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Quote:

Originally Posted by mousquet (Post 6362427)

Briefly, the EU's defined their main transit "corridors", that should prefigure the prospective continental HSR network.

http://ec.europa.eu/transport/themes...-policy_en.htm

Meanwhile, in the U. S., we're still stuck with a decaying, overcrowded highway system and a bunch of ratty airports.

Quote:

Originally Posted by M II A II R II K (Post 6388044)

Is green U.S. mass transit a big myth?

Read More: http://www.templetons.com/brad/transit-myth.html

http://www.templetons.com/brad/roboc...ans-energy.png

You missed the guys conclusion:

http://www.templetons.com/brad/robocars/transit-mpg.png

Quote:

Why it will take 6,000 dead goats to build the HS2 Railway
January 1, 2014
Posted in: Random
By Ian Mansfield

If, or when the High Speed 2 railway is constructed, it will require roughly 6,000 dead goats.

This curious statement comes from an old technicality as Acts of Parliament, when passed into law are still printed on vellum, which is typically made from goat skins.

Two copies are printed, one for storage in the Victoria Tower, and another is sent to the National Archives in Kew. Now, it has proven surprisingly difficult to work out the average number of pages of A4 that can be extracted from a single hide of skin, but I finally found a page that uses sheepskins as an example.

That shows that the average sheep produces a single sheet that can be folded 8 times to produce 16 sides of vellum of roughly A4 size.

All parliamentary bills need to be printed onto vellum, but the reason I am commenting on HS2 though, is because at 49,814 pages in length, the bill is the largest one ever presented to Parliament.

Oh, and it’s a railway and I write about railways a lot.

Two copies of the Act means nearly 100,000 pages of nearly A4, which is roughly 6,000 animal skins.

There have been attempts in the past to scrap the use of animal skin for printing Parliamentary Bills on, but they stick to vellum as it is known to last longer than the longest presumed life of archive paper, which at a mere 500 years (in theory) is really not good enough for an archive that needs to last thousands of years.

Fortunately, the goat skin is a by-product of the animal industry, so it’s not quite as if there will be a massive sacrifice just outside Euston as thousands of goats are slaughtered to the great railway gods.

http://www.ianvisits.co.uk/blog/2014...e-hs2-railway/

The Barcelona concept represents to day the most advanced integrated concept in urban public transport available on the European scenery.
Designed by Johan Neerman it summarizes the optimum in the tramway technology and human factors
Created like a light box in allows the traveler to communicate with this urban device and informations has never been more readable for the pedestrian.
The spatial equation in between the vehicle and the station reaches high levels of ergonomic integration.
J.Neerman has a patent on that concept and illustrates the full potential of applied system thinking.
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedi...Neerman669.JPG

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedi...eerman7859.JPG

One would think that it would be awfully hot in a glass tramway in Barcelona...

^ We sometimes happen to make use of air-conditioning... Every single rail vehicle is air-conditioned nowadays.

Shanghai’s Metro Becomes the World’s Longest

http://nextcity.org/theworks/entry/n...-japans-maglev

Quote:

.....

- China’s largest city, Shanghai, is now home to the world’s longest metro system. The Shanghai Metro opened parts of Lines 12 and 16 on December 29 — the rest will follow in 2014 — and now measures 567 kilometers, or 352 miles, in length, edging out Seoul for the world’s top spot. Shanghai’s subway network is probably the fastest growing on earth, with a few new lines and extensions opening each year and many more in planning.

- Shanghai does not, however, have the most comprehensive urban rapid transit network. That honor belongs to Tokyo, whose railway network makes every other city’s look puny by comparison. While Shanghai has concentrated all of its investment in subways, Tokyo’s network evolved largely through the upgrading of existing railways. Formally, Tokyo has barely more than 300 kilometers of metro lines between its two subway companies. But it also has a sprawling network of private suburban railways that provide service indistinguishable from that of a subway and which carry many times the number of commuters. In many cases, suburban trains become subways as they run straight onto either Tokyo Metro or Toei Subway tracks to reach the city center, further blurring the line between what’s a subway and what’s a commuter railway.

.....

http://nextcity.org/images/daily/_re...ro-line-16.jpg

http://www.wmctv.com/story/23870069/...idtown-memphis

MEMPHIS, TN -
(WMC-TV) - A trolley, with nine passengers and a conductor in tow, caught fire on a busy Memphis street Monday.

Rest of story

Washington, New York looking to a future without farecards

Read More: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/...out-farecards/

Quote:

Transit riders in Washington and New York are inching closer to a world that doesn’t require a paper or plastic farecard to hop on a train or ride a bus.

