Netherlands protests?
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I know we've got some NL people here--any comment on this?
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@Benjamin-Hall said in Netherlands protests?:
I know we've got some NL people here--any comment on this?
What’s going on is that the government wants to reduce nitrogen oxide emissions, and one of the ways they intend to do this is by introducing quotas on farming. This has farmers up in arms, with a couple of major protests this past week that saw hundreds of tractors being driven into two major cities (The Hague, where parliament meets, and Utrecht, where the environmental agency responsible is housed), with accompanying protests by farmers and their hangers-on. If I’m not mistaken, last Wednesday (IIRC), this caused the longest traffic jams ever recorded because of the farmers taking major motorways to get to their destination, in vehicles capable of maybe 40 km/h top speed.
Politically, it has seen the government coalition parties and responsible ministers sort of backpedal a bit, as well as the populist frontmen delivering speeches which were apparently well-received by the farmers — for the obvious reason of being mostly populist rhetoric that says what the audience wants to hear.
In some ways this is fairly remarkable, because the Netherlands doesn’t have all that much of a tradition of protests. Not like in neighbouring Belgium or just a little bit further south in France, where people protest easily, loudly, and disruptively — protest demonstrations in this country tend to be pretty tame and organised in such a way as to not cause any inconvenience.
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For once it seems Twitter is correct. I didn't read the whole thread, but his account of the facts and the sentiment are correct.
The statement "the army was deployed" sounds worse than it was: all they did was preventing the farmers from reaching the parliament square, probably the only place in
were protesting is not allowed, and the army is the only government body with vehicles big enough to prevent a tractor from getting where it wants to be.
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@Gurth said in Netherlands protests?:
the government wants to reduce nitrogen oxide emissions
Not exactly.
Expanding a bit there: EU requires managing nitrogen emissions (News reporting consistently talks about nitrogen, not nitrogen oxide or ammonia). Up till recently, this was handled through the 'Programma Aanpak Stikstof' (Nitrogen handling program) which seemingly boiled down to 'we ignore the problem and we'll see how it goes'.
That got thrown out by the highest court, must be a few months ago now. Since then, until new rules are in place, the limit on new emissions is zero. This has halted all activities (such as building) which might even temporarily increase nitrogen emissions near a natura 2000 area. With about 120 assigned area, nearly all of the Netherlands is near a natura 2000 area.
At this time, there is not yet a long-term solution to unblock the building and other related sectors. Reducing nitrogen output by reducing the agrarian sector (which are frequently particularly close to natura 2000 areas) is one of the plans on the table.
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@Gurth I'm trying to figure out why farming / livestock is such a bad contributor of nitrogen oxide emissions.
Is it again nitrogen in fertilizer that somehow ends up being released into the atmosphere? (I've heard of nitrogen in fertilizer causing problems because it ends up being washed into nearby rivers/lakes where it, being a fertilizer, causes algae-blooms and so on.)
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@cvi said in Netherlands protests?:
@Gurth I'm trying to figure out why farming / livestock is such a bad contributor of nitrogen oxide emissions.
Is it again nitrogen in fertilizer that somehow ends up being released into the atmosphere? (I've heard of nitrogen in fertilizer causing problems because it ends up being washed into nearby rivers/lakes where it, being a fertilizer, causes algae-blooms and so on.)
Modern farming is incredibly nitrogen intensive. And it's not just atmospheric--runoff is a huge issue in lots of places.
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@Benjamin-Hall If it's just nitrogen (as opposed to nitrogen oxide or whatever other compounds) then the problem probably isn't with it getting into the air.
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@hungrier Unless somebody proves me wrong, I'm assuming that they really mean nitrogen oxides (and perhaps other nitrogen compounds) and just shorten it to "nitrogen" because raisins.
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@cvi They're definitely talking about emissions. But there's also definitely people talking who don't know what they are talking about.
Another measure that got talked about a bit is reducing the maximum speed on highways. But I think that's just a pet measure the environment mob wants to push through.
