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Install Gentoo posted:It's also not taking away 2/3 of the traffic lanes, there were 6 lanes before, 2 used for parking, leaving 4 through traffic lanes. There's now 5 traffic lanes, with 3 through traffic lanes, and the bike lane is a turning lane at intersections where you can make a left turn. Sounds to me like one of those parking lanes should go.
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May 9, 2012 19:06
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grover posted:Know what strikes me the most about this? A lot of cars, an utter lack of any bicycles, and a lot of wasted space. How is taking 2/3 of the traffic lanes away for bicycles justified when the # of cars clearly way outnumbers the number of bicycles? (Seriously, I can only count five cars in motion in all of of those pictures)
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May 9, 2012 19:38
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Mandalay posted:Sounds to me like one of those parking lanes should go. They've been doing these things called 'Road diets' here in So Cal. Our town has a fairly busy road that used to be 4 lanes, 2 in each direction, with parking on either side. It was a bit of a nightmare for anyone driving, walking, or biking, especially around the college. Bikes were forced into the door zone, and cars would make wild, risky u-turns all over the place to find parking. What they did was take it down to 3 lanes, 1 in each direction with the 3rd in the middle being a dedicated turning lane in either direction. The extra space created has been used to give a buffer zone for drivers and passengers getting in and out of vehicles, and keeping the bike lane out of the door zone. There's a 1 metre wide lane between the parking and the bike lane which provides this. It's great, as a lot of cyclists used it anyway to get off the even busier road one block away, and this way everyone is protected. Traffic moves as fast or faster in each lane as turning cars aren't stopping randomly in the lane while looking for a park as they can now move into the turn lane if need be.
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May 9, 2012 19:51
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Mandalay posted:Sounds to me like one of those parking lanes should go. Why should they go? Seriously what reason is there to remove them?
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May 9, 2012 21:45
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Midget Fist posted:They've been doing these things called 'Road diets' here in So Cal.
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May 9, 2012 22:03
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Install Gentoo posted:Why should they go? I don't know why publicly subsidized parking, when there are ample parking lots scattered around Manhattan's CBD, takes precedent over traffic lanes for cars and bikes. It's not like you have the luxury of space, and maybe people who park should pay for the full extent of the costs of parking as determined by the private market. On street parking also increases congestion unless everyone can find parking (which will never happen in NYC): http://www.uctc.net/access/38/access38_free_parking_markets.pdf posted:when researchers interviewed drivers stopped at traffic signals in New York City in 2006 and 2007, they found that 28 percent of the drivers on a street in Manhattan and 45 percent on a street in Brooklyn were cruising for curb parking. I imagine that on-street parking also reduces throughput for adjacent lanes (i.e. on-street parking is a traffic calming device). Midget Fist posted:They've been doing these things called 'Road diets' here in So Cal
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May 9, 2012 22:08
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Mandalay posted:I don't know why publicly subsidized parking, when there are ample parking lots scattered around Manhattan's CBD, takes precedent over traffic lanes for cars and bikes. It's not like you have the luxury of space, and maybe people who park should pay for the full extent of the costs of parking as determined by the private market. You're honestly making no sense. Have you ever been to New York City before? What makes you think there isn't enough traffic lanes for cars and bikes - especially for the bikes why would we need two bike lanes on each the avenues? And this isn't the central business district either, it's Chelsea. Removing on street parking would do nothing to help anything. Adding back a travel lane wouldn't help traffic any either. Nintendo Kid fucked around with this message at 22:26 on May 9, 2012 |
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May 9, 2012 22:17
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Install Gentoo posted:You're honestly making no sense. Have you ever been to New York City before? What makes you think there isn't enough traffic lanes for cars and bikes? And this isn't the central business district either, it's Chelsea. Admittedly I haven't been back to NYC since I moved from there to CA back in the nineties, but I'm really confused by your contention that killing a parking lane to make it a traffic lane will not help congestion. Back to the original subject, I think that a parking lane (instead of a traffic lane) should be sacrificed to make for a dedicated bike lane. vvvvv: Saw that. Just very confused that traffic didn't get worse with one fewer travel lane. Mandalay fucked around with this message at 22:42 on May 9, 2012 |
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May 9, 2012 22:30
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Mandalay posted:Admittedly I haven't been back to NYC since I moved from there to CA back in the nineties, but I'm really confused by your contention that killing a parking lane to make it a traffic lane will not help congestion. Because NYC already killed a traffic lane to make room for a bike lane? And traffic didn't get worse with one fewer travel lane? There's a bike lane right there man! Did you miss it the first time or something?   Bike lane implemented^  Street before the bike lane, with diagram of the roadway afterwards^ Notice how there were 4 traffic lanes before, and 3 traffic lanes now? You can even see it on street view http://g.co/maps/g5rvd
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May 9, 2012 22:35
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Suffolk knows what's up when you have a road with no pavement and lots of bicyclists using it, give them priority over all other traffic. http://g.co/maps/ggdng
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May 10, 2012 01:14
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Mahmoud Ahmadinejad posted:Suffolk knows what's up when you have a road with no pavement and lots of bicyclists using it, give them priority over all other traffic. That's not the clearest signage I've ever seen - I imagine it's still pretty scary to be a cyclist on that road.
