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New motorcyclist going 178 mph on Ga. 400
"Science is the belief in the ignorance of the experts" – Richard Feynman
New Absolute bellend
I don't care if he (and it surely is a he) kills himself, but at that speed, any vehicle with which he interacts is going to have a really bad time, and they're not going to be able to do jack shit about it.

I have a weird relationship with speed limits. Bear in mind the following is based on the UK, which is a very different driving environment to the UK.

Urban speed limits - I would have them (and other driver behaviours) rigorously enforced, because that's where people and vehicles mix, in close proximity, for extended periods of time.

Extra-urban - I would scrap 'em, but there's a "but". And it's a big "but", I cannot lie.

I would also increase the difficulty of the driving test by a very significant degree; to a point where most current drivers (including me) would probably fail to acquire a licence, without significant training and study. Licences would also be renewed on a regular basis - say, five-yearly - with a re-assessment, and revocation of the licence for those who do not pass the re-assessment. Under this scenario, drivers encountering our hero above would have the skills they need to better deal with someone making bad decisions (like travelling at around three times the speed of the flowing traffic).

There's a second "but" - I am wholly in favour of extra-urban limits for the purpose of controlling traffic flow on motorways. This works, and greatly increases the capacity of the road. This is not a safety or control thing, but a "I don't want my taxes increased to pay for widening of motorways" thing.

Traffic densities in the UK have reached a point where we need much better drivers - and that's in a country whose standard of driving, evidenced by accident and fatality stats across any possible metric, is much better than the US.

Some of this is applicable to the US, especially in the states with greater population density and traffic volumes.
New For one thing . . .
. . all drivers from New Jersey should be stopped at the California border, and told to take a bus if they wan to go farther. People accustomed to entering freeway traffic at 25 miles per hour without looking should not be allowed to driver here.
New I have been to 4 states.
NJ - inattentive loons
NYC - Angry inattentive loons, and they're closer to you
PA - They just. don't. look. ever. Also, they like reading at the wheel. On the freeway.
CA (San Diego/LA) - LA drivers are like NYC drivers. San Diego drivers are actually not bad.
New It's easier to have your views in the UK.
You have other means (I would argue superior means) of commuting. The sister of my English mate here has lived in England her whole life. She's about my age and has never driven an automobile. Her son, too, whom I met while visiting also has never driven an automobile in his life. Neither ever intends to do so and both have been easily able to get around on your vastly superior public transportation system. If I were fortunate enough to live in England, the last thing I'd do is piss away time and money on a late 19th and early 20th century form of transportation. This is the 21st century, FFS.

I'm all in favor of what you suggest, but I would add a staggering tax for automobile ownership. Say, 30% of the purchase price of the vehicle each and every year you own it.
bcnu,
Mikem

It's mourning in America again.
New Sort of. But mostly no.
The only place it is practical to not have personal transportation in the UK is in central London, where a car is definitely a pain in the arse to own, unless it's in use for daily business. The mass transit options there are genuinely great.

The rest of the UK has dogshit public transport, and realistically speaking, one needs a car.
New I don't have firsthand experience, of course.
The two folks I mentioned live in Woodcote and Reading respectively. Until recently, both of them worked and reported no trouble getting around. Neither of them ever lived in London and I think you'd agree, Woodcote ain't no London.

Your country has the enormous advantage of being very small as compared to the US. My sister-in-law just drove here from California (about 2/3 of the way across the country). That was a trip of just under 2,300 miles (not quite 3 times the distance from Land's End to John o'Groats) and she had about 1/3 of the country left to drive across. It's ironic that we have a greater need for public transport and a lower demand for it despite cars killing 30,000 to 40,000 of us every year.

It's a very good thing your country isn't populated with Americans. If no one in this country ever had to travel domestically further than 800-900 miles, there'd be absolutely no way the populace would tolerate funding any high speed rail at all. They won't do it now even though the benefits would be tremendous.

Personally, I can't think of a dumber mode of transportation than automobiles.
bcnu,
Mikem

It's mourning in America again.
New And I can't think of a beter one . . .
. . for a person like me, with no regular schedule, being on-call for emergencies all over the county, and needing to carry significant loads of equipment, building and maintenance materials, and a 6 foot laddar, to and from locations that are not known more than a couple hours in advance. Helps a whole lot with loads of groceries from a half dozen scattered ethnic markets too. Both my business and my clovegarden.com Web site would be impossible without a car.

