Transportation

Those ass-backwards highway naming conventions

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Those ass-backwards highway naming conventions … 🚗

The NY 9-suffixes violate the naming convention that New York uses for most state highways — east west highways are odd numbers like NY 5 or NY 7, while north-south highways are even numbers like NY 8, NY 10, NY 22, etc.

The US highways use the opposite system that New York uses, because our state is ass backwards at least when it comes to numbering highways. Virtually every other state uses the federal convention, not the New York convention for numbering highways.

US 2 and US 20 is are east-west highway, while US 9 and US 11 is a north-south highway. Interstate 90 is east-west while Interstate 87 is North South.

The 400 kWh a day city electric buses

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The 400 kWh a day city electric buses. ⚡

The new all electric city buses (well excluding the seasonally uses diesel cabin heaters) that CDTA has bought use 488 KWh battery packs to provide roughly 200 miles of range in city traffic for a 10 or 12 hours of operating service. City buses are heavy, they do a lot of stop and go driving, they burn a lot of energy. Diesel buses get 3.5 mpg or burn roughly 55 gallons of diesel for a 200 mile day.

The thing about it is that 400 kWh a day (save 88 kWh to avoid over depletion) or two megawatt hours worth of electricity for a five day service week is an incredible amount of energy when you’re trying to get it from any renewable source. A week operating a single bus is equivalent to burning one ton of coal or the output of 9,000 250 watt solar panels operating for one hour, assuming a real world output of 200 watts on the panels. The energy math of powering a whole urban fleet of buses on solar power or even wind is pretty insane when you think of all the other energy demands of the economy.

I do think electrifying the bus fleet makes environmental sense and provides long term cost savings and flexibility. It is more energy efficient to use electric motors and batteries in city buses as diesel motors pale in efficiency to large power plants and energy efficient electric motors. But the idea that electric buses are going to be powered by renewable anytime soon is pretty silly in my book.

Michigan’s 75-MPH Speed Limit Has Made Highways More Dangerous

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Michigan’s 75-MPH Speed Limit Has Made Highways More Dangerous

Speed can still kill. That's the lesson Michigan is learning on the 600-plus miles of rural freeways where the speed limit was raised from 70 mph to 75 mph thanks to a 2017 law. With the number of drivers now going over 80 mph on the increase, more people are getting into crashes and losing their lives.

Bridge Media analyzed state police records and found that roads with the new 75-mph speed limit had, on average, more crashes and injuries in 2018 (the full first year for the new limits) compared to the entire road network. While the statewide average for crashes rose 3.4 percent in 2018 compared to the annual average from 2014-16 (remember, the speed limits went up part of the way through 2017), the average on the 75-mph roads went up 17.2 percent, Bridge Media found.

The real-world average speed increase on the 75-mph roads in one single-day test sample was just under 2 mph (from 74.6 mph in 2016 to 76.9 mph in 2018), but the total number of people going over 80 mph went from 10 percent to 40 percent of all cars. The result for some rural Michigan roads is that plenty of people are still driving well under 75 mph, but more are now going even faster.

Should Public Transit Be Free? More Cities Say, Why Not? – The New York Times

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Should Public Transit Be Free? More Cities Say, Why Not? – The New York Times

Fare box recoveries are so low, they might as well make it free.

It costs a lot of money to collect money, while most transit systems are heavily reliant on state and federal subsidies -- CDTA relies on 85 percent of it's revenue from sources besides fare boxes. Smaller systems recover even less from the fare box.

Why is the federal government subsidizing airports?

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I was thinking the evening, how silly it is that the federal government is operating our air traffic control and security check-ins at airports. ✈Airlines are a for-profit, money-making operation, they should themselves be operating and paying for air-traffic control, not taxpayers. Airplanes are expensive and polluting, an industry that should be taking care of their own expenses, 💰 not something at the trough of the taxpayer, many who can’t afford to ride planes, certainly not at a regular interval.

Hang Gliders above Greylock