Yeah. With 10 billion people in the world, only 0.0001% of people need to be boat owners for there to be a million boat owners… And I’d be willing to be the actual % is higher than that
The amount of people in a populated area is beyond comprehension. You can look at the numbers, but being aware of how many people there actually are is a rare epiphany. I was driving in rush hour traffic a few days ago and had a touch of it - I could see the line of lights both ways stretching out for a few miles and realized that I was but one in this sea of people, and it was but an instant of an hours-long flow of cars.
A marina full of boats isn’t that many compared to lanes of stopped cars for miles.
On family road trips when I was a kid, I remember looking at the flow of cars in the opposing lanes, and thinking about just how many people there were in the world: We’d pass another car every second or so with at least one person in it, for hours and hours. It was a never-ending parade of humanity, and with only a handful of exceptions, people I would never, ever see again. The mind can’t grasp those kinds of numbers.
And I’m old, so there are, like, almost twice as many people now.
Traffic is always one of the things that boggles me, because even for how many people there are on the road at that precise moment, it still doesn’t even come close to the amount of people in the area.
To explain my thought: If everyone is traveling 60 mph, and there are four lanes, and everyone is riding each other’s asses by being one second apart, that’s still only 240 cars per minute passing a particular spot. That means in an hour of relatively rough traffic that is somehow smoothly flowing, only 14,400 cars are going to pass that spot in an hour.
I live in a large metropolitan area, so there are ~8-10 large highways leading towards the metro’s center (that’s 4-5 highways, but counting them twice for each one’s inflow). Most of them vary in lane number as they come inwards, ballooning from 2 in the rural areas to 4-8 in the urban areas (though the areas with more than 4 are really only where highways are merging, so I think 4 is a good number to say as the highway’s ‘average’). So we can multiply that 14,400 number by 10 and get 144,000 cars moving into a city’s center in the span of an hour. That still doesn’t get anywhere near the millions of people living in the metroplex. Hopefully that means most people are living relatively close to their work, and all are living close to their play/chore destinations.
It really makes me ponder how much a certain element of the population has shaped our views, considering the amount of people who do the whole ‘commuting’ thing must be relatively small, yet that is such a giant complaint I hear about all the time.
Yeah but that’s a deceptive number. You can park a car in your driveway, put gas in it, and spend a few hundred bucks on maintenance every year. Keeping a 27’ boat in the water, and functioning, is far more expensive. Trailers, dock fees, cleaning, wintering, replacing broken things, engine work, it all adds up. The longer it goes without maintenance, the more expensive it becomes. You can’t sail a boat until it sinks into the water the way you might drive a car until it dies. The end of a boat’s life is often the most expensive part.
They say a boat is a hole in the water you throw money into.
An engine failure can mean running around on rocks and wrecking the hull, or a failure of a through hull fitting can flood the boat, or a failure of the hull itself.
Yeah. With 10 billion people in the world, only 0.0001% of people need to be boat owners for there to be a million boat owners… And I’d be willing to be the actual % is higher than that
The amount of people in a populated area is beyond comprehension. You can look at the numbers, but being aware of how many people there actually are is a rare epiphany. I was driving in rush hour traffic a few days ago and had a touch of it - I could see the line of lights both ways stretching out for a few miles and realized that I was but one in this sea of people, and it was but an instant of an hours-long flow of cars.
A marina full of boats isn’t that many compared to lanes of stopped cars for miles.
On family road trips when I was a kid, I remember looking at the flow of cars in the opposing lanes, and thinking about just how many people there were in the world: We’d pass another car every second or so with at least one person in it, for hours and hours. It was a never-ending parade of humanity, and with only a handful of exceptions, people I would never, ever see again. The mind can’t grasp those kinds of numbers.
And I’m old, so there are, like, almost twice as many people now.
Traffic is always one of the things that boggles me, because even for how many people there are on the road at that precise moment, it still doesn’t even come close to the amount of people in the area.
To explain my thought: If everyone is traveling 60 mph, and there are four lanes, and everyone is riding each other’s asses by being one second apart, that’s still only 240 cars per minute passing a particular spot. That means in an hour of relatively rough traffic that is somehow smoothly flowing, only 14,400 cars are going to pass that spot in an hour.
I live in a large metropolitan area, so there are ~8-10 large highways leading towards the metro’s center (that’s 4-5 highways, but counting them twice for each one’s inflow). Most of them vary in lane number as they come inwards, ballooning from 2 in the rural areas to 4-8 in the urban areas (though the areas with more than 4 are really only where highways are merging, so I think 4 is a good number to say as the highway’s ‘average’). So we can multiply that 14,400 number by 10 and get 144,000 cars moving into a city’s center in the span of an hour. That still doesn’t get anywhere near the millions of people living in the metroplex. Hopefully that means most people are living relatively close to their work, and all are living close to their play/chore destinations.
It really makes me ponder how much a certain element of the population has shaped our views, considering the amount of people who do the whole ‘commuting’ thing must be relatively small, yet that is such a giant complaint I hear about all the time.
Considering older boats can to be cheaper than used cars. My friend bought a 27 ft sail boat for $3000.
Yeah but that’s a deceptive number. You can park a car in your driveway, put gas in it, and spend a few hundred bucks on maintenance every year. Keeping a 27’ boat in the water, and functioning, is far more expensive. Trailers, dock fees, cleaning, wintering, replacing broken things, engine work, it all adds up. The longer it goes without maintenance, the more expensive it becomes. You can’t sail a boat until it sinks into the water the way you might drive a car until it dies. The end of a boat’s life is often the most expensive part.
They say a boat is a hole in the water you throw money into.
Same as a car for most people.
Entropy is especially cruel to boats.
No, the two aren’t even comparable
When my car dies I don’t drown
What kind of boat sinks when it has no power?
… do you think the engine is the only part that needs maintenance?
Do you think that it suddenly loses buoyancy?
There are many failure modes on a boat.
An engine failure can mean running around on rocks and wrecking the hull, or a failure of a through hull fitting can flood the boat, or a failure of the hull itself.