Whoopsie! Sydney's road planners just discovered induced demand is a thing, after opening a new motorway.
For those outside Sydney, the New South Wales state government recently opened a new spaghetti intersection just west of Sydney's Central Business District.
It was supposed to solve traffic. Instead, it's turned into a giant car park:
"For the third straight day, motorists and bus passengers endured bumper-to-bumper traffic on the City West Link and Victoria Road. A trip from Haberfield to the Anzac Bridge on the City West Link averaged an agonising 44 minutes in the morning peak on Wednesday.
"Several months ago, Transport for NSW’s modelling had suggested traffic from the interchange would add only five to 10 minutes to trips on Victoria Road through Drummoyne and over the Iron Cove Bridge during morning peaks.
"Those travel delays have now blown out."
So what do motorists say when their shiny new road that was supposed to solve traffic instead turns into a massive traffic jam?
'Dude! Just one more lane!'
From the article:
"[Roads Minister John] Graham and his Transport boss Josh Murray appear reluctant to do what many motorists reckon is the obvious solution.
"That is, add lanes or make changes at the pinch-points that are causing the pain. A three-lane to one merge point from Victoria Road onto the Anzac Bridge, along with two lanes merging into one on the City West Link, are proving to be painful bottlenecks."
@fuck_cars@sydneytrains@urbanism@ajsadauskas That is about the right level of freeway for a city (entire MSA) of about a million people. I believe that the picture is for a city population of 7 million.
You really need to put a sarcasm tag on that. I almost got whiplash.
My city is doing the same thing. They let developers build out exclaves around the city and then ask the city to annex it. There seems to be no limit to how stupid the city council is about this. The latest one is on a hill with no water, police, fire, or school services that got annexed. Now the city has to build out everything. The ROI to the city is in the range of centuries based on the tax revenues. Add in that it’s 100% commercial district free and now we’ve added an eternal car snake on a tiny two lane road into town.
We’ve gotta start building some mixed use density or all of this infrastructure is going to collapse.
I've been thinking about getting a hardware security key and have heard of yubikey before; but I want to see what my options are and if they are worth it in your opinion.
My current setup is a local KeePassXC database (that I sync between my PC and phone and also acts as TOTP authenticator app), I know that KeePass supports hardware keys for unlocking the database.
I am personally still of the belief that passwords are the safest when done right; but 2FA/MFA can greatly increase security on top of that (again, if done right).
The key work work together with already existing passwords, not replace them.
As I use linux as my primary OS I do expect it to support it and anything that doesn't I will have to pass on.
PS: what are the things I need to know about these hardware keys that's not being talked about too much, I am very much delving into new territory and want to make sure I'm properly educated before I delve in.
When I did some research on hardware keys I was between Yubikey and Nitrokey. I ended up going with Yubikey because KeepassXC supported it.
Something to keep in mind is purchasing a backup key. I bought one for my wife and we use each other’s as a backup.
For KeepassXC it does not support registering multiple keys (at least not that I have figured out), so I have a copy of my database where it uses my wife’s key as a backup.
In my research, I’ve found SoloKeys may be a US company. They are headquartered in New Jersey and one Co-founder is in New York City. However, according to their WhoIs data, the domain was registered in Iceland.
My two cents on the topic is that HSR from Melbourne to Sydney should implemented as a series of incremental upgrades, rather than a single megaproject.
It wasn't done as single megaproject. Instead, it was done in small segments. A bypass around a town. A section of road between two town upgraded to dual carriageway. Eventually, over 40 years, the whole road was upgraded.
We should be doing the same thing with the train line from Melbourne to Sydney.
Hey @RM_Transit not sure if you're aware but nsw trainlink who run the syd-Melb xpt have placed an order to replace the xpts and it doesn't include sleeper carriages. I think that would've been worth including in your vid because it really kicks the can on expanding sleeper service another 30 years down the road. It's not insurmountable, but it's difficult to see expanding sleeper service as a viable way fwd when we have brand new carriages that don't have that function.
I think a bit of advocacy and awareness around that issue would be helpful!
@ajsadauskas@RM_Transit@fuck_cars totally agree. there is no excuse for work not to start immediately on upgrading the tracks between Campbelltown and Mittagong. That will have significant benefits for freight and passenger services to both Canberra and Melbourne
6% of car drivers are cold blood animal killers, 89% of which are SUV drivers
ENG
Interesting experiment showing car drivers intentionally going on the road shoulder to kill by standing (fake) animals. Not surprisingly the majority of those are #SUV drivers
ITA
Interessante esperimento "scientifico" in cui si vedono automobilisti cambiare traiettoria per investire animali finiti sul lato della strada. La maggior parte guidano SUV
Europe has so many awesome wagons, and we get almost none of them. People here would rather drive lifted hatchbacks that handle like shit, rather than a cool wagon.
Erm, I guess this is one of those cases where words don’t translate well between variants of English … I hardly ever see “station wagons” (estate cars?) here, whereas there’s lots of cool lifted hatchbacks around like the Fiat Panda 4x4
If only there was a autonomous vehicle that could move a ton of people around that fully operates underground. Like a super car! Maybe Elon is going to invent something…