text:
Rivals! Frenemies Who Changed the World
By: Scott McCormick
Narrated by: Prentice Onayemi, Samantha Turret, Khristine Hvam, and others
Did you know that most of our dinosaur fossils were discovered because two grown men absolutely hated each other? It's true! Rivals! Frenemies Who Changed the World is a riotous audio exclusive, like if Monty Python taught your history class....
Sorry I waited so long to listen to this
By Miamigrrl on 05-26-19
1. Rivals! Frenemies Who Changed the World
Narrated by: Prentice Onayemi, Samantha Turret, Khristine Hvam, Gabriel Vaughan, Josh Hurley
Series: Rivals!
2. A Grown-Up Guide to Dinosaurs
The Man Who Knew the Way to the Moon
By: Todd Zwillich
Narrated by: Todd Zwillich, Angelo Di Loreto
Without John C. Houbolt, a mid-level engineer at NASA, Apollo 11 would never have made it to the moon. Top NASA engineers on the project, including Werner Von Braun, strongly advocated for a single, huge spacecraft to travel to the moon, land, and return to Earth....
Caveat Emptor: Bone to Pick
By Judah Family on 07-05-19
3. The Man Who Knew the Way to the Moon
4. The Adventures of Tom Stranger, Interdimensional Insurance Agent
Series: The Adventures of Tom Stranger, Interdimensional Insurance Agent
5. Billion Dollar Whale
SNL's Beck Bennett performs Screwball, a wildly funny and wistful take on Babe Ruth's little-known stint in the minor leagues, from one of America's funniest writers, Simon Rich....
6. Screwball
By: Chisa Hutchinson
Narrated by: Brenda Pressley
Constance thought she had a happy life and a loving husband. Suddenly, a tragic accident splinters her upper-class black family - and forces Constance to face uncomfortable truths about her marriage and herself....
Surprisingly amazing
8. Proof of Love
9. Bull Mountain
Series: Bull Mountain, Book 1
In her memoir, a work of deep reflection and mesmerizing storytelling, Michelle Obama invites listeners into her world, chronicling the experiences that have shaped her....
10. Becoming
5 out of 5 stars 107,803 ratings
Evidence of the Affair
By: Taylor Jenkins Reid
Narrated by: Julia Whelan, George Newbern, James Daniels, and others
The correspondence between Carrie Allsop and David Mayer reveals, piece by piece, the painful details of a devastating affair between their spouses. With each commiserating scratch of the pen, they confess their fears and bare their souls....
Has all the magic of the short story form
By Jonetta (Ejaygirl) on 07-13-19
11. Evidence of the Affair
Narrated by: Julia Whelan, George Newbern, James Daniels, Dara Rosenberg
12. The New Girl
Series: Gabriel Allon, Book 19
An unforgettable memoir about a young girl who, kept out of school, leaves her survivalist family and goes on to earn a PhD from Cambridge University....
13. Educated
Gary John Bishop gives you the tools and advice you need to demolish the slag weighing you down and become the truly unf--ked version of yourself....
14. Unfu*k Yourself
Series: Unfu*k Yourself
For David Goggins, childhood was a nightmare - poverty, prejudice, and physical abuse colored his days and haunted his nights. But through self-discipline, mental toughness, and hard work, Goggins transformed himself....
15. Can't Hurt Me
Beloved author Elizabeth Gilbert returns to fiction with a unique love story set in the New York City theater world during the 1940s....
16. City of Girls
Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, Book 1
Narrated by: Jim Dale
Harry Potter has never even heard of Hogwarts when the letters start dropping on the doormat at number four, Privet Drive....
My Sad, Sad Confession…
By Mike L Lane on 08-08-17
17. Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, Book 1
Series: Wizarding World, Book 1, Harry Potter, Book 1
18. The Silent Patient
19. Red Metal
In this generation-defining self-help guide, a superstar blogger cuts through the crap to show us how to stop trying to be positive all the time so that we can truly become better, happier people....
