[HN Gopher] The Suez Canal will be widened
___________________________________________________________________
The Suez Canal will be widened
Author : pseudolus
Score : 134 points
Date : 2021-05-16 11:42 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.businessinsider.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.businessinsider.com)
| FridayoLeary wrote:
| Lets see. There exists a class of ships known a suezmax. As their
| name suggests, they are the maximum size that the Suez can
| reasonably accommodate. This announcement sounds like an
| admission that the engineers screwed up (big time) when drawing
| up the specifications of the suezmax class. Ah. Heads must be
| rolling right now, i wonder if any retired engineers/surveyors
| have been receiving uncomfortable phone calls...
| LatteLazy wrote:
| I don't think it suggests that at all. The engineers built
| ships that were as large as possible while still passing the
| canal. There were no plans to enlarge the canal. I don't see a
| mistake there except for the politicians who decided the fix
| the canals size then changed their minds...
| FridayoLeary wrote:
| They are not changing their minds arbitrarily, it's in
| response to the fact that as the Evergiven demonstrated, so-
| called Suezmax ships actually don't fit. In reality, they are
| "Suezbarelys"
| LatteLazy wrote:
| Isn't that exactly what suezmax means? SuezBarely?
|
| If you ask for a Xm long ship, you get an Xm long ship.
| That's not a design flaw because it crashes more easily
| than a smaller ship when not maintained/piloted properly...
|
| Edit: if the Suez officials are serious about this, they
| should limit the size of vessels to the current maximum.
| doctor_eval wrote:
| I think the point is, the Suez canal operators say "you
| must be no more than THIS BIG to pass through the canal".
|
| So shipbuilder builds a ship THIS BIG and it doesn't fit.
| [0]
|
| I think that's the canal's fault, not the shipbuilder's.
|
| [0] in fact, most of the time it fits, but sometimes it
| doesn't.
| FridayoLeary wrote:
| No. You don't completely fill up your computer memory.
| Whenever we are given a certain amount of space within
| which to operate, when smooth flow of traffic is
| essential, we aim to stay below the absolute maximum
| limits, in order to avoid fatal bottlenecks. This is very
| logical, and you can see it in all aspects of life.
| LatteLazy wrote:
| You don't fill up computer memory because it's cheap to
| buy more and catastrophic to run out. Imagine if you were
| paid to fill computer memory, and the only way to stay in
| business was to be 99% full. You'd fill your memory then.
| And that's logistics. That's by ships are so big and full
| and why planes are over booked and why Suez hasn't been
| enlarged more.
| imglorp wrote:
| They fit fine. There was an issue with that ship having
| large sail area from all those containers and insufficient
| control authority to counteract the added wind forces.
|
| If anything they may want to limit Max crossing to calm
| days. Also the crew's judgement should be examined: wind
| forces in tight quarters are a big concern for any vessel
| and yet they decided to enter.
| kqr wrote:
| If there are a bunch of conditions under which Suezmax
| ships fit (calm days, above-average crew judgment, etc.)
| isn't that effectively support for Suezmax being more of
| a Suezbarely?
| DuskStar wrote:
| So, how long until we get a NEW, new suezmax class of
| containerships to compensate?
| krisoft wrote:
| Sorry, but that's not how it works.
|
| Containerships don't conform to the canal. Both the ships and
| the canal are made to conform to the standard.
|
| There is a document titled Rules of Navigation issued by the
| Suez Canal Authority which defines the maximum dimensions for
| the vessels authorised to transit. You can read it yourself:
| https://www.suezcanal.gov.eg/FlipPDFDocuments/Rules%20of%20N...
| (it's on the 90th page as the pdf reader numbers them, or 68th
| by the document's internal numbering)
|
| Based on what you say it sounds like you think the current
| limits are experimentally found. As if ship owners build all
| kind of ships and then try to cram them through the channel and
| see which one goes. That would be madness.
| Denvercoder9 wrote:
| > Containerships don't conform to the canal.
|
| Containerships absolutely do conform to the canals. Lots of
| ships are built to the maximum size that can transit the
| Panama or Suez canals. It's called Panamax and Suezmax ships.
| When the Panama canal was expanded, that caused larger ships
| to be built to the new specifications of the canal (called
| new Panamax).
|
| If this expansion causes the maximum dimensions allowed
| through the Suez canal to be increased, ships will be built
| to that larger standard.
| devoutsalsa wrote:
| I want to see a ship that's the width of the Panama Canal,
| but like 10x taller, called Panaminmax.
| krisoft wrote:
| :) That's a good name.
|
| In reality, the maximum air draft (how much the ship is
| sticking out over the water) is also limited by the
| Panamamax standard. It is constrained because the ships
| has to go under bridges and some cables too while
| crossing the canal.
| krisoft wrote:
| You are very kind to explain the Panamax and Suezmax
| concepts to me. I can assure you I'm familiar with them.
|
| When you order a ship and you stipulate that it must be
| able to cross the Suez Canal the shipyard won't send out
| two dudes with a theodolite to measure how wide the canal
| is. They will look up the standard (the very same I have
| just linked!) and build the ship to that specification.
| That is to say the ships conform to the standard not to the
| canal.
|
| Similarly if you are engineer working for the SCA how do
| you know when to dredge the canal? Easy. You read the same
| standard and you dredge where ships of the published
| maximum size would not fit. Likewise you check the
| published air draft maximums before designing over-water
| electric transmission crossings. That is to say you make
| the canal conform to the standard.
|
| > If this expansion causes the maximum dimensions allowed
| through the Suez canal to be increased...
|
| True. But there is zero reason why the SCA would be coy
| about announcing a neo-Suezmax standard if that is what
| they would be wanting to do. In fact they would float any
| such plans years and years in advance, because vessels are
| not built in a day. I have seen no indication for that.
| rocqua wrote:
| Suezmax is the biggest that is allowed through Suez, not the
| biggest that will fit. If the authorities don't change the max
| they will allow, then no new class of ships will emerge.
| capableweb wrote:
| Yeah, I think that's the point DuskStar is making, how long
| until they change the max (effectively bringing in a new era
| of new new suezmax)?
| egeozcan wrote:
| This would be then very similar to the Bosphorus bridge problem
| in Istanbul. A bridge wasn't enough, so they built the second.
| After it's opened, came a spike in car sales so that it wasn't
| enough way sooner than expected, so they built a third bridge,
| completion of which is followed by a spike in car sales,
| despite the economical situation.
| belatw wrote:
| Well the third bridge was built as a gift to Tayipp's friends
| who bought up all of the land near it before he announced it
| as one of his "crazy projects". It's kind of in the missle of
| nowhere. My understanding is it didnt have any impact
| positively or negatively.
|
| Speaking of which, whatever happened to the EV, pedestrian
| and bicycle tunnel under tje bosfora starting at kabatas
| which he claimed would be finished 2 years ago, along woth
| the 4 levant metro extension.
| DC-3 wrote:
| This problem generalises and is why building more, bigger
| roads is not a silver bullet solution to congestion. More
| road capacity pushes people towards using cars for all their
| journeys so increases traffic, sometimes to the extent that
| congestion is worsened not lessened.
| martingoodson wrote:
| This is called 'induced demand'. Surprisingly, the opposite
| happens when you remove road capacity - which is called
| 'traffic evaporation'. It's why taking road space from cars
| and reallocating it to bicycles is often more successful
| than predicted:
| https://nacto.org/docs/usdg/disappearing_traffic_cairns.pdf
| kqr wrote:
| Removing capacity from infrastructure is a solution that
| works when you want to discourage use of that
| infrastructure.
|
| If that's not the case, I only know of one other
| solution: charge directly for usage. That way you can set
| the price such that demand stays at a high level, but at
| one supported by maximum available capacity.
|
| If someone knows of a different solution, I'd like to
| know -- I have an induced demand problem in a type of
| infrastructure that I would like to operate at high
| capacity, and charging for it would be unconventional to
| the point of making it hard to find support for that
| solution.