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May 10, 2012 01:45
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Mandalay posted:I wonder where this is--I live in SoCal. I live in Ventura. I know it's also going on in some places around LA, but only from reading the Biking in LA blog.
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May 10, 2012 06:35
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Cichlidae posted:-In some tunnels, especially in shallow ones, there are emergency staircases at regular intervals that go to the surface. If you're in the Gotthard Base Tunnel, you'll run into one about halfway through, but you'd better be ready to climb a thousand meters to get to the surface. The entire AlpTransit project is quite impressive. It's nice that at least one country looked at the pollution and other issues transporting everything by trucks causes and implemented a proper, comprehensive and fully funded rail solution. We desperatly need to shift the load from road to rail in other countries but road haulier lobbies... 
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May 10, 2012 13:46
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Munin posted:The entire AlpTransit project is quite impressive. It's nice that at least one country looked at the pollution and other issues transporting everything by trucks causes and implemented a proper, comprehensive and fully funded rail solution. This is true, Europe in general is rather far behind in rail transport compared to the US: "In the 1950s, the U.S. and Europe moved roughly the same percentage of freight by rail; but, by 2000, the share of U.S. rail freight was 38% while in Europe only 8% of freight traveled by rail.[3] In 1997, while U.S. trains moved 2,165 billion ton-kilometers of freight, the 15-nation European Union moved only 238 billion ton-kilometers of freight.[4]"
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May 10, 2012 13:59
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Install Gentoo posted:This is true, Europe in general is rather far behind in rail transport compared to the US: We have a lot of rivers, though.
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May 10, 2012 16:11
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Install Gentoo posted:This is true, Europe in general is rather far behind in rail transport compared to the US: We move a hell of a lot more passengers though.
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May 11, 2012 01:22
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Install Gentoo posted:This is true, Europe in general is rather far behind in rail transport compared to the US: Europe has very little overland cross continental bulk traffic though.
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May 11, 2012 01:38
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Koesj posted:Europe has very little overland cross continental bulk traffic though. You don't need bulk traffic to send stuff by train. Also 60 years ago the relative proportion of freight shipped by rail was identical in Europe and the US so clearly you lot have just stopped using freight rail as much.
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May 11, 2012 03:01
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Install Gentoo posted:You don't need bulk traffic to send stuff by train. Of course not, it's one of the key advantages of freight rail though. quote:Also 60 years ago the relative proportion of freight shipped by rail was identical in Europe and the US so clearly you lot have just stopped using freight rail as much. Cool, where's the stats? e: Never mind I found the relevant paper "We find that almost 80 percent of the gap in 2000 is probably due to natural or inherent differences, principally geography, shipment distance and commodity mix. A little more than a 20 percent of the gap cannot be explained by these inherent differences and is presumably due to public policies including priority of passenger service, lack of interoperability at borders, and incentives of the rail operators. We estimate that if that policy gap were closed railroads’ share of freight in Europe would almost double, increasing to 15 percent."* Koesj fucked around with this message at 13:59 on May 11, 2012 |
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May 11, 2012 13:52
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Jonnty posted:We move a hell of a lot more passengers though. Well yes, and this comment exemplifies the issue - Europe moves persons by train, America moves freight by train. Neither has yet to develop a mixed-mode system that makes attractive accommodation for both service classes, so Europe has specialized in persons and America in freight.
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May 11, 2012 15:08
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 (p.23) So that's that. I find their analysis on residual factors a bit lacking and on the count of policy matters almost disingenuous btw.
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May 11, 2012 15:18
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I'd also like to see a thing that lists the actual million ton-km shipped by other modes. Its not really the raw amount of ton-km shipped by rail that matters so much as it is the proportions. Oddly enough, I've had real problems trying to find any such info on trucking, as well as air freight and waterway-borne. Edit: This is from Eurostat and seems to indicate that the recently joined EU countries brought the rail share up a lot: 
Nintendo Kid fucked around with this message at 18:16 on May 11, 2012 |
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May 11, 2012 18:12
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Chaos Motor posted:Well yes, and this comment exemplifies the issue - Europe moves persons by train, America moves freight by train. Neither has yet to develop a mixed-mode system that makes attractive accommodation for both service classes, so Europe has specialized in persons and America in freight. Mixing fast and slow traffic also cuts capacity dramatically. You're really best off with two separate systems.