20. The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck
4.5 out of 5 stars 114,485 ratings


Also known as "The Vampire Facial" and popularised by Hollywood stars in recent years; Platelet Rich Plasma (PRP) is a unique treatment appealing to clients seeking a natural method to rejuvenate their skin and stimulate healing.
At Medaesthetics™in Perth, we use two of the most well-established brands in the industry. Regen™ PRP and Angel™ PRP.


text:
One of Ours
CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 19.03.2018 - 366 Seiten
Nutzerbericht - rainpebble - LibraryThing
One of Ours by Willa Cather; (4 1/2*) This book is a beautifully written study of a sensitive, idealistic young man. But what elevates it to near masterpiece status is its extremely subtle depiction ... Vollständige Rezension lesen
Nutzerbericht - Donna828 - LibraryThing
Claude Wheeler was ill-suited as a Nebraska farm boy. His longings were realized after he entered a one-sided marriage and became obsessed with the news of WWI. When he decided he must enter the fray ... Vollständige Rezension lesen
Willa Siebert Cather was born in 1873 in the home of her maternal grandmother in western Virginia. Although she had been named Willela, her family always called her "Willa." Upon graduating from the University of Nebraska in 1895, Cather moved to Pittsburgh where she worked as a journalist and teacher while beginning her writing career. In 1906, Cather moved to New York to become a leading magazine editor at McClure's Magazine before turning to writing full-time. She continued her education, receiving her doctorate of letters from the University of Nebraska in 1917, and honorary degrees from the University of Michigan, the University of California, Columbia, Yale, and Princeton. Cather wrote poetry, short stories, essays, and novels, winning awards including the Pulitzer Prize for her novel, One of Ours, about a Nebraska farm boy during World War I. She also wrote The Professor's House, My Antonia, Death Comes for the Archbishop, and Lucy Gayheart. Some of Cather's novels were made into movies, the most well-known being A Lost Lady, starring Barbara Stanwyck. In 1961, Willa Cather was the first woman ever voted into the Nebraska Hall of Fame. She was also inducted into the Hall of Great Westerners in Oklahoma in 1974, and the National Women's Hall of Fame in Seneca, New York in 1988. Cather died on April 24, 1947, of a cerebral hemorrhage, in her Madison Avenue, New York home, where she had lived for many years.
Titel One of Ours
Autor/in Willa Cather
Verlag CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2018

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


If you checked in on Friday then you know that the room I designed for my oldest son was featured on Project Junior!! This was such an awesome experience and I am excited to talk a little more in-depth about the space today!
So Bobby is really into a lot of different things right now but predominately it's the solar system, clocks and the time as well as music. So designing a space around all his passions right now was a lot of fun- plus I had him there telling me the things he was wanting as well which was just adorable to say the least.
I really wanted his room to feel like a transitional space that will carry him through a few years and not something that needs to be changed in a few months- I really feel like we accomplished that! One of my favourite things in his room is this Star Map that we got him for his birthday, it is a picture of the nights sky the night he was born and it is just so special. Another special piece is his dresser that I refinished- it was a vintage dresser that was my parents and we just freshened it up with some grey chalk paint and new hardware and it has a completely updated feel now that is perfect for his room- I love how it brings in some family charm.
His bed and bedding is the same as his little brothers and I love how transitional and simple it is. I am a fan of keeping those pieces fairly neutral so you can use them for many years and your not always looking to replace them with the latest thing your child is into.
The boys are in love with these Cuddle & Kind stuffed animals that are hand made and so snuggly! They are the perfect size and they have been sleeping with them every night since they got them.
You guys know I am a big fan of Girliture pillows and these two on his bed and on his rocker are just so lovely! I adore the mudcloth inspired print and they really add great style to his room. Throw pillows are the perfect decor item and a lot of times they are forgotten in kids bedrooms but they really add such a great layer in their space and make things feel even more cozy. That sweet little blanky on his rocker is by XOVE baby is so soft and cuddly!