| goodpoint wrote:
| Charging money for access to transportation is very
| politically biased: people with low or no income are
| effectively denied transportation while people with high
| income are not discouraged. This is how slums are
| created.
|
| > If someone knows of a different solution, I'd like to
| know
|
| Some cities have areas that allow unlimited access to
| locals and deliveries and limited access to others (X
| times per year)
| supertrope wrote:
| Are people entitled to free roads? If yes then the
| electorate will not care that fuel taxes and registration
| fees don't cover road maintenance costs - it's a dignity
| not a price. If not then all roads should be toll roads
| or cars can be taxed per mile via odometer readings.
|
| Making things free at the point of use is not always the
| best way to help the poor or public. The inefficiency of
| no charge first come first serve could outweigh equity
| benefits. Having everyone pay in time (traffic jams) is a
| large hidden cost. Time is valuable even for those who
| lack money. The US Department of Transportation came up
| with a benchmark of $12.25/hour (50% of median household
| income) to evaluate the expected time savings of proposed
| transportation projects (2014).
|
| With free roads only time, fuel, and vehicle depreciation
| are considered. Roads are considered zero cost. There's
| minimal consideration of mass transit, carpooling, or
| moving closer to work. Just demands to add another lane
| and more parking everywhere. If roads were tolled or a
| lane was re-allocated to buses that could help poor
| people by making carpooling or riding a bus a realistic
| lower cost alternative to owning a car (or second car).
| Carpooling is a great example of how tolls incentivize
| high efficiency: 2 coworkers coming from the same
| neighborhood can cut their vehicle ownership expenses,
| the toll only hits half as hard, the people/hour
| throughput of the road goes up, and they take up less
| parking. Two people get to avoid congestion doubling time
| savings.
|
| Infrastructure is always shared. There are hard normative
| questions about how capacity should be allocated, and who
| should be subsidized. Making it free at the point of use
| doesn't eliminate those trade off questions.
| goodpoint wrote:
| I don't understand what point you are trying to make.
|
| > If not then all roads should be toll roads or cars can
| be taxed per mile via odometer readings
|
| ...or you tax the combination of car usage and fuel
| efficiency by taxing fuel consumption. Which is already
| done with steep taxes on fuel sale in some countries and
| it's discouraging car use. For some people.
| supertrope wrote:
| Charging for road use is not necessarily anti-poor
| people.
| Dah00n wrote:
| How would you make it not be anti-poor without some kind
| of road taxation based on income (which would mean those
| with the most money would pay the least as they can
| afford help to abuse the loopholes)?
| kqr wrote:
| Yes, that's a problem. I've debated with myself over what
| would be a fair division of "limited access" in my case
| but not arrived at a satisfactory solution. Anything I
| can think of will devolve into an inefficient, sucky,
| inofficial market. (This is why I'm contemplating an
| efficient, less sucky, official market in the first
| place.)
|
| To be clear: the infrastructure I'm working on isn't
| transport, but it'd still be odd to only allow paying
| users. I was thinking two similar copies of this piece
| infrastructure, where one is priced to avoid congestion,
| and the other will be as congested as induced demand
| allows.
|
| I'd like the discussion to stay general because I suspect
| any solutions will be reusable.
| goodpoint wrote:
| ...another example is the bus/metro transportation card:
| in many cities you get charged both based on your income
| bracket, usage pattern and things like being
| retired/student/young/adult and so on
| kqr wrote:
| This is a great point and one applicable to my case as
| well. I have an obvious proxy for income bracket to even
| out the playing field. Thanks!
| londons_explore wrote:
| I assume that both traffic evaporation and induced demand
| have a knock on effect elsewhere in the economy. When a
| road is closed fewer people can get from A to B easily,
| meaning less trade in shops near there, people taking
| less-optimal nearby jobs because they can't commute to a
| better job further away, delivery companies using two
| trucks and drivers instead of one, etc.
|
| Each individual sees a small disadvantage when a bridge
| is closed, but the overall economic effect might be very
| substantial, and hard to measure.
| adrianN wrote:
| Traffic and the economy are complex enough that the
| answer is "it depends" most of the time. Generally when
| you close a street to cars pedestrian traffic increases.
| Pedestrians tend to spend a lot more money on a street
| that cars driving by. Cafes tend to flourish.
| londons_explore wrote:
| I guess the way to model that is to model the traffic and
| economic effects of a closed road, and separately model
| the economic benefits of a pedestrian street. Add the two
| together, and you have your result.
| goodpoint wrote:
| On top of that, low-walkability car-intensive cities
| strongly correlate with increased street crime and mental
| illness (depression, social isolation).
|
| In various countries sprawls, shopping districts and
| office-only areas are prohibited by building regulations
| in order to create mixed areas where people can
| live/shop/work and build local communities.
| greggman3 wrote:
| > low-walkability car-intensive cities strongly correlate
| with increased street crime
|
| Do you have any links? that goes entirely against my
| intuition. SF is generally considered walkable and has
| high street crime. I'm pretty sure the same is true for
| NYC, Paris, Berlin, other highly walkable cities where as
| say Irvine, Brea, (E.T. like neighborhoods that require a
| car to do anything) have low-street crime.
|
| Update:
|
| The first 2 hits I found on google found higher
| walkability correlated with more crime
|
| https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/001391652092
| 184...
|
| https://link.springer.com/article/10.1057/s41284-018-0016
| 1-7
| karpierz wrote:
| Those are measuring crime within a city, not comparing
| cities. Though I think you're going to have a hard time
| separating 'walkability', and other features of old
| European cities.
| goodpoint wrote:
| It's a well known fact in traffic engineering. You can
| start from the links at the bottom of the page:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walkability#Socioeconomic
|
| As the sibling poster wrote, by comparing the only
| walkable area in the downtown of a car-centered city you
| are [involuntarily] cherry-picking the populace that
| cannot afford a car. You have to compare whole countries.
| crazygringo wrote:
| > _meaning less trade in shops near there_
|
| I can't remember the link, but one study I read found
| that it mainly affected whether people took multiple
| trips or one to do the same number of things.
|
| E.g. if no traffic, you'll pop to 5 different shops on 5
| different days because it's easy.
|
| If tons of traffic, you save it all up to go to the same
| 5 shops in a single trip instead.
|
| So obviously the effects are complicated, and the
| consequences aren't obvious. Also, if it's harder to make
| it to the middle of the big city, that can stimulate more
| vibrant jobs/shops/activity/etc. in towns on the
| outskirts that weren't there before.
|
| So while all the examples you've chosen are detrimental,
| you can also reframe them all as positive.
| greggman3 wrote:
| As someone that lives in a city with lots of public
| transportation (Tokyo) and lots of stores surrounding
| almost every train/subway station, the number of
| opportunities to buy something daily is vastly higher
| than when I lived in a SoCal suburb and drove a car.
|
| Basically with car, I went from home -> work -> home and
| unless I went really out of my way (pull into shopping
| center, park, get out of car, walk to store) then I
| wasn't near anything to buy. I basically had to make the
| conscious decision to go to a store.
|
| Where as now, every time I enter or exit a train station
| I pass by 15-20 store fronts (book stores, bakeries,
| coffee stands, dessert stands, lunch stands, clothing
| stores, drug stores, grocery store, etc...) and it's
| literally 1-2 seconds off my path to be in one and buy
| something.
| klipt wrote:
| Shifting demand from roads to trains seems like a good
| thing. But just closing roads without good public transit
| seems like it would be pretty bad for the economy.
| closeparen wrote:
| It's true. Car infrastructure gives people in far-flung
| low-density environments access to much more variety,
| competition, and productivity than they would otherwise
| have. The more attractive we make them, the more people
| live in them. The argument is that this is a backwards
| use of public funds.
|
| On the other hand I don't think it's _funds_ that are the
| problem here, there 's plenty of money chasing more urban
| lifestyles. The limits are on the zoning and permitting
| for urban housing types in the locations that need them.