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May 13, 2012 12:33
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Jasper Tin Neck posted:Designing mixed mode-infrastructure is extremely hard though. Passenger rail stock usually has a high top speed and a high traction/weight ratio which means it doesn't handle sharp curves well but is insensitive to gradients. Cargo rail stock on the other hand is run with as low traction/weight ratios as possible because the top speed is much less important than economy. This means that they don't care so much about sharp curves as steep gradients. Britain does it pretty well - our premier intercity passenger lines, the East and West Coast Mainlines also see dozens of freight trains a day, many of them very heavy coal trains. We achieve it using lots of passing loops where freight trains can recess to allow passenger trains past, and avoiding lines at difficult locations like busy stations. Sometimes these lines are dedicated to freight, but sometimes they're just less frequent and slower passenger lines. I think this approach is pretty much the same as the rest of Europe's, though our volumes of passengers and freight per track mile tend to be higher I think.
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May 13, 2012 13:03
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Jasper Tin Neck posted:Designing mixed mode-infrastructure is extremely hard though. Passenger rail stock usually has a high top speed and a high traction/weight ratio which means it doesn't handle sharp curves well but is insensitive to gradients. Cargo rail stock on the other hand is run with as low traction/weight ratios as possible because the top speed is much less important than economy. This means that they don't care so much about sharp curves as steep gradients. That's how France does it: the LGV are completely separate, except within cities, where the TGV operates at low speed. Meanwhile, within the Chunnel and across the Manche, the track is already pretty much at capacity. Has England's 1st high speed line helped much with that?
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May 13, 2012 14:43
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Cichlidae posted:That's how France does it: the LGV are completely separate, except within cities, where the TGV operates at low speed. Meanwhile, within the Chunnel and across the Manche, the track is already pretty much at capacity. Has England's 1st high speed line helped much with that? I've only been on the domestic part of High Speed 1 once, and although it's great (London to Dover in just about an hour), I don't think it gets all that much traffic. HS1 was built primarily for the Eurostar, and even the new high speed service to the Kent coast is only uses HS1 as far as Ashford, then reverts back to the old line. HS1 will also be used during the olympics to ferry people between St Pancras and the olympic village at Stratford. It's only like 15 minutes and the Kent coast trains seem to have plenty of capacity to spare. I think the real capacity problems are north of London, the proposed HS2 line to Birmingham is meant to help with that much more. There's been quite a lot of opposition to it though, and I'm not read up enough to know if it's genuine concern or just NIMBYism.
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May 13, 2012 15:10
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What does it mean?  
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May 14, 2012 04:23
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Cichlidae posted:That's how France does it: the LGV are completely separate, except within cities, where the TGV operates at low speed. Meanwhile, within the Chunnel and across the Manche, the track is already pretty much at capacity. Has England's 1st high speed line helped much with that? Actually only roughly half of the passenger capacity is used up in the tunnel and it's even worse for freight - only 10% of paths are actually used by trains. There's a few problems - by treaty, rail services through the tunnel cannot be subsidised, making passenger crossings particularly expensive, and the freight figures fell last decade thanks to the unreliability of the British network in the post-privatisation era (fortunately the track owner was renationalised a few years ago and things are now looking up.) Also, there's loading gauge issues - mainland European trains are generally too big for the British network, which means you have to use either specially designed or British wagons for the journey, which is presumably wasteful if a lot of your journey is through the continental network. The Channel Tunnel has actually been disappointing in the long run in a lot of respects, and there's a few investigations going on as to what went wrong. It's being opened to other passenger operators like Deutsche Bahn soonish though, which might improve things and mean there's a few more destinations for passengers using the Tunnel. HS1 - the high-speed line from the tunnel to London - is also underutilised: I don't think the line's running anything close to capacity and passenger numbers are lower than expected. Freight's just started running however - as the line is built to the Continental loading gauge freight can make it to the depot near London before goods are transhipped to British wagons. Jonnty fucked around with this message at 09:48 on May 14, 2012 |
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May 14, 2012 09:46
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Zero One posted:What does it mean? It means stop if your car is yellow! Jonnty posted:HS1 - the high-speed line from the tunnel to London - is also underutilised Am I misremembering, or does HS1 have sidings for high speed trains to pass freight trains? It said that, because freight trains are slow, the actual capacity of the line is much lower than if it were passenger-only. Maybe I was thinking of the original line.
