if that's a problem with the track construction being incorrect, or the specs for the trains changing during construction.
(3) Track quality, as said before.
A far better solution in the US would be lighter electric or diesel multiple-unit trains that can run as 80-100 mph, but do so more consistently and have good acceleration when starting out from a station. Something like the IC3 FlexLiner would be great, IMHO.
That's a *benefit*?! Yes, driving is fun. As I said before, *having* to drive sucks royally for a variety of reasons.
5. American teens can break out of their shell when they turn 16.
Even if they weren't able to drive, they'd still break out of their shells. If fewer people drove, more people would live in denser conditions, where it's possible to walk or bicycle to places worth going to. Being able to drive is a sign of coming of age. It does not in itself make you come of age...
-b.
Only sort of squished. Basically, trains are better at moving some things than highways - tanks are wide and a transport of tanks on the highway would be slow, unwieldly, and block traffic. Not to mention requiring a driver for each truck, rather than a train crew of 3 or 4 for a freight train carrying, say, 20 tanks (plus military guards if needed).
All this being said, wide highways have one important advantage over railways - their ability to withstand damage. It's a lot easier to cause steel rails to be bent or broken enough to cause a derailment. It's somewhat more difficult to render a concrete and asphalt road completely impassable, especially by an all-wheel-driven military 1-tonner. You can even route *around* damage on local roads if a bridge is blown up or something. Try that with a freight train...
-b.
Then there's nothing wrong with putting an exit every mile or so in a city. Unfortunately, urban exits seem to be spaced even closer together - it seems that I-676 in Philly has one every 1/4 mile or so. By "populated areas", I was talking about urban *and* suburban areas - there's no need for every town of 30,000 people to have 4 or 5 expressway exits dedicated to it when 1 or 2 (for redundancy) will do.
That's one thing that the designers of the NJ Turnpike did right - outside of the immediate NYC area, exits are generally 5 to 10 miles apart and closer to 20 miles on the last southern stretch. (The 5-10 mi. interval actually used to be longer before they added exits 7A and 8A). As much as people complain about Turnpike traffic, it's not half as bad as places liek the DC area, where people jump on and off the highway every mile.
-b.
Let's say 3 cars, and you're making payments on all at $250/month. That's $9000/yr. Assuming each is driven 10,000 miles/yr and all 3 get 25 mpg. That's 30,000 miles / 25 mpg = 1200 gallons of gas @ $3/gal = $3600/yr. Add to that insurance at $2000/yr. Oil changes and misc stuff that isn't under warranty - say another $1000.
We're up to $15600. Quite a chunk of change, and maybe more than some houses...
-b.
You order the staples (milk, bread, veggies, etc), and they get delivered to you regularly. "Special" items can always get picked up when you need them - and it's surprising how much a bike with panniers can carry.
-b.
Minor nitpick, but you've never seen trains moving tanks?
http://www.jefflawson.net/stuff/m1a1train.jpg
Not to mention the Normandy Road, which is a 15-mile military railroad from an inland naval station (NWS Earle) in NJ to the docks at Atlantic Highlands. They use it to transport ammunition and bulky ship components...
-b.
Well, that's due to the dumbass designs of Amtrak railcars, not to any inherent flaw in rail transport. When I took the train from London to Edinburgh in the 90s to go biking and camping in Scotland, a few of the cars had a baggage space in front where you could put heavy and bulky items.
Now, maybe this won't fly in the US today due to paranoia about terrorism ... but maybe attitudes will change. After all, Britain 10 or 20 years ago had just as much to worry about, what with the IRA "troubles."
-b.
Well, considering the amount of towns that set speed limits too low or put 4-way stop signs everywhere and then derive their revenue from this, 4 tickets/yr sounds just about right. Now, if some sort of uniform state standard for speed laws were established and speeding less than 25% over the limit didn't go on your record (fine only), I'd totally agree with you.
I wouldn't drive to work every day if I had an alternative.
Can't argue with that - I take the train into NYC (1/2 hr) and bike to the station. Driving is fun. *Having* to drive sucks.
-b.
What's the actual advantage, apart from special speedometers for US use not having to be made anymore. People are used to it, and it works just fine. Why should everything in the world be exactly homogenized, standardized, and boredomized?
-b.
Heh. I used to live near Philly, and roads were either not paved in the last 50 yrs or under perpetual construction, so I hear 'ya. :-P
NJ isn't that bad - it's just that we have a lot of really *old* infrastructure that needs replacement more than anything else. (The Pulaski Skyway aka Rt. 1&9 was the first freeway in the US - built in the 1920s with left-hand entrance ramps about 2 inches long.) Newer roads like Rt. 78 are actually pretty good and well maintained.
-b.
