The headline price is an artifact of congressional accounting. It is an estimate of the 10-year cost.
The MSM uses that number when their corporate masters want you to be against the spending. They actually explain why it is a fairly meaningless number when they want the spending.
This builds on an NHTSA-funded pilot program called Driver Alcohol Detection System for Safety (DADDS; https://www.dadss.org/).
DADDS advanced two technologies for passive impaired driving detection: non-contact breath sensors (exhaled EtOH near the driver), and touch sensors (embedded into the steering wheel).
The bill adds this as a requirement on top of existing distracted driving prevention systems, which have been expanding but don't always get much press (e.g. Subaru's driver-facing cameras).
The wording in the actual bill looks vague enough that I hope this is more for show than for actual implementation.
It specifically requires non-contact sensors that can “accurately” detect blood alcohol level of the driver. It may be possible to detect trace exhaled alcohol in the air, but you’re never going to get accurate blood alcohol measurements from proximity alone.
In the unlikely event that such a system made it to market, it would quickly become common knowledge among alcoholics that it could be defeated by rolling down your window to get more airflow through the cabin. More airflow means trace alcohol in the air is diluted and blown away. Reading goes to zero.
The bill also requires that the technology limit the operation of a vehicle after impairment is detected. There’s no way a system that suddenly causes a vehicle to slow down to pedestrian speeds could be considered safe for use on freeways. Can you imagine someone’s car slowing to a crawl on the freeway and forcing them to move at low speeds on the shoulder because their distraction detection system had a false positive? Even a false positive rate of 0.001% would mean a lot of us would pass a car experiencing a false positive on our commute every week. Awful.
This whole time I've been confused how investing more money in roads is compatible with our climate goals. Should we not trying to decommission roads and encourage people to move to denser, walkable and cyclable city centers?
That’s probably a reductive take. This bill is massive, over 2000 pages. It has funding for all kinds of transportation, green, energy and digital infrastructure. Roads are a part of that because once they are built, they need to be maintained or else people will die. There are several examples of bridges and overpasses collapsing and leading to deaths and badly maintained road surface leads to fatal accidents as well. Also, talking about this bill in terms of what it does for roads and bridges is going to be the best way to talk to the public as that is the thing they experience every day. Talking about the esoterics of the energy grid isn’t going to land for most people.
> Should we not trying to decommission roads and encourage people to move to denser, walkable and cyclable city centers?
Roads are still needed inside cities and between them. The Ancient Romans (famously) had roads.
Roads used to be for people:
> Before the advent of the automobile, users of city streets were diverse and included children at play and pedestrians at large. By 1930, most streets were primarily a motor thoroughfares where children did not belong and where pedestrians were condemned as "jaywalkers."
> In Fighting Traffic, Peter Norton argues that to accommodate automobiles, the American city required not only a physical change but also a social one: before the city could be reconstructed for the sake of motorists, its streets had to be socially reconstructed as places where motorists belonged. It was not an evolution, he writes, but a bloody and sometimes violent revolution. Norton describes how street users struggled to define and redefine what streets were for. He examines developments in the crucial transitional years from the 1910s to the 1930s, uncovering a broad anti-automobile campaign that reviled motorists as "road hogs" or "speed demons" and cars as "juggernauts" or "death cars." He considers the perspectives of all users--pedestrians, police (who had to become "traffic cops"), street railways, downtown businesses, traffic engineers (who often saw cars as the problem, not the solution), and automobile promoters. He finds that pedestrians and parents campaigned in moral terms, fighting for "justice." Cities and downtown businesses tried to regulate traffic in the name of "efficiency." Automotive interest groups, meanwhile, legitimized their claim to the streets by invoking "freedom"--a rhetorical stance of particular power in the United States. Fighting Traffic offers a new look at both the origins of the automotive city in America and how social groups shape technological change.
Roads act more like veins transporting resources to parts of civilization. Decrease efficiency, increase emissions. But the critical thing is infrastructure being in disrepair can and has killed people.
The US is huge, and people are already migrating to the cities (a bad move in the light of COVID). The remaining cities still need to be connected by roads, even if you’re closing down small communities.
You can also improve public transport, build bikelanes and sidewalk, while updating roads to help the parts of the community that will inevitable live outside the inner city limits.
> This whole time I've been confused how investing more money in roads is compatible with our climate goals.
It is compatible with our goal of getting from point A to point B safely. Climate goals are not the only goals, and if you look at this bill carefully, you'll see that they are quite secondary to other goals, which reflects the underlying political reality.
You'd still need most of the roads for logistical reasons. Cities need food, a whole lot of food, and it has to come from somewhere it can actually be grown.
good catch; it's $550B in new spending and $450B of renewing infrastructure programs that were going to expire (or have expired since the bill has dragged on)
I don't know what the $450B is though, all the media focus and interest is on the new shiny stuff.
Ha! Just as I expected, a bill that mostly builds infrastructure that corporations/Wall Street wanted, not much for the slave class (also known as the “middle class”).
As Warren Buffet once said “there has been class warfare and my class won.”
Biden should man-up and issue executive orders to satisfy at least a few of his campaign promises to the non-elite class.
You have to be more specific and explain why the middle class slaves don’t benefit from power lines, airports, fixed water pipes, flood protections etc.
Much ink gets spilled over the machinations leading up to legislation. But the machinations being in the open as they were give us normies a chance express our opinions on it in real time to our representatives. It’s actually the opposite of lobbyists and crony capitalism. Granted, two things can be true and lobbyists and “well funded interests” get their say all throughout the process. Still a world of difference from a bill coming out from closed door meetings with nobody outside even seeing it.
kwertyoowiyop|4 years ago
https://www.cnn.com/2021/11/05/politics/house-votes-infrastr...
netcan|4 years ago
Am I being shallow? Does it make bad sense to cut a $100bn slice for something epic? A hypersonic monorail perhaps?