Ok and these Educational Charts?! Like how stinking cute are they! They are from this amazing company called Squared Charts and they make the prettiest learning charts for kids. I love the minimal colour yet high impact deigns they do, they keep learning simple but also look great hanging on the wall. I feel like this makes them feel like more of a long term piece and not something you need to take down as they get older.
I hope you all enjoyed this reveal of my sons bedroom and he is just so in love with his room now it is the cutest thing ever. He wants to be in there all the time which makes me feel like we really succeeded in creating a space that reflects him!
This blog post contains gifted product but of course all opinions are my own! Thank you for supporting this blog and the brands that I work with.
Last month I changed my daughter room's furniture with kids furniture to give her room a refreshing new look. I bought a bedroom set with beautiful lines framing, tapered feet and metal knobs, which made an excellent contrast to the white finish. This set includes six pieces furniture -headboard, foot-board, rails, dresser, dresser mirror, and nightstand. Which is rich in quality, material, and completes full room decoration.
My firm was burned last year, it was all in a sudden. It was so hard for me to get a loan. Thanks that I got small short term loans . Easy to get a loan and pay too. Without any mortgage and through online.


text:
Pedestrian Observations
For Walkability and Good Transit, and Against Boondoggles and Pollution
Post Queue
Why Northeast Corridor Privatization is Doomed to Failure
Alex Armlovich asked me whether it's possible to design a public-private partnership on the Northeast Corridor (NEC) to build high-speed rail. I took it to a Patreon poll, in which it prevailed over three other options (why land value taxation is overrated, why community groups oppose upzoning, and what examples of transit success there are in autocracies). On social media I gave a brief explanation for why such a privatization scheme would fail: the NEC has many users sharing tracks, requiring coordination of schedules and infrastructure, and privatizing one component would create incentives for rent-seeking rather than good work. In this post I am going to explain this more carefully.
Conceptually, the impetus for privatization is that the public sector cannot provide certain things successfully because it is politically controlled. For example, political control of infrastructure tends to lead to spreading investment around across a number of regions rather than where it is most needed; when Japan National Railways was broken up and privatized, the new companies let go of many lightly-used rural lines and focused on the urban commuter rail networks and the Shinkansen. Political control may also make it harder to keep down headcounts or wages. A competent government that recognizes that it will always be subject to political decisionmaking about services that should not be political will aim to devolve control of these services to the private sector.
The problem with this story is that privatization itself is a public program. This means that the government needs to be in good enough shape to write a PPP that encourages good service and discourages rent-seeking. Such a government entity does not exist in the realm of American public transportation. This doesn't mean that all privatization deals are bad, but it means that only the simplest deals have any chance of success, and those deals in turn have the least impact.
When it comes to HSR, private operations work provided there is no or almost no need to coordinate schedules and fares with anyone else. One example is Texas, which has no commuter rail between Dallas and Houston nor any good reason to ever run such service. In California, this is also more or less the case: Caltrain-HSR compatibility is needed, but that's a small portion of the line and could be resolved relatively easily.
In the Northeast, where there is extensive commuter rail, such coordination is indispensable. Without it, any operator has an incentive to make life miserable for the commuter rail operators and then demand state subsidies to allow regional trains on the track. Amtrak is already screwing other NEC users by charging high rates for electricity (which is supposedly the reason Conrail deelectrified, having previously run freight service on the NEC with electric locomotives) and by coming up with infrastructure plans that make regional rail modernization harder and demanding state money for them. If anything, the political control makes things less bad, because congressional representatives can yell at Amtrak; they will have less leverage over a private operator. In the other direction, Metro-North is slowing down Amtrak between New Rochelle and New Haven for the convenience of its own dispatching, and is likely to keep doing so under any PPP deal.
I have written many posts about what it would take to institute HSR on the NEC at the lowest possible cost. All of these make the same point, from many angles: organization – that is, improving timetabling – is vastly cheaper than pouring concrete and building bypass tracks. In chronological order, I've written,
A post about MBTA-HSR compatibility
A post about Metro-North-HSR compatibility between New York and New Rochelle
A compendium of cost saving measures I called NEC, 90% Cheaper, back when Amtrak's budget for it was only $150 billion
A followup about capacity in the New York commuter belt
A look at track-sharing around Washington Union Station
A criticism of Amtrak's lack of integration between rolling stock and infrastructure plans
Another look at planning coordination
A criticism of NEC Future's overpriced plan ($300 billion for full-fat HSR!)
