I think you lost the plot. This thread diverted to a discussion on the pitfalls of urbanization.

I think we are largely in agreement on the closed lane issue.

3 was not much of an assumption. Roads are very rarely exposed to their peak capacity. 99.9% of the time they have substantial capacity to absorb excess traffic. Your assumption that they cannot is that 0.1%.

Once the motoring public at large understands the method and utilizes it, the only way it doesn’t minimize t

False. Patently false. The degree of control required to prevent stoppages is not available to individual drivers. To avoid hitting cones, drivers near the end of the closing lane have to make rapid changes in speed to ensure they are lined up for a zipper merge. That means hard braking, and that braking ripples through to everyone behind, in both lanes. Zipper merging is the root cause of stop and go traffic.

That hard braking isn’t required when zippering at the beginning of the closure, because there is no hard obstacle to hit in the open lane.

At best, this zipper-at-the-end method “works” not by achieving any traffic benefit, but by setting the expectation for other drivers behavior.

The alternative to zipper-late is “no passing in work zones”. Your position is established at the time you enter the zone; you have between that time and the obstruction to merge, but you may not pass someone in the adjacent lane. There is no longer any benefit to racing ahead to the end of the lane. The zipper merge occurs shortly after the lane closure.

The upside of zipper-late is that there are fewer opportunities to be pissed off at “cheaters”. It is psychologically better. It reduces road rage.

The downside of zipper-late is everything related to traffic. It introduces far more disruption. It needlessly turns free-flowing traffic into stop-and-go. It endangers workers at or near the closure.

“No passing” is objectively better for traffic before and during the closure. It increases speeds and thus throughput. But it also makes it easy for everyone to identify and be pissed at “cheaters”. Those cheaters induce road rage, so we can’t have the superior traffic method. Instead, we have to normalize cheating and tolerate worse traffic.

We tolerate slower baggage handling and longer walks through the terminal when they move the baggage carousel further away from the gate, but we complain much less when they do that. Zipper-late works much the same. It worsens traffic, but trains us to be more tolerant of worse traffic.

Well, you’re in the right community.

If the roads have more cars on them, they’ll break faster and cost more effort to fix.

True, but irrelevant. The best metric for measuring a road is utility, not lifespan. The “best” road is the one with the highest traffic/cost ratio. You’re trying to decrease costs, but the way you’re doing it is by decreasing traffic. Your approach is actually worsening the utility ratio.

like the power and gas are made right next to your farm and you can just plug into it with a 100m cable

They are. The gas fields need power anyway, so they run the lines carrying gas to your city right alongside the lines carrying electricity to your city. Since the solar, the wind turbines, and the gas fields all need serviced from time to time, there are road along them as well. Dropping a small settlement here and there along the way reduces the housing burden, the traffic burden, and all the other burdens of rampant urbanization.

Now you just need to get water for your crops from elsewhere. I figure you’re not gonna want to use well water, because if there were enough water under your farm to feed the crops, you wouldn’t need irrigation.

Water wells might be the largest source of irrigation water. If they aren’t, they are second only to surface water: lakes and rivers. Nobody uses treated water for irrigation.

But if we’re talking about 300 people’s houses, we can do better than a 300 off-grid solar setups. We can build an economy of scale.

Yeah. We tap into the lines running from the various power sources in the countryside to the industrial centers, and use them to power our pleasant, rural settlements.

We can build row houses

Yeah, that’s that medium density stuff you were talking about. Not dense enough to justify infrastructure investment into public transit, but too dense to simply be happy in your own home. The kind of housing that maximizes tax revenue to governments and rent to slumlords, while minimizing public services. The kind of housing that carries the worst attributes of both the suburbs and the urban centers, with none of the benefits of either. Contrast with rural living: massive improvements in wireless internet and a building Work-From-Home culture means you don’t have to commute anymore. You don’t have to go into the central office for your daily grind. Less commuting, less travel, enough space for a workshop, a deep freezer, a craft room. An actual vegetable garden: A garden where you have to decide what to can, freeze, or dehydrate for winter. A garden that feeds you for months. Not the potted plants on your back porch that might give you a couple tomato slices for a burger and some peppers to add to a salad.

We can run trams instead of electric cars and waste far less energy moving metal vehicles around.

Medium-density row housing doesn’t provide enough demand for trams, let alone trains. You might get buses. You don’t get the benefits of public transport until residences go vertical and you’re literally living on top of eachother.

