Hybrid Car Comes In Handy to Escape Rita

"Of course, a decent passenger rail system between cities and a better evacuation plan would have helped more people..."

That's tough to say.

A theoretical freeway lane can accomodate 1,650 vehicles per hour at 60 mph, with an average vehicle seating roughly 5 people per vehicle. So the flow rate for passengers of a 12 foot wide freeway lane is 8,250 people per hour (again, theoretically, since there are merge and other system effects which obviously can tie up traffic). Keep in mind, too, that one can also haul things in addition to the people in the vehicle.

By comparison, a light rail car can accomodate 171 passengers, and typically has a maximum of three cars per train. Keep in mind that at that capacity it won't be able to haul too much stuff along with the people. But anyway, that means a given train can move 513 people. Assume a small service interval of 5 minutes, then 12 trains should be able to move 6,156 people per hour. The service interval would need to drop to 3 minutes to handle more people (10,260 of them) than a single freeway lane can.

Three lanes of freeway can handle 24,750 people in personal vehicles. You'd have to have a three car light rail train leaving every 1 minute 15 seconds to be able to carry the same number of people at the same rate.

So the flow rate for passengers of a 12 foot wide freeway lane is 8,250 people per hour

Now *that's* tough to say! Assuming an occupancy of 5 people per vehicle is overestimating by half. I think the main point of this evacuation was that during a simultaneous traffic jam, you are not going to get 1650 vehicles per hour b/c its performance degrades w/ increased load, whereas a rail or fixed transit system can continue to operate at full efficiency.

Of course, all those calculations assume just "one" rail line. In Houston, we've got many, many rail lines going in and out of town, and all for freight. Amtrack uses the double set of tracks on the other side of the electic right-of-way (ROW) from where we live, but they are the only ones using it for passengers. I-10 West used to have a similar pair of rails but they were all bought up by our former mayor/developer (can't remember the jerk's name now) torn out and are currently in the expanded ROW for the 18-lane expansion being built between downtown and Katy. We could have had light rail going both directions by now :|

And don't use the one light-rail line we have in town as an example of what we would have gotten. That was one of the worst decisions our city has made in a long time. I'm glad it exists at all, but the initial route was not the best of choices (from downtown to the TX Medical Center and nowhere else.)

Also, way back in the 80's (or maybe the early 90's) Texas proposed high-speed rail. It was killed by two very powerful lobby groups in Texas: the airlines and the concrete manufacturers. If we had been able to build these lines way back then, I feel the concept of light rail would have been better accepted by the masses and even insisted upon a lot sooner than has happened. And we would have been able to get more people out of town faster anyway. Plus, focusing your calculations only on rail and not on the combination of rail, air, buses, contra-flow and cars/trucks kind of looks a lot like how those that counter alternative energy look when they say solar/wind/wave can't individually supply all our needs (as if we were going to stop using all of the current oil-based choices all at once.)

The choice of good passenger rail out of town would have been welcomed by most of us here. We might have left town, too, had rail been an option :)

The difference is that the train won't run out of gas, costs you only your ticket (no need to own a car) and shouldn't be affected by panic/accidents/others running out of gas in front of it/etc.

It can also be made free during mandatory evacuations so that the poor can use it.

There are (at least) three constraints. One is the path (road or rail). The other is the vehicle (car or train). And then there's fuel.

Let's look at path constraints. There are far more roads than railroads. (Part of the problem in Texas though was that people didn't know about most of the back roads.) The railroads can handle a higher density, if you have enough trains. How much higher? Maybe a factor of 5? 10? I'm not sure.

Let's look at vehicle constraints. It's likely that there are 4 million cars in the Houston area, having an average capacity of ~4 people. You need 500,000 cars and have 4 million, so there is plenty of capacity. The New York subway system gets ~5 million riders per day, going a short distance, with 6400 subway cars. I don't know the average rider distance; let's say it's 10 miles. So to evacuate 2 million riders a distance of 200 miles, we'd need 6400 * (2/5) * (200/10) = 51,200 train cars. Since these cars are all going one way, we would probably need twice as many, to account for all the time they spend going back empty. So we need around 100,000 train cars to carry all these people out in 1 day; we could have used 50,000 over 2 days. But NYC's subway traffic is peaky and the evacuation can use all 24 hours evenly, so we may only need 20,000 train cars.

