u/TheGodDamnDevil

I was talking to a friend of mine about the cost of driving and he casually mentioned that he thought it cost him "maybe $1000 per year".

I was like "Uh... that's less than $100 per month. You spend more than that just on gas", and he goes "oh yeah...".

We kept talking and basically the only costs he was thinking of were stuff like maintenance, parking and tolls. The fact that the cost he pays to drive also includes paying for gas, insurance, registration and buying a car completely slipped his mind.

Like, obviously this is an extreme example, and he immediately realized that it cost him more than he had initially guessed, but I often see other people making these same sorts of mistakes when thinking about these things.

Taking the Vermonter to Burlington is way better than taking the bus. It's generally on time, it's a lot more comfortable and it's usually a little cheaper too, even at the last minute.

Going north, both the train and the bus take about the same amount of time, but going south, the timing of the bus is way worse. You have to leave Burlington at like 5am and go through Albany, which takes like 2 hours extra.

Going up, the bus does have the advantage of getting you there a couple hours earlier in the day. It also stops directly in downtown Burlington whereas the Vermonter stops in Essex Junction. Stopping in Essex Junction isn't a big deal though, you can either get a ride or take the local bus that goes directly from the station to Burlington (GMT #2).

Oh yeah? Name some cheerful facts about the square of the hypotenuse then.

But I'm talkin' 'bout Shaft

They say this cat Shaft is a bad mother...

It was a run-by fruiting

No heat 'til trick-or-treat!

I'm also an avid cyclist

😂😂😂

Probably. There was a case a few years ago in Houston where a driver started yelling at a couple who were on a bike ride. He left, but then came back and swerved towards one of them and she fell. Her husband then fired at the driver (apparently the driver had started to reverse too?). The driver was hit, but survived and was charged with aggravated assult with a deadly weapon. The cyclist was not charged.

Cyclist self-defense highlighted after armed rider shoots road rage driver on Houston’s east side

'My first instinct was to shoot him' | Man says he shot driver who hit his wife during bike ride in Houston's Greater East End

There have been a few cases like this in other parts of the country too. In Detroit, a driver started yelling at two cyclists who were in the road, and when one of them yelled back, he got out of his SUV and approached her with a knife. She fired one shot at him, and killed him. She wasn't charged either.
Bicyclist shoots SUV driver armed with knife dead in downtown Detroit road rage confrontation

They didn't just date, he was married to Kimberly Guilfoyle.

I highly doubt most people would bike to downtown, even if it’s only a 10 minute bike ride, in December-February.

I'm not delusional enough to think that everybody is going to start biking year round, but I already do bike in the winter myself, and it's easier than most people think, especially for short trips.

Like, people still walk downtown in winter, and biking in the winter is not much harder than that. The difference with biking is basically just that there's more wind than walking, so warmer gloves are important, and I'm more likely to wear some sort of face covering (a neck warmer, scarf or balaclava). You don't need a warmer jacket though because you'll get warm just by biking (in fact, having a layer you can take off is a good idea because it's easy to get too hot).

Historically there was a second station on the North-South tracks in Springfield, but it had already fallen into disuse before Amtrak. A lot of the trains that went south from Springfield were trains that started in Boston and went via "The Inland Route", which meant they were already passing through Springfield Union Station as well.

The building for the other Springfield station still exists. It's now a police substation, although I'm not sure it's actually used. It's located near the intersection with State Street. Maybe they could copy New Haven and have two stations: one big one called Union Station, and one weird little one that confuses people called State St.

Have you been there in the past 10 years? They completely restored and renovated the original building. It's beautiful now. Some of the platforms need some more work, but that's going to be part of what's happening with this project.

Currently platform D is old, but okay, platform C is a new high-level island platform, platform B is a dump (it looks abandoned) but it's only used by the Lake Shore Limited, and platform A actually is abandoned (it looks like platform B).

This project will restore all four platforms, including an extension of platform C.

The station is located on the east-west tracks. The north-south tracks are like two blocks away. It's not as simple as just adding another platform, you'd effectively be building a second station.

