Interesting transportation things

[Eightball]

Traffic fatalities are up a large amount this year so far. Higher speed limits are a major factor in the rise. I remember many here were cheering the increase in speed limits, while I voiced concern that deaths would rise significantly.

http://www.cartalk.com/blogs/jim-mot...-driving-cause

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• Video Link

[M II A II R II K]

Ontario's highways as a subway map:

[vid]

I made something like that for the 400 series years ago, but never finished it:

[M II A II R II K]

The Future of New York City Transportation: Goodbye Cars, Hello Rails

Read More: https://www.inverse.com/article/5839...rs-hello-rails

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Transportation engineer Samuel Schwartz — better known as “Gridlock Sam” to his readers in the Daily News — has studied transportation in New York City for almost all his life, beginning as a taxi driver in the 1960s, and eventually serving as the Department of Transportation’s Chief Engineer. Today, his eponymous consulting firm helps the city consider what efficiency could look like and his new book, Street Smart: The Rise of Cities and the Fall of Cars.

- "We’re already seeing more rapid changes than we’ve seen in a very, very long time. One is just land issues — the amount of development within three miles of the central business district. Within the central business district itself, growth has been extraordinary. It’s largely been driven by millennials, who are living in all the communities that have covered the East River — from Williamsburg, to Red Hook, to Long Island City, to Hunters Point, to Astoria. That’s created a whole change in demand. These are people that are looking for active transportation."

- "Bike and pedestrian paths will reach their limits. Before the East River bridges opened the only way that you could get directly from Queens or Brooklyn into Manhattan were bike or pedestrian paths. Even more rapidly changing have been transportation network companies, like Uber, Lyft, Via, and about 30 others that are all going around the United States and the world, and are looking to get into the New York market. So we’re seeing many many more vehicles on city streets, a lot of people that just use Uber, driving part-time, and that’s adding to congestion. Travel speeds have been going down."

- "What autonomous vehicles will do is both good and bad. For those people who are going to be driving anyhow, it does make it safer. But it also will only contribute to a lifestyle that’s more sedentary and ever-increasing, which I discuss in my book parallels the growth of obesity and cardiovascular diseases, diabetes, stroke and others problems. I worry about a future in which people don’t walk. Their Uber car takes them right to the portal of wherever they’re going, and their office chair comes right out and greets them. Or it’s their home and their recliner comes and greets them. We won’t need legs anymore, like in Wall-E."

- "What we thought was lousy transportation in the 1950s is no longer seen that way. The younger people want to be able to get places. It’s not about the status symbol of your big car with the huge rims, which was my generation. I had a big Chevy Impala with huge rims on it and I loved that car and that was a sign of freedom for me. Now a sign of freedom is having a smart phone and having the apps or Uber, Lyft, Zipcar, or Via. Suddenly you’re more free. You don’t have to lug around several thousand pounds of steel and figure out a place to park it and worry if you’re going to have a couple drinks and fight the traffic on the way home."

- "There are now self-powered streetcars. There’s a Chinese company called BYD — Build Your Dreams — that has buses that can run from 18 hours on battery charge. We’re seeing the same thing with streetcars. They’re able to run for 10, 12 and soon 18 hours. I’ve built a small system on the island of Aruba, and it’s running beautifully. I’m now looking to do something along the waterfront of Brooklyn and Queens, and I would hope to do something on 42nd St."

- "We going to see more auto-free areas — more bike lanes, more plazas popping up. I know Mayor de Blasio has talked about maybe undoing Broadway Plaza, but I doubt very much if that’s going to happen. What I see is that we will have congestion pricing in New York City. That’s just about a given — the question is when. I have my own plan called “move New York,” which lowers all the tolls everywhere else to make it a bit more palatable to drivers, and to be more fair. So we’re definitely going to have congestion pricing and a revenue stream that will provide for good transit and transportation.

- "There are always different paths we can take. We can be really dumb as a country — and we have been dumb as a country. We don’t maintain our public works, our infrastructure the way we should. So the real risk is that we have all these young people that are moving back to cities like New York and Boston and San Francisco and Cleveland and just about every city is beginning to see a rebirth, and forget we have to take care of the very basic infrastructure or we’re going to lose all the advantages we get from that."

