On Mon, Jul 21, 2014 at 6:13 PM, Jay Ashworth <jra@baylink.com> wrote:
From: "William Herrin" <bill@herrin.us>
On Mon, Jul 21, 2014 at 5:30 PM, Jay Ashworth <jra@baylink.com> wrote:
Ironically, I've had the opposite experience. The nearby Dulles Toll Road, Greenway and Beltway HOT lanes are all in much better condition than all but a few of the rest of the local roads. My buddies out at http://hoveroad.com/ don't keep the roads in as good shape, but they are in excellent repair for an organization that maintains 157 miles of roads on a $1M annual budget. Vastly better than what I've seen a municipality achieve for the same price.
Stop it, Bill.
Owen didn't say "privately owned *toll road*"; "very wealthy gated communities" are even still rarely large enough to need their own turnpikes.
If you keep setting up straw men, we'll be happy to knock them down for you, but you'll end up looking a little foolish.
(A) The referenced example, the HOVE RMC, is 157 miles of privately owned road which is neither a toll road nor a gated community.
That was one example of 4, the last. The other appear to be toll roads, though I don't live in the neighborhood.
Indeed. One is a purely private toll road, one is a public-private partnership toll road and one is owned and operated by a quasi-governmental agency. Why consider just one class of private roads when you can examine examples of four? VDOT actually does a halfway decent job of maintaining local public roads but they spend a vast fortune on it and they're decades (with an s) behind expanding those roads to meet the demand. Compared to Verizon/Netflix they're about the same: works OK a good part of the day but comes to a screeching halt during the quarter of the day that are prime hours. Compare that to Maryland which enjoys reducing lanes for construction work on already congested roads for months at a time and DC itself which spends a cast fortune on roads which are usually in worse condition *after* the maintenance. Soon the roads there will have more metal plate surface area than asphalt. DC roads are like a network with permanent 10% packet loss and your only alternative is geo satellite. But HOVE is a nice example. As a land owner and therefore shareholder in the RMC, I pay my fees every year. I vote directly on those fees too, so if I'm not happy I have some real control. As a shareholder of Verizon I have no control. I truly earnestly wish my stock would go to zero. Rather, I wish for Verizon to encounter trouble that would cause my stock to drop to zero. But as long as that isn't happening I may as well collect the dividend. If the government ran it, I couldn't even do that. What were we talking about? I forget. Regards, Bill Herrin -- William Herrin ................ herrin@dirtside.com bill@herrin.us Owner, Dirtside Systems ......... Web: <http://www.dirtside.com/> Can I solve your unusual networking challenges?