Driving f***ing sucks.

[The Man]

So. Thursday night, as I attempted to drive back to Sarasota, I was confronted with a twin series of problems. First off, my trunk wouldn't open. It turned out that the latch that opens the trunk was broken. Secondly, I discovered the hard way that one of my tires had gone flat, by realising my car was unbalanced after driving it. Naturally, I called AAA. Getting the spare out with the trunk broken turned to be a monumental chore, but when the dude arrived about forty minutes later it turned out that the key to the lug nut on my wheel was missing. I had the car towed to a local gas station which would have been capable of removing this key, and resigned myself to the fact that I wouldn't be able to get home that night.

Friday morning, I called up the station and the guy there tried to convince me that all four tires needed replacement. I was convinced this was a load of horse****, so I had the car towed to a local Sears Auto Center to get a second opinion (although doing so required a large amount of haggling with AAA). It turned out that the kind of tires I had on my car (the flat one of which, by this point, had been completely destroyed) are no longer made, so in order to prevent the car from becoming unbalanced, I had to get two new tires - which is going to set me back something like $400, and thus has resulted in me needing to postpone a vacation I was hoping to take during Spring Break instead.

The tires still haven't been replaced, because Sears didn't have a key to the lug nut either. That's going to have to wait until tomorrow, and I'm going to have to get up rather early in order to get the tires replaced. My parents had to come over and pick me up, and they're going to have to drive me back tomorrow.

Keyed lug nuts are a pretty retarded idea anyway - in the time it takes you to remove the wheels, you could easily just steal the whole car.

In conclusion, why can't America just have a decent train system like other civilized nations? It would make matters a lot easier. I accept that a large reason for the absence of workable public transportation is the unwieldy influence of the auto industry over America's government, but either way, it disgusts me.

[Ugly Casanova]

I am so glad I don't have to drive to Sarasota anymore.

[Larsa]

Well a lot of things in America are disgusting. One reason why most people have deserted the train syteme is because were selfesh little brat who have to get our own car. On a second notion a lot of citys in America are very spread out making it very expensive to mave mass transit staions.

[Ex Deo]

I'm with you 100% on the public transportation deal. Driving here in St. Louis is a bitch because all of the drivers are *******s, plus I just hate having to drive anywhere. I'd rather ride a horse.

[Antikhrist]

Originally Posted by Ex Deo

I'm with you 100% on the public transportation deal. Driving here in St. Louis is a bitch because all of the drivers are *******s, plus I just hate having to drive anywhere. I'd rather ride a horse.

During the week, Leavenworth's fine. During the weekend, however, 406ers roam the streets. People from Seattle are horrible drivers, especially with as much snow as we have.

[The Man]

Originally Posted by Larsa

Well a lot of things in America are disgusting. One reason why most people have deserted the train syteme is because were selfesh little brat who have to get our own car. On a second notion a lot of citys in America are very spread out making it very expensive to mave mass transit staions.

It's true that cities in America are spread out, but even so there are a few places like San Francisco and New York that seem to manage pretty much fine. I'd chalk this up in no small part to the mentality of American city design. Since driving is so common, there needs to be plenty of parking, which results in there being larger distances to cross, which results in more people needing to drive.

Now, if public transportation were better, more people would use it. But herein lies the central problem of public transportation: The less people that use it, and the more people that drive instead, the more worthless public transportation becomes. There is a principle of rational self-interest involved in driving everywhere, for public transportation makes stops along the way, which drivers need not do. As an example, let us say that it takes one hour to get from Miami to Boca Raton by bus, but takes merely forty minutes to get from Miami to Boca Raton by car.

However, what occurs when everyone therefore begins to drive everywhere is a form of the "Tragedy of the Commons," because of the resultant increase in traffic. The end result is that it actually takes one hundred minutes to drive from Miami to Boca Raton, because the road system is so clogged that it ceases to function effectively. The problem could be solved if everyone began using the bus system again, but since it takes two hours just for a bus to get from Miami to Boca Raton, no one bothers, especially since buses have become so underused that they only run once every three hours anyway, where before they used to run every thirty minutes.

The solution is for an outside force - preferably the government - to provide incentive to people to start using public transportation again. While the government cannot restore to people directly the extra twenty minutes they'd spend sitting on a bus, it can provide through tax breaks and other means the incentive for people to stop driving everywhere they go - preferably enough so that they no longer need to work two jobs just to afford the exorbitant cost of living in South Florida. Unfortunately, this does not happen, and so we are left with what we have: A ****ty road system and an even ****tier public transportation system. It's no wonder Americans are so stressed. Driving is awful, and it just keeps getting worse.

