On Mon, Jul 21, 2014 at 6:13 PM, Jay Ashworth <j...@baylink.com> wrote: >> From: "William Herrin" <b...@herrin.us> > >> On Mon, Jul 21, 2014 at 5:30 PM, Jay Ashworth <j...@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 ................ her...@dirtside.com b...@herrin.us Owner, Dirtside Systems ......... Web: <http://www.dirtside.com/> Can I solve your unusual networking challenges?