Given that NYC has only 6,400 train cars and they have far higher daily subway usage than Houston, and they have a much higher population using mass transit, it seems unlikely that Houston would have 20,000 train cars, even if the population was using mass transit a lot. You can also compare to San Jose, which has a population of just 1 million, but is more transit friendly than Houston, yet has only 50 light rail cars.

I think automobiles probably work out better here. Public transit, even with 100% of the population using it, is going to be optimized for short distances and would not have the capacity to take 2 million people 200-300 miles in 2 days. You'd have to build a system specifically for disaster scenarios, and that system would go unused the rest of the time. The money is probably better spent on roads (argh!).

"Now *that's* tough to say! Assuming an occupancy of 5 people per vehicle is overestimating by half."

I'm just telling you the capacity comparisons - the theoretical flow rates.

"I think the main point of this evacuation was that during a simultaneous traffic jam, you are not going to get 1650 vehicles per hour b/c its performance degrades w/ increased load"

There's all sorts of reasons that the system backs up - mostly that an amount exceeding the maximum capacity tries to access the system, then all the congestion-forming things happen -- bad merging, lane switching, breakdowns, tailgating, rubber-necking, etc.

"whereas a rail or fixed transit system can continue to operate at full efficiency."

Public transit in this country rarely performs optimally. And again, the numbers I was putting up assumed no cargo. More cargo, less people who could get on trains.

"And we would have been able to get more people out of town faster anyway."

That's a pretty tough conclusion to make, considering there are far more than 3 freeway lanes of capacity to move people out of the city, so the numbers I gave only give a small sense of how much capacity is actually there. The fact that people didn't use that capacity optimally doesn't fault the possibilites of the system, but merely the way it's used suboptimally.

"Plus, focusing your calculations only on rail and not on the combination of rail, air, buses, contra-flow and cars/trucks kind of looks a lot like how those that counter alternative energy look when they say solar/wind/wave can't individually supply all our needs"

I just wanted to make a simple comparison, not write a treatise on the trade-offs and interactions of various transportation modes.

"The difference is that the train won't run out of gas"

Having just spent 5 hours in the dark after a recent storm here, I think an electric train can come to a dead stop just as easily as cars can.

"costs you only your ticket (no need to own a car) and shouldn't be affected by panic/accidents/others running out of gas in front of it/etc."

Couple of things. Light rail tends to run at grade, so unless you somehow preempt all the cross-traffic of cars, then thinking that it won't get blocked is not a solid assumption. And transit, in practice, is far more expensive per passenger mile than cars are. Marginal uses may have efficiencies, but the system as a whole, at least in this country, tends to be expensive. So to say it "cost you only your ticket" is to not acknowlegde that taxes pick up the bulk of costs for a transit system (usually 75-80%).

"It can also be made free during mandatory evacuations so that the poor can use it."

And people can share rides, too.

I just got done reading a wackjob editorial in the Strib about how Katrina "proves" poor people need more cars. It's unfortunate that people are using these rare incidents to try and "prove" one mode is better than another.

In practice here, it wouldn't really have been a case of "one or the other". Rail would have come in *addition* to the existing automobile park, so it's hard to argue that it wouldn't have helped.

"so it's hard to argue that it wouldn't have helped."

Again, it's hard to say.

We got our light rail line running last year, and for a good portion of it, it runs along a major road, to the west side of it.

I used to use that road from time to time if I was coming from the southeast towards downtown, now I regret it every single time I get on it - especially going north or trying to cross it from the east. The way they've designed the train crossings and signals to interact ends up creating amazing congestion that doesn't actually need to be happening, but even if they tweaked it to improve it, you'd still get lots of problems because the cars and the train are sharing the same grade.

It's not a deal-breaker for me with light rail or transit more generally, but it's important that we acknowlegde the faults of transit instead of idealizing it.

"And we would have been able to get more people out of town faster anyway."

""That's a pretty tough conclusion to make, considering there are far more than 3 freeway lanes of capacity to move people out of the city, so the numbers I gave only give a small sense of how much capacity is actually there. The fact that people didn't use that capacity optimally doesn't fault the possibilites of the system, but merely the way it's used suboptimally.