| Once there is capacity for people to urbanize, then we
| can talk tactics to nudge the reluctant.
|
| If you just make the suburbs painful without upzoning the
| city, all you've done is decrease quality of life.
| atatatat wrote:
| In a city, yes.
|
| In a suburb, the solution isn't anything _except_ building
| more and better roads.
|
| People aren't bicycling 10-15 miles to the grocery.
|
| They should be, but, that's a different societal problem.
| ben_w wrote:
| Alternative solution: different zoning rules.
|
| When I lived in a tiny Cambridge commuter village
| 30-minute cycle out from where I worked, the local
| grocery store was closer to me than one corner of Milton
| Tesco car park is from its opposite.
|
| Here in Berlin? First place I stayed, out in the suburbs,
| the basics were a bit further -- 300m for a bakery -- but
| there were also seven supermarkets within 1 km.
| paulgb wrote:
| The very existence of suburbs where the closest grocery
| is 10+ miles away is itself an example of DC-3s
| generalization.
|
| Instead of cars making trips within cities faster, we
| started tolerating the same commute but spreading cities
| out more.
| Cola wrote:
| The solution is to make suburbs more dense so that people
| are closer to the places they want to go. I suppose this
| would ultimately result in a "town" rather than a suburb,
| though.
| masklinn wrote:
| > In a suburb, the solution isn't anything except
| building more and better roads.
|
| That's not a solution. Suburbs are self-bankrupting by
| definition: they're so sparse the taxes can't cover the
| infrastructure cost.
|
| The solution is to relax zoning and make the suburb
| denser and liveable.
|
| Removing and narrowing roads is a good way to do that: it
| increases space available for non-car infrastructures and
| produces free surface for "neighbourhood businesses". It
| also naturally routes through traffic around the area,
| rather than having to force that through inconvenient
| culs-de-sacs and making the suburb into a maze which
| requires driving 10 minutes to go to the neighbor's
| house.
| iso1210 wrote:
| I can't remember the last time I went to the grocery
| store, and that's not just covid.
| oscardssmith wrote:
| In suburbs, we shouldn't have grocery stores be that far
| from people.
| OwlsParlay wrote:
| Welcome to American zoning laws, sadly.
| adamjb wrote:
| ...are there really places in the US that are considered
| suburbs where the nearest place to get groceries is 10-15
| miles away? That's appalling.
| dazc wrote:
| It does sound appaling but, here in the UK, my dad lives
| in a fairly large city and, once a week, I drive him to
| the largest supermarket in the area which is about 10
| miles away.
|
| There are, of course, other supermarkets much closer (2
| within walking distance) but they are not quite so big,
| have a limited choice and are situated in areas which
| attract a certain class of clientel (known in the UK as
| Chavs). For him, the inconvenience is worth it - although
| it does take 3 hours out of my day.
| [deleted]
| iso1210 wrote:
| So your dad will only shop at Sainsburys despite having
| an Asda on the doorstep?
|
| I don't get going to a supermarket at all. We've had
| groceries delivered once or twice a week from Sainsburys,
| Ocada, Tesco, Asda, etc for about 10 years.
|
| The concept of walking around a supermarket on a regular
| basis fills me with dread - all that wasted time and
| effort.
| dazc wrote:
| I agree with the wasted effort, compounded by having to
| navigate ailes populated with internet-order-pickers, but
| it keeps him happy.
| other_herbert wrote:
| I think most people would call that "the middle of
| nowhere" or out in the boonies... or it could be a new
| area that is growing.. 15 miles from groceries is too far
| to be called a suburb
| masklinn wrote:
| > I think most people would call that "the middle of
| nowhere" or out in the boonies...
|
| Not in the US. In the US "in the middle of nowhere" is
| grocery runs of 50+ miles. 15 miles is a "far out"
| suburbian hellscape e.g. https://i1.wp.com/cdn-
| images-1.medium.com/max/1080/1*AEfVhyv... or
| https://bostonglobe-
| prod.cdn.arcpublishing.com/resizer/h2N-h...
| masklinn wrote:
| Lots. e.g. I took a random Tucson suburb and looked for
| the closest grocery store: https://www.google.be/maps/dir
| /32.3863674,-111.0376983/Groce...
|
| Apparently you can't just put a generic "grocery" as the
| destination, but if you search for "grocery" and check
| different results, you'll get 10-15mn for all of them.
|
| That's pretty standard US suburban sprawl, usually under
| the insanity that is euclidean zoning: entire
| neighbourhoods zoned _exclusively_ for detached single-
| family homes, not allowing any business (no bakery,
| grocery store, florist, no nothing) and no multi-family
| dwellings.
| AlgorithmicTime wrote:
| Ten minutes away is not ten miles away. In fact, there
| are multiple grocery stores within 3-4 miles of the
| location you chose.
|
| https://www.google.be/maps/search/grocery+store/@32.37693
| 77,...
| jltsiren wrote:
| Better transportation also creates trips that would
| otherwise not exist at all. For example, people go
| grocery shopping more often and buy less on each trip. Or
| they decide to go to the office one more time each week
| instead of working from home.
| throw0101a wrote:
| One of the better definitions of _sprawl_ that I 've come
| across: when residential areas are not with-in walking
| distance+ of commercial areas.
|
| +5-10 minutes (?).
| jellicle wrote:
| Your little subdivision that replaced a farm should have
| a commercial center that you can walk to.
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| Of course, it does also mean more people are able to use
| the road (or canal). So it's not a complete loss, even if
| it doesn't have the intended effect.
|
| It really comes down to whether you want to encourage or
| discourage the use of the infrastructure.
| choward wrote:
| It also encourages people to live further from where they
| work which also adds to traffic.
| triska wrote:
| This phenomenon is known as the Jevons paradox, named after
| British logician, economist and statistician William
| Stanley Jevons:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox
| dalbasal wrote:
| Traffic/travel is a relatively special case though... We
| have a near unlimited ability to consume transport.
|
| If you could get to Japan in 20m, I would probably pop
| over for lunch right now or Vladivostok for a Sunday
| stroll.
|
| As transport improves, people work/shop/etc further from
| home. Commuting range is measured in time, not kms. So,
| capacity (eg traffic) tends to be the balancing force.
|
| That's more than the typical Jevons Paradox, I think.
| maxsilver wrote:
| It's more the opposite special case -- we have a _hard
| cap_ on our ability to consume transport, which is why it
| 's usually a good idea to build more.
|
| You can own 2, or 20, or 200 houses, and block the usage
| of them from anyone else. (induced demand with unlimited
| consumption). You can own 2 or 20 or 200 cars, but you
| can't physically drive more than one at a time. This is a
| hard cap on transportation consumption (you can't
| literally drive two cars at once, you can't be going to
| two different places at the same time)
|
| This is why the induced demand philosophy doesn't work
| for cars. Demand for transit has a low hard cap. If your
| society is broken such that there's lots of latent
| unserved demand, it will _artificially look_ like there
| 's induced demand happening near the beginning. But that
| demand will vanish as soon as you get close to a
| functional level of capacity.
|
| For a more practical example: If you could get to Japan
| in 20m, then you might choose to do so, And if you could
| go to lunch in Japan, you can't also be having lunch in
| California, which means you can't be waiting in traffic
| on the Bay Bridge. The induced demand philosophy obsesses
| over the "downside" of improved transit (that you get to
| go to cooler places faster and cheaper), but
| intentionally ignores the upside (that you free up the
| capacity of whatever you had chosen to do prior, and now
| no longer do).
| supertrope wrote:
| More lanes are built. More people move in and select
| their jobs and housing based on being able to drive
| between them in 30 min. Congestion returns. Red queen
| race. We're applying a linear solution to an geometric
| problem.