I'm sure there are a great many others who are not cubical dwelling "salarymen" (to use the Japanese term) with a routine job and a wife at home to spend her day fetching groceries, from the one store she can get to with public transport.
New What is it with Californians and their stupid cars? :0)
bcnu,
Mikem

It's mourning in America again.
New same here, for me to use public transport
I would have to walk or bicycle 10 miles to the coastal rd to catch a bus then walk, cycle another 10 miles to my destination.
"Science is the belief in the ignorance of the experts" – Richard Feynman
New We all know that in your "workers paradise" . . .
. . everybody lives in tiny apartments in huge Soviet style rectangular buildings so they can be trucked en-mass to their "jobs for life" at the factory or cubical. Life consists of being trucked to the job, eating a Soviet style lunch at the factory cafeteria, being trucked back to the apartment buildings, eating a Soviet style dinner at the local cafeteria, watching state sponsored TV until falling asleep. Then, at the exact same time as everyone else, the alarm goes off, giving just enough time to have a Soviet style breakfast of weak coffee and greasy pancakes at the local cafeteria, before being trucked back to the "job for life".

Here in California, we find that a perfect illustration of Hell.

PS

Sorry to take so long to respond, but I was called away by a client with a printing problem (POS front end to their system, so printing is veeeery important). Quickly responded due to having a car, while public transport would have taken at least an hour more each way.
Expand Edited by Andrew Grygus Sept. 9, 2020, 09:27:58 PM EDT
New The best thing that ever happened to me in California was when my car broke down.
I lived in Long Beach in an apartment across the street from Long Beach City College. My full-time job was in San Pedro. Traffic made that commute about an hour each way. Then, the transmission blew up and I didn't have the money to fix it. So I got bus schedules. I took a Long Beach bus to downtown Long Beach where I made the the free transfer to LA's bus system to complete the journey to work. When I got off of work, I repeated the process backwards. Total trip time was less than 30 minutes longer than "driving" and I was saving about $6.00 per day on gas alone (which back then was real money). In short order I'd saved enough to fix the transmission, but chose not to until just before I left California for good. Why? Because I'd purchased a Sunday Only LA Times subscription which I read cover-to-cover during my commute to work (the paper back then was thick). Without a car, I was able to educate myself during the commute instead of wasting my young life behind the wheel of a car most often sitting almost parked on the freeway.
bcnu,
Mikem

It's mourning in America again.
New A vehicle for you is a tool of work.
New They're outliers, then.
Sorry, but the buses in Reading are no better than the buses up here, to wit: shit.

I'm happy that they've found a way of living that means they don't need a car, but their experience is absolutely unrepresentative of the not-London mass transit situation. People around here (a very ordinary small town in England albeit on the coast) who don't have cars find themselves either considerably disadvantaged (good luck taking a job with irregular hours, because if you finish at midnight or later, getting home is going to be an ordeal) and/or flinging themselves on the mercy of their car-owning friends and family.

For example: my office (that I don't go to any more, because WFH :D) is 30 miles away, which is 40 minutes by car. By public transport? Two hours, five minutes. And I live literally 5 minutes walk (about a third of a mile) from a (very minor) railway station.

There's a saying: in England, a hundred miles is a long way. In America, a hundred years is a long time.

The thing with cars is this: they give you agency. You get to go where you want, when you want. This is very powerful. Public transport, as much as I'm a huge proponent of it, is best suited to solving the commuting problem - as evidenced by its obvious success in London (and, to be fair, NYC, and other giant cities). But it's inherently travelling at the pleasure of someone else, and that's a very conditional freedom.
Expand Edited by pwhysall Sept. 10, 2020, 01:38:47 AM EDT
New Yeah, personal transportation is not going away
For those that can handle it the electric bikes, scooters, unicycles have crossed from toys to amazing long-distance transport vehicles.

Long-distance meaning under a 15-mile commute. Each way. At around 30 mph.

I would have loved to have any of them to get from my house to the train station and then from the train to my office. We could have cut a multiple car family down to a single car.

But they're not carrying a family and they're not enclosing you in the weather and you better be able to balance and stand. But for commuter vehicles for healthy people they look great. Until it rains or snows.
New Nit Re: You get to go where you want, when you want.
Provided, of course, somebody has built you a road to there. I'm not arguing that the same doesn't apply to buses, trains, subways, etc. It's just that there's this commonly held American fantasy (also, I'm not ascribing that to you personally) that the "highway is Merkin Individual Freedumb" and that is plainly not true.

I'll concede that, sadly, cars remain a necessity because of the ways we've chosen to arrange ourselves. That is a choice I'd hoped to see withdrawn in my lifetime, but that's not going to happen. And I'm as guilty as anyone for making that choice.