I guess you also don't understand that humans in general aren't going to think (and act) like engineers when it comes to life-or-death situations, so asking them to use the system "optimally" is even more of a stretch than me saying that we could have gotten more people out with the use of rail. I wasn't saying the use of the rail was the ONLY way to get them out, but we wouldn't have had as bad of a problem with the traffic had the rail been an option. Plus, I guess you missed the fact that I said we have far more than a few lines going into and out of town. Houston is a major port. If you lived near where we do and had the means, you would have moved by now. The train horns every 15-30 minutes is enough to make anyone move. So, obviously, there is a capability to move lots of people, too. And those highways don't remain at ten lanes all the way out of the city. Rather all of them revert to just four lanes once you get about 30-50 miles out. And people were being evacuated at least 100 miles out. I live here; I know the area and how things are done, or how the majority think in these situations.

""I just wanted to make a simple comparison, not write a treatise on the trade-offs and interactions of various transportation modes.

In this situation, it was not a good comparison since it really can't be applied as has been mentioned already with the problems of bottlenecks and slowdowns. Remember, every time someone leaves the freeway, they slow down. They brake and people behind them brake and on down the line. Had rail been available it would have been a wonderful alternative to being in traffic. Plus, trains are a lot heavier than cars and could have been used to evacuate almost right up to the time of the storm. People also started evacuating on Tuesday, so there's no need to calculate for a one-day evacuation; that just doesn't happen with people or situations like this. They will leave as early as possible, especially after seeing what happened with Katrina.

Oh, one other thing: the trains here are all diesel powered, so no problems with the power going out...

"I guess you also don't understand that humans in general aren't going to think (and act) like engineers when it comes to life-or-death situations"

You may guess that I don't understand that, but you would be incorrect in guessing so.

"I wasn't saying the use of the rail was the ONLY way to get them out, but we wouldn't have had as bad of a problem with the traffic had the rail been an option."

And as I said, that's going to depend on how well the rail system is designed in relation to the highway mode. You can't just make a blanket generalization like you're making.

"Plus, I guess you missed the fact that I said we have far more than a few lines going into and out of town."

Ohhh. Now you want to start talking about heavy rail. Normally, when one is speaking about rail transit, it's usually with respect to light rail primarily. So, now you want to talk about heavy rail that is controlled by the freight lines?

"Rather all of them revert to just four lanes once you get about 30-50 miles out."

Four lanes can move 792,000 people in a day with light vehicles.

"In this situation, it was not a good comparison since it really can't be applied as has been mentioned already with the problems of bottlenecks and slowdowns. Remember, every time someone leaves the freeway, they slow down."

Honestly, I'd appreciate it if you'd pay a little more attention to what I wrote before you misrepresent what I believe. Here's what I said in my very first comment:
"So the flow rate for passengers of a 12 foot wide freeway lane is 8,250 people per hour (again, theoretically, since there are merge and other system effects which obviously can tie up traffic)."

And I followed it later with this:
"There's all sorts of reasons that the system backs up - mostly that an amount exceeding the maximum capacity tries to access the system, then all the congestion-forming things happen -- bad merging, lane switching, breakdowns, tailgating, rubber-necking, etc."

So, to somehow represent that I'm discounting the reality of traffic flow versus theoretical capacity and/or performance is to not be representing my position or my understanding of these issues.

"Plus, trains are a lot heavier than cars and could have been used to evacuate almost right up to the time of the storm."

That's an odd thing to say. Weight isn't the only factor in stability. For example, a low-slung, light car is far more stable than a heavy semi, since the latter has a much higher profile and much greater surface area relative to a perpendicular wind.

"Oh, one other thing: the trains here are all diesel powered, so no problems with the power going out..."

There again you're speaking about heavy rail, not light rail. And heavy rail is not "transit" in the traditional sense, rather a long-range commuting mode (unless you're speaking about subways).

It would facilitate discussion if we could keep the distinctions clear.

Okay, the first thing to make clear is when I said "four lanes" that's total, not eight lanes. That's how I refer to freeways, not just the number going in one direction. So-o, that means, without "contraflow" you have just bottlenecked to two lanes one direction.


Second, I don't care about whether the rail is transit or freight; this was an emergency. If FEMA needed them (or our city or any city for that matter) then they should be able to take them over and use them for getting people out. If 4-6 heavy engines can pull over 100 freight cars, how many people is that on one trip? And long range is exactly what we need. Transit really can't be considered since it would only go a few tens of miles. Unless it were to go to awaiting buses brought in just for evacuation...