|
| The underlying argument behind induced demand is if you
| spend $XX million USD on widening a highway from 6 lanes
| to 8 lanes and now capacity has gone up NNNNN people per
| hour, that can be a worse investment than spending $XX-YY
| on million commuter buses going down an HOV lane to get
| the same NNNNN capacity boost, or maybe spend the same
| amount but get NNNNN+MMMMM boost.
|
| We should optimize for people per hour, not cars per
| hour.
|
| Work from home gets us another step further: instead of
| moving office workers bodies downtown so they can sit at
| a desk, why not eliminate the commute entirely?
| maxsilver wrote:
| > More people move in and select their jobs and housing
| based on being able to drive between them in 30 min.
|
| Cool, that means they no longer live in their old city,
| so the transportation infrastructure of their old city is
| now freed up. No congestion was created, it just got
| moved (by place and/or time). No "demand" was "induced".
| dalbasal wrote:
| Think of travel consumption in terms of kms, not cars,
| trains or whatnot. Waiting in a traffic jam is not
| traveling.
|
| You _can_ own 20 houses, not renting them out. People
| just wouldn 't, because it's pointless. You _could_ also
| own 97 iphones, or 400 pairs of jeans. Latent demand just
| that people would buy more if it was cheaper. That 's
| normal, not broken.
|
| IDk what "artificially look like there's induced demand
| happening" means. If we _could_ we would travel many more
| KMs. 1000s of times more, if teleporting existed and made
| travel instantaneous. The cost of travel, is largely
| time.
| maxsilver wrote:
| >IDk what "artificially look like there's induced demand
| happening" means.
|
| Urbanists sometimes intentionally undercount existing
| traffic and overcount later traffic, to try to paint
| public transportation infrastructure in a bad light. "We
| widened the public transit freeway by an extra lane each
| way, and now it handles ~33% more people per day. See,
| freeways _make_ traffic, public transportation is bad "
|
| The public transit freeway in this instance did not make
| any new traffic. It moved traffic from other sidestreets,
| and it allowed people who were underserved by transport
| to finally get served by transport. But nothing new was
| created here.
|
| It's like saying, "Hospital A has 100 sick patients and
| is full, but we can't build a new Hospital, because it
| will make more sick people". And then a new hospital B
| gets built, and they say, "see, before we had 100
| patients, now we have 200 sick patients, the new hospital
| induced more sickness!" But in truth, the Hospital didn't
| "make" any sickness, it's _treating_ patients that were
| previously uncounted or not getting treatment they needed
| -- that 's why we wanted to build a new hospital in the
| first place.
|
| > If we could we would travel many more KMs. 1000s of
| times more, if teleporting existed and made travel
| instantaneous. The cost of travel, is largely time.
|
| Right, and that acts as a hard cap. You can't travel to
| two places at a time, and you aren't going to want to
| spend every second of your life traveling somewhere. So,
| unless you think Winnebago's are going to be a thing
| everyone lives and works out of 24/7/365, there's a very
| explicit hard cap on transportation usage.
|
| If you make a teleporter between California and Japan
| (for example), then an urbanist could paint that as "your
| teleporter is bad, because it induced demand for trips to
| Japan". But it didn't -- for every one person in your
| teleporter, there's one less person on an international
| flight. Even if your teleporter makes trips to Japan more
| popular and common (because it's now faster + cheaper to
| get there), it still doesn't break this hard cap, those
| trips are disappearing from somewhere else.
|
| I live in Michigan, I would normally never grab lunch in
| Japan. But if I leave to go to Japan for lunch (using
| your new teleporter), then I can't be driving on US-131
| to pick up lunch back at home (a totally normal thing I
| would do today). I'm not going to suddenly eat 2 lunches
| just because your teleporter exists, so even though
| someone would argue you have "induced demand" for trips
| to Japan, you haven't really done so, you've just taken
| other trips and converted them.
|
| The only way "induced demand" will ever apply to cars, is
| if that hard cap is broken somehow. Driverless cars, for
| example, could actually induce demand, since a car no
| longer has to have a person in it to take up traffic
| space, and plenty of people would send driverless cars
| around, there's no longer a natural hard cap on transit
| usage.
| dalbasal wrote:
| If you go to Japan for lunch, you are traveling more.
| tuatoru wrote:
| > Right, and that acts as a hard cap. You can't travel to
| two places at a time, and you aren't going to want to
| spend every second of your life traveling somewhere. So,
| unless you think Winnebago's are going to be a thing
| everyone lives and works out of 24/7/365, there's a very
| explicit hard cap on transportation usage.
|
| This is why autonomous vehicles are concerning. It's
| going to become possible to consume a lot more
| transportation without using your own time. (Think: empty
| vehicles driving around rather than being parked, or
| empty autonomous taxis just driving around.)
| amanaplanacanal wrote:
| I doubt we could build enough capacity for all cars to be
| on the road at once, which seems to be where the hard cap
| would kick in.
| Tomte wrote:
| For traffic you've got the even more interesting Braess's
| Paradox: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Braess%27s_paradox
| hdjfntnrn wrote:
| That's like saying that building houses doesn't solve the
| housing crisis because they are immediately bought.
|
| Are you suggesting that Istanbul or London would be just fine
| with a single bridge?
| burlesona wrote:
| It depends on what you want to optimize. Usually cities
| build new roads hoping to eliminate traffic jams, but city
| after city has found that there is essentially infinite
| demand for free car lanes in urban areas. There are only
| two things that can fix traffic congestion:
|
| 1. You can demolish large chunks of the city so that fewer
| people have a reason to visit, and spread development
| paper-thin over a wide area so that it stays beneath the
| incredibly low density threshold that causes car
| congestion. This is the approach taken by most US cities
| after WW2, however it has only worked in cities that have
| gone into economic decline because the places with
| meaningful growth consistently fill in more densely than
| cars can accommodate even with half the old downtown
| reduced to parking lots and strict zoning laws etc.
|
| 2. You can charge for the roads. Congestion pricing deters
| people who don't really _need_ to drive at a particular
| place and time from doing so, and thus allows the roads to
| flow freely even in urban centers. Surprisingly, it doesn't
| take a huge toll to eliminate rush hour, as (1) the tipping
| point for traffic congestion is roughly the last 10% of
| cars that can fit on the road, and (2) it turns out that
| there's a _lot_ of low-value driving on the margin which
| simply stops when there's a price attached to it.
|
| The smart option is #2.
| adrianN wrote:
| Option 3: Plan your city so that average trip lengths are
| too short to make cars the best choice.
|
| Option 4: Build excellent public transport so that cars
| are not the best choice.
| burlesona wrote:
| Option #3 is, in my opinion, a pipe dream. I say this
| because in years of studying this topic (first
| professionally, now avocationally), I have yet to see a
| newly built urban area of any meaningful size where life
| happened primarily within walk-shed rather than a car-
| shed. The genie is out of the bottle, people want cars,
| and the only way to have an urban environment where they
| aren't helpful is to have an urban environment where they
| aren't _allowed._ this speaks to the utility that cars
| offer. What _has_ worked is _limiting_ cars, and this is
| especially effective in pre-car cities such as the urban
| centers of Europe.
|
| Option 4 is also very difficult to achieve. Even Tokyo,
| with its legendary transit coverage, also has a ton of
| car traffic. What is much easier is to recognize that if
| everyone plows into their car for every trip we'll all be
| stuck in gridlock, then put congestion charges in place
| so that everyone who can feasibly get their trip
| accomplished without driving is incentivized to do so,
| and the trips that really require a car are able to pay
| the fee and then have a nice trip quality.
| adrianN wrote:
| I don't think cars can be completely eliminated from
| cities, but I'm reasonably sure that we can remove at
| least 2/3rds of the car traffic by a combination of
| better urban planning, and better public transport. I
| don't think you have to restrict yourself to walkable
| distances. Ten minutes on a bike allows you to go several
| kilometers. I bet I can reach a quarter of my city in
| less than 15 minutes. If we make cycling safe and
| comfortable, that alone can eliminate a lot of traffic.