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@cvi for the livestock part nitrogen is in de form of ammonia (NH3), which degrades into NO1, for traffic/planes/etc the initial form is NOx. To be able to compare industries all types of emission are converted into a standardized form (1kg of NH3 is equivalent to 0.82kg of "nitrogen", etc).
Technicalities aside, nobody cares to comment on why those NOxes are so bad for nature reserves, so yeah
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@robo2 said in Netherlands protests?:
@cvi for the livestock part nitrogen is in de form of ammonia (NH3), which degrades into NO1, for traffic/planes/etc the initial form is NOx. To be able to compare industries all types of emission are converted into a standardized form (1kg of NH3 is equivalent to 0.82kg of "nitrogen", etc).
Technicalities aside, nobody cares to comment on why those NOxes are so bad for nature reserves, so yeahHere's a site I found with a quick Google, but I can't speak authoritatively.
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Farmers protesting, now that's a rare sight. Maybe we should raise their subsidies again to appease them.
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People woke up greeted with over 1200km of traffic
The average amount is 6km.Lol, we call that "Monday".
Fake edit: Apparently not, Monday is much worse. We call it Sunday.
https://cdn1.spiegel.de/images/image-1384486-galleryV9-xhje-1384486.jpg
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@robo2 said in Netherlands protests?:
Technicalities aside, nobody cares to comment on why those NOxes are so bad for nature reserves, so yeah
According to Wikipedia:
Nitrous oxide plays hardly any role in air pollution, although it may have a significant impact on the ozone layer,[4] and is a significant greenhouse gas.
[4] A. R. Ravishankara, J. S. Daniel, R. W. Portmann (2009), "Nitrous Oxide (N2O): The Dominant Ozone-Depleting Substance Emitted in the 21st Century". Science, volume 326, issue 5949, pages 123–125. PMID 19713491 doi:10.1126/science.1176985
The section on Health and environmental effects describes several health issues that NOx causes or aggravates due to the fact that it produces a lot of ozone, but then it also seems to say that NOx generally decreases global warming.
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Is this really about air pollution? The problems I hear about in Germany are mostly about high pollution of (drinking) water and soil due to nitrate based fertilizer.
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@hungrier said in Netherlands protests?:
@Benjamin-Hall If it's just nitrogen (as opposed to nitrogen oxide or whatever other compounds) then the problem probably isn't with it getting into the air.
The problem is nitrogen oxides, but this unfortunately gets shortened to just “nitrogen” (at least in this country, and I’m guessing probably elsewhere as well). I heard one well-known farmer on the radio the other day talk about these protests and the reasons for them. She included a remark along the lines of, “The air is 78% nitrogen, so what are we getting worked up about?!"
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@topspin said in Netherlands protests?:
People woke up greeted with over 1200km of traffic
The average amount is 6km.Lol, we call that "Monday".
Your country is nine times bigger and has about 4.5 times the population.
Also, are those maximum or average lengths, and which types of road are taken into account?
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If they are about those "nitrogen" a lot, maybe they should promote farming with potato or peanuts, or beans, where the "nitrogen fixation" will do it's job? (Reading the news seems suggest the "nitrogen" they talk about on the topic is in fact NOx, not N2)
Btw, the government should not care the nitrogenous compounds generated by farmers, as in the most case the nitrogenous compounds they produced in farming will in turn absorbed by the plants they grow, hence unless they buy and deploy factory produced fertilizers there will be overall negative balance produced.
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@cheong said in Netherlands protests?:
Btw, the government should not care the nitrogenous compounds generated by farmers, as in the most case the nitrogenous compounds they produced in farming will in turn absorbed by the plants they grow, hence unless they buy and deploy factory produced fertilizers there will be overall negative balance produced.
Yeah, not so much. The farmers quite often overfertilize their fields as they also have a problem with the huge amount of liquid manure their cows and pigs are generating.
