Comments by "Colorme Dubious" (@colormedubious4747) on "Wendover Productions" channel.

  1. "This video could change the world." -- It won't. As usual, things are more complicated than that. Zoning, for one, is great for keeping residences and smokestacks separated, but it has resulted in sprawl and, therefore, heavy traffic. Also, our roads are designed for post-apocalyptic scenarios, parking lots are designed for the Saturday before Christmas, and we keep building more roads instead of more OPTIONS. Roundabouts, double-diamonds, and other traffic-calming options are useful to have in our urban design toolkit, but they are merely tools and NOT solutions in and of themselves. If you want to gain any real traction (pun intended -- not sorry) with your local politicians, you'll need to get more citizens involved in the planning process.
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  2. "The problem with a lot of American (and Canadian) cities is the grid design of the city itself." -- Actually NOT. The grid design is the best since drivers can re-route themselves on the fly to get around accidents and street closures. The REAL problem was created in the 1920s and 30s when we started ramming dysfunctional freeways through our functional street grids. There is a large body of research supporting this conclusion. It's not hard to fix at all from an engineering standpoint. Just do what a number of cities have done (like when San Francisco demolished the Embarcadero Freeway): take down the damned urban freeways and restore the street grid. The difficulty is entirely political, since most people believe the lie that freeways are universally faster. They are not, except in very rural areas. Anecdotal support: Late one weekday afternoon I was taking photos of the Golden Gate Bridge. I left around 4:00PM and it took me barely 20 minutes to drive all the way through downtown to jump on the 101 freeway in order to go to Mountain View. It took the same amount of time just to move from the bottom of the ramp up to the travel lanes, and another 90 minutes to get to Mountain View. I had a nearly-identical experience driving from Queens to the New Jersey Turnpike, with the addition of a steep toll to cross the Verrazano-Narrows Parking Lot (some people call it a bridge). Urban freeways suck!
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  3. "What I still wondering about is how much cargo trains are used in the USA" -- heavily!  We have numerous intermodal freight facilities as well. We also have strict safety regulations governing joint-use trackage that make it very expensive to develop new passenger rolling stock.
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  4. What about gate and other ground facility leases? Isn't rent the largest revenue generator?
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  5. The fact that Wendover didn't even mention Houston's extensive network of dedicated Busways is even more astonishing! Not to mention the fact that I-10  expansion has spurred even more horrible leapfrog development of faceless, placeless, cookie-cutter subdivisions west of town, thus making the traffic burden exponentially worse. It isn't as if the exact same thing didn't happen when they turned US290 into a freeway, or when they widened the SW Freeway and the Gulf Freeway and when they built Beltway 8. They keep making the same awful mistakes that Robert Moses made in the 1920s & 30s and expecting miraculously different results.
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  6. The consistency of the color-coding throughout the La Paz system is EPIC. 😃
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  7. "Are flat-earther's point of views threatening to you own?" -- Not at all! We have great need of their unique skills. That bathroom isn't going to clean itself!
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  8. "Have fun waiting for the bus while I'm already on my way." -- Have fun being stuck for hours on I-66 or the Dan Ryan while my train (and 8 other trains) blows past you in the median. I'll be at my desk eating a bagel while you'll still be trapped in your car. Are you having fun, yet?
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  9. "We knew about Pearl Harbor before it happened." -- No, we didn't, you raving conspiracy nut! We knew they were going to hit SOMETHING in the Pacific, but everyone thought it'd be the Philippines. We didn't know they were hitting Pearl until the last part of their message to their Ambassador was decoded, and the attack was already underway at that time. Given that the Japanese were becoming extremely aggressive, there was no NEED for a false flag op nor any other bungholery. The war was inevitable.
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  10. We've known that more lanes create more congestion ("induced traffic") since the 1920s when Robert Moses imposed his incredibly flawed design ethos upon New York City's highways. Many engineers and designers showed him that he was only making the problem worse but he simply would not hear of it. Sadly, his skill at getting things built resulted in his terrible methods being universally adopted throughout the United States and elsewhere around the world with virtually no one in power asking the more important question of whether they should even be built in the first place.
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  11. "Elon already said we just need to build tunnels :P" -- Good plan! More of the most expensive transportation infrastructure that exists. About what I'd expect from a billionaire that doesn't have to drive himself anywhere.
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  12. "I know why autobahns aren't allowed in the US" -- Hate to burst your bubble but we have them. They're called Interstates.
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  13. "Sure there's a solution to traffic: get human hands off the wheel." -- driverless cars are NOT the cure for congestion. Sure, they'll probably reduce the fatality rate but they aren't MAGICAL Lots of people wanting to use the same road at the same time is the proximate cause of congestion and automation alone does NOTHING to change that. Cars hurtling at each other at intersections to hit small, precisely calculated gaps will compel countless drivers to hit their brakes reflexively and override the automation. That's going to end up being a net loss in throughput. Think it through.
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  14. MORE LANES MAKE IT WORSE! Think about it, you just make more lanes to traverse when entering or exiting the travel lanes. On a 20-lane freeway that's as many as 17 additional potential conflicts over a 3-lane. Signal, check your mirrors, move slowly over, etc, repeat until situated. Repeat in reverse order when you approach your exit. It simply doesn't work and we've known that since 1929.
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  15. You missed the primary cause of expense: political interference. Congresscritters INSIST on keeping Podunk Station in the middle of nowhere open because it's in their district and keeps almost 7 local jobs that they can point to. I realize you viewed this as a positive but none of these towns lack excellent highway access to larger markets. At the same time, a city like Waco has mainline freight tracks running right through the core of the city, but anyone wishing to catch a train has to drive at least 20 miles west to the tiny hamlet of McGregor to do so. Likewise, heavily populated corridors like San Antonio to Dallas have ONE train daily, in ONE direction. Why? Political interference.
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  16. 100,000? That's cute.
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  17. And so another Looper is born.
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  18. @ It's on my bucket list, too.
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  19. An excellent summary of an intricately nuanced and complex subject, but: 1) The shift to cars was VERY bipartisan, politically speaking. 2) You can't really discuss the evolution of the American highway without discussing the pernicious influence of Robert Moses (who taught the world how to get away with looting public transit budgets to fund highways and punching massive freeways through viable communities while displacing hundreds of thousands of residents, among too many other abuses of power to list here). 3) If you're going to talk about crappy rail systems, WMATA's Metrorail is NOT the best image to use, being one of our most high-tech, safe, and successful systems. 4) it wasn't just GM who killed the streetcars (although the National City Lines case emphasized their "conspiracy" with Firestone and Standard Oil), it was ALL the car makers, tire makers, and oil companies pushing rail transit out of the picture. Even though they were fined some symbolic pocket change re the conspiracy charges, there was no law forbidding their takeover of the streetcar companies (it turns out that all these entities, including the streetcar companies, had numerous politicians of every party in their pockets, it's just that the auto-tire-oil pockets were much deeper).
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  20. "HSR creates new travel markets from nothing" -- Not at all, it's simply a modal shift. People currently travel between those cities via car, bus, or plane.
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  21. Riley, your focus is ridiculously narrow. Look at the broader picture.
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  22.  @johncherish7610  Thanks for the clarification!
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  23. Actually NOT a streetcar, That UTA line is Light Rail.
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  24. Not DC or Baltimore. That's via the Chesapeake Bay.
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  25. There ARE multiple water routes between the Mississippi watershed and the Chesapeake Bay.
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