Interesting transportation things

[202_Cyclist]

Remember when the British attacked LaGuardia airport?

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/05/u...onary-war.html

We should have let them have Newark…

[mrnyc]

london is looking at going next level in congestion pricing --



Fears Sadiq Khan will bring in pay-per-mile road taxes after spending £3m on project

Gareth Corfield
Tue, April 9, 2024

more:
https://www.yahoo.com/news/fears-sad...200000484.html

[Swede]

Fears?

A km-tax for cars (scaled by vehicle weight) is the way we're all going. Gas taxes will net the governments less and less money. To make up for it you've got to basically do this, or introduce some *serious* taxes on car tyres as the new proxy for road usage.

[TowerDude]

Infrastructure should be financed through general taxation not "usage fees" masquerading as social engineering.

[202_Cyclist]

Dude-- the people who use the infrastructure and create the costs paid by others (congestion, pollution, traffic fatalities, etc...) should pay most of the costs of it. Yes, there are societal benefits from infrastructure and general fund money should contribute based on these benefits but user-pay is a sound method of financing transportation.

[jmecklenborg]

I just ran across this image of the old Dixie Terminal streetcar ramps in Cincinnati. These ramps afforded Kentucky streetcars a grade separated entrance into downtown:


The original ramps:


The replacement ramps, that were built around 1960:


The ramps were removed when the interstate highway trench was rebuilt into its current form in 1999. Kentucky buses now use a different bridge and make a circuitous lap around downtown. It's a far slower setup from the bus company's perspective, but flimsily justified by the argument that the buses come closer to more people. In the past, the Kenton and Boone County streetcars and buses did not operate on the streets of Ohio at all - only to and from the terminal building. Meanwhile, streetcars and buses from Campbell County always used a different bridge and did operate on the DT Cincinnati streets.

There was no law preventing Kentucky streetcars and buses from operating in Ohio, but after Cincinnati Transit became SORTA, there was a law preventing Ohio buses from picking up or dropping off passengers in Kentucky. The buses, however, could travel through Kentucky and back into Ohio without stopping, which several actually do:





Here is a short documentary on the Dixie Terminal building:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lYFUJR5P05Q

[Busy Bee]

Nice

[mrnyc]

post covid transit continues to recover — now to 79% pre covid levels —



Rail News: Rail Industry Trends

APTA: Transit-ridership levels continue post-pandemic recovery
4/11/2024


Public transit ridership has recovered to 79% of pre-pandemic levels after falling to 20% of pre-pandemic levels in April 2020, the American Public Transportation Association(APTA) announced this week.

Transit riders took 7.1 billion trips in 2023, a 16% increase over 2022's level, APTA officials said in a press release. Public transportation ridership levels increased throughout last year, even though office occupancy rates remained stagnant, according to an APTA policy brief.

"Success in ridership recovery has been dependent on transit-service delivery and reliability and external factors, such as the makeup of local economies," said APTA President and CEO Paul Skoutelas. "As clearly illustrated during the pandemic, public transportation provides mobility to essential workers, which has sustained transit ridership over the past four years. Public transit agencies continue to develop innovative solutions that are powering this ridership recover."


more:
https://www.progressiverailroading.c...ecovery--71668


Transit riders took 7.1 billion trips in 2023, a 16% increase over 2022's level, according to APTA. Photo – shutterstock.com

[mrnyc]

sanctioned scumbaggery --



Billions in Dirty Money Flies Under the Radar at World’s Busiest Airports

The Heathrow-to-Dubai flights have two big money-laundering features: One airport doesn’t scan outbound luggage for cash and the other welcomes sacks of it

By Margot PatrickFollow
April 21, 2024


Jo-Emma Larvin wheeled a baggage cart piled with suitcases through London’s Heathrow Airport in August 2020 and handed her passport to an Emirates Airline agent for a flight to Dubai.

Larvin was traveling business class with another woman and together they heaved seven heavy suitcases onto the conveyor belt. She exchanged texts with her boyfriend en route to the security line.

“Do you feel ok?” he asked.

“Yes phew,” Larvin wrote. The suitcases carried millions of dollars worth of British pounds wrapped with rubber bands and bundled in plastic.


more (wsj paywall):
https://www.wsj.com/business/airline...money-9f49cc7f

[mrnyc]

thx uncle joe --



Airlines Required To Give Automatic Cash Refunds For Canceled And Delayed Flights

The Biden administration is defining a significant delay as lasting at least three hours for domestic flights and six hours for international ones.

David Koenig
Apr 24, 2024

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/airli...b01248ca9b9290

[UrbanImpact]

https://posts.voronoiapp.com/automot...r-Culture-1099

[Busy Bee]

God that's depressing.

[craigs]

Why did they exclude Mexico from North America? That changes the statistic significantly.

[iheartthed]

And half of the 5% of transit riders in North America are in one city.

[Busy Bee]

Would love to see the same graph with mode share c.1920, 1950, 1980 even if only NA and Europe.

[wwmiv]

Originally Posted by craigs

Why did they exclude Mexico from North America? That changes the statistic significantly.

The underlying causality (how cities are built, and how you make what choices you make to get to work) is cultural, rather than geographic. Although they’re using geography as a shorthand, Mexico shares much greater cultural affinity with Central America (the broader Aztec and Mayan influenced post-Spanish colonial cultural region) than it does with the United States and Canada.

It’s a smart choice, imho, and is similar to how Europe and Asia are broken into cultural regions. Still a lot of poor choices to complain about, though: Africa is not included in any way, either, which is the real problem. Neither are Australia/New Zealand and Oceania. And how exactly are they dividing Asia up? Are the Philippines, Indonesia, and Malaysia included in Southeast Asia woth Vietnam, etc.? Or is Vietnam part of East Asia in this case?

[TowerDude]

Originally Posted by wwmiv

The underlying causality (how cities are built, and how you make what choices you make to get to work) is cultural, rather than geographic. Although they’re using geography as a shorthand, Mexico shares much greater cultural affinity with Central America (the broader Aztec and Mayan influenced post-Spanish colonial cultural region) than it does with the United States and Canada.

It’s a smart choice, imho, and is similar to how Europe and Asia are broken into cultural regions. Still a lot of poor choices to complain about, though: Africa is not included in any way, either, which is the real problem. Neither are Australia/New Zealand and Oceania. And how exactly are they dividing Asia up? Are the Philippines, Indonesia, and Malaysia included in Southeast Asia woth Vietnam, etc.? Or is Vietnam part of East Asia in this case?

I still think Mexico, Central America and the Caribbean should be in the North America statistics.

[Nouvellecosse]

There isn't really any "should" with statistics beyond what information you're trying to find and the purpose you intend to use it for. If you want to see how Canada and the US compare to other regions then you should isolate their stats from other places. If you want to compare how all of NA compares to other regions then you should use the combined stats for all of NA. In this case they have Europe divided into four different regions to allow them to be compared individually so it makes sense that other continents would be subdivided as well, unless the idea is that Canada and the US are so similar to the rest of NA that there's no reason to separate them.

[Nouvellecosse]

Originally Posted by iheartthed

And half of the 5% of transit riders in North America are in one city.

Half the transit riders in the US, not in NA.

[jmecklenborg]

Originally Posted by Nouvellecosse

Half the transit riders in the US, not in NA.

The NYC metro area has over 20 million people, meaning if it were a state, it would be the third-largest state behind California and Texas and...ahead of New York.