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@Rhywden from what I read, the big problem in NL is exactly the livestock (not the plant farmers).
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@Benjamin-Hall said in Netherlands protests?:
@Rhywden from what I read, the big problem in NL is exactly the livestock (not the plant farmers).
I don't have numbers, but I have the impression NL has a relatively large amount of lifestock, and this is in part because of a relatively large amount of land too poor to grow anything other than grass.
No, not that kind of grass.
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@Gurth said in Netherlands protests?:
@topspin said in Netherlands protests?:
People woke up greeted with over 1200km of traffic
The average amount is 6km.Lol, we call that "Monday".
Your country is nine times bigger and has about 4.5 times the population.
Also, are those maximum or average lengths, and which types of road are taken into account?
Average per weekday, Autobahn (I think). The maximum was about 13,000km, which scales well with the ~10 times bigger size. But 6km doesn’t.
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@topspin I believe the numbers generally reported here include secondary roads.
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@PleegWat maybe here, too, I’m not sure.
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@topspin said in Netherlands protests?:
https://cdn1.spiegel.de/images/image-1384486-galleryV9-xhje-1384486.jpg
Trust the Germans to shift "Mittwoch" just off the week's middle
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Tbqh, seeing traffic reported as total distance of jams over an entire country makes me
. I could see reporting such things for a single highway, or maybe even one major route, but as a total for all highways and side roads? No.And I've been in 10km jams myself. Every Thursday, in fact. And that's called... Thursday. Not even rush hour. Those are even worse. Every day.
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@Benjamin-Hall It's a general indication of how bad rush hour is. Remember NL only has a single metropolis; most things affecting traffic tend to affect it nationwide. Exceptions (like rain or snow in only part of the country) do get called out.
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@kazitor the middle of the wörk week, as it should.
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@PleegWat said in Netherlands protests?:
I don't have numbers, but I have the impression NL has a relatively large amount of lifestock, and this is in part because of a relatively large amount of land too poor to grow anything other than grass.
No, not that kind of grass.
@PleegWat said in Netherlands protests?:
@Benjamin-Hall It's a general indication of how bad rush hour is. Remember NL only has a single metropolis; most things affecting traffic tend to affect it nationwide. Exceptions (like rain or snow in only part of the country) do get called out.
For a given definition of “nationwide” anyway — that part of the nation living in, or needing to be in, said metropolis. I couldn’t care less if the whole Randstad were one big traffic jam, as it wouldn’t affect my part of the country at all, nor any other parts that Randstad-inhabitants consider to be the countryside.
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@PleegWat said in Netherlands protests?:
I don't have numbers, but I have the impression NL has a relatively large amount of lifestock, and this is in part because of a relatively large amount of land too poor to grow anything other than grass.
No, not that kind of grass.
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@topspin said in Netherlands protests?:
Average per weekday, Autobahn (I think). The maximum was about 13,000km, which scales well with the ~10 times bigger size. But 6km doesn’t.
I don't know where the 6 km came from.
The average traffic jam lengths in the Netherlands (highways only), is about 300 km during the morning rush hour.
The data is for 2019, so it is likely to become a bit longer, since autumn always has denser traffic than any other season.
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@topspin said in Netherlands protests?:
@Gurth said in Netherlands protests?:
@topspin said in Netherlands protests?:
People woke up greeted with over 1200km of traffic
The average amount is 6km.Lol, we call that "Monday".
Your country is nine times bigger and has about 4.5 times the population.
Also, are those maximum or average lengths, and which types of road are taken into account?
Average per weekday, Autobahn (I think). The maximum was about 13,000km, which scales well with the ~10 times bigger size. But 6km doesn’t.
That's interesting. I've never heard traffic measured / reported with "length" here in the US.
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@kazitor said in Netherlands protests?:
@topspin said in Netherlands protests?:
https://cdn1.spiegel.de/images/image-1384486-galleryV9-xhje-1384486.jpg
Trust the Germans to shift "Mittwoch" just off the week's middle
There's week, and there's weekend.