I was making a joke, but interestingly the reason our trip was interrupted was because the Canyon Spirit hit a tanker truck on the tracks ahead of us.

The branding is a little unclear to me, but I believe the Canyon Spirit used to be called the Rocky Mountaineer too, and it's run by the same company, but now they've switched to only using the Rocky Mountaineer name for the trips they do in the Canadian Rockies (the Canyon Spirit runs in the Colorado Rockies and Utah).

I used to work in a gas station and one day a young guy in a car with New Jersey plates came inside and was like "Uh, hey, can you tell me how to do this?". Apparently he'd done it once before, but he was still nervous and wanted to make sure he was doing it right.

I had a similar conversation with a woman who had just moved from California. She'd never lived anywhere with cold winters and she wanted to know how the defrosters in a car worked, and how to correctly use them. It sounds funny to anybody who grew up with icy mornings, but it's a good question to ask. It's not totally intuitive, and she was also asking before it had gotten cold that year, which is smart.

That's where your Discman is supposed to go.

There was a dude who used to upload videos of himself riding his scooter around the Alps and any time a car would pass him too closely, he would throw an egg at them. He had a special rack which could hold a carton of eggs across the top of his handlebars.

They also ordered food for everybody, but most people didn't get it because the buses started to show up before the food did. I shrewdly chose to wait for the second bus and was rewarded with a hamburger and fries, plus a less crowded bus.

When the bus dropped us off at a later station we boarded another train. I sat down across from a woman who was starting her trip there and hadn't been on the bus with us. She had brought more food than she needed and offered me a container full of pasta with sausage, which I accepted.

So not only was I traveling for free, I was getting fed for free too. Why is society coddling lazy people like me?

Are you smelly?

In general? Not really. After riding overnight on the train? A little bit.

Incidentally, David Koch has died since then, but it was not I who killed him.

When they turned down funding, it created an opportunity for other states. In 2018, when Connecticut started running CTRail trains on the Hartford Line, there was an opinion piece published in the Hartford Courant newspaper that sarcastically thanked Florida. It was also re-published in the Orlando Sentinel:

Hartford hails its new train, made possible by Florida Gov. Scott

This much-anticipated train service almost didn’t happen. It’s thanks to Florida’s curious distaste for mass transit. Florida Gov. Rick Scott turned down federal transit funds in 2011, which this state then scooped up. It’s rare that Connecticut says this, but thank you, Florida.

Floridians may not care for trains, but they have proved to be an elegant, efficient, environmentally better way to move people from city to city. Trains encourage tourism, housing and jobs along their routes. They reduce pollution and dependence on oil. Plus, they are just plain fun. There’s a reason why they’re so popular in the most charming cities in Europe.

Northampton doesn't have direct control over PVTA. Stuff like service improvements and new transit facilities often gets coordinated by the Pioneer Valley Planning Commission, and what gets built depends mainly on what funding is available from the state and federal government, rather than local funding.

I believe they're looking into possible expansion of the G47 like adding weekend service and increasing frequency, but it's not a sure thing yet.

I haven't heard any talk about building a real transit hub in Northampton, but I think it would make sense. The Academy of Music functions as a sort of de facto transit hub, but it's just a big outdoor bus shelter. The transit centers in Holyoke, Greenfield and Westfield, and Union Station in Springfield, all have dedicated buildings with seating and bathrooms.

Parking garages in general have shorter lives than other buildings their size. Because they're unenclosed there's less protection from water, and in climates like ours they're also exposed to freezing temperatures and road salt that gets brought in by vehicles. Concrete is porous, and the moisture flowing through it causes the steel rebar inside of the concrete to rust, and because that rust takes up more space than the original steel, it creates pressure inside of the concrete, which eventually causes the concrete to fail. This happens with concrete structures everywhere, but it happens faster in places that use road salt because the salty water is more corrosive.

This garage is nearly 40 years old. That's towards the lower end of the expected life of a parking garage, but it's not exceptionally low. There's a reason there aren't a lot of historic parking garages.