- In Washington, Metro announced Wednesday that it will begin a pilot program later this year testing a new electronic fare payment system at rail stations, on buses and at its parking garages. The transit agency said it had awarded a $184 million contract to Accenture, a management consulting and technology company, to replace the current fare system. --- “The new technology will provide more flexibility for accounts, better reliability for riders, and real choices for customers to use bank-issued payment cards, credit cards, ID cards, or mobile phones to pay their Metro fares,” Metro General Manager and CEO Richard Sarles said in a news release announcing the contract. --- Riders will be able to continue using SmarTrip cards, but the goal is to also add other payment options including some credit cards, federal government identification cards and mobile phones. The new system will not accept paper farecards.

- The benefits of ditching magnetic-stripe subway cards are clear enough: The move would save the MTA money by allowing it to ditch all those card-vending machines. It would get people onto buses and trains faster, because they wouldn’t have to waste time dipping their cards into a machine or repeatedly swiping them at a turnstile. Few New Yorkers would miss the experience of standing behind a beleaguered flock of tourists as they struggle to master the precise swiping motion necessary to get a finicky card reader to let them through.

.....

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/...1-1024x701.jpg

The Japanese Think They Can Build a Maglev for $8 Billion

Read More: http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/...hably_low.html

Quote:

The story, reported in Japan's Asahi, that the Japanese government would be willing to float a $4 billion loan to cover half the cost of a D.C.-Baltimore "super-maglev" that would cut travel time between the two cities to 15 minutes is very cool. The only problem is there's no way you could build a D.C.-Baltimore maglev for that kind of money.

- New York's Metropolitan Transportation Authority is building a tunnel that would let Long Island Railroad trains go to Grand Central Station and that costs $8.76 billion. Amtrak wants $7 billion to renovate Union Station. The Silver Line of D.C. Metro going from suburban Virginia to Dulles Airport is costing $6.8 billion. --- Now let's be clear—these civil engineering costs in the United States are totally insane and way out of line with what other developed countries manage to achieve. Reform of the issues at the root of these sky-high costs ought to be a high priority.

- Given the actual structure of American civil engineering costs, many fewer projects pass a cost-benefit test than would be true if we had French, Spanish, or Japanese construction costs. --- The people behind The Northeast Maglev project point out that they've always offered a $10 billion estimate of the cost of the Baltimore-DC leg. That's perhaps more realistic.

.....

http://www.slate.com/content/dam/sla...ediumlarge.jpg

Quote:

Originally Posted by M II A II R II K (Post 6403693)

The Japanese Think They Can Build a Maglev for $8 Billion

Read More: http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/...hably_low.html

The Japanese are talking about an express service with just the two terminating stations, that takes just 15 minutes to run from end to end. That's a twice and hour round trip, meaning headways every 30 minutes over just one track/guideway. That single track automatically means half the construction costs over double track. So, an $8 Billion cost seems reasonable vs a $16 Billion cost for an alternative double track HSR train in an entirely new corridor.
Baltimore to D.C. is approximately 39 miles. If the train took 15 minutes to travel that far, it's averaging 156 mph. I thought a meg-lev train should be able to go twice as fast. So 15 minutes should be easy to maintain.
Additionally, $8 Billion/39 miles= $205 Million/mile. I think that might even be high for construction costs, I would think a single track elevated guideway could be achieved cheaper assuming the route chosen was over an existing freeway, highway, tollway, or railway which didn't require significant land purchases.
What would be interesting is whether there is or will be sufficient traffic between these two cities to warrant express services.

How London Plans to Eliminate the Search for a Parking Spot

Read More: http://www.theatlanticcities.com/com...ing-spot/8088/

Quote:

This week, the City of Westminster, one of London’s local councils, will start embedding the first of 3,000 sensors into the streets. They will be in the ground by the end of March, making London the world's first major city to adopt the long-heralded "smart parking" revolution.

The idea is simple. According to the council, motorists spend an average of 15 minutes searching for a space in Westminster—which with Parliament, the main shopping district, and dozens of tourist sites, has a legitimate claim to be the heart of London. If drivers know where the empty spaces are, they won’t have to cruise the streets looking for one.

Other cities, most famously San Francisco, have experimented with "smart parking" and companies from France to America are developing the technology. But San Francisco turned off its sensors on December 30, 2013, and is now evaluating the results of its pilot program. Westminster is going full steam ahead, bashing in 50 sensors a day with a team of three men. Boroughs in Manchester and Birmingham are also trying out the system.

Each sensor in the ground detects when a car is parked on the street above it. The council releases the data to the public through a smartphone app. Results from a pilot program in 2012 were encouraging: The proportion of occupied parking spots that weren’t paid for dropped from 12 percent to under 10 percent, a sign that more people were paying for parking, says Kieran Fitsall, the parking services development manager for the council. (Some proportion of spots will always be unpaid for, because some vehicles are loading or unloading, dropping people off, or have exemptions.)

.....

http://cdn.theatlanticcities.com/img...-7/largest.jpg

http://qzprod.files.wordpress.com/20...?w=1024&h=1024

You would think with the amount of CC cameras in central London, they could wipp up some fancy triangulation software that optically spots the open and occupied spaces and feeds the same information that the very tangible embedded sensors would.

