3 ms·
And the proper way to argue with such a person is to write the fourth-power rule on a large sheet of paper, roll it up into a small, tight cone, and stab them i
by logfromblammo 8y ago
And the proper way to argue with such a person is to write the fourth-power rule on a large sheet of paper, roll it up into a small, tight cone, and stab them in the eye with it.
Road wear is proportional to axle weight to the fourth power. Gas tax is proportional to total weight to the first power.
In collisions, the more massive vehicle sustains proportionally less damage. A large truck could completely pulverize an economy car while barely even denting its own grill. Clearly, collision liability insurance should be proportional to a vehicle's mass and its top speed, while own-vehicle insurance should be proportional to speed and inversely proportional to mass.
Uber is not a threat from a road maintenance perspective. It's a question of road capacity used per passenger trip distance. If you measure a road's capacity by vehicle throughput per unit time, a hailed ride can transport 0 to 5 passengers in one vehicle-plus-buffer 60m long. A bus is a longer vehicle, but it still needs a traffic buffer for safe stopping distance much longer than its own length. That bus can transport dozens of passengers with nearly the same road capacity utilization as the car.
What's needed to reduce congestion in car-heavy traffic is robovehicle-to-robovehicle communication, that can automatically negotiate multiple robocars into a train, to reduce the length of empty roadway needed ahead of each one for collision-free travel. The robocars have to agree to brake and accelerate at the same times, in the same amounts. Buses can already accomplish this easily, just by putting all the riders in the same box, and using one driver to control the speed of everyone in it. So the problem really is the ride-hailing driver. Their reflexes are too poor to drive at 60 mph with their front bumper touching the rear bumper of the car ahead.
- sharkmerry 8y ago>> And the proper way to argue with such a person is to write the fourth-power rule on a large sheet of paper, roll it up into a small, tight cone, and stab them in the eye with it. What a nice reasonable start to a discussion. >> Road wear is proportional to axle weight to the fourth power. Gas tax is proportional to total weight to the first power. Great, I didnt argue for a gas tax. You are arguing about road capacity which my original point about 49%-61% more rides out there is in line with. and which is what the much-maligned medallion system aimed to work on (it has its own issues but thats due to not raising the limit with population/demand vs the idea being wrong).
- nkurz 8y agoWhen 'logfromblammo' says "such a person", he is referring to a person who complains that cyclists aren't paying their fair share of road taxes. He was not attacking you, although he may have been attacking 'kazinator', the author of the comment he responded to. Personally, I enjoyed both the creative phrasing that 'kazinator' chose and the imagery of the response from 'logfromblammo', and think both of them were having good fun with language while making reasonable points.
- logfromblammo 8y agoThe damage a bicyclist does to a road by riding on it, in comparison to that caused by large trucks, storms, and freeze-thaw cycles, is effectively zero. The "fair share" of a bicyclist for roads maintenance is thus zero, as we stopped chopping pennies up into farthings a long time ago. The fairest use tax for roads would be to charge passenger vehicles and road tractors annually, proportional to ("wet weight"/ 2 )^4, and separately charge the semi-trailers attached to the road tractors for each trip, proportional to ( loaded weight / 4 )^4 * trip distance. Anyone suggesting that bicycles cause any kind of burden to the roads themselves, rather than just to urban traffic patterns and traffic congestion, need a memorable explanation of the fourth-power rule. Which they can read with their remaining eye.~