response 50 of 111:

Jul 1 02:43 UTC 2003

You've avoided parking tickets while living in Ann Arbor?  That's unusuall,
assuming you own a car and work in town.

response 52 of 111:

Jul 1 06:58 UTC 2003

I've only ever gotten one speeding ticket, and it was in Michigan.  I was
pulled over for doing 19 over the limit, ticketed for five over, and given a
lecture on how I shouldn't expect to get away with things that older people
could get away with (I was 17 at the time).  I noticed at that point that out
of the $60 ticket, only $20 was the fine.  The other $40 was split among
various fees.  Was this to get around the rules Larry talked about?

Doing my Ann Arbor to Detroit suburbs commute almost every day for several
years, I got in the habit of driving at least 80 (generally 85 or so through
the Washtenaw County section of M-14 where I never saw anybody getting pulled
over, and slowing down to 80, which was considered a safe speed, in Wayne
County).  I left Michigan doing 85-90 for most of the trip, once I got past
Minnesota, and didn't see a cop until just West of Salt Lake City.  He pulled
me over for 84 in a 75 zone, and in true Utah style gave me a lecture saying
"you need to learn that the speed limit in this state is 75, not 84," while
I tried to decide whether to respond, "you pulled me over for nine over?" or
"I was only doing 84?"  I also got a written warning there, but no ticket.
The written warning is still up on my fridge.  It says, "this is not a summons
to appear in court.  It is a friendly contact by the Highway Patrol regarding
improper driving."  Utah is a strange place.  But now I live somewhere where
almost nobody drives 80+ mph, and 75 is considered quite fast.  From time to
time I still drive in places where 80 seems to be considered the accepted
speed, and it now feels incredibly fast and uncomfortable to me.

For a different approach to such things, I spent five days in Montana a couple
months ago.  Just about everywhere I've done significant amounts of driving,
the speed limit has been treated as a guideline for the speed everybody should
go 5-10 mph faster than.  Montana, being a fairly liberatarian state, has
taken a different aproach, with the speed limits instead being set higher than
they expect anybody to drive.  That took some getting used to.

response 54 of 111:

Jul 1 14:22 UTC 2003

Last time I drove on the LA freeways, the speed fluctuated between 30mph and
80mph - speed up, slow down, speed up again - like compression waves.  I was
constantly speeding up or slowing down, never cruising.  I remember San
Francisco area freeways as being substantially tamer though.

response 56 of 111:

Jul 1 16:05 UTC 2003

Tell them that interstates are about getting from point A to point B as 
fast as possible, and if they want the slow, scenic route they should 
take US-12.

response 58 of 111:

Jul 1 21:18 UTC 2003

I watch the locals for cues on what the "actual" speed limit is.  I drove
through Arkansas on my way to Texas with 70 mph speed limits and signs saying
something to the effect of "speed limits strictly enforced."  My usual policy
is to do a speed closely approximating the speed limit until I see a healthy
sampling of local vehicles doing otherwise.  I didn't see any local vehicles
doing anything other than speeds very close to 70, so I kept it down close
to 70 myself and drove very comfortably.

Perhaps two hours into Arkansas I noted with considerable relief that there
was finally a faster moving vehicle, a Durango, preparing to pass me in the
left lane.  It looked to be doing about 80 as it went by, and I prepared to
hit the accel button on my cruise control, until I looked at the plate...

Naturally, the first car I saw doing anything close to 80 in the state was
from Michigan.

response 60 of 111:

Jul 2 00:38 UTC 2003

We've discussed the speed limit on M-14 at Main before.  The police have been
patrolling it in packs for about a year now.  What some see as a a "speed
trap" I see as a reasonable attempt to enforce a safety-related speed limit
that is routinely and reckless ignored.

My habit was to disengage the cruise control as I passed the 55-MPH sign. 
I very seldom had to use my brakes to decellerate.  I was never stopped for
speeding, although I'd see others who had been stopped.  I got the impression
that if you were making a reasonable effort to slow down, you were fine.

response 62 of 111:

Jul 2 02:23 UTC 2003

Re: #61
With trucking, all the trucking companies can be worthless idiots (in
terms of getting your freight to where you need it on time & in good
shape at a reasonable rate), but if one lone owner-operator does a good
job for you, you're covered.  (If you've got more freight than one guy
can haul, don't worry - he'll talk about you keeping him busy, and more
capacity will quickly appear.)  In any case, swarms of trucks can move
pseudo-randomly around the very extensive public road network without
much problem, planning, lead time, or capital investment beyond the
trucks themselves (for the truckers, that is).

Railroads are a totally different beast.  They don't go most places -
compare the number of businesses that can ship & receive by truck with
the number that can ship & receive by train.  Where there *is* service,
it's almost certainly monopolized by one railroad - if they can't or
don't feel like meeting your needs, then forget it.  Train logistics
are vastly slower & more ponderous then truck logistics - think of 'em
as landgoing container ships.  Substantial capacity upgrades generally
involve the railroad spending a *lot* of money, often with long lead
times.