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May 14, 2012 12:27
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Cichlidae posted:Am I misremembering, or does HS1 have sidings for high speed trains to pass freight trains? It said that, because freight trains are slow, the actual capacity of the line is much lower than if it were passenger-only. Maybe I was thinking of the original line. I doubt it, lines built to LGV standards have no provision for non-high speed passenger traffic. The only exception is the channel tunnel itself, which is not LGV.
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May 14, 2012 12:38
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Cichlidae posted:It means stop if your car is yellow! Yes, the HS1 has passing loops to allow passenger trains to overtake. Otherwise, a freight train would effectively render the line useless for most of its passage along the line. They only started using it for freight very recently, and there's only two flows at the moment with a third on the way, so I can't imagine it's restricting capacity in any significant way, especially given the disappointing passenger figures. The original line wasn't so much a "line" as a route through the southern England railway network as far as I'm aware, so the bits used for freight will be just as suitable for it as anywhere else, and possibly specially cleared for higher containers. quote:I doubt it, lines built to LGV standards have no provision for non-high speed passenger traffic. The only exception is the channel tunnel itself, which is not LGV. Nor is HS1, which is British.
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May 14, 2012 13:19
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Btw, there is a D&D thread for UK train chat: http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3483456 And all the various ways in which the current UK system works/is totally hosed up.
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May 14, 2012 13:33
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Jonnty posted:Nor is HS1, which is British. Right, but it uses the TGV repere markers and in-cab signalling too, I thought it was built to those standards. EDIT: Thanks Munin, will check out!
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May 14, 2012 14:15
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PkerUNO posted:Right, but it uses the TGV repere markers and in-cab signalling too, I thought it was built to those standards. It does use TVM signalling (so does the Channel Tunnel) and is probably very similar to French high speed lines most other respects just for the sake of standardisation, but definitely has freight loops.
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May 14, 2012 14:29
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Carpocalypse Los Angeles is beginning soon. The real one, not that sissy one they had earlier. Where the 405 freeway meets Wilshire Boulevard there are eight ramps. There is an extraordinary amount of traffic here as it's the primary spot for north and southbound traffic to flow east and west through west Los Angeles. It's terrible. It's terrible due to the mind-blowing volume. It's terrible because entering and exiting traffic from the Santa Monica Boulevard exit just south weave together at all the ramps which is bad when cars are going 2mph and terrifying at 70mph. It's terrible because traffic jams up at all the ramps, under the freeway, down Sepulveda, down Wilshire. It's a knot of lead fueled steel pain.  So they're going to knock all the ramps down and rebuild them, some with flyovers to separate entering and exiting traffic, thank Christ. They're taking down two ramps soon for 90 days of 24 hour work, but god's teeth that leaves six more to go. I walk to work near this area and four out of five days traffic is gridlocked for both morning and evening commutes. I cannot imagine what it's going to be like as it all spills onto Sepulveda to go either north or south to the closest on and off ramps. I'm very curious to see if the improvements are visible to the naked eye. If we can see past all the blood stains from where the masses will murder each other during demolition and construction.
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May 14, 2012 20:23
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How would you fix it? Could you even fix any part of LA's traffic without carpet bombing?
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May 14, 2012 20:34
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Jeoh posted:How would you fix it? Could you even fix any part of LA's traffic without carpet bombing? The best way to fix LA is a massive earthquake requiring all the roads to be shut down for an extended period of time, carpet bombing might leave some passable areas. 
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May 14, 2012 20:35
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Jeoh posted:How would you fix it? Could you even fix any part of LA's traffic without carpet bombing? The new LA metro lines are actually pretty decent. The trouble is just getting people to live and work near them. Sadly, many people cannot resist the lure of living and driving to work in the Westside..
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May 14, 2012 20:37
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Jeoh posted:How would you fix it? Could you even fix any part of LA's traffic without carpet bombing? That depends! Would you consider today's freeway operations to be acceptable delay, or is the whole system already broken? Triple the state gas tax a week in advance, and you'll see volumes drop enough to allow plenty of road work. You'll also fund it!
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May 14, 2012 23:20
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They've started to install LED streetlights in my area of LA and they are pretty snazzy. Losing the orange glow is a great thing, lower light pollution and even lighting on the street, heck it even makes it easier to read the road markings. I hope they keep going with this and nobody starts up a stupid "our ugly streetlight heritage" project to block it!
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May 15, 2012 04:13
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