| Add in good public transport for trips that are longer
| than a few kilometers, and another big chunk of car
| traffic becomes unnecessary.
|
| I lived a few months in Tokyo, without a car of course,
| and got by very well with a shitty mamachari and the
| subway. I wonder what the modal split in Tokyo is like,
| compared to other cities. I bet most person kilometers
| are met by trains and subways.
| Dah00n wrote:
| >then put congestion charges in place
|
| That's less about removing congestion and more about
| clearing the roads of poor people to make room for
| everyone else unless you pay road toll as a % of income
| and assets.
| masklinn wrote:
| And since traffic congestion is essentially constant, you
| can also reduce the available car lanes and replace them
| with other denser modes of transport (public transport,
| protected bike lanes, ...). It won't make congestion
| _worse_ , as the increased inconvenience... will simply
| make less users drive.
|
| It becomes more important to reserve "transfer nodes"
| (especially at the edges) where drivers can drop their
| car and hop on other transport modes though. That is
| something which is often lacking.
| MereInterest wrote:
| For option #2, do metered highway entrances provide a
| similar effect? On the one hand, the goal is to prevent
| that last 10% of cars from being able to enter the
| highway during peak hours. But on the other hand, unlike
| tolls, it isn't known until you reach a highway entrance
| whether they'll be present, so they wouldn't impact trip
| planning as much. So I could see it going either way.
| drewmate wrote:
| I think that metered entrances don't necessarily reduce
| the number of cars on the freeway, for exactly the reason
| you mentioned. Instead, it is designed to break up
| 'platoons' of cars from trying to merge in at the same
| time which cause ripple braking effects and traffic jams.
| The net result of meters is squeezing more cars at the
| same speed and maximizing flow rate of traffic.
|
| So you wait a little bit at the meter but your (and
| everyone else's) overall travel time is actually faster.
| I recommend this YouTube video (and the whole channel)
| for great explanations of the traffic dynamics.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=30uzZRSVxXQ
| toast0 wrote:
| Metered entrances help a bit (I've seen the difference in
| traffic when they went from being installed to operaring
| in santa clara county), but you would have to run them
| very aggressively (long cycles) to eliminate congestion,
| and people would not be happy to wait for that long.
|
| When the line from the meters spills onto the adjancement
| roadway, some people will take alternate routes, but
| mostly people want to get onto the freeway because it's
| the best route, even if it's congested.
| FridayoLeary wrote:
| >That's like saying that building houses doesn't solve the
| housing crisis because they are immediately bought.
|
| Makes sense. London is blessed with apparently empty high
| rise apartment blocks. 'Investment' flats, bought by
| foreign owners, who haven't seen their places and have no
| interest in them. It's just a safe place to store their
| wealth and they don't care if they screw up everyone who's
| actually trying to buy a home. Tax empty homes, should help
| things a lot.
|
| Now, my idea to solve congestion is a bit different. For
| useless, bloated big SUV's, place restrictions and taxes on
| exterior options like alloys and paints. Incentivise
| smaller cars. That should help congestion a bit. And is it
| just me or are even supposed minis absurdly bloated and
| elongated these days?
| iso1210 wrote:
| How would taxing a particular paint effect congestion?
| FridayoLeary wrote:
| It's an accumulation of small things. Forcing blander
| paint colours and less 'bling' in general on over-sized
| cars, will disencourage unnecessary purchases. Instead of
| looking to go flashy with a huge Mercedes G-wagen, people
| will look at smaller cars. Smaller cars may partially
| help with congestion. At the minimum, they pollute less.
| masklinn wrote:
| > That's like saying that building houses doesn't solve the
| housing crisis because they are immediately bought.
|
| I'm not sure Jevon's paradox applies to houses, whereas it
| absolutely applies to car traffic.
| hdjfntnrn wrote:
| Like it or not, that increased car traffic delivers more
| utility.
|
| You can't have a car free metropolis. That's a
| contradiction.
| masklinn wrote:
| > Like it or not, that increased car traffic delivers
| more utility.
|
| It rarely delivers enough utility to even compensate for
| it costs.
|
| > You can't have a car free metropolis. That's a
| contradiction.
|
| It's absolutely not, your assertion is outright
| nonsensical.
|
| Car-centricity is by far the worst way to build a
| metropolis.
| ben_w wrote:
| "Car free" is one of several ways to not be "car-
| centric", but not the only way. I believe it's possible
| to make a car-free metropolis, but I don't know if any
| (modern) metropolis demonstrates this.
| masklinn wrote:
| Sure but I'm not the one which set up this straw man
| dichotomy and saw no reason to care for or acknowledge
| it.
| tux3 wrote:
| Paris is certainly trying. The idea that you need a car
| to move around a city is probably cultural.
| masklinn wrote:
| Paris is hardly the only city doing that either, and far
| from the first.
| masklinn wrote:
| While a fair bit smaller, Amsterdam is probably a better
| example here (and it helps that they got started in the
| 90s).
|
| And as points of difference (aside from size), Amsterdam
| has a much smaller metro network, but a larger tram
| network (Paris completely shut down its tram system in
| the late 30s and has been rebuilding it since the 90s,
| whereas Amsterdam's tram network was never completely
| shut down, and while a number of Amsterdam's tram lines
| were switched over to buses in the 40s and early 50s,
| trams got repopularized very quickly, as soon as the late
| 50s).
| adrianN wrote:
| You can't have a car-free metropolis, but you sure can
| have a metropolis where cars are used by much, much fewer
| people than is typical today.
| [deleted]
| KptMarchewa wrote:
| The utility vehicles, buses, delivery of goods to stores
| etc are percentage of overall vehicles on the road and
| require little infrastructure compared to using cars as
| main individual mode of transportation.
| MaxBarraclough wrote:
| See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Braess's_paradox
|
| > _adding one or more roads to a road network can slow
| down overall traffic flow through it._
| hn8788 wrote:
| Oh look, a 5 minute old account created just to be
| argumentative.
| toyg wrote:
| Yeah, that's the problem. Realistically, the only solution is
| Suez and Panama agreeing on a common size, which would become
| the de-facto upper size for shipping boats, and then implement
| it. It could even be smaller than what they have at the moment,
| the important part is that it's common so the straits can be
| managed consistently and safely.
| usrusr wrote:
| How would Panama canal profile have played into the Ever
| Given incident? It's not like it happened because someone
| accidentally drove a Panamax into Suez due to confusing
| continents. (Suezmax is bigger anyways)
| toyg wrote:
| It's more that it would help the industry standardize on
| one size, which meant facilities in all places could also
| standardize and ensure edge cases are properly taken care
| of. The current status quo is "we have a strait, and the
| biggest boat you can squeeze into that _should_ be able to
| pass through"; a standardized approach would be "if you
| build a boat X by Y, we _guarantee_ it will go through -
| because we can basically put it _on rails_ once you get
| here". It's a bit like they did with containers: from
| "build the biggest box we can fit on a ship" to "build the
| box that ships can guarantee will be optimally treated".
| [deleted]
| raverbashing wrote:
| The whole shipping facilities industry is being pushed by the
| shipping companies to widen/deepen canals and ports. It's a
| bit of a rat race.
|
| But as the Evergiven incident has shown, it has a limit. We
| were lucky it didn't get stuck worse than it has.
| hdjfntnrn wrote:
| > _We were lucky it didn 't get stuck worse than it has_
|
| At some point it makes sense to just blow up the ship to
| free the channel.
| joshuahedlund wrote:
| Real life is not like video games. Blowing something up
| doesn't make it disappear; it could actually spread
| debris chunks everywhere and (in addition to the
| collateral damage factor) make the problem worse
| Kye wrote:
| People just don't get the scale of things like this, do
| they? Ever Given is taller than the canal is deep when
| _empty_. Blow it to bits and you 'll get some bits that
| are at least as deep as the canal.
