#transport

[opendirectories]

[usafphantom2]

The Budd RB-1 Conestoga was a highly unusual and short-lived American military transport aircraft developed during World War II.

What made it truly unique was its stainless steel construction, a feature that reflected the design and manufacturing expertise of its builder—the Budd Company, better known for making railroad cars.

@Destroye83 via X

[sleepy-bebby]

[glimpseinto]

Tokyo (2008) by Willem Alink on Flickr.

[todays-xkcd]

If they're going to make people ride bikes and scooters in traffic, then it should at LEAST be legal to do the Snow Crash thing where you use a hook-shot-style harpoon to catch free rides from cars.

Urban Planning Opinion Progression [Explained]

Transcript Under the Cut

Typical urban planning opinion progression [Each panel is connected to a point on a timeline]

Cueball: I wish there wasn't so much traffic to get into the city. They should put in more lanes. Megan: And more parking. Megan: Parking is so bad here.

Knit Cap: I have to go to Amsterdam for work next week. I hear they all ride bikes there. Ponytail: Bikes are fine but people shouldn't ride them in the street! I worry I'm going to hit someone!

Cueball: It would be nice if we had better transit options! Cueball: I tried a scooter. It was fun but I wish there were more bike paths.

Megan: It's funny how widening roads to speed up traffic makes them more dangerous to walk near, making driving more necessary and creating more traffic. Megan: Really makes you think.

Knit Cap: Visiting the Netherlands was cool! Knit Cap: Amsterdam is really neat.

Cueball: We've ceded so much of our land to storing and moving cars, with the rest of us tiptoeing around the edges and making drivers mad for trespassing on "their" space. Cueball: Even though we're the ones in danger from them!

Megan: Those giant trucks with front blind spots that keep hitting kids should be illegal.

Knit Cap: We should be more like the Netherlands. Knit Cap: They design their street to prioritize...

Cueball: The problem is car culture. It's systemic. Cueball: I don't know if we can fix it.

Megan: People approach road planning decisions from the point of view of drivers because that's how we're used to interacting with the city, so we make choices that make it more car-friendly. Megan: It's a vicious cycle.

Knit Cap: Netherlands! Netherlands! Netherlands! Netherlands!

Cueball: Anything that makes a city a worse place to drive in makes it a better place to live, short of scattering random tire spikes on the road.

Megan: Honestly, I think the city council should consider the tire spikes thing.

[alice-arty]

Fashionably late like last time haha! Got here in the end and casually spending it more so this time by the table with punch, a bit more realistic for me. Thanks to @zaigg for getting this thing being a thing Fun fact, I genuinely wore this dress to my maths exam and had a panic attack in it, good to get some punch after the whole shebang though haha :)

[probablyasocialecologist]

Link (archive.ph)

[sibirsibir]

Celtic Bronze Horse (550-300 BC), used as a votive item, found near the border of France and Germany.

Horse was of tremendous importance to the early nomadic Celts, a major symbol of energy, power and fertility. There is also an evidence that the ancient Celts rode horses and used them in warfare. Epona is the White Mare Horse Goddess, also known as Rhiannon (Wales) and Macha and Etain (reland). by Archeology Aesthetic

[spawnofvulcan-knits]

Me too, monorail, me too…

[zadokthepriest]

by Maciej Drabik

[opendirectories]

[usafphantom2]

Bet you’re sorry you landed at Minot AFB huh?🥶

@ron_eisle via X

[scotianostra]

On February 21st 1842 ­Scotland’s first inter-city railway, the Edinburgh-Glasgow mainline, opened to ­regular traffic.

The building of a railway between the two cities was authorised by an Act of Parliament in 1838 following several years of public discussion.

Construction work on the 46-mile line took almost four years. It was no easy task. To ensure a level route, numerous cuttings were dug, four viaducts were built and three tunnels were driven through hills and solid rock. Members of the public were invited to walk through the Queen Street tunnel on New Year’s Day 1842 to satisfy growing interest in the project. The line opened to regular services on 21st February that year, following a ceremonial opening of the station three days earlier, as I posted on Sunday.

The railway put an end to the slow and cumbersome stagecoaches that had linked Glasgow and Edinburgh for more than a century, and would eventually drive business away from the canal network as well.

The project’s engineers had wanted to build a bridge over the Forth and Clyde canal – but the canal’s owners refused. A tunnel under the waterway had to be constructed instead.