[itcouldbesweet]

Yeah I hear that. I recently rolled over a hole in the road and thought I busted my tire because I could feel the car shift downward. Once I got the wheel off I realized that I didn't bust the tire. The actual rim itself exploded in the opposite direction and the air escaped from the tire. It took me a while to put my spare on since it was my first time but I made it through.

[My Final Heaven]

Primary reason for america not having a good train system is all that geography in the way. England, europe, lots of places along the way. America, there's like, hundreds of miles in some places between places you could justifiably put a train station, and that's unacceptable.

And also, like it or not, a car is actually more efficient a people/goods mover than a train. Hand to god, a car with all its **** is more efficient even, and I'm not making this up either, even if you took 1 mid sized car per person vs using a train full of people, the sum amount of energy used by the cars vs the train would still be less to the cars.

It has something to do with the fact that trains, because they are so heavy and combersome and because they run on rails which have garbage traction vs tires on pavement, need to expend massive amounts of energy to move up to speed and then almost imediatly need to slow down again, and there is no system to absorb the breaking power used to stop the train back into the engine (Even though they work on electric dynamometers but what ever). So you have huge energy going into acceleration and breaking, vs a car which is by comparison tiny. So the tiny little cars each only need to spend a small amount of energy and they use it much more efficiently because in theory they take the people inside them directly from point a to point b and do no more and no less than they need to.

[The Man]

meh. Even if trains are less efficient than cars (which I seriously doubt, due to the fact that the average car transports something like 1.3 people at a time; are you sure your statistics are correct?), they still don’t run on oil, which is a nonrenewable resource, and they're a ****load safer as a mode of transportation than cars are. Not to mention a ****load less frustrating. Once you board a train you can sleep until you reach your stop, whereas when you’re driving you have to deal with other people, and that’s frustrating. You also have to deal with any problems that might occur to your car, as I had to do above; any problems that might occur with trains are the problems of the state.

And America once had one of the best train systems in the world, but it’s fallen into disrepair due to lack of funding/people caring.

[My Final Heaven]

Well, I didn't check my facts but I got them from a show called top gear. Its a car review show that kept getting complaints from environmentalists that they were promoting a planet killing lifestyle or something like that, so they went out and did thier own fact checking and came out with the numbers.

It makes sense if you think about it though.

Say you have seven hundred pounds that you need to move right? And you can either take it in one huge lump sum on the back of a flat bed, or you can move it using four wagons. You have four people to move either one. You don't just have to move the load over flat ground but up hills and down as well. So if everybody moves the big flat bed, you're going to spend as much time stopping the thing getting out of control as you are actually moving the load, whereas in small more manageable chuncks, it's an easy job for each person to take a small load, and you'd get it done faster anyway.

It's the reason that the best rocket isn't just the biggest one with the most gas crammed into it, because beyond a certain weight, you're burning more gas moving the gas than you are moving the rocket. That's what trains are like and it's why small gas powered vehicles are more efficient. And somewhere down the line, trains are burning gas or coal or nuclear energy so simply saying they aren't burning it themselves doesn't mean they aren't having it burned.

[The Man]

Meh, I don’t really trust that logic then. Sure, you’re moving people’s weight no matter what, but that ignores the fact that cars generally weigh several tons each, and usually only transport one person each. While trains weigh a lot more than cars do, they generally transport way more people proportional to their weights (I would assume) than cars do as well, especially since they only have to have one engine each. Whereas each car that’s transporting one person has to have its own engine.

Granted, a lot of trains probably do run off electricity generated through coal burning or nuclear fuel, but that’s a rant for another topic (I agree those forms of energy should be abandoned as well).

[My Final Heaven]

But that's why I put the rocket science bit in there. It isn't simply a measurement of weight to fuel ratios, and that ratio is not a straight line, it's a curve. Cars are at the bottom of the curve and trains are at the top. You also have to take into account that the same technollogy is being used to drive both of them and you're dealing with constant gravity. Now because a train is huge, there's a huge amount of energy needed just to break the static inertia, because you're moving thousands of tons at once insead of just one or two. All that energy gets wasted when the train uses it's brakes. Exactly the same thing happens in a car, except that you remember the constant gravity? Because the car is lighter but they're using the same kind of force, in this case, torque, to break that inertia then relatively minute ammounts of power are needed to move the car, and you can easilly accelerate a car to 100 kph but a train has to work thousands of times harder to do the same thing. Now, once the train gets moving, then it becomes more efficient, but the thing about mass transit is that it has to make frequent stops just like a car does, and it's in that start and stop where the train is horribly inefficient.

FOr what it's worth, flying is the most efficient form of transportation currently available.

