Appropiate Roads

The deadliest bridge disaster in US history was caused by a tiny crack just three millimeters deep | by Matt Reimann | Timeline

The deadliest bridge disaster in US history was caused by a tiny crack just three millimeters deep | by Matt Reimann | Timeline

harlene Wood was driving home at 5 p.m. on December 15, 1967, when she felt Silver Bridge shake. The bridge, built in 1928, spanned the Ohio River between Ohio and West Virginia, and served 4,000 vehicles every day. On this cold Friday, a single eyebar — a 55-foot-long section of steel, two inches thick and 12 inches wide — had suddenly fractured. Then the pin holding it in place fell loose, sending the bridge’s components into catastrophic failure. “It was like someone had lined up dominoes,” Wood recalled. “I could see car lights flashing as they were tumbling into the water. The car in front of me went in. Then there was silence.”

Silver Bridge inherited its name from its metallic aluminum paint, but it was notable as well for its distinct design. The American Bridge Company, which won the bid for the project, settled on the cheaper method of using eyebars instead of cables of steel wire, the sort used in famous suspension bridges like the Brooklyn and Golden Gate.

The Race for the Red Light

One of the behaviors that annoys me the most about other drivers, is those who race to to the red light.

When the traffic light turns red, you might as well just slow down, and coast to a stop — rather then maintain your speed and slam on your brakes the last possible minute.Β There is absolutely no reason to waste fuel or wear out your brakes prematurely. Your certainly not saving any time, by speeding towards a red light.

Have Cars Destroyed Urban America?


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Look at any American city from an aerial photo…

What is the first thing you see? Most likely it’s the highway system and it’s connected parking lots.

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Near the superhighways is a dead-zone — not just dead grass from the copious amount of salt laid down, but also an economic dead zone, because nobody wants to live next to the rumble and pollution of an expressway. Cars make a lot of noise, that goes through walls and generally makes humans miserable. Cars spew toxic gases shorten people’s lives. When a driver is distracted or makes a mistake, they become deadly weapons that take life indiscriminately.

Many Lanes of Traffic

Automobiles kill cities. It’s that simple.Β 

But they also kill the countryside too, by demanding cities grow larger and larger, sprawling out into the countryside to accommodate the cars need for parking and high-speed roads to move them from place to place smoothly. Suburbia isn’t about homeownership, is as it’s about having a place to put the automobile, where it can be safely parked off the street.

Parking

There are plenty of homes in cities. For generations before the automobile, homeowners-owned row houses in the city. The problem is dense urban areas lack places to park automobiles safely. So people choose to move out to the suburbs, where they can have a garage and a driveway to park their cars. In the suburbs, one only has to drive a short distance to a freeway then to another vast parking lot at the office campus.

Farther Up the Dead End Road

Society needs to rethink it’s relationship with automobile.

Cars are a lot of fun, used in moderation. Like an occasional drag on a cigarette or a cold beer after work, driving is a pleasurable activity on the open road, in a rural area. But cars don’t belong in cities. Having a lot of horsepower, and dropping the gas pedal can be a lot of fun.

A Narrow Rough Road

I think in the future, automobiles will be used primarily as something you use on Sunday after church, to go out on a picnic in the country, following lush tree-lined parkways. Parks will be located at nearly every exit of the parkway. People will use cars on vacations to go places too unpopular to be worthwhile to run a transit line. Maybe also driven by farmers and rural residents, at least to a park and ride lot on the outskirts of city, which you would take a transit vehicle the rest of the way.

Boring Roads

I have to admit driving in New York is downright boring compared to West Virginia. The roads are so flat, so straight, and so wide.

But then again, New York’s mountains have wide valleys, and it’s rare that a road has to traverse a narrow canyon or do any kind of significant climbing. Few major highways climb over mountains in New York.

County Route 47 in Catskills near Winnisook Lake at 2,680 elevation is the highest elevation all season highway in New York. There aren’t a lot of high elevation roads in New York for sure. The highest Interstate in New York is Southern Tier Expressway in Almond at 2,110 elevation