In non-Covid days, I commute by car to work 40 miles from home and there is no mass transit of any sort between me and where I work, despite my office being in the second largest city in my state. In fact, Moffat Scotland has more regular bus service than that second largest city in my state has within its city limits. So, I could say, "I must have a car in order to get to work." But, that accepts as fact that I "must live 40 miles from where I work." TBH, that's a dubious claim.
bcnu,
Mikem

It's mourning in America again.
New Nah, that's not it.
It's that you don't have to wonder if there is a bus to your destination, and if it's running today, and whether you can take the dogs with you, and is there a return service, etc. You don't have to stand in the pissing rain waiting for the bus that isn't coming because they're running a reduced schedule due to strikes, driver illness, or whatever. Also, when The Man decides you're not travelling, well. You're not travelling.

There are simply too many people now for everyone to live within walking or even cycling distance of their place of work. It was practical when, in a town of 10,000 people of working age, they almost all worked in the local industries, and lived in the kinds of housing that was within a mile or so (aka shitty slums).

There are a couple of correct answers here:

1. Eliminate the need to commute. People should work from home where it is practical. This is a lot of people. And this will lift the load on the transport infrastructure for those who do need to commute.

2. Improve mass transit. This should be entirely focussed on commuting right now.

3. Eliminate ICE vehicles. This will make everything quieter and cleaner.

4. For shorter journeys, greatly improve sustrans infrastructure - this means proper cycleways everywhere, nice wide footpaths, properly engineered crossings where peds and cyclists have to traverse roads, mass transit vehicles that can accommodate a lot of bikes, etc.

tl;dr: the ability to partake of personal travel, without recourse to a third party for permission, is freedom. There are a very large number of journeys made, however, that are either unnecessary, or could be made via sustrans and/or mass transit. But personal travel is still freedom, and doing these things makes it better.
New Real estate and rent is significantly more expensive the closer to a city center you get.
Someone I work with just bought an extremely nice house out in the burbs for the same monthly outlay as a 2br apartment in downtown Detroit.

Personally I despise apartment living.
Regards,
-scott
Welcome to Rivendell, Mr. Anderson.
New apartment==kennels don't like them either rather live in a trailer park
"Science is the belief in the ignorance of the experts" – Richard Feynman
New The trouble with Super-bikes + Ordinary-people buying them is,
The 'ordinary' means, here in 'Murica: damn little comprehension of math, physics (or even Ohm's Law). To wit:

1) Failure to comprehend that there's another characteristic of such (marvelous) machines besides Power==HP.
2) The endorphin creation comes from acceleration [and brakes equally proper]; That effect is what you feel foremost,
whereas vast-speeds ==> vast wind trying to blow you off.
3) TORQUE* is what you Need: that Force: not some super-'HP' number.
4) Which is why I was immediately drawn to the only Acceptable Vee-twin [all the 'Murican Harleys n'such were simply, unwieldly awful-'handling' Hogs]
via gratuitous weight, lousy ground clearance in cornering etc.--as so befits the 'Murican love for Insolent Chariots (with 4- or 2 (3 w/sidecar) wheels).
* Electrics should creaam All the numbers (or steam /never mind] with Max torque at Start

That is all Ye need to Know IMhO: to be not-Ordinary any more. (thus not endangering everybody Not-you)

Fun was: the 150 mph speedo seemed geared-to the throttle; nothing like the screamer 4 cyls. at absurd revs (had a few, later).
Shadows did 0-60 mph in 6 1/2 secs [still a respectable number on any vehicle] the 'Rapide had a lower gearing,
less HP, torque etc. BUT: gearing got 0-60 in 6 sec flat. Rarely did I feel a need to top-out at a few mph shy 130
..it's boring, mainly (but the number IS: your built-in dynamometer!) If you don't see the proper Max
[same roads, weather etc.] ... you might check a few things, eh?
New A former client was a motorcycle shop . . .
. . they sold Ducati and Aprilla.

I overhead the conversation between their chief sales guy and a young man who wanted to buy a motorcycle. He asked the price of one of the top units on the floor.

The salesman asked his experience, which he admitted was close to none. The sales guy told him, "I will not sell you that bike. If you bought that bike you'd be so terrified you'd never learn to ride".
New Yeah give me a Yamaha 125
That thing was fun when I learned to ride when I was 12. I maxed out at a Honda 250 about 10 years later.
I never understood the desire for power beyond that, the weight and lack of flexibility wasn't worth it.
New Mine was a Yamaha RD-350 2-stroke
Then a Suzuki GS55ES, pseudo cafe racer with the half fairing. Reviews when it came out said it had a pretty flat power curve,* and everything was tucked up enough that you were unlikely to scrape anything no matter how hard you threw it into the turns. In other words, great fun in the twisties, but capable enough for 4 hours at freeway speed without being painful.