| Digit-Al wrote:
| I am genuinely interested in learning how you think that
| could possibly be workable. The reason I ask is that I am
| not particularly knowledgeable about either explosives or
| the canal but I can instantly envision a number of
| reasons why such a course of action would be completely
| unworkable.
|
| I think it's always interesting to get another
| perspective and I am somewhat disappointed that people
| have downvoted you without even wanting to hear your
| reasons. Such conversations are always an opportunity to
| either learn or to teach for those that are open to it.
| hdjfntnrn wrote:
| Instead of actually thinking about how that could be
| done, people jump at the lowest hanging fruit to dismiss
| a thing.
|
| Imagine I said "just blow up a building to get rid of
| it", and people will diss it the same, without thinking
| that there may actually be a way (controlled demolition).
| MauranKilom wrote:
| I think part of it may be that it's a new account, using
| a gibberish name. That's not a good prior for "will be an
| interesting discussion to engage in" when the comment is
| also missing some fairly obvious step in the thought
| process.
| dale_glass wrote:
| There are practical limits to how big a ship can be. Apparently
| they're already about as long as steel can take, so they're
| getting wider instead.
|
| So for the Suez that'd mean there shouldn't be any danger of
| that happening. The EverGiven was stuck length-wise, and if
| they're not getting longer then at worst they can become
| square, which is probably not the right shape for a ship.
| masklinn wrote:
| > There are practical limits to how big a ship can be.
|
| The limits are way beyond what's at issue here. There are
| lots of ships which are already too big to go through the
| Suez canal.
|
| Canals tend to limit dimensions based on:
|
| * the canal width (limits beam)
|
| * the canal curves (limits beam and length)
|
| * the canal depth (limits draft)
|
| * locks (limits length)
|
| * bridges over the canal (limits height)
|
| "Capesize" is the general category of ships which can't go
| through the Suez or Panama canals[0], and must therefore go
| around Cape Agulhas and / or Cape Horn.
|
| [0] although with the deepening of the Suez canal it's now
| possible for many capesize to go through Suez, just not
| Panama.
| em-bee wrote:
| why does that now make think of spherical cows? :-)
| gruez wrote:
| >Apparently they're already about as long as steel can take,
| so they're getting wider instead.
|
| How does a ship being longer cause stress on the steel?
| bombcar wrote:
| Out on the ocean there are waves - if the ship is between
| two of them it acts like a bridge and the steel has to
| support the weight or snap in two.
| patentatt wrote:
| Random thought: Why don't we see things like ship trains?
| With many linked smaller hulls being pulled by a single
| tug. Or something to that effect. Seems like a solution
| to that phenomenon.
| m4rtink wrote:
| River barges basically work this way, likely mainly due
| to tighter curves on rivers and inland canals.
| jagged-chisel wrote:
| I would think (i.e. pure conjecture) that it's about
| economies of scale. Making enough smaller ships to make
| trains will costs more steel. Making a train that fills
| up a similar area in the ocean reduces the available
| storage per shipment.
|
| Follow this thought to "let's just make these trains as
| long as possible." You can imagine some wild
| consequences, both positive and negative.
| watwut wrote:
| We do, I have seen three or four smaller hulls. On river
| icegreentea2 wrote:
| Steering would be painful. Trains work particularly great
| because of the tracks.
|
| Also, drag on a hull is such that longer hulls tend to be
| more efficient.
| GordonS wrote:
| Would you need to do much tricky steering outside of
| getting in/put of ports? At ports, even ships themselves
| are often pulled by tugs because of the difficulty of
| manoeuvring in such a small and busy space.
| PoignardAzur wrote:
| At that point you might as well make multiple ships.
| GordonS wrote:
| Surely it's a _lot_ easier and less expensive to build an
| engineless, ship "trailer" than a self-propelled ship
| with an engine, fuel tanks, propellers, a generator etc?
| bombcar wrote:
| The ships are already at the maximum efficiency size
| given their engines, so to pull a similar sized ship
| they'd have to add an engine to the first one, in which
| case why not add it to the second and have two ships?
| GordonS wrote:
| Could they be pulled by multiple small tugs instead? (no
| idea if that's feasible on the open seas!)
| usrusr wrote:
| But there's an obvious solution to that: more steel.
|
| Still, a far more effective solution would be increase
| width and draught likewise to reach your target volume.
| And that's where we're back at ${canal}max classes (locks
| also impose a length limit but I'd assume that those are
| much easier to adapt than width/depth).
|
| If Suez Canal authorities are serious about trying to
| prevent future Ever Given incidents (how serious they are
| likely depends on the exact outcome of the ongoing
| liability fights) they should keep some parts of the
| canal at the existing profile (locks perhaps?) to prevent
| suezmax 2.0 (or whatever their current version+1 is)
| manquer wrote:
| More steel/thicker/different steel is expensive, as is
| say some other material like carbon fiber composites .
|
| We could make a much bigger , lighter efficient ship with
| carbon fiber entirely, however there is no economic
| incentive to spend 100x on the ship, fuel costs and
| economies of scale rtc don't help recover that capital
| cost
| dmurray wrote:
| > More steel/thicker/different steel is expensive
|
| Expensive would be OK, of course a bigger ship costs more
| to build than a small one, but you hope to make the
| investment back by carrying more cargo and additionally
| benefit from some economies of scale.
|
| However, the biggest ships we have are at the limit of
| how thick we can join steel plates with current welding
| technologies. So there's some non-linearity here.
| manquer wrote:
| Yeah, it is ecosystem of changes, you need bigger docks ,
| shipyards and canals in conjunction with the technology
| improvements.
|
| The costs of all of it needs to be economically feasible
| even if the technology is there, I don't think welding is
| only reason we have been limited in the size
| bombcar wrote:
| You can see the practical limit in the ships designed to
| go directly from China - Los Angeles - as it's just open
| sea.
| CalChris wrote:
| Those ships still have to enter the harbor and then have
| to be unloaded. The _Benjamin Franklin_ has a 52 foot
| draft and stacks containers 10 high [1]. That means
| deeper dredging and bigger cranes. She called on LA,
| Oakland and Seattle but now transits from Asia to Europe
| via the Suez Canal.
|
| Who pays for this dredging and these cranes? The
| localities. It's difficult to defray these costs with
| shipping fees. American President Lines pulled their
| headquarters from Oakland to Phoenix when Oakland did
| that. [2]
|
| [1]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CMA_CGM_Benjamin_Franklin
|
| [2] https://www.prlog.org/10551489-apl-phoenix-
| headquarters-relo...
| manquer wrote:
| No doubt those waters are ideal given the high traffic
| and limited geographic barriers, even these however ships
| would still need to dock in LA.
|
| I am not saying the limit doesn't play a major role, I am
| saying if it's was the main bottleneck there would be a
| lot of r&d in solving it, solving it would certainly
| help, but the economics and other limitations mean
| solving welding won't mean a revolutionary change to ship
| sizes
| cobbal wrote:
| Eventually, a long enough ship should be supported by 3
| or more waves at the same time, assuming waves have some
| sort of maximum wavelength. (Disclaimer: no idea what I'm
| talking about)
| krisoft wrote:
| Ships don't always float on mirror flat oceans. Waves wave
| around them which can create more buoyant force one the
| ends than at the middle. This makes the middle "sag down"
| and the structure of the ship has to be strong enough to
| take the associated tension and compression. It can also
| happen that there is more buoyant force at the middle
| forcing it up while the ends are somewhat less supported.
| (Also known as "hogging".)
|
| The longer the ship is the stronger these forces can be.
| atatatat wrote:
| Leverage, concisely.
| gambiting wrote:
| There's an extremely easy solution to this - just don't
| increase the width of the entry and exit points.
| em-bee wrote:
| that doesn't help. the problem was the length of the ship,
| not its width. a narrow entry point does not limit the
| length.