A very long and detailed look at New Rochelle-Greens Farms
Privatization is supposed to solve the problems of an incompetent public sector. But Amtrak's incompetence is not really about wages or staffing; NEC trains are overstaffed relative to Shinkansen trains, but not relative to TGVs. Nor is it about unprofitable branch lines, not when the proposal is to privatize the NEC alone, rather than the entirety of Amtrak so that the private operator could shut down the long-distance trains. Some of the incompetence involves politicized procurement, but this is not the dominant source of high NEC costs. No: the incompetence manifests itself first of all in poor coordination between the various users of the NEC. Given better coordination, Amtrak could shave a substantial portion of its New York-New Haven runtime, perhaps by 10-20 minutes without any bridge replacements, and reduce schedule padding elsewhere.
To fix this situation, some organization would need to determine the timetables up and down the line and handle dispatching and train priority. In the presence of such an organization (which could well be Amtrak itself given top-to-bottom changes in management), a PPP is of limited benefit, because the private operator would be running on a schedule set publicly. Absent such an organization, privatization would make the agency turf battles that plague the entire NEC even worse than they are today.
In 2009, SNCF proposed to develop HSR in four places in the US: California, Texas, Florida, and the Midwest. The NEC, with its existing public intercity and regional rail operations, was not on its map. More recently, Texas Central is a private Japanese initiative to build HSR between Dallas and Houston. On the NEC the only Japanese initiative involved maglev between Washington and Baltimore, a mode of transportation that doesn't fit the NEC's context but is guaranteed to not share tracks with any state-owned commuter rail operation.
The invention of HSR itself was not privatized, and the European privatization paradigm involves public control of track infrastructure. Competing operators (some public, some private) can access tracks by paying a track charge, set equally across all operators. But even then, the track infrastructure owner has some decisions to make about design speed – mixing slower and faster trains reduces capacity, so if there's a mixture of both, does the infrastructure owner assume the design speed is high and charge slower trains extra for taking high-speed slots or does it assume the design speed is low and charge faster trains extra? So far the public rail infrastructure operators have swept this question under the rug, relying on the fact that on high-speed tracks all trains go fast and on low-speed ones few HSR services go faster than an express regional train.
Unfortunately, the NEC requires large speed differences on the same route to avoid excessive tunneling. This complicates the EU's attempts at a relatively hands-off approach to rail competition in two ways. First, it's no longer possible to ignore the design speed question, not when regional trains should be connecting Boston and Providence in 51 minutes and high-speed trains in 20 minutes, on shared tracks with strategic overtakes. And second, the overtakes must be timed more precisely, which means whoever controls the tracks needs to also take an active hand in planning the schedules.
Handwaving the problems of the public sector using privatization works in some circumstances, such as those of Japan National Railways, but could never work on the NEC. The problems a PPP could fix, including labor and rolling stock procurement, are peripheral; the problems it would exacerbate, i.e. integrating infrastructure and schedule planning, are the central issues facing the NEC. There is no alternative to a better-run, better-managed state-owned rail planning apparatus.
Written by Alon Levy Posted in Amtrak, High-Speed Rail, Incompetence, Politics and Society, Transportation
2018/02/24 - 19:04 Mark E. Singer
As the status quo will not hold much longer for Amtrak, let alone the Northeast Corridor (NEC), a new paradigm is desperately required. Having no transparency on data and finances provided by Amtrak plays into its "shell game" that prevents a logical paper trail to audit how the long distance routes funding is bled off to cover the widening fiscal hole of the NEC. Concomitantly, how much, if not every dollar paid by the non-NEC states is turned around to support the NEC? For how long has Amtrak manipulated such finances to dump the NEC's overhead and infrastructure costs into the long distance and state-supported sectors?
