Submitted by Phillip_Lipton t3_xy0nuk in todayilearned
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Haha could you imagine the road rage these days if we all did 35mph on the freeway?
I can't imagine having to go that slow for any serious length work commute let alone full highway travel. Trying to visit family would have been a nightmare
When you ride alone you ride with Hitler!
Campaign poster for wartime carpooling.
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Most of the interstate freeway system wasn't built until the 50s. The rural highways in the article were often 1 lane roads in each direction. People in the 40s didn't generally choose to live so far from their workplaces as we do today.
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It’s a good thing I mentioned “these days” then
This was before the freeway system and the concept of “highway” was a lot more primitive than what we have today. Long distance travel via automobile was also vastly less common vs. train.
They were, they simply didn’t travel as far as we commonly do today.
At the start of WWII, Route 66 was about 15 years old. And it was leisurely and romantic as the song implies. Road trips in those days was one part Griswold Vacation, one part Conestoga wagon train, one part diarrhea apocalypse from all the roadside diners.
My Grandma talked about a 6 day road trip from Denver to Salt Lake City in the middle of the war. She made it seem like half the time they were waiting for cattle to move.
Carpooling is great if it wasn't for the people.
Yeah, at least Hitler doesn't constantly complain about my music.
The implication is that the interstate freeway system would have a higher mph rating. Which, it got, @ 55mph as the "most efficient speed". You're comparing two situations that are dissimilar in the important aspect.
Hey you also forgot to mention that the US was founded in 1776, the list of founding fathers, the various religious sects at play within the states in question, and the impact those believes had when mingled with our economy in order to form a practice conveniently unaligned from our new enemies.
Everyone knows you've gotta invent (and show your math for) the wheel to make a reddit post. /s (Sorry for your downvotes.)
People in this country can't even be asked to wear a mask inside of walmart....could you imagine if this was re-instated today?
That’s why I used the word “imagine” and “these days” it was a hypothetical situation on how it would be portrayed these days IF they made it mandatory for 35 mph on the freeway
Edit: don’t understand the downvotes on what was clearly stated in the comment I had posted. Some salty ass people I guess. Or just Reddit culture to downvote anything they see downvoted.
Yea I’m sure the outcome would be what happened back then too, a lot of tickets were handed out and the department made a pretty penny.
In the early to mid 40´s, germany had alot of tourists.
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And today you'd have half the country intentionally hitting 100mph everywhere they drove just to "stick it to Biden's commie speed limit"
Why would it be reinstated today? Vehicles are much more efficient at high way speeds than 35.
Youre right. Only republicans go over the speed limit
That works. Cutting out long discretionary trips seems like part of the plan.
Of course. Someone even set a hilarious book during one.
>I can't imagine having to go that slow for any serious length work commute
are you kidding, this is an upgrade in LA and the bay area
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Yep. We've already seen how that set responds to calls for self sacrifice
I think whatever modern measures people were asked to put up with they would, for a war of that magnitude.
I thought 55 was bad…
I can’t imagine any sort of voluntary participation thing that we could get even a third of the country to reliably do. Anything coming from the top-down automatically loses half of the population.
Sometimes I think about everything we use social security numbers for and all the different uses they have in a modern technology-driven society. Can you imagine if the federal government told the citizens of today that they were going to assign everyone a number to help keep track of them? I don’t think it would go over smoothly.
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In which nation? You seem to not have mentioned.
Presumably the one nation on Earth that doesn't think it has to specify.
Next you'll be saying Dr Strangelove or Catch 22 weren't funny.
Anyhow, having actually red the book, it is hilarious.
Air resistance ruins gas efficiency past 55 mph, it worsens quickly any higher.
Highway speed is better MPG due to (as I recall) other cars already cutting that air for you, essentially paving a less resistant path through the air, making that travel at higher speeds more efficient. So it's not so much the speed, but cars in front of you cutting currents through it to make it easier.
In general, the lower the speed, the less air resistance, the greater the efficiency.
At really low speeds, like 5 mph or whatever, you're burning more gas than you're using to move the car, energy wasted. 35 mph is the first generalized "sweet spot" and the next is 55 mph.
And a lot of cars in that era had terrible drag coefficients- even the fairly sleek Beetle.
The fact that modern cars aren't more thoroughly streamlined is still silly to me.
Give me a giant pill, man. Screw the aesthetics.
And it takes very little to change the efficiency.
I had a car bra for my 3 series- E36, the last of the boxier models- and with nothing more than smoothing out the bumper/fender transition and adding a couple small wedges to direct air a little I got a full mile per gallon highway improvement.
That's over a full summer of testing, with the same drives done over 50 times. Held up nicely- 30mpg highway without it, 31 with.
It probably wasn’t that difficult to enforce. New tires were good for only 12,000 miles, and that was if you took care of them, and each registered car was allowed four for the duration of the war. There were no newly manufactured automobiles for the duration except those ordered by the military, and those were all of the same models that had been introduced in 1941. Of course, gas was severely rationed as well, despite the fact that the US was the world’s largest producer of petroleum, but restricting gasoline made tires last longer, and rubber was the chokepoint.
Individual_Ad2579 t1_ires3qy wrote
Man I hope they didn’t do that on highways