The collective loss of hope
I hear that the roundabout at Chiverton Cross is under major redevelopment, everything is going to change on the A30, this time they’ll get it right.
STEEPLE – A Scary Go Round Comic
by John Allison
I hear that the roundabout at Chiverton Cross is under major redevelopment, everything is going to change on the A30, this time they’ll get it right.
Societal breakdown is kind of like a holiday, right?
That’s a normal occurance.
Yes, I had to google “emmets”. I’m not ashamed.
Me, too. I suppose the masses of people are on their way to visit tiny, (formerly) quiet towns like Tredregyn.
Me 3.
I have now added “emmets” to the ever-growing list of words/phrases I’ve learned from John Allison’s comics.
yet no one wants to save me the google search!
It means grockles. I think that is a Devon/Cornwall divide in terminology.
It means “pismire”.
I’m not British, but I knew that both emmet & pismire refer to ants. So I understood the slang from context.
It’s a derogatory term for tourists/outsiders used by the Cornish. It’s derived from a word meaning “ants”, since said tourists are often red (like ants) from sunburn and swarm annoyingly (like ants).
“yes,” they said, “we will add more lanes, because they are in our jurisdiction”
“did you fix the bottleneck that causes traffic to collect” I, an engineer asked.
“that’s not in our jurisdiction,” they replied.
You can add a thousand lanes to the road, it will still be congested. In fact, the wider a road is, the more congested it becomes. The secret to suppressing traffic jams is not to make more and bigger roads, but to do the opposite — fewer and narrower roads, compensating by adding railroads and dedicated bus lanes.
This is because cars is the least surface-efficient way to transport people around. If you want to move a lot of people through, knowing that a car contains on average less than 2 people (since most cars only contain their driver and no passenger), that a lane is on average around 3-meter-wide, and that the safety distance for slow traffic between two cars is about 30 meters (that number increases with speed, 30 meters is the figure for 50 km/h), we get a transit density of less than 2 per 100 square meters.
There’s absolutely no way that this will ever be even remotely competitive with the seating in a train, or even in a coach.
When you widen roads by adding more lane, all this public money spent on making an intrinsically inefficient system more attractive is not spent on making more efficient systems attractive or even, in some areas, functional at all. So people are incited to take the inefficient system, generally because that’s their only choice, or sometimes the only choice they’re aware of. You induce demand for inefficiency, and the end result is just more congestion.
Sometimes you have to wonder what people are thinking. Take the abject failure of the Vegas Loop for example. Got a tunnel system connecting Point A with Point B. It’s single lane, and officially aimed at moving a lot of people. What does it use? If a person who had their brain cells turned on replied, they’d say “a metro” because what else do you use in underground tunnels for mass transit? But that’s not “disruptive” enough, so the actual answer is “cars”. In what is possibly the worst use case for cars as there’s no branching, it’s just point A to point B. So you get traffic jams.
Just don’t do what Seattle does: multiple unconnected (not even meeting at the same stations), all transport under-maintained, propose changes and put them to the vote and then ignore the voters’ will. “Do you want this solution?” “YES!” “Ok, we’ll keep looking for other solutions then…”
But I’m not bitter…
no bro I’m sure just one more lane will fix it please bro please don’t you want to fix it please one more lane I can get a bond for it
I don’t know. In NYC, over the years, the main attempts to solve the traffic problems have always involved trying to convince people to use the public transit system (or else use bicycles). One of the main ways they’ve attempted this is to deliberately make driving in the city even MORE unpleasant. All this has done is to make the traffic problems even worse. Native New Yorkers are often happy to use the public transit system- despite all the jokes, it’s actually a really good public transit system, compared to many other places- but commuters and people who moved into the city from elsewhere really like using their cars, far too much to give it up, even if it means sitting in traffic for hours and having to drive around for another couple of hours to find parking.
Hard disagree here. I remember when NYC traffic was actually worse in the 80’s and 90’s and there were no bike lanes or traffic calming measures and riding the bus was an effort in futility. Trust me you may be annoyed that the driving experience is worse, its not, but thatbis mainly due to the idea that cars should be the only road users.