Sorry for not reading all your notes, but it got just too dry for me; I'm not an engineer. Isn't the reality of how this traffic situation turned out evidence enough that we need more than calculations on how much traffic CAN get through versus what really happens? We NEED rail by any means. If that means having in place a NATIONAL system of passenger cars that can be brought into areas over time (such as at the first sign of trouble or in our case, landfall) then that's more of a start than trying to tell people to stick to cars because we can get more out in one day by your estimation. We got a lot of people out anyway, even with the traffic jams and fuel problems. What we need are more ways to get people out than just the roads. Rail is the first to come to mind, even if it is freight. They seem the best qualified to get lots of people out of an area were we to implement a system using their existing lines.

"Okay, the first thing to make clear is when I said "four lanes" that's total, not eight lanes. That's how I refer to freeways, not just the number going in one direction."

The calculation was for four lanes.

Flow rate of freeway lane at 60 MPH => 1,650 vehicle/hr. 5 people/vehicle => 8,250 people/lane/hr. Four lanes => 33,000 people/hr. 24 hours => 792,000 people/24 hrs.

"Second, I don't care about whether the rail is transit or freight; this was an emergency. If FEMA needed them (or our city or any city for that matter) then they should be able to take them over and use them for getting people out. If 4-6 heavy engines can pull over 100 freight cars, how many people is that on one trip? And long range is exactly what we need. Transit really can't be considered since it would only go a few tens of miles. Unless it were to go to awaiting buses brought in just for evacuation..."

I'm not clear on what you're proposing. Are you saying there should be thousands of passenger rail cars sitting around every city ready to evacuate people on short notice? The original discussion had to do with hybrids and transit being better options for the sake of emergencies like hurricanes. I'm not clear on how we got to the point of proposing a stand-by inventory of passenger rail cars in every major metro area.

"Sorry for not reading all your notes, but it got just too dry for me; I'm not an engineer."

Well, neither am I, but if you're going to be engaging in discussion with someone and retorting views you think a person has, it's only fair to read what they've said.

"Isn't the reality of how this traffic situation turned out evidence enough that we need more than calculations on how much traffic CAN get through versus what really happens?"

The fact that they weren't very organized about it doesn't negate the technical capabilities of a given mode. The reason I mentioned light vehicles (ie, cars, trucks, and SUVs) is that many people underestimate their carrying capacity on a given roadway relative to transit or other forms of shared transportation.

You need to cut your result in half then. Here four lanes means = two outbound, two inbound. The contra-flow idea wasn't implemented right away. Now they're having traffic jams getting back in. It never ends.


As for passenger cars being available, they don't ALL have to be in the city that's going to need them. How long would it take to get the needed cars into the city being evacuated? I have heard from when Katrina struck that Greyhound alone has 2000 buses. That's spread out over the whole country. It would take them much longer to get all to one city in any state than for the rail lines to get the same number of passenger cars to any given city. Frieght rail doesn't have the kind of slowdown problems this country has on the roads. Sure, they have other in-city rail lines to deal with, but their traffic problems (at least to my observations) aren't anywhere near as bad city to city as they are for roadways. From what I have seen, too, looking at maps, rail lines are often pretty straight, point to point versus roadways. But you would really only have to give up a relative few cars per city across the country for all the cars a city would need to get people out.


The thing is, we can debate this all we want; it's the governments that will or will not implement anything we think is reasonable or makes sense. But, in Texas anyway, cars are what people think of first. And our roadways are only set up for light traffic outside of the cities. Despite the knowledge that we live in a dangerous part of the world for the potential of killer storms like these, we continue to either under-estimate the need for evacuation schemes that don't rely so heavily on cars/trucks or we don't even think about the need for good evacuation plans until it's too late. And when we do think about them, what comes to mind more often than anything is "more lanes of freeway" instead of mass transit and high-speed rail. Anything to get people out of the way more efficiently than the vehicles most often used. Thanks to Katrina people are FINALLY thinking of fuel-efficiency, but it took a deadly situation to drive prices up enough for people to even notice. Now all we need are cheap hybrids, better ideas on long-range mass-transit and less people on the coasts.


Thanks for the debate, though. It still made me think :)

Thanks to everybody who wrote comments. Lots of interesting stuff (keep it coming!).

One other thing you probably need to consider with rail is -- how do people get to the embarkation point itself?

