Re: People Without Meaningful Lives Seek Power Over Others

On 1/24/2025 8:08 AM, Roger Merriman wrote:

Catrike Ryder <Soloman@old.bikers.org> wrote:

On Thu, 23 Jan 2025 19:54:37 -0600, AMuzi <am@yellowjersey.org> wrote:
>

On 1/23/2025 7:42 PM, Frank Krygowski wrote:

On 1/23/2025 7:33 PM, John B. wrote:

>
And who pays the road tax if you call the police? Or the
water works,
or the fire department, all of which need to use the roads
to aid you
the caller?

>
I'm not saying non-drivers should pay zero for the roads.
But they do pay, as Andrew said, in property taxes, sales
taxes, and even the price of goods, since companies build
transport costs into that price.
>
I'm simply saying more of the burden should be on those who
make more use of the roads.
>
I think railroads are a close parallel to highways. Andrew
says, in essence, we should all pay for roads because we all
use goods delivered by roads. I can agree with that concept.
But it also applies to railroads. We all use commodities
delivered by rail.
>
Our difference is that the car fans here want no further
expenses on those who use cars on those same roads. In
practice, they want to drive with no fares, to have their
driving subsidized. But they don't want to subsidize train
fares, even though that's a perfectly parallel situation.
And they don't want to pay congestion charges in super-
crowded cities. They just want the city residents to deal
with their presence, their contribution to congestion,
pollution, etc.
>

>
Some important differences there.
Governments do not own or maintain track (outside of local
urban systems such as MTA or CTA or BART).
>
The only intercity passenger rail is Amtrak, which is an
entertainment/display system, not a functional
transportation system. It's not anywhere near competitive on
travel times, reliability or price. And Amtrak does not own
or maintain railbed AFAIK.

>
There's also big differences in how highways and railroads share
freight travel and passnger travel facilities. Are rail passengers
going to be Ok with freight train speeds and the switching delays?  I
suspect lots of special facilities would be required for high speed
passenger trains whereas cars and trucks get along with each other
just fine on highways.

 Not quite HGV cause much more frequent maintenance, and will require
shallower grades and curves, and in general require the road to be tailed
to them, the Heads of the Valley road in Wales they have spent over a
billion and this is for Trucks benefit so they don’t need to slow, and some
shaping of the road profile still has to climb the 1000ft or so up but
trying to keep the grade sub 10%
 Cars etc this wasn’t a issue, it was trucks that cooked their brakes on way
down, seeing them on fire in the sand pit escape lane be that just the
brakes or the entire truck wasn’t that uncommon at school.
 Likewise some of the other roads in the area before sat nav’s and truck
ones, have over the years had coaches or lorries that have come a cropper
due to being unsuitable for the roads being unable to cope with either/or
both the grade or the turns.
 HGV very much needs a particular type of road. Now UK/EU trucks tend to be
bit shorter and with bit more powerful engines and so on, the max weight is
the same around 40t as they will need to cope with tighter spaces and
generally hillier terrain.
 US train networks seems to be almost entirely a slow speed freight lines
that the passengers trains fit to their schedules and cope with lines
maintained to their standards hence the slow speeds lot of the trains could
be traveling quite a lot faster, ie it’s not given anything like the
government subsidies that road is.

>
--
C'est bon
Soloman
>

Roger Merriman
 

In fairness, basic layout and design protocols of UK M-roads, US Interstate system, Germany's Autobahns all derive from the original Autostrada. The engineering/design standards are for efficiency and safety of all vehicles, particularly for autos. Any benefit to large cargo trucks is incidental; merely a subset of the basic design.
--
Andrew Muzi
am@yellowjersey.org
Open every day since 1 April, 1971