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@boomzilla said in Netherlands protests?:
@topspin said in Netherlands protests?:
@Gurth said in Netherlands protests?:
@topspin said in Netherlands protests?:
People woke up greeted with over 1200km of traffic
The average amount is 6km.Lol, we call that "Monday".
Your country is nine times bigger and has about 4.5 times the population.
Also, are those maximum or average lengths, and which types of road are taken into account?
Average per weekday, Autobahn (I think). The maximum was about 13,000km, which scales well with the ~10 times bigger size. But 6km doesn’t.
That's interesting. I've never heard traffic measured / reported with "length" here in the US.
They're trying to switch to minutes of delay, but length seems to stick around.
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@PleegWat said in Netherlands protests?:
@boomzilla said in Netherlands protests?:
@topspin said in Netherlands protests?:
@Gurth said in Netherlands protests?:
@topspin said in Netherlands protests?:
People woke up greeted with over 1200km of traffic
The average amount is 6km.Lol, we call that "Monday".
Your country is nine times bigger and has about 4.5 times the population.
Also, are those maximum or average lengths, and which types of road are taken into account?
Average per weekday, Autobahn (I think). The maximum was about 13,000km, which scales well with the ~10 times bigger size. But 6km doesn’t.
That's interesting. I've never heard traffic measured / reported with "length" here in the US.
They're trying to switch to minutes of delay, but length seems to stick around.
I still don't quite get aggregating those numbers, but I'll chalk that one up to them durn furriners
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@Benjamin-Hall said in Netherlands protests?:
@PleegWat said in Netherlands protests?:
@boomzilla said in Netherlands protests?:
@topspin said in Netherlands protests?:
@Gurth said in Netherlands protests?:
@topspin said in Netherlands protests?:
People woke up greeted with over 1200km of traffic
The average amount is 6km.Lol, we call that "Monday".
Your country is nine times bigger and has about 4.5 times the population.
Also, are those maximum or average lengths, and which types of road are taken into account?
Average per weekday, Autobahn (I think). The maximum was about 13,000km, which scales well with the ~10 times bigger size. But 6km doesn’t.
That's interesting. I've never heard traffic measured / reported with "length" here in the US.
They're trying to switch to minutes of delay, but length seems to stick around.
I still don't quite get aggregating those numbers, but I'll chalk that one up to them durn furriners
How else do you propose to aggregate the number of total traffic jams?
I guess total capacity used would also be representative, but then you'd always be at 100% - epsilon. Millions of hours wasted? Billions in economic damage? Probably also reported somewhere.
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@topspin said in Netherlands protests?:
@Benjamin-Hall said in Netherlands protests?:
@PleegWat said in Netherlands protests?:
@boomzilla said in Netherlands protests?:
@topspin said in Netherlands protests?:
@Gurth said in Netherlands protests?:
@topspin said in Netherlands protests?:
People woke up greeted with over 1200km of traffic
The average amount is 6km.Lol, we call that "Monday".
Your country is nine times bigger and has about 4.5 times the population.
Also, are those maximum or average lengths, and which types of road are taken into account?
Average per weekday, Autobahn (I think). The maximum was about 13,000km, which scales well with the ~10 times bigger size. But 6km doesn’t.
That's interesting. I've never heard traffic measured / reported with "length" here in the US.
They're trying to switch to minutes of delay, but length seems to stick around.
I still don't quite get aggregating those numbers, but I'll chalk that one up to them durn furriners
How else do you propose to aggregate the number of total traffic jams?
I guess total capacity used would also be representative, but then you'd always be at 100% - epsilon. Millions of hours wasted? Billions in economic damage? Probably also reported somewhere.I'm not sure why you'd even want to aggregate the number of total traffic jams. It's like averaging the temperature in Florida and Alaska and claiming that's some kind of representative average. They're both only of local interest.
