A guy manually installed a highway shield/label for the left-side exit of this highway:
“For nine months, no one noticed that the change was the work of a private citizen. Ankrom eventually leaked the story to a local paper. The sign was reviewed in the Los Angeles Times as art, and the locals enjoyed its functionality. The most unexpected reaction came from the California transit authorities: They left Ankrom’s civilian sign in peace for eight more years. It’s a rare day when performance art yields something useful, rarer still when public officials leave such a thing unmolested.”
An amazing train station design — the trains don’t have to stop.
This looks like a feasible way to accomplish the nonsense I had thought of a while back.
:: kottke ::
We used the monorail for the first few days we were in Vegas, to go from Riviera on the north end of the Strip down to the main southern section. It’s expensive and kind of a pain to use. Riding the bus worked a lot better:
“On the Strip, as I walked south from the Sahara, I couldn’t help noticing the crowded bus stops. As it turns out, in 2005 the RTC started running a flashy double-decker bus called the Deuce up and down the Strip. It costs $3 a ride and is very popular, averaging 35,000 passengers a day. The monorail has been attracting about 17,000 a day, roughly a third of its predicted ridership.”
Personal Rapid Transit (PRT) is getting some attention. NPR has a story.
It’s an interesting compromise between full-blown rail mass transit and personal vehicles. The primary concern is that PRT would only work in compact, high-traffic areas; like connecting the hotels in Vegas, getting around a university campus, or at facilities like airports.
I was talking with someone the other day about a conceptual PRT-like system as an alternative to light rail, where there’d be many cars all evenly spaced apart that would run on a limited-access rail system. To get on and off the cars there could be “exit paths” along which the cars would slow down some and passengers would board from a series of accelerating moving sidewalks, similar to the continuous circuit train rides at Disney World. This idea, of course, is totally half-baked with plenty of flaws, but I don’t think it’s too far from what these PRT studies are exploring in San Jose and Ithaca.
My thinking on it is that you’d want a system that did not stop at each and every stop, like a personal equivalent of an express train. Certain popular stops would have more cars arriving, since more passengers would request that stop, and, inversely, more would want to board there. The intelligent system would know the queue lengths at each stop, and if an empty car rode by a stop with a queue, it would exit and let the waiting passengers board. PRT systems seem more attractive than light rail in certain locations because they could reduce wait times. If the stops along your circuit have similar levels of traffic and are similarly desirable stops, the even distribution of ridership would lend itself well to more small cars, rather than fewer larger ones.
Meet the Train Makers
Infrastructurist is doing a series on the manufacturers of high-speed trains:
The transportation industry seems to be undergoing a “retrofication” these days. We’re going back to the original form of mass transit: the railroad.
The computer business is the same way. Business computing through the 70s and 80s consisted mostly of UNIX mainframe/terminal architecture. In the 90s the world went the way of the personal computer, providing fast computing for everyone right at their desks. It feels like we’re swinging the other way again, with terminal services and shared resources making a comeback, along with all of the “cloud computing” possibilities around today.
Mockup drawings of Robert Moses’ NYC highways in Google Maps.
Moses wanted to build Mid-Manhattan and Lower Manhattan Expressways to connect Long Island with Jersey via Manhattan. The first would’ve connected the Lincoln and Queens-Midtown Tunnels, the second would connect the Manhattan and Williamsburg bridges to the Holland Tunnel. Needless to say, NYC would be a completely different place had these projects been pursued.
Developers in Houston want to extend the Grand Parkway through a section of prairie known as Katy Prairie west of Houston.
This 15-lane toll connector from I-10 to US-290 will eventually become part of a third beltway around the Houston metro center. Third. 15 lanes.
The State of Texas wants to spend $181 million of it’s expected stimulus money on something that will promote exactly what the stimulus program is trying to prevent: massive urban sprawl. Activists in the Houston area claim, rightly so, that that money would be better spent improving areas where people already live, rather than opening up a new expanse to new development.
This is one of my primary concerns of the whole “stimulus” idea. How do you tell a region or municipality how to spend their money on a local scale?
Clash of Subways and Car Culture in Chinese Cities.
“…it cost about $100 million a mile to build a subway line in Guangzhou, including land acquisition costs for ventilation shafts and station entrances.”
“By contrast, New York City officials hope to build 1.7 miles of the long-delayed Second Avenue line in eight years at a cost of $3.9 billion, or $2.4 billion a mile. The city expects to use a single tunneling machine.”
Subway line costs us 24 times as much as China. No wonder they’re racing ahead.