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[M II A II R II K]

A Real Plan to Replace London’s Tube With Moving Walkways

Read More: http://www.wired.com/2015/09/real-pl...ving-walkways/

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This vision of the future comes from the London architecture firm NBBJ, which came up with that funky skyscraper that doesn’t cast a shadow. The firm developed the concept for an ideas competition New London Architecture hosted to generate “hypothetical but realistic proposals to make London a better place.”

- The 17-mile Circle Line is a loop through central London with a reputation for being slow, delayed, and clogged with tourists. It carries 114 million people each year, but can run no more than eight trains at a time, each limited to 20 mph. NBBJ thinks walking would be faster—if you give people a little help.

- First, you get rid of the tracks and replace them with three adjacent moving sidewalks (which, by the way, Britons call “travelators”). Passengers enter through stations and pay fares the same way (some things never change), but instead of waiting for a train, they step off the platform onto the outermost lane, which moves at 3 mph—a typical walking speed.

- In the tunnels between stations, each lane could speed up. (ThyssenKrupp has figured out how to make a variable speed walkway using magnetic levitation and overlapping plates. It’s quite loud and totally awesome, and Toronto’s Pearson airport has been using a variation on the tech since 2007.) At max speed, a Londoner or tourist could be walking at 15 mph. Without the need to stop at each station, NBBJ says, you could make the full circle in 55 minutes—five minutes faster than the train.

- More important than speed, though, is eliminating the train’s most annoying aspect: overcrowding. With the walkways, you can fill the entire tunnel with people, and not lose space to spread out trains. As a result, the system could carry three times as many people. “The real benefit is the capacity,” says Christian Coop, NBBJ’s design director. That’s the “realistic” part of the idea: using proven technology (moving sidewalks) in a proven way (a highway lane system) to fix a vexing problem.

- Oh, the downsides. First off, it’s unclear how much this system would cost to build or operate, or how much energy it would use. That’s because it’s still in the early concept phase, Coop says, and the team hasn’t bothered doing the math yet. The bigger problem is any system based on moving sidewalks isn’t friendly to people who don’t walk well, or at all. One rendering shows a person in a wheelchair (other renderings include Daniel Craig, Queen Elizabeth II, and Elvis) and chairs set up in the fastest lane. But it’s really easy—like super easy—to imagine people having trouble moving between lanes, or stumbling as they get on and off.

- Plus, anyone who’s been to an airport knows these things break down. A nuisance when you’re changing flights could make getting from Notting Hill to the Tower of London a disaster. Still, Coop says “the idea has real solid potential,” and that it’s been well-received so far. It likely won’t see the artificial light of an underground tunnel, but the concept is worth something in its own right. “Usually an idea just leads to another idea,” Coop says. Maybe the next one will fix London.

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[Busy Bee]

^everyone has the same music in their head while viewing that GIF. You know what it is.

[ssiguy]

Not too beneficial for the elderly or disabled due to no handrails near entries and none in the middle lane. Interesting concept thou.

[M II A II R II K]

London Tube map shows the real distance between stations:

https://www.whatdotheyknow.com/reque...ions%20Map.pdf

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The government is trying to make walking American again

Read More: http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/w...merican-again/

The U.S. Surgeon General on Wednesday proposed a radical idea wrapped in a banal government document, a 72-page "call to action" with 359 tiny-font references: Americans, Vivek Murthy said, should walk more.

- We should walk to the grocery store, and to school, and to the bus stop. We should take "walking meetings" at the office and spend more time walking in parks. And, because nearly a third of American adults report living in a neighborhood without a single sidewalk, we should rethink how we design communities so that it's actually possible to walk them.

- Maybe this sounds like obvious advice, a health tip right up there with admonitions to eat right and wear sunblock. But for much of the last century, the federal government has backed a different idea — cars running on cheap fuel and fast asphalt should carry us everywhere — that has largely proved incompatible with walking.

- "If the Surgeon General had called for people to exercise more, that would be just another predictable announcement," says the University of Virginia's Peter Norton, who has studied the history of transportation. "But he called for walking. That puts him up against a long history of official discouragement of walking."

- The "call to action," a rare science-based edict meant to shape national discussion on major public health threats, implicates America's car culture and "sprawling land use patterns." The paper, though, is a little coy on the main culprit: "Large distances often exist between home, school, work, stores, and other frequently sought destinations," it reads, "and this distance can limit people’s ability to incorporate walking into their everyday activities."

