I’ve worked on college campuses for over a decade now. You can bet I get my flu shot every year and anything else I’m offered. When I was in Washington State and they had a whooping cough outbreak I got a booster for that too.

Part of the problem with that schedule is it pretty well locks you out of picking up a second job. So drivers have to be people who don’t need a living wage. Traditionally they’ve tended to be retirees or spouses of people with regular jobs.

This actually exists. You’re describing owner-operators. It’s not managed by one company (there are a number of places they look for loads) but it’s a real thing. It generally doesn’t work as a part-time gig, though, because the cost to buy and maintain a big rig is so massive. It’s an expensive asset you have to get…

Places to put extra roads are in short supply in some of these places. Not the case for Lake Tahoe, but in the case of Paradise and towns like that there’s often only one viable corridor. The only solution to that is to evacuate early, but that doesn’t always work depending on where the fire starts.
There are whole…

Rural NorCal doesn’t necessarily want to hear from the governor, and politicians there wouldn’t be caught dead taking advice from him. It’d be like vaccines, where the more Democrats push them the less Republicans want them.

I’m sure these people got out — while the traffic jam is bad, the fire hasn’t reached there yet. I saw similar backups when Lincoln City, OR evacuated, but they only lasted a few hours.
It’s not quite a Paradise situation where the fire ran a dozen miles overnight and caught everyone flat-footed. In that scenario I…

And occasionally bear. Although I honestly saw more bears in Michigan than I have in California.

Another issue with the “just log it all off”/”rake the forests” solution is many of the California forest areas that burn lack anything that would be recognizable as a commercially viable tree. This area burned only hours after I took this photo: (Background is a storm cloud, not smoke -- the fire started later.)

Historically commercial tree harvesting hasn’t really helped with fire risk. You’d think it would, but it results in fast-burning light fuels growing in, and leaves slash piles and other flammable material around. The dead/dying trees that you’d most want to remove are usually left behind to burn because they’re not…

To be fair Californian animals are far less poisonous. So it does depend on your version of ‘fun.’ ;)

Are they like the ones in Australia, where big trucks can just drive straight over the middle?

You *can*. It doesn’t mean they’ll be approved. I’ve been involved in events that had road closures. They had to be approved by the county, there was a required notice period of several weeks, and even then we had to set up the roadblocks ourselves. The county road commission left some barricades for us to use but the…

Either they’re full of vegetation ready to burn, or they’re barren and waiting to dump mud on you next time it rains. Just not good places to be.

I saw discussion of this after the Paradise fire. The way one of the local city officials put it was, “does it make sense to widen roads to put in lanes that will be used once every 50 years? Who would pay for it?” It’s a tough question, especially since the people who live in places like that often moved there for…

I think we both know when people argue for reduced parking they aren’t talking about places like Lake Tahoe.

Cutting down the forests only reduces fire risk if you’re going to cultivate the land or otherwise maintain it. In the West clear-cuts usually are followed by a lot of brush growing in that’s even more flammable than the trees were.

People get a certain glee out of watching California burn, in spite of the fact that other states often compete with CA for total acreage.

“It would be nice to not have to drive literally everywhere” isn’t really the same thing as “no one should own a car.”

They seem to have a certain popularity anywhere there’s snow. When I went to college in Houghton, MI, Subarus were everywhere, and there was a Subaru dealership in Marquette. This was in an era when driving import cars was mostly not socially acceptable in Michigan, and foreign car dealerships were mostly limited to…

Like most stereotypes it has a kernel of truth to it. Subaru was one of the first car companies to place ads in gay/lesbian publications. Their US market share at the time was only 1% so they figured any loyalty they got would benefit them more than the backlash would hurt them.