I so badly want to know how many people clicked that link

And the gelatine

“not as bad as Venus” is probably not the goal we should be setting ourselves though

Hey, the planet is just fine, that was the point right?

I dunno, seems a bit lacking. It could do with a full loop around.

It kinda looks like they’re just chucking the deadguy into the “river”.

along with mocking people who have a fetish for flying military hardware.

Which is all of NCD, it’s on the entrance exam.

The answer is obviously yes. Hence the lead coffin

I’m not from remotely near there, but I pay 12 euros a month for water… That would be over 2 years for me…

If Boeing didn’t want to get laughed at, maybe they shouldn’t have such an open door policy for their planes.

Concerts and sporting events have rules and regulations to prevent this nowadays. Guess who cries “persecution” when you try the same for them.

Also, a lot of these events are in the poorer countries, where these regulations don’t exist.

And also because, apparently, god doesn’t want to rescue these people.

That’s not remotely close to what I think the world SHOULD BE like.

It is, unfortunately, what I think the world IS like.

I’m also pointing out that if you want that aspect of the middle ages, you can have it right now by also taking all the crappy aspects of the middle ages…

Noooooo, really?

If there were real giants in Egypt at any point, I’d cancel my vacation and go to Egypt right fucking now.

If anything, China benefits from maintaining the situation in Russia. When the war ends, their huge hold over Russia ends too

You can put hashtags on your Tumblr posts. And people sometimes use it as a post scriptum

You yourself seem to suggest that it is more related to the sheer size of freeways and interstates that make open-graded mixes cost-ineffective, which I agree with.

No, what I said is that you can absolutely use open asphalt outside of freeways, but that the benefit is smaller. Whether or not you want to do it all depends on how you weigh your cost-benefit analysis. Many Dutch cities use it in the city for noise reduction, regardless of higher cost. But if you value things like noise and splash reduction less, then the cost-benefit will land more solidly on “don’t build expensive things”.

but I am curious why you keep calling that road an “access road”

Probably a bit of a holdover from Dutch civil engineering. We split roads here in three main types: The first type are “Flow roads” (stroomwegen) whose purpose is to have unimpeded traffic flow without obstacles. Think highways without level crossings.

The third type is the “Living street” (erftoegangsweg), which is mostly unmarked and has no signals, the kind of street that’s walkable and bikable, leading to houses and stores and parking areas.

And then there’s the thing in the middle, which is what you put between option 1 and 3, which is the (gebiedsontsluitingsweg), which literally translates to “area unlocking road”, but better translates to accessroad. It has level crossings with traffic lights or roundabouts, and serves to connect different areas like suburbs to town centers.

This road is some kind of deformed hybrid between 2 and 3, intended to connect different areas and moving traffic, but constantly interrupted by crossings and traffic signals. You have to stop two whole lanes of longer-distance traffic, just to get to a parking spot at a single store. As a result, you need a crazy-wide road with multiple turning lanes, just to make room for all the waiting cars. This contraption creates constant interaction between two intirely different types of traffic, and mixes two uses of roads that really don’t combine well. You shouldn’t have to stop multiple lanes of longdistance traffic just because I want to move from the pharmacist to the supermarket.

This one massive slab of asphalt could be a 2-lane area-unlocking-road with seperated exits leading to living streets. It would take far less road surface and massively improve the flow of traffic, because you’re not mixing fast through-traffic with slow destination-traffic.

huh? which part did I make up?

This being a closed-asphalt mix? That’s pretty obvious, since there’s water pooled on top. That the road was poorly designed? It’s a 6 or 7 lane accessroad, by definition that’s poorly designed. That the maintenance is bad? There’s water pooling in dozens of places because either the road sagged from the weight of waiting cars (the lengthwise puddles) or from ripples caused by braking cars (widthwise puddles). Or that the US doesn’t spend money on infrastructure? I guess that’s debatable (6 lane accessroads don’t come cheap after all).

That source has a pretty significant bias itself. It being from 2001 might be a clue as to why: before polymer-modified bitumen, there were many more downsides to using open asphalt mixes on anything but long, straight highways. That’s probably also why it only mentions hot-mix asphalt, which the Netherlands is basically banning next year for environmental reasons in favour of warm-mix. I REALLY hope this isn’t the latest version of this book.

It’s true that high-speed roadways more greatly benefit from open asphalt, but it’s very much not true that open-graded mixtures don’t have benefits at lower speeds. They still reduce road noise by 5-7 db even at 50kph speeds, and of course the benefits of less water on the road is substantial. The downside is that there is more fraying, so using it at traffic lights or roundabouts is not a great idea. Even with modern PMB mixes and SAMI treatmeants that reduce fraying pretty effectively (which didn’t really exist in 2001 when that source was composed), a stone-mastic asphalt is still the go-to for areas with a lot of turning or braking.

But most of all, it’s more expensive to build and to maintain, and since maintenance is already pretty crap in a LOT of places (having 6 or 7 lane accessroads doesn’t help there) using open asphalt is probably a bad idea.

Source: Married a Dutch engineer, worked on a lot of roadbuilding projects myself (admitedly not in the design phase, I do know what gets put where here in the Netherlands).