| gambiting wrote:
| But physics already limit the length of the ship, no? You
| can't make the current container ships any longer without
| also making them wider, so if you restrict the width you
| are also kind of restricting the length, at least with
| current technology.
| refurb wrote:
| I assume they'll widen the parts of the canal that are easy
| (long stretches with either no or minimal reinforcement of the
| banks) and leave stuff like the locks themselves alone as I
| doubt their easy to widen at all.
| Denvercoder9 wrote:
| The Suez canal does not have locks.
| refurb wrote:
| So it doesn't!
|
| Then I'll refine my statement to bridges and such.
| egeozcan wrote:
| It would have been nice to have some insight into how they think
| 40m (131 feet) would be enough. "In the hopes of avoiding a
| repeat" doesn't sound too confident.
| LatteLazy wrote:
| That's what I wondered. Presumably it just means the ship can
| be even more off course / incorrectly aligned to the channel
| before it crashes?
|
| Edit: maybe there is a curve in the canal and the radius of the
| curve limits the length of ship for a given width. Widening it
| at the curve would let you build longer...
| masklinn wrote:
| > It would have been nice to have some insight into how they
| think 40m (131 feet) would be enough.
|
| It's probably what they think is achievable at acceptable
| costs. SUEZMAX is 400m long, but there's no way they can
| increase the canal width to 400m (at depth) to ensure no ship
| ever touches both banks at once. The minimum width is currently
| 205m at 11m deep (and the bank slope is 1:3 to 1:4 so a surface
| width of at least 270m), the work to double that would be
| insane.
| Stevvo wrote:
| _Ever Given_ is still stuck in the canal, because the ship is
| being held at ransom.
|
| They are asking nearly a billion dollars to unstick it... doesn't
| matter how wide you make the canal when it's a cesspit of
| corruption.
| throwaway2037 wrote:
| Very bottom of the article says:
|
| << A few days after the Ever Given was dislodged, the SCA
| impounded the ship and its cargo and lodged a compensation
| claim of $916 million.
|
| The canal authority since reduced the claims to $600 million.
| However, the insurer of the vessel said this amount is still
| too high. >>
|
| Not billions. Also, what do you mean by "cesspit of
| corruption"?
| ClearAndPresent wrote:
| Let's hope they don't plan to widen it with nukes...
|
| https://www.businessinsider.com/us-planned-suez-canal-altern...
| HenryKissinger wrote:
| It would take hundreds of nuclear weapons, given the length of
| the Suez canal.
| capableweb wrote:
| What about dragging out lines with acid similarly to how
| napalm is spread out in a line?
|
| Otherwise carpet-bomb with nuclear warheads should do the
| trick as well.
| medstrom wrote:
| Sorry, but why not?
| adrianN wrote:
| People generally dislike it when other people release large
| amounts of radioactivity into the environment.
| morelisp wrote:
| When your program OOMs, you have three options:
|
| - You can reduce the program's memory usage, or increase the
| program's / system's alloted memory. But there's usually some
| hard limit to this - if you've got 100GB of data, you've got
| 100GB if data, and if you've got a non-distributed problem you'll
| eventually run out of RAM slots. Plus you usually just get
| induced demand when a customer shows up the next day with 200GB
| data.
|
| - You can make the program handle the too-large-data case better.
| This requires deeper systemic changes usually across multiple
| components (the program, your monitoring and error reporting,
| upstream and downstream integrations). But this also tends to
| have knock-on improvements across the system. And a lot of times
| it's cheaper than the first option when you compare total rather
| than marginal cost.
|
| Or to be more direct: Why fuss over 131x10 feet and not the fact
| your only recovery plan is one excavator and a handful of
| tugboats?
| masklinn wrote:
| > When your program OOMs, you have three options:
|
| The issue with your analogy is that here the "program" did not
| OOM as part of normal operations, instead it OOM'd because of a
| rare condition you can't really avoid (even calling it a bug is
| debatable, as a bug implies misbehaviour in the canal).
|
| In that case, increasing your safety buffer so you can recover
| before swapping to death or the OOM killer -9-ing programs left
| and right is a good idea.
|
| > - You can make the program handle the too-large-data case
| better. This requires deeper systemic changes usually across
| multiple components (the program, your monitoring and error
| reporting, upstream and downstream integrations). But this also
| tends to have knock-on improvements across the system.
|
| How would you make "the program" handle "the too-large case
| better" exactly? As in, how would the canal handle a ship
| getting stuck sideways after having lost propulsion save by
| _being wider than the ship can be long_?
|
| > And a lot of times it's cheaper than the first option when
| you compare total rather than marginal cost.
|
| We're talking about a 200km canal.
|
| > Why fuss over 131x10 feet and not the fact your only recovery
| plan is one excavator and a handful of tugboats?
|
| Maybe they're working on both but increasing the canal width to
| provide more buffer in case of rare issues is a much more
| complicated and thus interesting thing, and thus gets more
| visibility?
| ignoramous wrote:
| > _Or to be more direct: Why fuss over 131x10 feet and not the
| fact your only recovery plan is one excavator and a handful of
| tugboats?_
|
| One should identify both corrective measures and preventive
| measures in equal measure.
| morelisp wrote:
| As long as people are heavily incentivized to build boats to
| exactly the size of the canal (i.e. as long as international
| shipping exists) the measure isn't actually preventative.
| aliceryhl wrote:
| Regarding this, see this other comment:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27173290
| dale_glass wrote:
| It's kind of a tricky problem. If something needs such help
| once in a decade, how do you deal with it? It may make no
| economical sense to build infrastructure to deal with a very
| rare problem, when it may be cheaper long term just to
| laboriously dig the ship out, even if it looks embarrassing.
|
| Also it seems like a win-win approach: harder for ships to get
| stuck, and room for more traffic.
| danaos wrote:
| Too many invasive species flocked in the Mediterranean through
| the Canal. Widening the Canal will only be making the problem
| worse. Extensive care needs to be taken so as to stop new ones.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mediterranean_Sea#Invasive_spe...
| viztor wrote:
| That's an entirely different subject isn't it? I don't see how
| a widen canal would worsen the problem as long as the demand
| for cross-continental transport persist.
| lolinder wrote:
| Not at all. The invasive species in question are salt-water
| animals that traveled through the canal. If there are no
| controls in place, a wider canal means a larger volume of
| water flowing toward the Mediterranean, which means more
| opportunity for invasive species to find their way through.
| From the Wikipedia article linked:
|
| > A first look at some groups of exotic species shows that
| more than 70% of the non-indigenous decapods and about 63% of
| the exotic fishes occurring in the Mediterranean are of Indo-
| Pacific origin, introduced into the Mediterranean through the
| Suez Canal. This makes the Canal the first pathway of arrival
| of alien species into the Mediterranean.
| Someone1234 wrote:
| I don't even understand what "controls" means here? Are you
| talking about turning the Suez Canal into a filtered lock
| system able to hold Suezmax class ships (160,000 DWT)?
| Wouldn't the massive energy usage by pumping/filtering that
| much water (and the usage by the ship's idle engines while
| they wait) do more environmental damage than the invasive
| species?
| istjohn wrote:
| We use electrified barriers to prevent Asian carp spread
| in the Great Lakes region [0]. I'm not sure of the
| practicality of something similar in a saltwater canal.
|
| [0] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/jun/24/asian-
| carp-gre...
| asdff wrote:
| What about a gillnet?
| lolinder wrote:
| I was thinking of a filtered lock system, and you're
| right that that's impractical for the Suez.
| PoignardAzur wrote:
| Obviously the correct engineering solution is underwater
| laser turrets. Mounted on sharks.
| pvaldes wrote:
| This ship has sailed long time ago.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Lessepsian_migrant_spe...
|
| _Wider_ could have a major effect on terrestrial non flying
| mammals but zero effect on aquatic animals (except maybe for
| the biggest whales). Deeper yes, would made a difference for
| aquatic species.