There has been talk about "railroading" some of America's major long-
haul trucking routes.  Truckers would drive their rigs onto rail flat
cars at one end, then board a "rolling truck stop" passenger car (with
showers, restaurant, sleeping rooms, etc.) for the trip to the other
end.  Drive off, drive the trucks waiting there on, & repeat.  I have
not heard that any railroad has risked the money to try it, though.

response 64 of 111:

Jul 2 06:51 UTC 2003

Actually, the whole point of containers is to get rid of a lot of that
"ponderousness".  It's not so easy to spot out east, where railroad
traffic is pretty thoroughly hidden by everything else, but if you go
out west, it becomes more obvious.  There are lots of trains that
consist of almost nothing but containers, and the box cars are in fact
fast disappearing because of this.  Those containers in turn go on
ships, or in many cases trucks.  Containers going by truck aren't
obvious, but if you look careful, you can spot them; they're the ones
with the funny mismatched frames under the box (typically a slightly
different color).

An older scheme was to just ship truck trailers.  This was done with
"piggy-back" flat car beds, which went through several different
iterations of design.  I think these are fast being replaced by
containers, which work world-wide not just here, also containers can be
stacked 2 high on railcars, so are doubly efficient.

Trains and trucks have an additional difference: trucks are essentially
in part subsidized by public monies.  The road beds they run on etc. are
generally funded by the public, and taxes on fuel etc don't generally
the full expenses.  The usual rational is because "all" of us benefit,
part should be covered by the public sector.  Railroads, by contrast,
are usually funded privately.  The roadbeds, etc., are private property,
and acquiring new roadbed, especially anywhere where people already
live, is nearly impossible.  As a general rule, railroads, as private
businesses, are expected to fund the gov't, and not the other way
around.  Additionally, in many areas, railroads have all sorts of
complicated and bizarre rules and laws, both in relation to government,
and also with unions and other interested parties.  The rules and laws
can make it hard for railroads to change the way they do business.  For
instance, many railroads would like to eliminate the fireman and just
have an engineer in the cab of most locomotives -- unions especially
hate this move.  Sometime in the near future it ought to be possible to
have fully automated freight trains, but I don't think many people are
prepared to argue this would actually be safer.

response 66 of 111:

Jul 2 18:34 UTC 2003

Re #58: I tend to strictly observe the speed limits everywhere except
Michigan.  I know how much cops love to ticket people with out-of-state
plates.

Re #59: I-80 is the same way.  I-75 has a mix of traffic until about 10
pm, at which point the cars disappear and the semis take over.  I kind
of prefer it that way.  Semi drivers are, on the whole, much more
predictable.

Re #62: They tried it, and it's still done in some places, but it's not
too common.  It didn't work well because of the inefficiencies of
loading trucks on rail cars -- with highway weight limits what they are,
and the dimensions of semi trailers, you end up with substantially less
tonnage than you'd normally put on a rail car.  What's mostly replaced
piggybacking is intermodal containers.  The big advantage is they can be
double-stacked on lines where the clearance permits it, getting a more
reasonable amount of tonnage per car.  (I realize as I read on  through
the item that this is basically what's pointed out in #64.)

Another interesting application of container freight is "land bridge"
operations.  Containers are unloaded from a ship on one coast, put on an
express freight train, then unloaded onto another ship on the other
coast.  The shipping company can turn around their ships faster and
avoid a long, slow, expensive trip through the Panama Canal.

response 68 of 111:

Jul 15 00:10 UTC 2003

Hmmm.  I've never thought of myself as "lucky" to be living in the Bosotn
er, Boston area.  It has, however, made me a much better driver, if only
to deal with all the other assholes around here.  Anyhoo, I routinely drive
10-15 mph over the speed limit, in all states.  I have never been stopped,
much less gotten a ticket.  I do make an effort to find a "bunny" to 
follow--someone who's going about as fast as I want to go, who will 
presumably draw off a single police car that's looking to ticket.  The first
and only time my bunny got pulled over was outside Buffalo a few months 
back.  
California's an interesting state.  I understand that the law there is such
that you can get a ticket for doing anything that they deem to be interfering
with the flow of traffic.  Thus, you can get a ticket for going only 70 mph
in a 65 zone if everyone else is trying to go 75-80.  
Are radar detectors legal or illegal in Michigan?  Don has a Valentine One
radar detector (they're legal in CA) and it's pretty impressive.  Were I
more worried about getting speeding tickets, I would certainly get one.
It tells you what radar band it's detecting, where the signal is coming from
(ahead, behind, right or left) and how many signals it's picking up.  The
only problem is that it also picks up some burglar alarms that use radar,
so you get occasional false alarms.

response 70 of 111:

Jul 15 03:23 UTC 2003

California has a pretty precise impeding traffic law -- if six or more cars
are stacked up behind you, you have to pull over and let them pass.  Speeding
up to the point where they weren't stacked up behind you would mean you
weren't impeding traffic anymore, but I've never heard of that being an excuse
to get out of a speeding ticket.

response 72 of 111:

Jul 15 05:27 UTC 2003

According to http://www.afn.org/~afn09444/scanlaws/radar4.html
only DC and Virginia currently have laws against radar detectors.

However, there are also different kinds of radar detectors, and the
laser-based systems are much harder to detect in time to actually do something
about your speed.

response 74 of 111:

Jul 15 15:31 UTC 2003

With modern "instant on" radar, you're hoping someone in front of you
will get clocked before you do so you'll know to slow down.  With laser
this doesn't work, because the beam is too narrow.  By the time your
detector goes off, you're already in trouble.