What Will Happen to Public Transit in a World Full of Autonomous Cars?

Read More: http://www.theatlanticcities.com/com...ous-cars/8131/

Quote:

.....

If the autonomous cars of the future will come to look an awful lot like transit, then what will become of the transit we know now?

- We make billion-dollar investments in new transit infrastructure because we expect to use it for decades. Metropolitan planning organizations are in the very business of planning 30 and 40 years into the future. The Washington Area Metropolitan Transit Authority recently released its dream map of subway service in the city for the year 2040. By then, autonomous cars – in some form – will surely be commonplace.

- If autonomous cars can one day better perform some of the functions of transit, shouldn't we let them? Shouldn't we take the opportunity to focus instead on whatever traditional transit does best in an autonomous-car world? --- "If you can’t get more than 10 people on a bus, or five people on a bus, then why bother running it?" Lutin asked me after his session. "You’re wasting diesel fuel."

- The implication in this raises (at least) two more questions: Exactly where (and when) will it make sense for people to use buses or rail instead of autonomous cars? And if autonomous cars come to supplement these services, should transit agencies get into the business of operating them? In my initial daydream – where shared self-driving cars are whisking us all about – it's unclear exactly who owns and manages them.

- Lutin sounds skeptical that transit agencies will be able to move into this space. "They don't adapt well to change," he says. They're also governed by rigid mandates that limit what they can do. A mass transit agency can't overnight start operating something that looks like a taxi service. Public agencies also must contend with labor unions, and labor unions likely won't like the idea of replacing bus routes with autonomous cars.

- There's also another consideration. --- "There's an opportunity for autonomous taxi services to make money," Lutin says. "And nobody wants the government to compete with private industry and make money. We barely tolerate toll road authorities. If it looks like we can trade in our buses for a fleet of autonomous vehicles, and we can drop fares and at the same time we can make money, somebody in the private sector is going to want that."

- And if public transit agencies exist in part to subsidize a service the private sector won't provide, what if that service no longer needs a subsidy? "It no longer needs to be a governmental function."

- Lutin is certain that we'll still need transit, particularly in dense cities. An autonomous car, after all, takes up as much physical space as a car with a human at the wheel. We'll be able to fit more autonomous cars on a given roadway, because they'll be smart enough to drive practically bumper-to-bumper without colliding into each other. But there's still a finite capacity on the road. And in densely populated areas, buses and subway cars will still be able to carry more people. --- "Theoretically, a highway [lane] can carry 2,200 vehicles per hour," Lutin says. "Even if you go to 4,400 or 6,600 vehicles per hour, there’s still that limit."

- So we'll still need transit to get people into the Loop in Chicago, or across the Bay Bridge into San Francisco, or onto the island of Manhattan. These are the things that transit already does best, and that it will still do best in the age of the autonomous car. What's more, the same technology that will bring us autonomous cars will make traditional transit better, too. When buses have the same autonomous, communicating power that cars will have, they'll be able to drive safely within inches of each other, too. Picture a dedicated Bus Rapid Transit lane with moving buses queued up end-to-end. --- In this world, cars may start to function like transit, but buses could come to work like trains. And they're a lot cheaper to deploy.

.....

http://cdn.theatlanticcities.com/img...LK/largest.jpg

M II A II R II K, I am inclined to believe that the gross energy/resource equation will not permit a massive proletariat owning autonomous cars. I am certain the upper and upper middle classes will own such vehicles.

I am inclined to believe, as have numerous science fiction writers that the autonomous vehicle society can only work if the vehicles are owned by some combination of the state and corporate enterprise. This would a lower number of vehicles to move the same number of people.

I am sure, too, that the cost/time algorithms involved in scheduling and routes will radically change how people move with these cars. In addition, cost structures will reflect energy consumption, route traffic load, etc.

(the new snobbery: "I don't HAVE to use a naughty auty... I drive when and where I choose.)

At this point it's largely theory and speculation. Instead of buying and SUV for all uses, it will end up being what car do I need today, and have the advantage of not having to actually buy a car and maintain it.

Car capacity can be increased with a 3 dimensional system of multi-level single lane routes that can have a low footprint with lighter and stronger materials, and you can leave your car, and it can go park itself elsewhere.

At the end of the century everyone may have their own individual pods that are small and can be linked together with others to make PRT mass transit feasible in that fashion, and if you're travelling with others have some way to merge with other peoples pods internally. Everyone would have personal mobility where there would be no need for public transit at all, except of course for travelling overseas.

Quote:

Originally Posted by M II A II R II K (Post 6412681)

I can see the Japanese doing this. Multicultural, multiethnic, and, multiracial societies will have a far hard time sharing intimate space. Of course, if all people are autonomously observed and the "state" enforces special infractions, this might work in nations like the US and Brazil.

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