* Which at that time meant not enough at the bottom end to make the front come over too easy, and not enough on the top to be worth wringing it out.

If I had it to do over, I'd rather have had a dirt bike so I could get comfortable with sliding around. I'm sure I rarely pushed the capabilities of anything I rode.
--

Drew
New Oh no, you misunderstand, I never owned a bike
Except my moped when I was a kid.

I had a buddy who was my brother's older buddy who was stupid enough to hand me his Yamaha 125 when I was 12. I dumped that thing hard in the mud after smashing my knee on a tree while screaming for them to pull it off me because I was sure it was going to burn me.

Over the years various people would allow me to drive their bikes. So I got to cut school and go have fun zipping around. The key of any bike was the ability to throw it over a fence when you were running from the cops. I could lift a Yamaha 125. Not much past that.

When I was all grown up, Robbie, you remember Robbie from the wedding, offered to pay for a weekend of fun which included jumping out of airplanes, rock climbing indoors inside a cathedral, and riding motorcycles that we rented. Robbie knows how to throw a weekend. Note: Robbie ain't speaking to me anymore, I caused too much damage to his psyche.

So while I was capable of riding that Honda 250 over the various jumps and woodsy twisty turns I am certainly not competent to ever take one on the real road. Everyone out there is trying to kill you. Screw that.
Expand Edited by crazy Sept. 11, 2020, 12:58:54 PM EDT
New Robbie sounds like fun
Was he one of the guys setting off the fireworks at Beepbash?
--

Drew
New No Rob was never beep bash.
Give me a bit I'll email you photo of us. Which you might have taken.
New The tall guy helping serve the cake?
That's the only one I took with someone I don't recognize.
--

Drew
New Sent
Was the hell of a picture. I was crying emotionally throughout the evening. Margaret actually asked me if I had done any LSD for the evening. Nope, it was all just my emotions.

Rob is the bald one in the picture I sent you.
New Can't say I remember him
--

Drew
New S'ok
It was an intense couple of days. On my side I remember almost nothing. I wandered the pictures to refresh my memory occasionally. I'm very happy that my nephew filmed the actual ceremony so I get to review that. I really wish he had filmed the rabbi and the priest doing their act for the half hour before I came in. I'm told it was hilarious but I can't see it.
New He's dead right /no pun.
Any parent who'd let his charge begin with a screamer ..ain't got no cuth. I'd hope this salesman is among many, by now; they Know: start small thus light. (All I ever wished-for was a ~250# Shadow--the real one was too-heavy by my 'lights.

Similarly: when my meat-gyroscope failed my POST-rule I peddled the 550cc Kawasaki-4 to a local guy who had owned a vanilla Triumph. (The K was tricked out with a floating-iron front brake==2-fingers: run into a rubber wall. Had R-rated tires. This 550 weighed only slightly less than the Vincent, produced just a few HP less than its 1000 cc (!) Techno! (!). But a screamer, blah torque. (This was not a young'un getting first bike). A few days later we talked; "This thing is S C A R Y !!" (but in a Nice way).

With Crazy on this too: when my modest Matchless 500 cc was in shop I had a cheezy Harley 125 loaner for a couple days; this you could man-handle effortlessly; learned (in sandy loam) all sorts of fun things-about-momentum. The small bikes now, via same Techno advances--are all a sane person needs ... but many will always want M O A R just because.

VROO--->OOM, but choose a Carillon ..not Carrion.
New My then-inamorata had her younger brother visit thirty years ago
…and he rode from Buffalo NY to Oakland CA on a motorcycle he’d owned only a few months. He reached his destination emotionally and physically shaken, parked the beast behind her apartment and flew back after a fortnight, leaving her instructions to sell the thing.

Contrariwise, the late V bought a motorcycle in 1980, spent three weeks learning to ride the thing, and shipped it to Europe, where she spent a couple of months tooling around on it. She described her terror tooling along a narrow coastal highway in Yugoslavia, in the rain, with lots of big heavy trucks on the road. She prayed, she told me, for the first time since childhood. Me: “In English, or in Russian?” V (almost indignantly): “In Russian, of course.” But although she eventually unoaded the motorcycle, she had no regrets.

cordially,
New Love. It. [plus an Ernst Leitz Gotcha! tale]
re The former: indeed that was a daunting first real Trip; I congratulate him for his insight in dumping the plot.
(That too, is why I never pondered such marathons) as: freeway 'touring' is just-a-day-spent resisting the Main-force of wind; boring is too kind a word.