I care if there's a jam (and how many minutes of delay it is) on my route; I don't care at all about jams over in St. Petersburg (on the other side of the Tampa Bay Metro area). I certainly don't care about traffic jams in Miami, Orlando, or Boston.
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@topspin said in Netherlands protests?:
@Benjamin-Hall said in Netherlands protests?:
@PleegWat said in Netherlands protests?:
@boomzilla said in Netherlands protests?:
@topspin said in Netherlands protests?:
@Gurth said in Netherlands protests?:
@topspin said in Netherlands protests?:
People woke up greeted with over 1200km of traffic
The average amount is 6km.Lol, we call that "Monday".
Your country is nine times bigger and has about 4.5 times the population.
Also, are those maximum or average lengths, and which types of road are taken into account?
Average per weekday, Autobahn (I think). The maximum was about 13,000km, which scales well with the ~10 times bigger size. But 6km doesn’t.
That's interesting. I've never heard traffic measured / reported with "length" here in the US.
They're trying to switch to minutes of delay, but length seems to stick around.
I still don't quite get aggregating those numbers, but I'll chalk that one up to them durn furriners
How else do you propose to aggregate the number of total traffic jams?
Why bother? Practically the whole system is jammed up every day. Which is one reason why I love working from home.
I guess total capacity used would also be representative, but then you'd always be at 100% - epsilon. Millions of hours wasted? Billions in economic damage? Probably also reported somewhere.
We get articles talking about average time people in a metropolitan area sit in traffic. No doubt length of traffic is an interesting number for people responsible for maintaining and expanding the road network.
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@boomzilla said in Netherlands protests?:
No doubt length of traffic is an interesting number for people responsible for maintaining and expanding the road network.
Length of traffic on specific intersections/regions may be important, but aggregate length?
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@Benjamin-Hall said in Netherlands protests?:
@boomzilla said in Netherlands protests?:
No doubt length of traffic is an interesting number for people responsible for maintaining and expanding the road network.
Length of traffic on specific intersections/regions may be important, but aggregate length?
Specific sections (between two intersections) are definitely tracked as well.
Aggregating nationally in NL should not be compared with doing so in a much larger country like US. It's more akin to aggregating in one US state (most of which I believe also have only one major metropolis).
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@Benjamin-Hall said in Netherlands protests?:
@topspin said in Netherlands protests?:
@Benjamin-Hall said in Netherlands protests?:
@PleegWat said in Netherlands protests?:
@boomzilla said in Netherlands protests?:
@topspin said in Netherlands protests?:
@Gurth said in Netherlands protests?:
@topspin said in Netherlands protests?:
People woke up greeted with over 1200km of traffic
The average amount is 6km.Lol, we call that "Monday".
Your country is nine times bigger and has about 4.5 times the population.
Also, are those maximum or average lengths, and which types of road are taken into account?
Average per weekday, Autobahn (I think). The maximum was about 13,000km, which scales well with the ~10 times bigger size. But 6km doesn’t.
That's interesting. I've never heard traffic measured / reported with "length" here in the US.
They're trying to switch to minutes of delay, but length seems to stick around.
I still don't quite get aggregating those numbers, but I'll chalk that one up to them durn furriners
How else do you propose to aggregate the number of total traffic jams?
I guess total capacity used would also be representative, but then you'd always be at 100% - epsilon. Millions of hours wasted? Billions in economic damage? Probably also reported somewhere.I'm not sure why you'd even want to aggregate the number of total traffic jams. It's like averaging the temperature in Florida and Alaska and claiming that's some kind of representative average. They're both only of local interest.
Not for you, but for policy decisions. There are way too fucking many traffic jams, and way too many construction sites. Some better planning could at least alleviate parts of that. An easy way to reduce some traffic jams, for example, would be to not set up new construction sites exactly one day before the first snow and then have it sit idly for 4 months, just because you need to get that budget out at that time.
It's a call to action. Not that the people responsible will ever fix anything, but at least this gives them an overview.
