(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.

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

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!”

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.)

That’s great and all, but I’m still waiting for it to be affordable to install my own so that it can also be a whole-house uninterruptible power supply.

Just kidding… mostly.

Realistically, your diary is safe enough on your Mac. (By the way: you say “I am certain I need to install a Linux distro or a BSD,” but technically, MacOS already is a BSD.) IMO the main threat vector you have to worry about would be Apple changing something to start harvesting your data itself, either for its own purposes (e.g. AI training) or legal compliance with Orwellian bullshit. That risk is a lot lower than the certainty it is with Windows, but it’s still proprietary software so it can’t be zero.

If you’re really that paranoid about it, any device without an Internet connection would do just fine, including something that isn’t on the Internet because it’s too old to be compatible with it (hence the typewriter, but a very old computer running DOS would do fine, too.) Otherwise, if you want a maximally-paranoid but still modern system, look into something like Tails or Qubes OS on a PC, or Graphene OS on a mobile device.

Exactly. (I should’ve included scare quotes.)

That “average price” includes cards with factory overclocks and other enhanced gimmicks to jack up the MSRP above what the base 9070XT is supposed to be. What does it look like for the specific models of cards that were actually intended to hit the $599 price point?

But it’s funny how they’re trying to downplay it.

I did literally that.

The real solution is regulatory, though, because obviously my boycott has done absolutely fuck-all to change manufacturer behavior.

There’s a better way that doesn’t even require a wizard.

You know what’s really fucked up? The zoning code (at least in my area) mandates minimum parking requirements for bars. The law expects people to drive to them and enforces that behavior to be accommodated!

If an open flame matters, so does the fuel producing it. As such, the only open flame cooking anybody should care about is a charcoal or wood grill outside.

You say that as if saving $10 on a bulb once every few years is worth the risk of spending $100s or apparently even $1000s if they get damaged.

There are reasons cars have been getting ever more unaffordable (above and beyond inflation), and stuff like bespoke model-specific headlights requiring complicated tooling to manufacture is one of them.

My Miata with pop-up sealed beams gets ~30 MPG. Any aerodynamic problems it has are due to being a convertible, not the headlights.