- Distance, though, was never an accidental byproduct of suburban design; it was the feature that enabled spacious lawns, mass-produced single-family homes and vast shopping malls. As a black-and-white video about the suburb of Lakewood, Calif., put it, people in "the future city as new as tomorrow" loved "the way the homes and streets were laid out so neatly around the super modern shopping centers with acres of free parking!"

- Communities designed around more compact, walkable street grids — places that have what the Surgeon General calls "connectivity" — have been correlated in research with reduced rates of obesity, high blood pressure and heart disease (they also have fewer fatal car crashes, another public health problem). One study of a million residents in Toronto found that people in less walkable neighborhoods were more likely to develop diabetes.

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• Video Link

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Unbuilt London: Replacing buses with a monorail network

Read More: http://www.ianvisits.co.uk/blog/2015...nrail-network/

In 1967, the Conservative Party published a document calling for the scrapping of buses in central London – and replacing them with a huge Monorail network. The move was far fetched, but based on some very real concerns. Since the early 1950s, bus usage had declined as commuters switched to the motor car, and this was causing congestion problems in the centre of London.

- As the report noted, London needed a better bus network, but also more space for motorists. Save some schemes to put a motorway through the middle of London, realistically, there was no more road to provide, and yet congestion continued to increase. The scheme proposed by Brian Waters, and endorsed by Desmond Plummer, Leader of the Conservative Opposition at the GLC, was to get rid of buses entirely. This would free up considerable road space for motorists — but what to do with the displaced public transport users? Elevate!

- In a way, this was a precursor to the Docklands Light Railway, but being a monorail meant that far less rail infrastructure would be above the heads of pedestrians, so that pavements wouldn’t feel gloomy. The proposals called for the use of the electric SAFEGE system, with short trains running at around 40mph on rubber wheels — fast enough to be convenient, and quiet enough to avoid steel-on-steel screeches. As with the Underground, passengers would use escalators to get up to the platforms, which were expected to be built alongside shops, who were then likely to be keen on opening 1st floor entrances to their stores.

- Again, mirroring the later DLR, each platform would have been around 100 feet long, for 2 or 3 carriage monorail trains, and as we now have on the Jubilee line, there would have been platform edge doors to stop people falling down to the road below. The monorail was expected to be driverless, and thus able to feed extra trains into the network when unexpected demand required it. In terms of the monorail supports, these upright columns were to be spaced at 100 metre intervals, and with a width no wider than a current traffic island should not have been an impediment to road traffic.

- It was expected that construction would take about 2 years for each of the four loops, which amounted to 43 miles of monorail network. The cost was put at £53 million (vs the £65 million Victoria Line being built at the time). A future expansion to the Barbican was also envisioned. Rather delightfully, the report said that if built, then “Bus diesel fumes and noise, so much a part of the London street scene, will be replaced by the gentle ‘woosh’ of the monorail passing over the street”.

- Sadly, the gentle wooshing was not to come into being. Although the Conservative’s won election later that year, their majority shrank in following years, and the necessary political will, even if funds were available, faded away. Today we still use buses, in volumes that can be scarce imagined — they carry twice as many passengers per day than the London Underground. How much more interesting would London have been with a network of monorails?

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[ssiguy]

The guy in the video should get his terms and facts straight before making an ass of himself.

He jumps from transit to HSR like they are the same thing and they have little in common. Comparing the densities, lower car ownership, and cheaper gas prices to Europe is ridiculous. Also Europe didn't just invest in rails but also a huge amount in their road systems. European roads and freeways are in excellent shape and is a huge system.

If the guy wants to compare transit then fine but bringing up HSR in the same conversation is ridiculous. They serve two completely different purposes and two completely different users and for him to use the terms interchangeably is ill informed at best and complete ignorance at worse.

[M II A II R II K]

Study suggests London Underground may be 'too fast'

Read More: http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-34334794

If Tube journeys are too fast, relative to going by road, then the model predicts an increase in the overall level of congestion. This is because key locations outside the city centre, where people switch transport modes, become bottlenecks.

- Reporting their findings in the journal Royal Society Interface, the researchers calculate that London's system would function best with underground trains travelling about 1.2 times faster than the average speed on the roads. This makes the optimum Tube speed approximately 13mph (21km/h); the current average is 21mph (33km/h). Dr Marc Barthelemy, the paper's senior author, said it was a theoretical study and more data would be required to make specific recommendations.