Just as California wised up to bring in DB for the LA-SF HSR infrastructure and operations, so must we now acknowledge that Amtrak has failed to maintain, let alone, improve the NEC infrastructure. As neither the USDOT nor FRA have the requisite sources, it is definitely time for the FRA/USDOT to commence a process to open-up the NEC infrastructure for a competent, experienced, and successful owner, or, owner/operator for the NEC.
This must be a better alternative to the present situation, where currently Amtrak does not even charge the NEC states for their trolley-like schedules. As well, despite the requirement of PRIIA 2008 for Amtrak to finally start charging the commuter users for operating and infrastructure depreciation costs, because Amtrak is an appendage so beholden to the power brokers in the Northeast, it never bothered to charge. As this neglect was apparently approved by Amtrak's Board of Directors, this issue did not change until mandated by Congress in December, 2015. As Amtrak has willfully evolved into a subservient tool to its Northeast political patrons, it has neglected its mission for a national system.
A privately-owned and operated NEC infrastructure should serve the following purpose:
1) Identify market rates to charge–and collect– for NEC operating and infrastructure depreciation costs from all users–commuter, freight, and Amtrak.
2) Consider fuller utilization and revenues of the NEC by enabling all parcel or mail trains to operate at night.
3) Appropriately prioritize infrastructure maintenance, repairs, and replacement for all parties to contribute, including states and federal, just as the states pay now for repairs to the interstate highways serving them.
4) Rather than continuing the solo operation of intercity trains by Amtrak, this operator should offer opportunities to properly vetted experienced operators to bid on franchise, or, even just offer open access.
5) With the infrastructure freed from the current political machinations favoring just current status quo commuter or Amtrak services, major improvements in the NEC could be contemplated to facilitate increased services and frequencies by improving the design of the current infrastructure.
We have to remove the "flash in the pan" politics that had the feds underwrite new Acelas to be built in NY state, when the NEC infrastructure begs for major renovation and cannot currently accommodate any significant increase in speed or frequencies. By ignoring the continuous degrading of the NEC infrastructure, the governors of NY and NJ, and their congressional delegations, have forfeited their voices and control over the NEC. The only way to save the NEC is to place it in the hands of a competent operator.Indeed, the nation's taxpayers west and south of the Hudson River do not appreciate the muscle game recently played by the senators from NY and NJ to withhold the approval of Mr. Batory to the FRA. If their continues to be this persistent obstinance to neglect the rest of the nation's rail needs in favor of just the NEC, Hornblower ferries may become the best option for crossing the Hudson
2018/02/24 - 19:50 adirondacker12800
The state agencies that use the NEC pay through the nose. And finance most the improvements.
They may be paying thru the nose now, but for how many years were they absent and relieved from making such payments? Frankly, just like Metra in Chicago and the west coast commuter lines, the states should pay for the improvements that more than benefit their commuters than the few Amtrak runs. Remember, Amtrak typically operates but 2 trains per hour in each direction.
The sttates do. And people using the commuter trains pay Federal taxes. Lots and lots and lots of Federal taxes.
2018/02/24 - 20:50 Benjamin Turon
I would agree with the above. Privatization is something thrown around because politicians and media pundits can't knowledgeably think in depth about the issue. The see "privatization" as the "cure-all" (see Trump's infrastructure plan) but don't seem to understand its mixed and nuance record both at home (failed toll highways) and overseas. The think that the "private railway" would bring in many billions of dollars that the public sector is unwilling to spend, and that they would improve management, even thou if there is political will and leadership, you can obviously have a well run public corporation. A better run public railway is the solution.
From my study of high speed rail overseas, what you really do see is "mixed-enterprise" railways, and that is what I think is missing in the US. The mantra "no public money for private HSR" is commonplace despite the fact that public dollars in the many billions are offered up to private enterprise, from sporting stadiums (Las Vegas Raiders) to TV factories (Wisconsin-Foxxcom)… why is HSR, which is of clear very long-term public benefit, different? I would have a lot more faith in the Texas Central project if it had the active support of the state government, and if it was structured as a private-public partnership with some public capital subsidy, perhaps free right-of-way or America's favorite subsidy… tax breaks. I'm unaware of a completely private successful high-speed rail project elsewhere in the world.