Better than public transport is “Just stay home”. But that’s not really an option when you don’t have space to do anything at home, and you have to travel for any hint of enjoyment.

You’d have a point if you were getting rid of the roads. But you’re not. You’re leaving them underutilized, out in the boondocks, where they are needed and used to service farms and mines and everything else your urban centers require. Those same roads serving population densities of <10 people per square mile are readily capable of serving population densities of 320 people per square mile. So, again, why not spread out? Why cram ourselves in like sardines, where we need buses and trains and trams and subways and rentable scooters littered everywhere?

You’ve still got that centralization mindset…

Electrical power. In your head, electrical power is in the city, and we need to take a little bit out to a farm house. We don’t want to take a big-ass cable out to a big rural community, because that would be wasteful.

The electrical power produced in the city is a coal-fired plant in the heavy industrial sector. That is not the kind of power we need.

The kind of power we need is produced by big-ass solar generators out near the farmland. It’s produced by big-ass wind turbines out near the farmland. It’s supported by big-ass pumped-storage facilities out near the farmland. This kind of power needs big-ass cables out to the rural areas. You don’t want to build big-ass cables out toward the farmland; big-ass cables are exactly what we need to bring power from the farmland to the cities.

Gas. Gas isn’t produced in the cities. Gas comes from wells scattered throughout rural areas, and flows toward the cities. The gas lines you don’t want to build are the ones that supply the city.

I’ve already addressed internet, but I’ll hit it again: Wireless works better out of town. In town, it is subject to all sorts of interference from everyone trying to use it at once. You need the cables in the city because the available EM spectrum is not nearly enough to meet the needs of that dense populace. Out in the rural areas, where interfering signals are physically separated, there is much more bandwidth available per person.

We wouldn’t need to build a 6 lane elevated highway, we could just make a simple two lane asphalt road with reflector posts.

Those simple, two-lane asphalt roads can handle much more than 320 people per square mile. Those simple roads would be much better utilized by increasing rural densities to the human average, rather than leaving them grossly underutilized. 6-lane elevated highways are features of the medium and high density urban areas, not rural.

The urban core generates tons of revenue for the city,

The urban core is consuming the resources produced in the rural surroundings. Again, two acres of agricultural land per urban dweller. The population density of land used by/for humans is 320 per square mile.

and then the suburbs spend it all.

Agreed, the suburbs are terrible. More specifically, lawns are terrible. Replacing all those lawns with gardens and orchards would completely reverse that problem..

But again: every 320 people need a square mile of agricultural land, regardless of how densely you decide to pack those people. There is no replacement for that land area. Whether we cram ourselves in high-rise apartment buildings, or spread ourselves out among our crops, we’re using two acres of ag land per person.

We still need the rural roads, the rural water. Vegetation needs irrigation. We still need rural wires to convey solar and wind power from those agricultural areas back to the grid at large. Internet Cabling is a little less important: lower rural population density means substantially less interference for wireless.

The answer that Strong Towns keeps finding is to invest more money in medium density mixed use neighbourhoods. … And I think you deserve to live somewhere like that.

Please don’t wish that on me. That sounds like the worst of all worlds. None of the benefits of rurality; none of the benefits of urbanity. Not dense enough to actually justify public transit, but still packed in like sardines. Needing to leave home and go into the city for any sort of entertainment. Needing transportation, because you don’t have enough room to simply be comfortable where you live. Medium-Density mixed-use areas are the easiest for City Hall to tax, and the easiest for City Hall to neglect.

It seems that “Strong Towns” is primarily interested in maximizing tax revenue. I’ve got nothing against taxes, but the purpose of taxes is to serve the people. Cramming us into maximally-neglectable units isn’t serving us. It’s exploitation.

That’s a lot of infrastructure. Seems like it would require an exorbitant population density to support all that.

Why are we stacking everyone on top of each other? Every person, urban or rural, needs 2 acres of cropland to sustainably provide their food. That’s 320 people per square mile of agricultural land.

Why are we cramming 25,000 people into a square mile of urban blight? Why not spread out enough that we aren’t all huffing each other’s farts?

#1 is simply false. All merging is more effective at full speed.

#2 demonstrates a lack of comprehension. With the right lane closed ahead, the slowed traffic in the left lane indicates the effects of the obstruction ahead, and informs drivers that they should exit.

If the left lane isn’t backed up, the effects of the obstruction are not severe, and there is no need to exit.