- Dr Barthelemy, a statistical physicist at the CEA research centre in Saclay, France, is fascinated by the interplay between coupled networks. And transport networks, such as the roads and train lines in his study, are becoming increasingly interconnected. In a report on urban mobility published on Tuesday, the LSE Cities group at the London School of Economics describes a trend towards "multimodal" journeys, where travellers switch - for example - from train to bus or car.

- "In London there's a clear increase in the number of modes with distance," he explained. "It's a very clear effect." To test how these different transport networks can affect each other, he and his colleagues built computer models based on the exact structure of the road and underground train networks of both London and New York. Then, they connected these two layers based on the proximity between streets and subway stations. "We create these connections, and then we make an assumption, which is: When someone wants to go from A to B, they look for the quickest path - whatever the mode."

- This painted a distinctive picture of how they function together; the underground network, for example, tends to decrease congestion centrally but increase it where the underground lines finish. And there were key differences between London and New York. "Surprisingly enough, the network in New York is much more centralised than the one in London," Dr Barthelemy said. This means that, according to the model, levels of congestion in downtown Manhattan are so high that the city would benefit from faster trains "even if that increases the congestion at some peripheral points - the entry points to the subway".

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[Nouvellecosse]

Instead of slowing down the underground, perhaps they'd be better served by making those peripheral areas more efficient.

[mrsmartman]

As long as it is profitable to take the underground, people would take the underground. Theoretical equilibrium is reached if no arbitrage could be made.

[SkahHigh]

Caisse expected to go full steam ahead with $5B Montreal rail projects

Quebec Finance Minister Carlos Leitao said he expects the province’s public pension fund manager to proceed with two Montreal-area rail lines that together represent investments of about $5 billion.

Potential returns on the projects — a public transit system on Montreal’s new Champlain Bridge, and a rail line from the downtown core to the city’s main airport — are sufficient to guarantee the Caisse de dépôt et placement du Québec will go ahead with the investments, Leitao said Wednesday at the Bloomberg Canadian Fixed Income Conference in New York.

Premier Philippe Couillard’s government appointed the Caisse to plan, finance and manage infrastructure projects in January, and passed a bill authorizing the asset manager to create a new venture, CDP Infra, in June. As of June 30, the Caisse oversaw net assets of $240.8 billion.

“The Caisse has all the necessary legislative authority to proceed, and they are now as we speak into the planning stage for these two new projects,” Leitao said. “This will work because it is profitable.”

Having the Caisse “very closely” control construction costs will fuel returns thanks to its experience as an investor in Vancouver’s Canada Line, and from value created by developing land around the rail lines, Leitao said.

“The Canada Line was built on time and on budget,” the finance minister said. “If you build something on time and on budget, you are already a long way towards ensuring the profitability of the project.”

Ivanhoe Cambridge, the Caisse’s $48-billion property unit, will oversee real estate operations for the Montreal projects, the minister said.

“Along the rail line there will be train stations and commercial developments,” he said. Ivanhoe Cambridge “has got experience in this field, so they will be able to generate real estate value from their transportation link, and that will contribute to the profitability.”

http://montrealgazette.com/news/loca...nance-minister

[redblock]

Here is an article about Rise, a Dallas company connecting Dallas, Houston, and Austin using small planes.

http://www.wfaa.com/story/news/local...-jet/72706056/

They claim they are the only such operation in the US.

[drummer]

Originally Posted by redblock

Here is an article about Rise, a Dallas company connecting Dallas, Houston, and Austin using small planes.

http://www.wfaa.com/story/news/local...-jet/72706056/

They claim they are the only such operation in the US.

I read about that on either CNN or BBC. Even if I lived there it'd be out of my financial reach, but interesting nonetheless. If the Texas Central Railway ever happens, it'd be interesting to see how it would affect other attempts at helping the super-rich, super-commuters.

[202_Cyclist]

Originally Posted by redblock

Here is an article about Rise, a Dallas company connecting Dallas, Houston, and Austin using small planes.

http://www.wfaa.com/story/news/local...-jet/72706056/

They claim they are the only such operation in the US.

This is interesting and I wish this company success but there is a similar company, Surf Air, offering a month charter service like this within CA using Pilatus aircraft.

http://www.wsj.com/articles/members-...ets-1407730183