There's no way to get around the car problem. Even if you had passenger heavy rail, there's going to be massive tie-ups trying to funnel people to one or a few places of departure.

But let's look at capacity of heavy rail, since we haven't.

I got some numbers from New Jersey Transit for their new multi-level passenger cars. On average, for the fleet they're putting in service, seating capacity per car will average 136 people.
http://www.njtransit.com/nn_press_release.jsp?PRESS_RELEASE_ID=1989

Next, I looked for "world's longest passenger train" and found there to be a 44-car Amtrak train that also hauls autos. So, let's assume 44 cars to be the maximum length for a passenger train.

Take 136 times 44 and you get a hauling capacity per train of 5,984.

The question then arises as to how frequently one could load these trains full of people and send them on their way. To think that a train that size could be moved into position, get 6,000 people on there with all their stuff, then departing -- considering also that most Americans are unaccustomed to dealing with trains -- let's say that optimistically you can move one of these trains every 30 minutes. That means, at most, you're moving out 12,000 people per hour, or 288,000 per 24 hours. Keep in mind, also, there's either going to have to be an enormous supply of massive passenger cars sitting around or brought in somehow, then they're going to have to be stored somewhere until they're used. And unless somehow 15,000 of these cars is put in place, some are going to have to come back into the town to pick up more people, and that means taking up another track.

Getting back to freeway capacity using light vehicles, ONE LANE (ie, 12 feet of pavement) can move 198,000 people with 5 people per vehicle. Two lanes and you're well past what a passenger heavy rail line can accomodate under very generous assumptions.

If you really wanted to get maximum flow, then buses are probably the best bet. Assume 47 people per bus with a 45 foot length, and a freeway can handle 67,374 people per hour per lane via buses. Again, you'd have to factor in the logistics of people getting to the buses and getting on them, but once on the road, the above flow rate is correct - about 8 times better than light vehicles with 5 passengers per vehicle.

The other benefit of buses is that they use the existing road network, so you're not constrained by limited numbers of embarkation points, and the logistics of loading 47 people and getting on the road is a whole lot easier than 6,000 at a time.

The problem with buses, though, is that they're going to pour right onto roads shared with cars. The only way to avoid that is to keep diamond lane rules enforced, or to restrict those lanes exclusively to buses during an evacuation period, which I have trouble seeing happen (ie, people would probably get enraged at it).

I guess I'm saying the bottom line is that to trumpet hybrids, transit, heavy rail, buses, or whatever, as some superior solution in the rare instances of mass evacuations, is kind of a wrong debate to even have at all. Good transportation policy shouldn't be beholden to bizarre and rare situations such as that.

I'm just telling you the capacity comparisons - the theoretical flow rates.

And, in theory, there's no difference between theory and practice... but in practice, there is. You cannot blindly assume 5 people per car, especially when you are also stating that people in a car will be taking cargo that a train cannot handle. We have 2 families staying with us from Houston, and the maximum per car was 3.

Public transit in this country rarely performs optimally. And again, the numbers I was putting up assumed no cargo. More cargo, less people who could get on trains.

Your cases against trains seem to boil down to 'hey, it *could* break down', and 'yeah, but trains *might* not perform optimally', which is true of anything. You should give trains the same benefit of the doubt that you give cars... that 2 million people will ensure that they pack 5 to a car and space themselves out to give the theoretical maximum flow rate of 8,250 per hour. At least in trains, you can control the flow rate.

You seem sufficiently jaded against mass transit that further points would also fall on deaf ears, so I'll just bow out of this thread.

"You seem sufficiently jaded against mass transit that further points would also fall on deaf ears, so I'll just bow out of this thread."

"Seem" is a great word, isn't it? You don't ever have to go to the effort of actually finding out whether your presumption is correct or not - just assume and conclude based on that assumption.

My problem is not with transit, it's with people blindly supporting one or another mode as "superior" without actually addressing the extreme complexities when analyzing transportation issues. The fact that I stated theoretical flow rates is to provide a benchmark, not to lay it down in stone and say "With 100% certainty this many people can move at this rate in all instances". As I said to Eric, if you actually read all of what I wrote instead of cherry-picking parts of it and getting inflamed about it, you'd understand that I addressed the differences between theory and actual practice numerous times.