I think California in its planning of its CaHSR project would have benefited greatly if from the start the state had partnered at the start with a established overseas vertically integrated high-speed rail from Japan, South Korea, or Europe, by creating a company with mixed public and private ownership. The authority lacked the in house institutional knowledge to design a entirely new high speed railway, and I think is shows. The over reliance on consultants is a big issue in the states, I read many of the reports they prepare, and they don't actually seem to know much about modern intercity rail services. If I was a governor of a state that wanted to build a new HSR line, I would call up JR East or the SNCF and has if they wanted to make a deal to design-build-operate-and con-own a new HSR service in my state. Now that DB is taking a big role in the CaHSR project, I hope that it becomes more successful.
One big issue in the USA is that the Northeast Corridor I think may be one of the most complex high speed railways in the world, even compare to the East Coast, West Coast, and Great Western mainline in the UK. You have massive amount of traffic on very old infrastructure, including many lift-bridges and several tunnels. On the other side of the nation you have the CaHSR project I think may be the most difficult "first" high speed railway ever built by any country in terms of length and terrain being crossed. Its 450 miles long, crosses three mountain ranges, and has to enter two densely built up urban regions. As a result, both are super expensive build or rebuild. The result is that HSR always looks like a project that will take forever to build and cost an enormous amount of money.
Perhaps the new "Brightline" service and if Texas Central gets built, it will change the perception of HSR in the USA, by showing that for a few billion you can actually get a lot.
2018/02/24 - 22:05 Ian Mitchell
Three? Isn't it just altamont and tejon passes?
2018/02/25 - 03:03 Fluffy Bunny Slippers
I think the passes would be Pacheco pass, Tahachapi Pass and Soledad Pass as it will go up to the antelope valley like most of the other trains and not up Tejon Pass like the 5
2018/02/25 - 05:32 Alon Levy
SNCF did actually offer such a design-build-operate deal. The state didn't take it, for two reasons:
1. SNCF wanted a cost-plus model guaranteeing it a rate of profit, which the state would not agree to.
2. SNCF wanted to change the alignment to avoid going through Downtown Bakersfield and Fresno, instead serving them peripherally the way the LGVs don't enter cities (except Lille, which is a 200 km/h zone for nonstop trains and not a 300 km/h zone). I forget if it also wanted to go via Tejon and Altamont rather than the Tehachapis and Pacheco, but if it did then that would be a nonstarter for the HSR Authority, too.
2018/02/25 - 12:35 Brendan Samuel Dawe
I didn't know they wanted cost plus. That should have been enough reason than the holocaust bullshit that some at the state decided to smear around
The state didn't try to negotiate something better than cost-plus.
2018/02/26 - 13:41 Drunk Engineer
According to published accounts, SNCF did not propose a cost-plus deal. SNCF (and the investors) would have assumed all the risk.
See http://www.transdef.org/Blog/Whats_hot_assets/High-speed%20rail%20officials%20rebuffed%20proposal%20from%20French%20railway.pdf.
2018/02/24 - 21:36 Charles Smith
BRAVO!!!!!
"does the infrastructure owner assume the design speed is high and charge slower trains extra for taking high-speed slots"
Forgive me if I'm wrong, but isn't this just the answer right here?
State-run or not, agencies piddling away valuable infrastructure should pay dearly for doing so, shouldn't they?
I'm sure NJTransit could rearrange the schedules so every thing runs on the local tracks. And that sort of things works both ways, Amtrak would have to pay Metro North for clogging up their schedule.
2018/02/25 - 00:38 Michael James
Benjamin Turon 2018/02/24 – 20:50
From my study of high speed rail overseas, what you really do see is "mixed-enterprise" railways, and that is what I think is missing in the US. The mantra "no public money for private HSR" is commonplace despite the fact that public dollars in the many billions are offered up to private enterprise, from sporting stadiums (Las Vegas Raiders) to TV factories (Wisconsin-Foxxcom)… why is HSR, which is of clear very long-term public benefit, different?