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@PleegWat said in Netherlands protests?:
@Benjamin-Hall said in Netherlands protests?:
@boomzilla said in Netherlands protests?:
No doubt length of traffic is an interesting number for people responsible for maintaining and expanding the road network.
Length of traffic on specific intersections/regions may be important, but aggregate length?
Specific sections (between two intersections) are definitely tracked as well.
Aggregating nationally in NL should not be compared with doing so in a much larger country like US. It's more akin to aggregating in one US state (most of which I believe also have only one major metropolis).
Err.... let's take a few states (some large, some small).
Idaho has 2 "major metropoli": Boise and Idaho Falls. They're separated by about 250 miles, so aggregating anything over them is foolish. And even aggregating within a metropolis is meaningless, because there's at least several ways of getting from any point to any other point.
California has...lots of major metropoli, some of which are separated (SF vs LA), others not.
North Dakota has...zero? major metropoli.
Florida has...let's see. Tallahassee, Jacksonville, Orlando, Tampa Bay, Miami...at minimum.
The only states I can think of that only have one major metropolis are the tiny New England ones--Massachusetts, Rhode Island, etc.
I find it amusing that Europeans so frequently forget how much bigger (land area especially) the US is.
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@Benjamin-Hall Washington DC is a metropolis that goes into two states plus the District. Philadelphia's and New York City's metropolitan areas extend into New Jersey. Plus a bunch other that are right on state borders.
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@PleegWat said in Netherlands protests?:
@Benjamin-Hall said in Netherlands protests?:
@boomzilla said in Netherlands protests?:
No doubt length of traffic is an interesting number for people responsible for maintaining and expanding the road network.
Length of traffic on specific intersections/regions may be important, but aggregate length?
Specific sections (between two intersections) are definitely tracked as well.
Aggregating nationally in NL should not be compared with doing so in a much larger country like US. It's more akin to aggregating in one US state (most of which I believe also have only one major metropolis).
some don't even manage one!
at least not by the scale of Florida, or Texas, or California.
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@boomzilla said in Netherlands protests?:
@topspin said in Netherlands protests?:
@Gurth said in Netherlands protests?:
@topspin said in Netherlands protests?:
People woke up greeted with over 1200km of traffic
The average amount is 6km.Lol, we call that "Monday".
Your country is nine times bigger and has about 4.5 times the population.
Also, are those maximum or average lengths, and which types of road are taken into account?
Average per weekday, Autobahn (I think). The maximum was about 13,000km, which scales well with the ~10 times bigger size. But 6km doesn’t.
That's interesting. I've never heard traffic measured / reported with "length" here in the US.
Only for a specific incident: "The overturned truck on highway 123 has traffic backed up for 4 miles." I've never heard it used for an aggregate measure across a region; in fact, I've never heard of that as a statistic reported in any units.
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@Benjamin-Hall said in Netherlands protests?:
Err.... let's take a few states (some large, some small).
Judging by your examples, none of those is really comparable to countries like the Netherlands. Closest are probably the New England states you only just mentioned.
I find it amusing that Europeans so frequently forget how much bigger (land area especially) the US is.
Whereas we find it amusing that Americans so frequently forget how much smaller (land area especially) much of Europe is.
I think the point of aggregating traffic jams is mostly to give a global idea of how busy the roads are in general. Of course nobody is really helped by knowing there’s 500 km (or whatever) of traffic jams across the country today — but you can tell it’s a busy day if you hear reports about the total being, say, 1,000 km when more usually it’s less than half that.
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@Gurth said in Netherlands protests?:
but you can tell it’s a busy day if you hear reports
I never hear reports about congestion on my commute. Even though those 16mi on 65mph highway take (at least) 45min. That's because it's normal and there are no accidents. Only accidents rate mentioning during the traffic report. Even then, they still can't report on all of them in the time they have allotted (about 1 to 2 minutes - the report is every ten minutes on the 8s).
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