Mark Fleischmann sent this interesting article to me: In the first stages of its coverage of Mayor Bloomberg's proposal for congestion pricing in midtown...
... =v= Sigh. This trendazoid prose is annoying. The U.S. pattern of mall-sprawl is a project started by an earlier generation (think Robert Moses and the...
Paving the Way Effort to Make Downtown More Walkable Takes Big Step This Week When the city's Planning Commission released a fiery memorandum in April, under...
StarMetro, Tallahassee's transit system, has just recently stopped accepting pennies in their fareboxes. It sounds like they were tired of holding up buses...
Newspaper people often have trouble with math.... Can Amtrak really be as little as 20% more efficient than planes and cars??? Joel ... J.H. Crawford...
http://www.airwaysociety.org/airway/milespergallon/index.htm I'm not attesting to this page's accuracy, but if it is accurate...it says as much as 108 ...
I don't trust that page; I've found a number of errors without really looking. Surely someone, somewhere has put together a good synopsis. You have to be...
... Leaving aside the question of whether a 500-mile trip in a Honda Civic crammed with five passengers would be tolerable, I still fell that the numbers are...
This WikiPedia article is also worth a look, but it is also not flawless: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuel_efficiency_in_transportation Passenger trains, by...
... As far as I know there has been one fatality in forty+ years of bullet train travel: in Germany (faulty wheel caused a derailment). Japan initiated...
... Not to pick nits, but the German ICE wreck facts are: Nearly 100 killed Speed only 200 km/hr (not true high-speed operation) A tire came off a wheel, train...
I'm hoping this is on-topic (certainly follows the subject line). It concerns the fuel/energy requirements for _high-speed_ rail. George Monbiot has an...
... That's physics at work: resistance increases with the square of the speed. There are ways around it, to a degree. If the trains are light, energy...
There are secondary effects that are not reflected in any of these comparisons. For instance, a railway station within easy reach of pedestrians will both be...
There is an accountant joke I once heard where three accountants are applying for an executive position. The CEO of the company asks each of the candidates...
... =v= In the U.S. cars are rarely filled to seating capacity. The average ridership is slightly over 1 person per car. So it's hard to take numbers like that...
This is all pretty tangential. The basic physics are: It takes lots of energy to accelerate a train, and the total amount of that energy increases with the...
Hi All-- New photo essay on Bicycle Fixation: "The Bicycle in Amsterdam," by Henry Cutler, proprietor of WorksCycles in that city. Beautiful photography by a...
... My answer to Uli was: This has been a specific dream of mine. Philadelphia recently demolished 20,000 (?) houses in a derelict area that could have easily...
Actually, this brings up a question I've been wondering for some time. In an era of dwindling oil supplies, are we better off with jets or ships? 747 or QM2?...
... Ships do not have to be powered by oil or coal. Highly refined sailing vessels with solar auxiliary power for days of calms and for harbor maneuvering can...
Localization. "...it is obvious that if we are serious about sustainability, we will have to accept that international trade and travel will be slower and more...
Planning Guide for Bus Rapid Transit Published Manual Provides Comprehensive Look at the Global Emergence of BRT, Reveals Technical Secrets to the World's...
... =v= Certainly there is more capital outlay for rail, but since a bus uses tires on roads there is more friction, which means more maintenance costs and...