The Scotsman reported in February 1842 that “it rarely happens that a railway can be brought into the centre of a great city”, as it announced the opening of Queen Street station in Glasgow. But the original Edinburgh terminus at Haymarket was greeted with rather less enthusiasm. It was hoped that eventually the train line would stretch further into Edinburgh.

An extension to North Bridge was duly completed in 1846, and work on building the present Waverley station began in 1868.

The line was popular with passengers from the beginning. Initially, four services travelled in each direction from Monday to Saturday. Controversially, two services also ran on Sundays – provoking strong opposition from Sabbatarians. The number of trains throughout the week quickly increased.

Passengers could choose to alight at many more intermediate stations than today – with stops at Gogar, Ratho, Winchburgh, Linlithgow, Polmont, Falkirk, Castlecary, Croy, Kirkintilloch (later Lenzie) and Bishopbriggs. The Edinburgh & Glasgow Railway Company which built the line was absorbed by the North British Railway (NBR) in 1865. The NBR would in turn be absorbed by the London & North Eastern Railway in 1923.

There have been several high-profile train crashes on the route over the years. The most recent occurred on 30th July, 1984, when a rush hour commuter service out of Waverley struck a cow that had wandered on to the tracks near Polmont from a nearby field. The collision caused all six carriages to derail, killing 13 people and injuring 61 others.

The worst accident, in terms of loss of life, took place on 10th December, 1937, at Castlecary. During a snowstorm, the 5.30pm Waverley to Queen Street express collided with a late running local train from Dundee to Glasgow. The locomotive hit the rear of the standing local service at the now-closed Castlecary station at an estimated 70mph. Four carriages were completely destroyed by the collision, killing 35 passengers and injuring 179 more.

The £742m Edinburgh Glasgow Improvement Programme (EGIP) is the biggest project on the route since it was built 174 years ago. It will eventually see all-electric trains operating on the line, with faster journey times and more seats for passengers. The average journey time by train between Glasgow and Edinburgh (Waverley) is now 1 hour and 14 minutes, with around 191 trains per day.

A new passenger hall at Haymarket station opened in 2014, while Queen Street was recently comprehensively rebuilt.

[krumpkin]

Another cool Triumph bike 😎

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Lies, damned lies, and Uber

I'm on tour with my new, nationally bestselling novel The Bezzle! Catch me TONIGHT in PHOENIX (Changing Hands, Feb 29) then Tucson (Mar 10-11), San Francisco (Mar 13), and more!

Uber lies about everything, especially money. Oh, and labour. Especially labour. And geometry. Especially geometry! But especially especially money. They constantly lie about money.

Uber are virtuosos of mendacity, but in Toronto, the company has attained a heretofore unseen hat-trick: they told a single lie that is dramatically, materially untruthful about money, labour and geometry! It's an achievement for the ages.

Here's how they did it.

For several decades, Toronto has been clobbered by the misrule of a series of far-right, clownish mayors. This was the result of former Ontario Premier Mike Harris's great gerrymander of 1998, when the city of Toronto was amalgamated with its car-dependent suburbs. This set the tone for the next quarter-century, as these outlying regions – utterly dependent on Toronto for core economic activity and massive subsidies to pay the unsustainable utility and infrastructure bills for sprawling neighborhoods of single-family homes – proceeded to gut the city they relied on.

These "conservative" mayors – the philanderer, the crackhead, the sexual predator – turned the city into a corporate playground, swapping public housing and rent controls for out-of-control real-estate speculation and trading out some of the world's best transit for total car-dependency. As part of that decay, the city rolled out the red carpet for Uber, allowing the company to put as many unlicensed taxis as they wanted on the city's streets.

Now, it's hard to overstate the dire traffic situation in Toronto. Years of neglect and underinvestment in both the roads and the transit system have left both in a state of near collapse and it's not uncommon for multiple, consecutive main arteries to shut down without notice for weeks, months, or, in a few cases, years. The proliferation of Ubers on the road – driven by desperate people trying to survive the city's cost-of-living catastrophe – has only exacerbated this problem.

Uber, of course, would dispute this. The company insists – despite all common sense and peer-reviewed research – that adding more cars to the streets alleviates traffic. This is easily disproved: there just isn't any way to swap buses, streetcars, and subways for cars. The road space needed for all those single-occupancy cars pushes everything further apart, which means we need more cars, which means more roads, which means more distance between things, and so on.

