In really awful traffic even the carpool lanes stink. Actually, those people who just ride exist. It is called slugging: http://www.commuterpage.com/slug.htm

I’m too afraid of being squashed to bike (on the freeway??) but i purposely have a short commute

Holland has a system of bike routes that let people go everywhere in the entire country without riding in traffic. If they can do it, why can’t we?

Obviously, there are vast distances in the American Southwest. A path from LA to Veges would not be well used.

We should start by having bike paths in major metro areas. Each metro area is like a small country and could have it’s own system of bike paths.

Then, just for kicks, we could connect the cities.

Great video. Sure they are breaking the law, but I bet at the height of rush hour in the major cities (LA, NYC, DC, Chicago, Dallas) they can beat everyone of those cars to their destination. Plus, when they do ride in cars, they probably don’t need a rope and pulley system to get their fat ass out of the car.

I bet the CHiPs would eat his lunch…if they could catch him!

What happens when one of those cars suddenly opens its doors? Wham-Oh!

ERE, I like that thought. Taking it to an extreme, set a minimum speed limit on the expressways. If you get caught in a traffic jam, you get a ticket. That’ll fix the problem quickly: either people will stop driving during rush hour, or they will unscrew their various local, state, US guvmints to improve traffic capacity such that everyone who drives can maintain the minimum speed (at a cost of higher highway construction and maintenance costs, of course). Conversely, bicyclists may use the freeways as long as they can maintain the minimum speed.

legal in TX . . .

Too late Jacob,
The business op you mention that is… It’s already in vogue in various SE cities The “professionals” are called ‘carpool jockeys’ – and they help solo driver cars circumvesnt traffic jams without necessarily taking on extra passesngers.. Here’s the NYT coverage on the phenomenon!

Oooops! I’ve givesn everyone ideas now, haven’t I?

Best,
Surio.
—

As I see it, the problem is not freeways, bicycles, or Cars, Truck, SUV.
The problem is overcrowding. Where I live there is no overcrowding on our roads like that shown in the clip.
You say, “Well, gee, it don’t take no rocket expert to figure that out”!
I agree, it does not.
Maybe it does, however, take a rocket expert to learn to live somewhere else and lower your stress.
Or you could go with the Illuminati solution to overcrowding—AKA “Population Control”.
Where is a good place to begin population control? How about a major city? yeah, more bang for the Illuminati buck there.
I am NOT a rocket expert. Just offering this up for your consideration.

Jacob that would be equating population control to birth control. Depending on one’s mindset and beliefs, and whether your buying or selling, that is either:

a. A good idea

or

b. A bad idea.

I prefer to solve the problem via geography.

The US of A is still very large and pristine in it’s offerings.

@HSpencer – you don’t push your city people out here, and I won’t send my manure lagoon your way.

It is illegal in Australia to ride your bicycle on the free way. Which i thik is immoral. Effectively bicycling is the only “free” way of moving around the country and if you can’t ride on the freeways, when they’re the only way of getting around the country isn’t that saying you can only travel if you can afford to have a car? Didn’t they abolish poors law in englad like 150 years ago?

@et – That’s a huge argument for eliminating cars in the middle of LA. The problem with the bikes in the US is that everything is spread out. Rather than building concentrated living with lots of green space between the cities, suburbia happened, quite possibly due to cars + cheap gas. The problem is that gas is no longer cheap and there are so many cars thanks to affluence and population increases that the infrastructure can’t keep up. The US transportation system took a chance and dug itself into a hole.

For ERE purposes: Do not buy a home in suburbia — biggest mistake ever. These houses will lose value over the next 20 years because of their inconvenient location.

I pulled the following article off the ATS website. It is “at least” interesting in nature, and supports what I wrote in my last post:

—We all remember BP’s original statement that they were losing 5,000 bpd from the well. Then scientists said it was more like 100k bpd. Then the government said that it was about 10k bpd – not 100k. A few weeks later, they said “Ok – maybe it is 100k bpd.”

Now we’ve got new figures of 350k bpd spewing out of the wellhead, (ATS Link) and a total of 420-840 MILLION barrels leaked so far. (ATS link)

To me, it all seems to point to one thing – BP was lying from the outset about the amount of oil this well was producing before the explosion. If they’re lying about this one, they’re probably lying about ALL of the ones they own, as are the owners of every other oil well on the planet.

Why would they lie about it?

For starters, everyone here knows about the “peak oil” theory. If the petrocompanies say that oil is getting harder to get out of the ground, they charge more for it and we end up getting hosed. Meanwhile, they continue to set record after record in regards to company profits.

What do you think would happen if instead of having to pump like hell to get oil out of the ground, that oil was practically GUSHING out of their wells? Better still – that the wells were not “running dry” as we’ve been told, and were instead being replenished via a chemical process near the core of the earth (abiotic oil)? That the oil companies were shutting down “dry wells” just to keep the lie alive?

The answer is that the world economy would crash and crash hard.

By and large, most nations are deeply vested in petrodollars. Were oil to suddenly drop in price to $5 a barrel, many countries would simply implode – mainly the OPEC cartel and our pals in the big oil companies. They have nothing to lose and everything to gain by propagating the myth of peak oil.

I think the smoking gun is in plain-sight – surrounded by little unmanned subs and blowing hundreds of thousands of barrels a day into the gulf. ——–(end article)

This is just someone’s opinion, but it seems sensible to me.

Isn’t it legal to ride between two cars on the highway on a motorcycle in CA? Seems like if you want to do that it would make more sense to do it with a motorcycle rather than a bike. Our city just put in bike lanes on all the major roads, however, it’s still illegal to ride a bike on the highway. I say take public transportation, safest / cheapest option.

Riding on the freeway in Texas is legal. Austin Critical Mass got up on I35 on day without arrest. The official response was that it is legal, but they highly suggest you don’t do it. Lucky for us, the traffic in Austin never seems to be going much more than 15mph on the highway.

@Kevin M – That’s where the zoning laws come in [to interfere]. Maybe they’re overridden if you’re still an employee working from home. Oldschool management says to keep an eye on salaried employees lest they goof off, so I think telecommuting is mainly for contractors. [I have no stats to back up that claim.]

I’m not sure zoning laws apply to work from home people – I’m pretty sure the cities just don’t want lots of traffic and customers parking in residential areas. Perhaps we should just become contractors instead of salaried employees? Pay for results instead of just showing up – what a novel concept!

I think Q has some interesting ideas as well. Perhaps cities like Detroit should encourage these manufacturing zones and build affordable housing around them (within walking or biking distance).