[The Man]

Except that trains, as you yourself admitted, would often go hundreds of miles between stops. Whereas cars would constantly, over that same distance, be forced to shift direction, speed, and so forth. Obviously, for transportation covering a shorter distance, it would make more sense to use less massive forms of transportation, such as buses.

Furthermore, the weight ratios would be different by a magnitude of, like, a hundred. I seriously doubt it’s enough where the train’s huge size would outweigh the massive efficiency of transporting two hundred people or more in one vehicle.

[Faded Hero]

You have keys for your lug nuts? Florida FTL.

[My Final Heaven]

Meh, I was just passing on what the number crunchers said, and it was that trains use more energy. Couldn't tell you how they came up with it just my own theory as to what would explain it. I do find it dubious that when you have a train run off of energy that is being delivered remotely through a wire to a power station and is therefore not carrying around the weight of it's own engine, that it could possibly be less efficient than cars, but for the big diesel electric trains it does make a lot of sense. Now if they had braking dynomometers like on the hybrid cars, that would obviously fix that problem as well, because there the problem is that hybrid cars are too heavy to be really efficient, but what's a couple more tons to a train?

Anyways, apparently with currently used technollogy, gas run off gas are more efficient than trains run off either diesel or dc power. Now I'll grant you that doesn't include the cost of opperation, only the actual energy expenditure to transport persons from point a to point b. Always when considering efficiency ratings its vitally important to be clear about exactly which measurement of efficiency we're after here, but strictly for moving people, planes are the most efficient followed by cars and busses and trailling a long way behind is trains. They're just not efficient at moving people.

Now clearly the best form of transportation that might be in the near future is a type of train, the Magnetic levitation train. Personally, I don't see the problem with a network of vacume tubes myself like in futurama but people tend to look at me funny when I explain how easy those would be to actually make.

[The Man]

Originally Posted by My Final Heaven

I do find it dubious that when you have a train run off of energy that is being delivered remotely through a wire to a power station and is therefore not carrying around the weight of it's own engine

Yeah, indeed. There is a slight amount of loss through a wire, but it doesn't seem like it could be enough to negate the lack of engine.

Now if they had braking dynomometers like on the hybrid cars, that would obviously fix that problem as well, because there the problem is that hybrid cars are too heavy to be really efficient, but what's a couple more tons to a train?

Quite true.

I'll grant you that doesn't include the cost of opperation, only the actual energy expenditure to transport persons from point a to point b. Always when considering efficiency ratings its vitally important to be clear about exactly which measurement of efficiency we're after here

Yeah, that's another reason I'm skeptical of the "trains are less efficient than cars" thing.

Now clearly the best form of transportation that might be in the near future is a type of train, the Magnetic levitation train.

Yeah, magnetic technology seems like it could be the way forward. It's dreadfully expensive now, but as people research it more I'm sure it'll come down in price significantly.

Personally, I don't see the problem with a network of vacume tubes myself like in futurama but people tend to look at me funny when I explain how easy those would be to actually make.

I think it's more the fact that most people would be uncomfortable using those than anything.

[Larsa]

Originally Posted by The Man

meh. Even if trains are less efficient than cars (which I seriously doubt, due to the fact that the average car transports something like 1.3 people at a time; are you sure your statistics are correct?), they still don’t run on oil, which is a nonrenewable resource, and they're a ****load safer as a mode of transportation than cars are. Not to mention a ****load less frustrating. Once you board a train you can sleep until you reach your stop, whereas when you’re driving you have to deal with other people, and that’s frustrating. You also have to deal with any problems that might occur to your car, as I had to do above; any problems that might occur with trains are the problems of the state.

And America once had one of the best train systems in the world, but it’s fallen into disrepair due to lack of funding/people caring.

Not only is the train more efficiant in transporting many people, and saving a lot of time, and being much safer, AND being much less consuming of the fossil fuels that a hundred cars put out, it is also a very fun and enjoyable experiance just to be underground, on a train, and knowing that you will most likly be at your destination in a much shorter time.

About a year ago my sister told me that the average American spends 10.5 YEARS at a red light in their short life.

[XxVivixX]

Originally Posted by Larsa

About a year ago my sister told me that the average American spends 10.5 YEARS at a red light in their short life.

so i should start hitting red lights right? one thing about trains is that people have to make quick and frequent stops many times a day. i dont think that you can go back and forth on a train all day. plus everyone is just too lazy to take the train, get off at the station, and then have to walk some more to their destination. with a car, just park in the lot and after a couple of steps your there. maybe eventally we will have a city where everything is build around the train tracks like those movies about the future. until then, hold on to your car keys.

[Beeble]

Cars sucks All they do is costing you a whole lot of money that you could have used for more pleasant things. And yet, i need one...

[Angelus-Mortis]

I hate driving. Thankfully, there's a subway system where I live.