I haven’t actually lived in NYC for over a decade now. I grew up in NYC in the ’70s, and lived there during the ’80s and ’90s. I go back frequently. In my experience, the traffic situation is much worse now. Apparently, your experiences have been different.
The MBTA (Boston, MA) has been just one huge fuckup after another lately. With cars bursting into flames, parts of the track that *I* could outpace the train because it’s too unsafe to go any faster, “new” cars that are frickin’ unusable… UGH. And it shuts downintown around 2am and access to the ‘burbs pretty much ends at Cinderella time…. *UGGGGGH!*
It’s called carrying capacity. If you make the roads wider, it will temporarily decrease congestion, and more people will be encouraged to use the road until it reaches its carrying capacity and it’s jammed again.
Making the roads smaller and fewer doesn’t help, making people drive slower doesn’t get you there faster, that’s all superstition. It’s just bottlenecks, 100% bottlenecks. The problem that cars have (and all vehicles have) is that there are certain points where they have to stop. If they have to stop where another needs to move, traffic slows. Almost all car networks have low throughput outlets at their very end, even high capacity things like stadiums often have very low throughput bottlenecks, which is one reason why stadium traffic is a nightmare. People think mass transit solves the problem, but it’s just the same problem. If your mass transit is well planned and well run, it will do fine. But on the same token, that city could probably plan and run its roads well enough anyway, in that case it’s just “is the city structured better for mass transit or for cars” most American cities were horse cities and are now car cities, just the way it is. We have mass transit rail that has too few lines, so if a train breaks down, it’s an automatic bottleneck. But they won’t check tickets when you get on, I guess they think that will create a slowdown (note to those who don’t do logistics: adding a constant time to loading every car doesn’t slow the system down, the throughput remains identical.)
Anyway sorry to start this, it’s not terribly fun living in a failing society.
Gareth seems unimpressed by the seasonal migration of the natural fauna of the Cornish countryside.
Natural fauna? That’s a classic introduced invasive species, right there, like cane toads in flip flops.
The two ideas aren’t mutually exclusive, though. Invasive species can be introduced naturally, as, for example, when North America and South America first joined together.
Luke’s comment nearly made me howl. Let him cook!
It’s true. Gareth and Penrose have everything for become best friends for life. I kinda hope he will stay on the Earth now.
These two are such an unexpected match made in Heaven and Welsh Not-Cybertron.
I’m so happy I finally get to see the screen behind the hatch! (from whence the pink glow arose) No wonder there was no room in this car for a radio, or Zambian Driveplay, or fog lights… All is revealed.
Nice that David can have some facetime with Gareth whilst driving.
OHHHH I missed that subtle “AND SO” my first time through!
Very subtle. That’s why I go through the panels 3 times: 1 to get a look at the flow of the action, 2 to read the dialogue, and 3 to see what I missed the first two times. Inevitably I miss a lot on the early run-throughs (including the subtle “AND SO”).
I give up. Where’s that subtle “AND SO”?
The car exhaust in panel 1.
Hah. Thanks. Frankly, that looked like something else to me, so I dismissed the thought. Must be one needs to be native speaker to see such things clearly.
It took me a few years, but I’ve become quite fluent in Tackleverse, albeit with an accent.
Big Knight Rider feels – just having a chat with this self aware car while stuck in traffic.
Michael and KITT discovering they don’t really have a lot to talk about apart from work would be the most relatable moment ever to come out of that series.
What does the ‘Holiday Mode’ button do? Does a hatch open, revealing a sunhat, bucket and spade?
On thermostats I have owned, ‘holiday mode’ is indicated by a little suitcase. Engaging holiday mode was always a good reason to sing ‘Holiday Road’ by Lindsey Buckingham.
Even after watching National Lampoon’s Vacation umpteen times I never realised that the theme tune was by Lindsey Buckingham.
Presumably it refuses to respond to any input for two weeks.
If it’s like smart thermostats in the U.S., it turns off the heating or cooling for the duration of your absence.
Apparently it puts the system into frost prevention mode for the duration of the holiday, so your pipes don’t freeze, and turns back on just in time to be a pleasant temperature on your return. Sounds like something the Rev could do with, to be honest.