Allowing both lanes to back up introduces the worst delay, and doubles the number of vehicles needlessly exposed to that delay.

#3 correctly identifies that the load is spread among more routes, but fails to comprehend that those other routes are normally underutilized and have considerable excess capacity available to ameliorate the problem. Diverting excess traffic to routes with excess capacity is a solution, not a problem.

#4, stopped traffic is inevitable with zipper merging immediately before the obstruction. Anyone with more than a million miles of highway experience can corroborate that assertion.

Pushing people to seek a detour is the only effective way of actually reducing the effects of a traffic jam.

We all zipper merged back when we were traveling close to full speed. We would continue through the closure at nearly full speed, except some jackass has decided to run up to the end and come to a complete stop before attempting to merge.

Now, we all have to zipper merge at 5mph instead of full speed, because some jackass couldn’t figure out how to do it at the right time.

Anybody who has played Factorio should be able to recognize the problem. If the lane is obstructed anywhere, the capacity of the roadway is the capacity of the remaining open lanes. Filling the closed lane before the obstruction maximizes the duration of the traffic jam.

Ideally, zipper merging should start immediately after the last exit before the obstruction. It should be used to push as many people as possible to exit and seek a detour. The lane should be effectively closed from the exit before to the exit after the obstruction.

No, this “solves the problem” in the same way that moving the baggage carousel further away from the gate reduces complaints. It isn’t actually improving traffic flow; it’s making people complain about it less.

Take that Centralizationist attitude back to Reddit.

Exactly. The USPS should have pivoted from daily physical mail delivery to telecommunications services by the 1920s. The breakup of AT&T’s monopoly in the 1980s made the Internet possible; we could have had the internet 30-40 years earlier if we had pushed the USPS into telephone.

Absolutely. It was an excellent system a hundred years ago.

They failed to expand the postal service into telecommunications between 1890 and 1940, leading to AT&T’s monopoly on the phone system until 1982. They failed to expand their money transfer system into consumer-oriented electronic banking services in the 1990s, leaving Visa and Mastercard with a stranglehold on payment processing. We’ll have to break them apart soon.

The USPS needs to take a long, hard look at their Money Order, and pivot toward basic consumer banking. They were the first widespread service for money transfers. They need to return to that core competency. They should issue checking accounts and bank cards (rivaling Visa and Mastercard) for anyone who wants one. They should provide fee-free basic consumer banking services to the general public.

At this time, their operational model is “advertising platform” that happens to occasionally provide delivery services. Their reason for continued existence is bulk mailing. They aren’t a government service. They are a de facto business. They fund themselves, and they produce a revenue stream for their sole shareholder, the US Government. If they were actually a government service, they would be publicly funded, and junk mail would be broadly prohibited.

The USPS is currently a garbage delivery service. Neither snow, nor rain, nor uBlock Origin stays these ad peddlers from littering “Or Current Resident” with their stamped trash. They should shift their focus to parcel delivery, and consumer banking.

Exactly. A TUI is not a replacement for a GUI where human interaction is essential to the process.

But, very few computer processes require direct human input. The overwhelming majority of individual operations are performed silently in the background. The presence of a TUI in an image modification program allows for certain operations to be performed automatically, in the background, without a human ever needing to be involved. I actually needed to do this, to add what was basically a watermark and a date stamp to a PDF document via an image modification program. Repeated 80-120 times a day, 6 days a week. A TUI allows for the tying together of a half dozen simple operations into a functional system.

TUI. Text User Interface. Command line. Terminal. You interact with the application via the keyboard, rather than a mouse, touchscreen, trackpad, etc.

Games have rules.

It’s already available and parents are not utilizing it.

The parents have determined that it’s not needed. They’ve determined that trying to strictly regulate exactly what Little Johnny can and can’t see online does him far more harm than porn ever could. This hyper-authoritarian nonsense needs to die in a fire.

Dueling Banjos

I prefer Ride of the Valkyries to Imperial March.

Does the floor lamp have a “strobe” mode?

Stevia is the worst, IMO. It’s got a strange mouth feel.

You know how eating tortilla chips will cut up your mouth a little? They irritate the tongue and throat, making them feel a little gritty? Anything with stevia gives me that “tortilla chip mouth” sensation, even when I haven’t been eating tortilla chips.

Every other artificial sweetener tastes like cancer. Stevia tastes like sand.