I genuinely don't know what you mean by "mixed-enterprise" railways. Is there a single true HSR in the world that wasn't built by government? (Of course I don't mean the private building contractors etc that do the work. And let's exclude vaporware … ) None in Europe, Japan or China AFAIK, so that leaves Korea? Thatcher refused to allow government to fund or even help fund HS1 (Dover to London section of Eurostar line) and that is why it languished for 12 long years after Eurostar first began operations. It required her political demise and then heroic efforts by a few renegade Tories (notably Heseltine) to get the thing built.
Of course private interests will be happy to build HSR as a PPP conditional on majority funding and risk being taken by government, ie. their favourite model (communalise costs/losses/risks, privatise profits). Those stadia are a perfect example; ie. perfectly bad example.
The authority lacked the in house institutional knowledge to design a entirely new high speed railway, and I think is shows.
It's the Anglosphere disease. Governments have deliberately dismantled it over the past 4 decades. It's why the Anglosphere is, without exception, without HSR. (I grudgingly might admit HS1 but it owes more to the French than the Brits, another reason why Thatcher opposed it so viciously.) But this sad fact should not lead to resignation to, and full surrender to, vested private interests. Instead it implies the only solution is to revitalize institutional expertise, for which there are plenty of highly-successful models, needless to say outside the Anglosphere.
The UK doesn't have HSR (unless you count HS1, which you shouldn't), but it has the fastest legacy intercity rail in the world that I know of. The WCML and ECML average 140 km/h on city pairs like London-Birmingham, London-Manchester, and London-Leeds, and if I remember correctly London-York approaches 160 km/h, comparable to some of the slower HSR lines in the world, like those of Germany. Another such place is Sweden, which has no HSR (and shouldn't build any) but has 200 km/h tilting trains averaging about 140 km/h between Stockholm and Gothenburg or Malmö.
The WCML is good enough at places, to the point that Network Rail should have considered what I'm proposing for the NEC: no brand new line, but rather strategic bypasses to allow high speed. The question is whether there's enough capacity on the fast lines into London, and my understanding is that the real capacity bottleneck is in South London, particularly the South West Main Line, rather than anything feeding the main intercity terminals north of the Thames.
The problem is that Glasgow and Edinburgh are a long way (700+km) from London, so HSR makes a lot of sense, especially as (unlike France but like Japan) some 90% of the UK population lives in a quite narrow corridor making it very efficient (almost the same as the NEC on distance and population).
As I understand it, the main reason for building HS2 is that modifying the existing East and West Coast Mainlines would be horrific, especially as they are such heavily used routes. In fact they are already subject to lots of disruption for maintenance which creates a lot of complaints. The concept is that (at least for the WCML) the HS2 will allow much more effective repair and improvements of the old lines without any disruption (as pax will be able to use the HSR), plus it is planned for the old WCML to serve more smaller city destinations en route (which can't happen when its major job is connecting the major cities). It should be win-win for everyone, including all the habitual complainers in those smaller cities.
But then, I reckon they should have built it as maglev … like NEC should.
Re Sweden: I guess your rationale of not building HSR is entirely econocratic but 320km/h versus 140km/h is a big difference. And an approx. 3h link to Malmö, versus the current 6h, would really shrink the country and of course it would be an international route, continuing across the Øresund Bridge to Copenhagen and the rest of Europe (thus leveraging that high cost infrastructure even more). These things usually repay their capital cost many fold over (not in train fares of course). On those grounds I guess you wouldn't have recommended building the Madrid to Barcelona HSR line (almost identical distance). Well ok, much bigger populations & economies etc, though the international connection to the rest of Europe was another common factor.
Re Sweden to Malmö, if you built it going west you would have covered about half the distance to Oslo so only a teensy ≈200 km spur and you'd have a genuine Scandi-HSR network linking all the major nordic cities! Now linking Helsinki might be a tad of a stretch … (Probably provoke some Scandi-Noir; I noticed that the third season of The Bridge is starting next week here.)
