Yeah, if Trump’s sycophants filed for voluntary dismissal, it’s because they wanted to preserve the opportunity to try some other bullshit tactic later.

Sounds to me like either incompetence or malicious compliance on the part of the department implementing the reductions. Maybe work on fixing that instead of using it as an excuse to rail against the concept entirely.

There is no rule that you have to put “rule” in the title. It’s just a tradition.

Global warming sure doesn’t help, but the Colorado basin was dry AF even before the industrial revolution. IIRC, the Anasazi got fucked over in a similar way.

(Disclaimer: I am a traffic engineer in the sense that I have a degree in it and have done it professionally, but I got disillusioned and bailed in favor of software engineering so I’m not hugely experienced. Think EIT, not PE.)

That is a very good question I don’t have a good answer for, and have wondered myself.

First of all, it’s more in the wheelhouse of urban planning than it is traffic engineering (being concerned with an entire area rather than one road at a time), so there’s that. But on the other hand, urban planners are more concerned with issues like land use and aren’t necessarily analyzing traffic flows the way traffic engineers do. I’m not sure the specific kind of comprehensive designing you’re hoping for actually gets done often enough.

That said, it seems like the prevailing opinion (when it comes to the city street network, as opposed to freeways) is that having a hierarchy of functional classification, with the traffic being funneled from local streets to collectors to arterials, is the preferred way to go. Traffic engineers like it because they can (theoretically) design the arterial to provide better performance in terms of mobility while worrying less about pesky things like access and placemaking, and NIMBY homeowners like it because it gets the thru-traffic off their street.

Personally, I’m actually pretty skeptical of that, from an urbanist and “recovering engineer” perspective. I think it could be better if traffic were evenly distributed across blocks, such that (a) the lack of true high-capacity/high-speed corridors would discourage driving altogether and provide better placemaking and urbanism, and (b) each street’s “fair share” would hopefully be low and slow enough that it would be acceptably safe for cyclists/pedestrians/kids playing in the street etc. Basically, I think “worse” could actually be better, once you realign your goals away from moving traffic as quickly as possible and towards making a good place to live.

When it comes to freeways specifically, I’m not sure anywhere does parallel freeway corridors unless the area served by each justifies a freeway in its own right. But if anywhere does, it’d be Texas, home of the infamous Katy Freeway…

…and other extensive use of frontage roads. I actually learned about that just the other day from this recent Road Guy Rob video, which honestly might answer your question better than my screed above did, now that I think about it. (Sorry for not leading with that, but I’ve got too much sunk cost fallacy to delete what I wrote now.)

When did that happen?

I am genuinely surprised none of the freaks around here have mentioned the KFC dating sim yet.

They were built so long ago that it was back when Boeing’s engineering reputation was good.

Yeah, that exploitation definitely gets subrogated to the MAGAs, not Iran.

That’s Israel seizing its lebensraum. Sabotaging the peace deal is just a nice side effect.

Number of gallons of the water flowing during an unusually wet period, making the resulting number a fantasy relative to the amount of water normally available.

This isn’t a “prolonged drought;” this is normal. It’s the weirdly wet period a century or so ago that was the outlier!

The real problem here is that all the engineering and legal agreements governing who gets access to how much water was fundamentally built on a fantasy.

It’s a device that cuts grooves into wood using cutting bits that come in a variety of different profiles. It’s good for making slots (e.g. mortises for mortise-and-tenon construction) as well as decorative details, such as chamfers, roundovers, and ogee profiles. You can also use a pattern bit to copy a cut-out shape with it.

We already have those big specialized highways; that’s what freeways are. The trouble is, even if autonomous driving were capable of doubling the lane capacity (and IIRC the theoretical best case is actually less than that, closer to a 50% improvement), induced demand is still a thing. It maybe buys you a reprieve for a decade or so, but after that you’re right back to “just one more lane, bro!”

The trouble is, it isn’t symmetric that way. MAGA hypocrites would simply gleefully shout it from the rooftops as fact and it would end up being a propaganda coup in their favor, satire be damned.

See also: the bullshit asymmetry principle, The Card Says “Moops”, that quote by Jean-Paul Sartre, etc.

MAGAs want her to peg them.

If they weren’t trying to reference tons of JavaScript to do shit like that, they wouldn’t need the goddamned lazy loading in the first place!

You’re right: when traffic is at its critical density, that’s often what triggers the shift from the free-flow regime to the congested regime. But just because you make computers drive the cars – even assuming they did it perfectly without randomly braking, which they don’t – that doesn’t mean it eliminates that flipping between regimes. At best, it might get you a little bit more capacity before hitting that critical threshold, but eventually it’s still going to, and then something – a squirrel darting into the road, a sunbeam glinting off something the wrong way and momentarily confusing the AI, a bump that disturbs the car just enough to make it slow down a fraction of a MPH, etc. – is going to trigger that shift to the congested regime anyway.

No, that’s not how traffic works. That’s like saying a pipe can flow an infinite amount of fluid when you used a liquid instead of a gas because you got rid of the empty space between particles.

Even with theoretically-perfect timing and control, the road still has a finite capacity because cars take up a certain amount of space, both stationary and moving (following distance is still a thing even with computer control because of the mechanical limitations of brake performance). Moreover, it isn’t that much higher than we can manage with humans driving the vehicles already.

The only ways to exceed that limit are to make the vehicles smaller (e.g. bikes) or pack more people into them (e.g. buses or trains).

Hi, traffic engineer here.

That’s never going to happen. It’s nothing but a tech-bro bullshit fantasy.

Why? Because cyclists and pedestrians exist. In order to make it possible for the kinds of gains you’re talking about to happen, every road user has to be an autonomous vehicle, but (aside from freeways) streets simply do not work that way and never will.

(Oh, and also: even at the limit, the best it can ever accomplish is to be an inferior approximation of a train.)