That's a picture of the German maglev, the Transrapid, not the Japanese one. Somebody goofed. The German one can be built a lot cheaper than the Japanese one, however, iirc.

http://dc.streetsblog.org/2014/01/21...ee-households/

http://dc.streetsblog.org/wp-content...households.jpg

The data set brackets much of the Great Recession.

As a result, the table needs to be further broken down into cities where the ability to afford a card is more of an issue, and, those cities where this ability might be less of an issue.


Cities where the Ability to afford a car is more of an issue

Detroit
Baltimore
Chicago
Indianapolis
Milwaukee
Jacksonville

Cities where the Ability to afford a car is less of an issue*

New York
Washington DC
San Francisco
Seattle

These four cities are among the top 10 that have recovered the quickest from the depths of the Great Recession. Consequently, I suspect that more of the reduction of car ownership reflects the freedom to choose to own a car or not.

The crazy thing about Detroit is that literally until earlier this week, service for the city's mass transit system had been cut and ridership had plummeted, accordingly along aside this trend of fewer households without a car. It's like, really, how can you mess that kind of trend up? And, yet they've managed to. So, you've basically just stranded every new potential captive rider until the expanded service was proposed for DDOT, last week, and even that's just pittance compard to what was lost.

You have these suburbanites complaining about how no one in the city has a job, but you've had people having no real regular access to suburban service jobs, and when they get them, getting fired because of the region's shoddy, unreliable mass transit network, and when you pose the question about properly funding transit, it always ends up being a stalemate. So, you want people to have jobs to improve the economy, but you won't support even a pittance to fund the crappy transit system as it is, let alone expand it, to get people to jobs they can keep? **head desk**

Well, Henry Ford apparently dabbled in creating interurban cars with internal combustion engines, so the move of Ford into other transportation fields wouldn't be too exotic.

Railway Review

Why trains may switch to natural gas instead of diesel

Read More: http://www.csmonitor.com/Environment...tead-of-diesel




http://www.csmonitor.com/var/ezflow_...e_full_380.jpg

The big railroads that operate in the US- BNSF, UP, NS, CSX, CP, CN, and KCS, all have had a long experience with alternate fuels. The classic example involved converting from coal fired steam engines, to diesel.

Since WWII, railroads have experimented with oil (and coal?) fired turbine locomotives, and, oil powered steam engines. I am sure, too, that LNG has been discussed at great length, also.

The biggest advantage of diesel powered locomotives is that diesel is easy and safe to store, resists ignition during train accidents, has a higher burn temperature than LNG, and, uses very proven technology from the fuel tank through engine design.

However, IMO, LNG has a role in freight switching engines where LNG could be stored close to where it is used. Another possible use might be for locomotives that would run 24/7 that would provide electricity to jump start diesels. Maybe, too, urban commuter trains would be a good candidate as the pollution benefits and short distance traveled by commuter trains would make centralized LNG stations very practical.

There's probably many that don't know what the joke is here. As a graphic designer I say well done, well done indeed.

^I'm just glad someone else on here got the joke. :)

The Largest Free Mass Transit Experiment in the World

Read More: http://www.theatlanticcities.com/com...nt-world/8231/




http://cdn.theatlanticcities.com/img...1z/largest.jpg

Wow! Giving away free rides didn't help ridership much, if any. Very interesting.

After chewing this up a bit, I was struck by how Tallin, Estonia, is only about 20 years into the automobile age, due to having spent from August 1939 - July 1941, and from the fall of 1944 to 1994 under Soviet domination (From July 1941 to the autumn on 1944 the city was under German domination.)

In the period since 1994, Estonia has relished it's freedom. And a lot of that freedom includes the freedom, if one can afford it, to drive one's own car.

In a sense, Estonia today, is like the US in the 1920s where, for the first time, people do NOT have to take a tram, a train or a bus. For the first time, people do not have to smell people en route to work, to shop, or to go to entertainment venues.

Making bus service free in Tallin, IMO, had a less significant ridership effect than doing something similar might in a city long accustomed to bumper to bumper traffic.

In Estonia (as well as in Russia) and in most former members of the Soviet Bloc, people that can afford a car are just having too much fun driving to return to Soviet style buses, no matter how sleek they appear to be.

I cant imagine it having much effect anywhere honestly. Using a car is already so much costlier than using transit (like several times more and a magnitude of hundreds of dollars per month) that if people are willing to shell out to buy, power, and maintain a car when transit was already so much cheaper, then eliminating the cost of transit altogether won't make that much of a difference. If they could already save $500/month by getting rid of the car and switching to transit, is increasing the saving to $550/mnth going to really have that much impact?

^ I agree to an extent.

If you need a car for work or just want one to make things easy then you are going to buy one, case closed. Where this would make a difference is families that maybe have 2 cars where they may decide to ditch the second one. I appreciate in Estonia very few people have 2 cars but it is common in Canada.

You sound absolutely elated, you know, as if you've totally dropped the pretense of being objective, and you're just rolling in completely political, philosophical, and ideological talking points and buzzwords. lol

I saw the electric Coca-Cola delivery truck again on Wednesday. Perhaps I am too much like a little kid but it is always exciting to see that.