In the end, the fact that I mentioned the strengths of automotive transportation versus other modes doesn't mean I think one mode is superior to another. But since this post is about someone taking the position in favor of hybrids and transit, I felt perhaps some context would be useful to people who might not know better.

And as I also said upthread, I had the displeasure of reading a completely foolish editorial in the Star Tribune a few days ago entitled "The world would do better with more private cars":
http://www.startribune.com/stories/562/5630232.html

Any sort of one-sided approach to these things, based either on dishonesty or simplification, is just wrong. Plain and simple.

Joseph, settle down. You can't really accuse someone of 'cherry picking' a couple of points when you've done it over 20 times in these comments yourself. You have straw-man arguments: No one asserted that one mode is superior than another, and this (treehugger) post didn't really take a position that hybrids are better. If you read it, it says that they are 'handy'. Finally, the post didn't say that a rail system would be a substitute, so it's funny to hear the argument that any additional means of getting out of town wouldn't help. That's not engineering, that's simple addition.

Out comes the cowardly anonymous troll. Typical.

Please people, lets keep things constructive. Many very interesting things were said in this discussion and it would be sad to see it turn into personal attacks.

Mr. Willemssen, without reference to any of your following posts, your original post was rife with over-simplifications, gross assumptions and an attack into the dark against something that didn't exist in the first place.

The author of the piece regarding the potential use of light rail led in no insinuation or direction against freeway transit or vehicles. In fact, using a quote you used yourself:

"Of course, a decent passenger rail system between cities and a better evacuation plan would have helped more people..."

Where does this quote denote 'replacement'?

Secondly, and this leads me to immediately question the olive branch you offer alongside your rebuttal, you oversimplify nearly all of your provided information. Each car going 60 MPH? Each car holding 5 people? Each car is diversion-free? I can't even possibly hope to list the sheer amount of variables unaccounted for simply to bolster your incredibly flawed argument.

Give this up - you're making yourself look more biased than anyone else on here.

"Give this up - you're making yourself look more biased than anyone else on here."

That's nice. What's my bias? I'd like to know what you think it is.

Oh, and welcome to Treehugger, "Kip". I see that this is your first post here ever.

I see that a lot.

Here's a useful resource on traffic flow from the BTS:
http://ntl.bts.gov/DOCS/96100/ch02/body_ch02_03.html

In it, they also have data of actual flow rates on the Bay Bridge (albeit the data is a bit old).

Note the peak average single direction measured flow rate is about 9,000 vehicles per hour. For those not familiar with the Bay Bridge, it's a stacked design, five lanes on each level.

So, 9,000 vehicles per hour for five lanes comes to 1,800 vehicles per lane per hour.

My assumption of 1,650 vehicles/lane/hour is not out of line in the least.

Take a look at the BTS document, if you're interested, as it discusses the different things which can affect flow rate.

One of the things they experiment with here are ramp meters. If they can be dynamically managed, then traffic control people can do a lot to keep traffic flowing during a high-use period like an evacuation.

And as I said, I also think diamond lanes can be hugely useful, especially is there's decent physical separation from the standard roadway and traffic on to it can be moderated to keep off certain vehicles during emergencies.

Both of these things are fairly inexpensive upgrades to a road system that lacks them, compared to introducing a whole new mode.

You've attempted to spin data unrelated to the specifics at hand. The active traffic of the S.F. Bay Bridge on an average day is hardly relative of the mass expulsion of millions of evacuees. And in passing reference to that, you've offered an "...if they can be dynamically managed", which left those of us reading with an unspecific set of parameters based upon hypotheticals. Equally, I could say that I think roads are irrelevant - if we all grew wings.

Additionally, your argument follows further with "...IF there's decent physical separation..." - How? "...and traffic can be moderated..." - How? Speculation and idealism add nothing to an argument weighed on the actual pros and cons of existing evidence. Please specify portions of the NTL report you provided and clarify them to bolster your argument.

Finally, don't bother trying to turn this around on me with: "Well, where's your proof?" The burden of proof is on the accuser, not the accused. Personally, when I witness informed argumentation, especially in an online setting where concrete information is readily available, it's either a result of laziness or a lack of evidence from the author that ends up in hopeful scenarios played out in "What if this?" and "If this happened..."

You sure have a temper, son.

Now, when are you going to inform me what my "bias" is? Or don't you want to commit to saying it, for fear that you'll be completely wrong?

Being called "lazy" with respect to transportation issues - that's a good one.