_jal|4 years ago
The MSM uses that number when their corporate masters want you to be against the spending. They actually explain why it is a fairly meaningless number when they want the spending.
ianai|4 years ago
rsj_hn|4 years ago
ur-whale|4 years ago
A country running out of money and going into hyperinflation via money printing ?
Exciting enough for you ?
nickthemagicman|4 years ago
https://time.com/6086981/bipartisan-infrastructure-bill-brea...
semenko|4 years ago
This builds on an NHTSA-funded pilot program called Driver Alcohol Detection System for Safety (DADDS; https://www.dadss.org/).
DADDS advanced two technologies for passive impaired driving detection: non-contact breath sensors (exhaled EtOH near the driver), and touch sensors (embedded into the steering wheel).
The bill adds this as a requirement on top of existing distracted driving prevention systems, which have been expanding but don't always get much press (e.g. Subaru's driver-facing cameras).
PragmaticPulp|4 years ago
It specifically requires non-contact sensors that can “accurately” detect blood alcohol level of the driver. It may be possible to detect trace exhaled alcohol in the air, but you’re never going to get accurate blood alcohol measurements from proximity alone.
In the unlikely event that such a system made it to market, it would quickly become common knowledge among alcoholics that it could be defeated by rolling down your window to get more airflow through the cabin. More airflow means trace alcohol in the air is diluted and blown away. Reading goes to zero.
The bill also requires that the technology limit the operation of a vehicle after impairment is detected. There’s no way a system that suddenly causes a vehicle to slow down to pedestrian speeds could be considered safe for use on freeways. Can you imagine someone’s car slowing to a crawl on the freeway and forcing them to move at low speeds on the shoulder because their distraction detection system had a false positive? Even a false positive rate of 0.001% would mean a lot of us would pass a car experiencing a false positive on our commute every week. Awful.
ur-whale|4 years ago
Can't tell if sarcasm.
op00to|4 years ago
[deleted]
unknown|4 years ago
[deleted]
CalRobert|4 years ago
dougmwne|4 years ago
throw0101a|4 years ago
Roads are still needed inside cities and between them. The Ancient Romans (famously) had roads.
Roads used to be for people:
> Before the advent of the automobile, users of city streets were diverse and included children at play and pedestrians at large. By 1930, most streets were primarily a motor thoroughfares where children did not belong and where pedestrians were condemned as "jaywalkers."
> In Fighting Traffic, Peter Norton argues that to accommodate automobiles, the American city required not only a physical change but also a social one: before the city could be reconstructed for the sake of motorists, its streets had to be socially reconstructed as places where motorists belonged. It was not an evolution, he writes, but a bloody and sometimes violent revolution. Norton describes how street users struggled to define and redefine what streets were for. He examines developments in the crucial transitional years from the 1910s to the 1930s, uncovering a broad anti-automobile campaign that reviled motorists as "road hogs" or "speed demons" and cars as "juggernauts" or "death cars." He considers the perspectives of all users--pedestrians, police (who had to become "traffic cops"), street railways, downtown businesses, traffic engineers (who often saw cars as the problem, not the solution), and automobile promoters. He finds that pedestrians and parents campaigned in moral terms, fighting for "justice." Cities and downtown businesses tried to regulate traffic in the name of "efficiency." Automotive interest groups, meanwhile, legitimized their claim to the streets by invoking "freedom"--a rhetorical stance of particular power in the United States. Fighting Traffic offers a new look at both the origins of the automotive city in America and how social groups shape technological change.
* https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2924825-fighting-traffic
It's their current focus—basically only personal automobiles—that is the problem, and not the technology itself.
ianai|4 years ago
the-dude|4 years ago
Making these trucks electric won't help.
mrweasel|4 years ago
You can also improve public transport, build bikelanes and sidewalk, while updating roads to help the parts of the community that will inevitable live outside the inner city limits.
rsj_hn|4 years ago
It is compatible with our goal of getting from point A to point B safely. Climate goals are not the only goals, and if you look at this bill carefully, you'll see that they are quite secondary to other goals, which reflects the underlying political reality.
AnIdiotOnTheNet|4 years ago
tomohawk|4 years ago
beervirus|4 years ago
throwaway4good|4 years ago
If you add up the numbers at the bottom of the article, it is only about 500B. Is the rest already already allocated infrastructure spending?
mister_tee|4 years ago
I don't know what the $450B is though, all the media focus and interest is on the new shiny stuff.
mark_l_watson|4 years ago
As Warren Buffet once said “there has been class warfare and my class won.”
Biden should man-up and issue executive orders to satisfy at least a few of his campaign promises to the non-elite class.
pavlov|4 years ago
News-Dog|4 years ago
garmaine|4 years ago
quitit|4 years ago
marcellus23|4 years ago
throwaway4good|4 years ago
TheGigaChad|4 years ago
[deleted]
nickthemagicman|4 years ago
[deleted]
rrss|4 years ago
[deleted]
furgooswft13|4 years ago
ianai|4 years ago
Much ink gets spilled over the machinations leading up to legislation. But the machinations being in the open as they were give us normies a chance express our opinions on it in real time to our representatives. It’s actually the opposite of lobbyists and crony capitalism. Granted, two things can be true and lobbyists and “well funded interests” get their say all throughout the process. Still a world of difference from a bill coming out from closed door meetings with nobody outside even seeing it.
Bombthecat|4 years ago