re The latter: I too had pondered just-that: prior to my Grand Euro Tour w/passsenger, As I totted-up the er, cubic-closest-packing of a myriad of essentials plus detritus, it dawned: You Will (want to) acquire various kinds of stuff; rain and such Will-not Amuse your 'pillion'-passeneger or self ..in time.

tl'dr: My first New-car, the red Austin Healey Sprite (its 'trunk' Lid as non-existent as that maroon behemoth you depicted elsewhere): a large behind-seats, space. On the ship carrying us all back to (before dis-) US: I had sinister-ly crunched n-newspapers as a 'wall'--thence taped over that un-lockable space (the mess alone would have stopped the perp via onlooking eyes), I wotted. It worked too--no pilfering.

Fun Stuff ...travelling on this warped planet (pre-Transistors).



[Optional tale, but related sorta]
Ed:PS: Happpiness for gearheads is: discovery of a flaw within the product of a World-Std Mfg, [!!]
To wit a [Ernst] Leitz Pradovit color slide projector. Had acquired this cheaper-in-Euro device--one item needing the mentioned 'safeguarding'. Found later that: their means of adjusting focus consisted of two thin round discs, a single one operating slightly within periphery of a thinner double-disk. aka enmeshed. Trouble was: it was unreliable. Geometry made the Case: in such an array, the friction-forces ~~ cancelled-out--nearly as much drag as forward motion! Man! but that's just simple Physis! ..to boot.

Some years later [schlepping the Perp] I stopped at the Palace of these 'Leica' Masters of the world. Showed a minion The Problem. Then a [Herr Knissel] appeared: he had DESIGNED-in this er, 'slip'. Simple Cuth demanded actively re-phrasing my words about the matter. After this conciliatory exchange I left with the Demo-on-a-wall-shelf of a later, more expensive variant.
Alas though, even E. Leitz ..lacked the PR-chops, such that: it cost moi ~$60 for the 'upgrade'. as in, Heh..
(The inner-Nazi toyed with ~ "That's fine Sir, and herewith my bill for collateral damage--bringing this back: I charge $60 for any hand delivery"). But modesty forbade being, just then a Smartass. Gotta remember Karma.
Expand Edited by Ashton Sept. 20, 2020, 07:11:08 PM EDT
     motorcyclist going 178 mph on Ga. 400 - (boxley) - (32)
         Absolute bellend - (pwhysall) - (17)
             For one thing . . . - (Andrew Grygus) - (1)
                 I have been to 4 states. - (pwhysall)
             It's easier to have your views in the UK. - (mmoffitt) - (14)
                 Sort of. But mostly no. - (pwhysall) - (13)
                     I don't have firsthand experience, of course. - (mmoffitt) - (12)
                         And I can't think of a beter one . . . - (Andrew Grygus) - (5)
                             What is it with Californians and their stupid cars? :0) -NT - (mmoffitt) - (3)
                                 same here, for me to use public transport - (boxley)
                                 We all know that in your "workers paradise" . . . - (Andrew Grygus) - (1)
                                     The best thing that ever happened to me in California was when my car broke down. - (mmoffitt)
                             A vehicle for you is a tool of work. -NT - (pwhysall)
                         They're outliers, then. - (pwhysall) - (5)
                             Yeah, personal transportation is not going away - (crazy)
                             Nit Re: You get to go where you want, when you want. - (mmoffitt) - (3)
                                 Nah, that's not it. - (pwhysall)
                                 Real estate and rent is significantly more expensive the closer to a city center you get. - (malraux) - (1)
                                     apartment==kennels don't like them either rather live in a trailer park -NT - (boxley)
         The trouble with Super-bikes + Ordinary-people buying them is, - (Ashton) - (13)
             A former client was a motorcycle shop . . . - (Andrew Grygus) - (12)
                 Yeah give me a Yamaha 125 - (crazy) - (8)
                     Mine was a Yamaha RD-350 2-stroke - (drook) - (7)
                         Oh no, you misunderstand, I never owned a bike - (crazy) - (6)
                             Robbie sounds like fun - (drook) - (5)
                                 No Rob was never beep bash. - (crazy) - (4)
                                     The tall guy helping serve the cake? - (drook) - (3)
                                         Sent - (crazy) - (2)
                                             Can't say I remember him -NT - (drook) - (1)
                                                 S'ok - (crazy)
                 He's dead right /no pun. - (Ashton)
                 My then-inamorata had her younger brother visit thirty years ago - (rcareaga) - (1)
                     Love. It. [plus an Ernst Leitz Gotcha! tale] - (Ashton)

People don't pay that kind of money to walk around sober.
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