Around here roundabouts have become fashionable in the growing communities. The problem is, seeing as how roundabouts are not a common feature in the United States, the civil engineers here have little experience designing them. Hence we have varying levels of utility. Some are pretty good. Others are absolutely terrible.
An example: Only three roads coming together, and we get this flustercuck.
https://www.google.com/maps/place/45%C2%B036'08.2%22N+122%C2%B024'23.8%22W/@45.6022897,-122.4091813,730m/data=!3m2!1e3!4b1!4m4!3m3!8m2!3d45.602286!4d-122.406601?entry=ttu
That is unholy.
Please tell me that thing has an appropriate name, like “The Portland Witch-Tangle” or something.
Sorry, that name is already taken by two roller derby teams and a punk band.
I love it
Jeebus!
Actually it’s only two roads coming together. Everett St running north/south and Lake Road joining it. What we call a T Junction.
You’re actually correct. Lake Road used to just have a stop sign where it intersected with Everett St.
That’s not a roundabout, that’s a highway gall. A (presumably extremely large) parasitic insect laid an egg there, and the large round growth protects its developing larva.
Impressive. Is it meant to inspire pareidolia? I see a swan (sort of).
But still, it’s no Endless Gyratory.
My go-to for How Not To Do It is this abortion, where they took a dysfunctional intersection — the merger of 15-501 and Franklin Street happening right on top of the intersection of the merged road with Erwin Road/Europa Drive, with service roads on both sides complicating matters, and replaced it with a “roundabout” stretched and squeezed to fit into the space and without any of the actual useful traffic-flow features of a roundabout.
So what we have instead of a dysfunctional traffic-light-controlled intersection is a couple of dysfunctional and confusing traffic-light-controlled intersections with a hairpin turn that’s difficult for trucks to navigate and makes you go ring-around-the-rosie for what were previously straightforward (literally) use cases.
All they really needed to do was move the 15-501/Franklin Street merger back and stop pretending that Erwin/Europa crossing 15-501 was two different intersections.
I also enjoy the roundabout they put in in Manchester Vermont, which is much too small for tractor-trailers to go around… and which is in the intersection leading into the delivery entrance of the grocery store, which is the one intersection in town that gets regular daily tractor-trailer traffic. Hilariously, it took them a couple years to give up trying to plant flowers in the middle of the roundabout only to have them run over by tractor-trailers every day and just pave over it.
I see a crocodile.
Oh, hello 15-501. It’s a loooooong time since the year I lived in America, but during that year I lived very close to 15-501.
If you zoom out a little on that link, you can see the house I lived in from 1981 to 1992. Erwin Road, then left on Old Oxford and right on Booker Creek. I used to drive through that intersection about every day. My usual method of dealing with it was to use the service roads to bypass the through route, which is exactly the opposite of how it’s supposed to work.
Obligatory xkcd;
https://xkcd.com/253/
Sweet buttered Jesus on toast! What a fornicating piece of excrement!
wait W H A T
I have been one of those emmets, stuck going nowhere on the A30 on Bodmin Moor, trying to get home from St Ives, twenty-four years ago this month, after witnessing a total eclipse of the sun that was, in the event, hidden behind heavy cloud.
Was it this one? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1qQEsVl0wkQ
I think there’s a missing “a” in panel 4. “when you start thinking of death as /a/ sort of holiday”?
Or “…death as sort of a holiday” would work as a more colloquial form.
Dropped articles are not uncommon in Cornish speech.
What exactly is going on in that lady’s car in panel 3? Is she being smothered by a rolling blanket?
I think they’re peering over a pile of vacation luggage and whatnot in the back seat.
Looks like a child looking over blankets, luggage, etc. to see out the back window.
Made me think of Godard: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=GjwsxoyGmsA
John, Chivvy to Carland is currently HELL. I mean… it was always bad but it’s presently worse. I am so looking forward to them getting the new road finished! No Chivvy roundabout, no Carland Cross, no bottleneck… bliss. Well, I’m sure it’ll still manage to get jammed up in the summer, but at least it won’t be a windy nightmare even on a good day.
BASTARD emmets.