|
| Maybe would be a good chance to made two roads separated by a
| chain of islands instead. More expensive but not without extra
| benefits. By the way reduces the ever present risk of too long
| ships. With two isolated lanes you can rely always in the other
| to keep the road opened.
|
| Those chain of islands in the middle could easily hold
| infrastructures or attract tourism. And would be a great
| opportunity to became a sanctuary for migrant birds and fishes
| without blocking so much the migrant mammals.
|
| And if in the future they need to wide even the channel they
| could just keep the old docks and remove one island in
| strategic points to connect both lanes and make space.
|
| And could be done in several steps without blocking the
| activity or income in the old channel.
| zmix wrote:
| This shows, that it should have been done already before. And
| that Egypt should not ask punitive payments from the ships
| owners.
| bombcar wrote:
| I wonder if making it wider would just allow a ship to get more
| perfectly wedged sideways.
|
| Or maybe the idea is to leave something for it to ground on
| that's easily removable.
| kodisha wrote:
| [translation] Suez Canal will be widened by 40m feet to avoid a
| repeat of the Ever Given chaos
|
| /s
| stephenr wrote:
| The article claims it'll be deepened by 10 feet in a subheading
| but then says 10 meters in the body.
|
| That's a heck of a difference.
| voisin wrote:
| This happened once and caused a loss for a week or dia nd now
| they'll spend billions to widen and deepen 18 miles of canal?
| Doesn't this seem like a massive overreaction?
| rsj_hn wrote:
| The canal undergoes improvements often, being last widened in
| 2014 and it will be widened again the future. The latest
| incident helped spur the current widening, but it would have
| happened anyway. The issue is the canal is too narrow for the
| largest of modern ships, which are much more massive than what
| the canal was originaly designed for back in the 1850s, thus it
| has gone through widenings and other improvements to support
| modern shipping and this process will continue.
| [deleted]
| throwaway09223 wrote:
| The canal has been continually widened over time. This may not
| be entirely reactionary.
| smnrchrds wrote:
| The obstruction was resolved in one week because of the spring
| high tide. Had this happened another time of the year, it could
| have taken much longer than a week to remove the obstruction.
|
| https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/environment/a359688...
| blendergeek wrote:
| A 'spring tide' refers to the high tide at the full moon or
| new moon and does not refer to high tide in the spring time.
| A spring tide happens when the sun, moon, and earth are in a
| line. It is to be contrasted with a 'neap tide' at the
| quarter moons when the sun, moon, and earth make a right
| angle.
|
| https://oceanservice.noaa.gov/facts/springtide.html
| smnrchrds wrote:
| TIL. Thanks. So it's a phenomenon that occurs twice per
| month. That's not bad at all.
| kqr wrote:
| In fact, the average time you'd have to wait for it is...
| a week.
| lttlrck wrote:
| not something you'd want to rely on though - the
| obstruction could happen _at_ high tide.
| spoonjim wrote:
| The next one might be a lot harder to clear, and Egypt is
| completely fucked without the Suez Canal.
| dtech wrote:
| widening the canal has numerous benefits. Eyeballing it I think
| they chose this size so the current largest ships allowed
| (Suezmax) can pass each other with the additional width,
| allowing for 2-way traffic.
|
| The accident is probably just a nice catalyst or PR move.
| x0x0 wrote:
| It feels like an admission that the ships are too big for the
| current canal. You can read elsewhere about some ugly
| hydrodynamics of vessels that size if they get close to a canal
| wall.
|
| Here's an expert whose discussion is very interesting
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CZ14E289jvw
|
| Also, the canal generates critical foreign dollars for Egypt.
| They're probably slightly panicked about the proposed Israeli
| canal, particularly as transit companies are (one would
| assume!) much more open to alternatives.
| emmap21 wrote:
| Just watch a movie and wonder if Ever Given is big enough to ship
| Kong to Antarctica.
| quadrangle wrote:
| INDUCED DEMAND!
|
| (saw references in comments, but c'mon, this needs to be a top-
| level comment, this is totally obvious)
| newsclues wrote:
| Why not twin it for redundancy rather than widen it?
| manquer wrote:
| Parts of it already are two channel. The parts which are single
| lane allow only transit in one direction at a time currently,
| so twining it will not solve the current problem.
|
| It is also likely cheaper to widen than dig a while new canal.
| They will revise prices for wider ships to justify the expense
| of the widening project. There is not enough transit traffic to
| recover a full two lane system today.
| tomtomtom777 wrote:
| > The parts which are single lane allow only transit in one
| direction at a time currently, so twining it will not solve
| the current problem.
|
| If there are two directional channels you have the option to
| use the other for both directions when one channel is
| blocked.
| corobo wrote:
| Well apparently it's been blocked five times since it
| opened in 1869 so that might be a bit of a premature
| optimisation.
| metters wrote:
| 131 feet are 40 meters
| hutrdvnj wrote:
| I don't understand why they are still using feet. I mean it's
| not a local US newspaper, isn't it.
| dogma1138 wrote:
| Could be because the marine and flight "industries" still use
| imperial?
|
| Feet, knots, miles etc are still used for boats and anything
| that flies.
| kungito wrote:
| Not in Europe where Im from
| dogma1138 wrote:
| I'm also from Europe and i haven't seen metric used for
| maritime or aircraft industries these are governed by
| intentional conventions.
|
| Edit: I just checked even the French ship registration
| forms have tonnage in long tons (imperial) and boat
| dimensions in feet...
| svara wrote:
| Knots and (nautical) miles aren't imperial. They're useful
| for navigation because a nautical mile is exactly the
| length of a meridian arcminute, and a knot is one nautical
| mile per hour. Makes these units easy to use on nautical
| charts.
| Gwypaas wrote:
| No, they don't use imperial. The mile you are talking about
| is the Nautical Mile[0] which is the consequence of having
| 90 degrees between the equator and the pole, then splitting
| each of those into 1/60[1] (also called a minute), which
| although arbitrary complements the base of degree based
| measurements. Today the nautical mile is defined as 1852
| meters compared to 1,609.344 for the mile.
|
| [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nautical_mile
|
| [1]: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/59/Na
| utic_m...
| dogma1138 wrote:
| Yes I understand how the nautical mile works, the point
| was still that it's not metric. Altitude and physical
| length units are still in feet tho, same goes for weight
| which is in long tonnes.
| SECProto wrote:
| > Altitude and physical length units are still in feet
| tho, same goes for weight which is in long tonnes.
|
| The article on suezmax[1] uses metric as the primary
| units, even in images/charts. The article on deadweight
| [2] explains that long tonnes were used historically but
| now metric tonnes are used. I don't know much about the
| units used for altitude in shipping
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suezmax
|
| [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deadweight_tonnage
| hutrdvnj wrote:
| Ah okay, so it is not a imperial feet/mile, but a nautic
| feet/mile. Okay, that makes sense then.
| SECProto wrote:
| To speculatively answer your original question about why
| Business Insider reported the plans in US Customary
| units: It's an American media company. Albeit owned by a
| German publishing house. And the article was authored by
| someone out of London (where imperial units are still
| used commonly).
|
| But if you check other sources on the same news (eg
| Chinese state media company Xinhua [1] used only metric,
| or the Russian state-owned RT [2] uses only metric, while
| the Canada-based Reuters [3] uses a bizarre mix of only-
| metric, only-imperial, and both) - They're all writing
| for their target audience. Without watching the original
| TV address, I couldn't say which was originally used.
|
| [1] http://www.xinhuanet.com/english/africa/2021-05/16/c_
| 1399483...
|
| [2] https://www.rt.com/news/523483-suez-canal-expand-
| southern-st...
|
| [3] https://www.reuters.com/world/suez-canal-chief-says-
| southern...
| dazc wrote:
| In the UK, we went 'metric' in 1965. Feet and inches, Mph,
| etc are still very much in common useage though.
| Synaesthesia wrote:
| They have repeatedly widened it since it was built to accomodate
| larger ships.
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