It is an undeniable fact that geometry hates cars. But geometry loathes Uber. Because Ubers have all the problems of single-occupancy vehicles, and then they have the separate problem that they just end up circling idly around the city's streets, waiting for a rider. The more Ubers there are on the road, the longer each car ends up waiting for a passenger:

https://www.sfgate.com/technology/article/Uber-Lyft-San-Francisco-pros-cons-ride-hailing-13841277.php

Anything that can't go on forever eventually stops. After years of bumbling-to-sinister municipal rule, Toronto finally reclaimed its political power and voted in a new mayor, Olivia Chow, a progressive of long tenure and great standing (I used to ring doorbells for her when she was campaigning for her city council seat). Mayor Chow announced that she was going to reclaim the city's prerogative to limit the number of Ubers on the road, ending the period of Uber's "self-regulation."

Uber, naturally, lost its shit. The company claims to be more than a (geometrically impossible) provider of convenient transportation for Torontonians, but also a provider of good jobs for working people. And to prove it, the company has promised to pay its drivers "120% of minimum wage." As I write for Ricochet, that's a whopper, even by Uber's standards:

https://ricochet.media/en/4039/uber-is-lying-again-the-company-has-no-intention-of-paying-drivers-a-living-wage

Here's the thing: Uber is only proposing to pay 120% of the minimum wage while drivers have a passenger in the vehicle. And with the number of vehicles Uber wants on the road, most drivers will be earning nothing most of the time. Factor in that unpaid time, as well as expenses for vehicles, and the average Toronto Uber driver stands to make $2.50 per hour (Canadian):

https://ridefair.ca/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/Legislated-Poverty.pdf

Now, Uber's told a lot of lies over the years. Right from the start, the company implicitly lied about what it cost to provide an Uber. For its first 12 years, Uber lost $0.41 on every dollar it brought in, lighting tens of billions in investment capital provided by the Saudi royals on fire in an effort to bankrupt rival transportation firms and disinvestment in municipal transit.

Uber then lied to retail investors about the business-case for buying its stock so that the House of Saud and other early investors could unload their stock. Uber claimed that they were on the verge of producing a self-driving car that would allow them to get rid of drivers, zero out their wage bill, and finally turn a profit. The company spent $2.5b on this, making it the most expensive Big Store in the history of cons:

https://www.theinformation.com/articles/infighting-busywork-missed-warnings-how-uber-wasted-2-5-billion-on-self-driving-cars

After years, Uber produced a "self-driving car" that could travel one half of one American mile before experiencing a potentially lethal collision. Uber quietly paid another company $400m to take this disaster off its hands:

https://www.economist.com/business/2020/12/10/why-is-uber-selling-its-autonomous-vehicle-division

The self-driving car lie was tied up in another lie – that somehow, automation could triumph over geometry. Robocabs, we were told, would travel in formations so tight that they would finally end the Red Queen's Race of more cars – more roads – more distance – more cars. That lie wormed its way into the company's IPO prospectus, which promised retail investors that profitability lay in replacing every journey – by car, cab, bike, bus, tram or train – with an Uber ride:

https://www.reuters.com/article/idUSKCN1RN2SK/

The company has been bleeding out money ever since – though you wouldn't know it by looking at its investor disclosures. Every quarter, Uber trumpets that it has finally become profitable, and every quarter, Hubert Horan dissects its balance sheets to find the accounting trick the company thought of this time. There was one quarter where Uber declared profitability by marking up the value of stock it held in Uber-like companies in other countries.

How did it get this stock? Well, Uber tried to run a business in those countries and it was such a total disaster that they had to flee the country, selling their business to a failing domestic competitor in exchange for stock in its collapsing business. Naturally, there's no market for this stock, which, in Uber-land, means you can assign any value you want to it. So that one quarter, Uber just asserted that the stock had shot up in value and voila, profit!

https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2022/02/hubert-horan-can-uber-ever-deliver-part-twenty-nine-despite-massive-price-increases-uber-losses-top-31-billion.html

But all of those lies are as nothing to the whopper that Uber is trying to sell to Torontonians by blanketing the city in ads: the lie that by paying drivers $2.50/hour to fill the streets with more single-occupancy cars, they will turn a profit, reduce the city's traffic, and provide good jobs. Uber says it can vanquish geometry, economics and working poverty with the awesome power of narrative.

In other words, it's taking Toronto for a bunch of suckers.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/29/geometry-hates-uber/#toronto-the-gullible

Image: Rob Sinclair (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Night_skyline_of_Toronto_May_2009.jpg

CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/deed.en