Right, except the Northeast is practically as dense, and thus could use a decent transit system. Unfortunately, what we have is a bunch of not-too-well-connected systems run by local authorities (there are no local direct trains between NYC and Philly, for example) and Amtrak, which is a sorry excuse for a joke.
I don't think that "high-speed rail" is the answer yet, either. What we need is, first of all, a reform of Federal railroad regulations to place more emphasis on crash avoidance and less on crash mitigation. The strength regs for railcars in the US nowadays result in trains that are heavy, inefficient, and expensive to run.
After that is done, we need trains (electric or self-powered diesel cars) that are capable of accelerating quickly after stops and running consistently quickly (80-100 mph) on *existing* trackage. In addition, the cars need to be designed efficiently (3 doors per side?) to minimize stop times. Believe it or not, a significant portion of time in rail schedules is lost by just stopping and then accelerating back up to track speed.
The current state of things is disgraceful - Amtrak from NYC to DC takes about 3hr. Krakow to Warsaw, Poland is about the same distance, and took about 2 1/2 hr (with one stop) when I was there in 1997. This wasn't a high-speed train - this was with old electric (and steam still, in some cases) engines, and cars that looked like they were built in the 50ies.
-b.
Is it? The ones that I've seen seemed to be twistier and narrower than US rural expressways. Not to mention the odd mix of slow trucks keeping right combined with cars barreling down the hammer lane. I think the fact that the Autobahns are as safe as US interstates is due to (a) higher standards of driver education in Germany, (b) stricter enforcement of laws that actually *matter*, like prohibiting use of the left lanes by vehicles that aren't passing, and (c) the fact that a lower percentage of Germans drive, and there is a good public transit system that is an alternative to driving - something that is sorely lacking in most of the US.
-b.
That's taking it to an extreme, IMHO. I think the parent poster is talking about spacing exits on expressways every 5-10 miles rather than every mile or two (or even less) as is often the case in populated areas in the US. Especially when the road is only two lanes each way, having cars constantly merging on and off really slows down traffic, and discourages use of the right lane. This clogs the *left* lane and defeats its primary purpose as a passing lane.
-b.
The NJ Turnpike - I-95 north of exit 6 - is still sequential. Which means, as exits were added, you got exit numbers with an alphabet soup of letters afterwards, especially near NYC. You have 15E, 15W, 15X, etc... To add to the confusion, there are actually *two* routings of the Turnpike near the Lincoln Tunnel, spaced about 3 miles apart!
-b.
Except the differences between the penalties under the ordinary and 'political' laws in the USSR (and I am sure Mao's China) were grossly out of proportion. Kill someone? Get 10 years in the camps. Violate Article 58 (the catch-all law used for political crimes)? Get at least 10 years in the camps, or the death penalty. And section 58 also provided for the punishment of violators' families with up to 5 years' imprisonment.
This isn't even mentioning that political offenders were treated worse than 'normal' criminals in the prison camps.
-b.
Ugh. Creepy. Not to invoke Godwin's Law, but as someone whose family was in Poland during the Holocaust (and quite a few of them were killed in the camps), this hits a bit close to home. State-sponsored killing is still killing, no matter how much we try to sugar-coat and medicalize it. Personally, I prefer the bullet to the back of the neck. At least it's honest - there's no doubt that someone's being slaugtered in cold blood rather than being subjected to a 'medical' procedure. Not to mention being quicker and more certain (easier to find the back of the neck rather than poking around for 5 min trying to find a good vein in a convict that's shaking with fear).
The fact that doctors (who should be healers, not killers) are involved in this perversion in China makes it that much more atrocious. The more I think about it, the more I think that the people running the show in China are the only ones who may deserve such 'treatment.'
-b.
Sadly, it is possible. At least in the US, the lethal injection is actually two injections in series. The first one is a fast-acting general anaesthetic and knocks the victim out. The second one is a poison that stops the heart. Between steps 1 and 2, harvesting the unconscious prisoner's organs is possible without poisoning the receipient.
Of course, knowing the Chinese, they might not go for such niceties as the first injection. Just tie the prisoner down in a soundproof room, harvest whatever can be removed, and then give whatever is left the second injection.
-b.
No kidding? Couldn't you tell that my tongue was firmly in cheek on that one?
Cheers,
-b.
Surely, according to the religious nutcases, the min. age for seeing nekkid bewbage should be 0 ... since G-d meant for breastfeeding to happen and all that... :-P
-b.
Isn't Texas the place where possession of dildos with intent to sell is a felony?
A coupla years ago, some woman who was in the sex-toy-party business got nabbed for drunk driving. In the impound yard, they found a large quantity of sex toys in the car, so the police also charged her with a felony (iirc punishable by 10 or so years in prison).
-b.
Actually, Federal law does *not* require this across the board. It only requires it if the school or library applies for Federal funds. Kind of like the 55 mph speed limit - if you set a higher limit, you lost 10% of your highway funds or whatever.
-b.