2018/02/25 - 07:46 Untangled
Wow, only the third season, we really are getting shafted when it comes to overseas TVs and movies. Never mind that the forth begun 2 months ago.
BTW, isn't Stockholm to Malmo 4 hours now, not 6? You would want new HSR line to do better than 3 hours if it's to be worthwhile.
Also, with Denmark building a new tunnel to Germany, a new high-speed link from Stockholm to Copenhagen will mean much shorter travel times onwards to Hamburg and maybe even beyond. Connecting it to Hamburg and Germany is more realistic than Helsinki.
It's not even that good of a TV show. I bailed after the first episode of season 2. In season 1, the interactions between the two leads are precious, but the plot is weak and the resolution is really weak. It's one of those rare shows that would be made better if it were more episodic, because the escalating murders of season 1 don't really work given who the murderer turns out to be.
A lot hangs on "much bigger populations and economies." Stockholm County has 2.5 million people and the Malmö metro area has 700,000 (and Copenhagen has another 2.5 million). Madrid has 6 million and Barcelona 4.5 million, and Zaragoza in between has another 800,000. Sweden just has really poor population distribution for HSR, unlike Japan, or for that matter the UK, which as you note is fairly linear.
A lot hangs on "much bigger populations and economies.
Yes, yes. I used the Seville-Madrid-Barcelona HSR as an argument for the Melbourne-Canberra-Sydney HSR case: roughly comparable in distances and population catchment; not to mention Syd-Melb is the second or third busiest city-pair air-route in the world. I am sure I gave you the reference for my article in The Age (almost a decade ago).
The Øresund Bridge cost about $3bn which is rather a lot for such small populations, as you point out, don't you think?
Untangled, it may well be the fourth season of The Bridge (though I am talking about its broadcast on SBS, ie. free-to-air, which is sometimes a season behind if it is also broadcast on pay-tv in Oz). I only watched the later seasons sporadically–partly because it was late at night and partly because it wasn't so good. (I'm also ten years beyond being a bit bored with autistic or whatever main characters in tv shows. I preferred the all-too-human fat philandering cop but he was written out … )
Stockholm to Malmö is ≈620km so yes, I should have said closer to 2 hours than 3h. I agree with your other comments about the other links to Europe. My remark about Helsinki was a joke (about half the distance–of ≈500km–is over water, currently a 12h ferry trip) … but it would be nice … and then logically a link to St Petersburg (which is already HSR linked to Moscow).
BTW, my first trip to Copenhagen, coming from Hamburg I guess (this was about 37y ago), was an overnight sleeper train that actually was rolled on to a ferry for the journey across the straits (now replaced by the StoreBaelt bridges & tunnels). Those were the final years of the grand age of European (wagonlits) train travel. HSR is the new grand European age of train travel. (if Alon and his ilk don't kill it with economic rationalist nitpicking … 🙂
2018/02/25 - 10:25 Eric
It's for cars and road freight as well as rail.
Eric, I was being facetious. I generally believe in building, indeed overbuilding, infrastructure. But I was making a dig at Alon who likes to make fine econocratic modelling to see if population and economic issues "justify" such infrastructure. Thus: would the "Malmö metro area of 700,000" really justify a $3bn car/rail bridge?
Of course it connects to Stockholm (and Oslo) but that is a 8h+ trip by car and still 5h+ by train … So, actually I reckon they could run a car+truck-train like on the Channel Tunnel. And upgrade the rail so it is only 2h+ …
In the Anglosphere we spend 10x more time and political capital in arguing whether we should build infrastructure. HSR to link our east coast cities (where 70%+ of all Australia's population lives) was first mooted in the early 1980s when the (either French or Japanese) offered to build it for a few billion dollars … today, still arguing about it and the last enquiry (which cost $20m to the consultancy that did it) came up with a figure of $120bn (partly because in all this time a ROW was never reserved so a lot of tunnels etc and expensive land requisition is now required). It turns out that the single biggest cost, in the Anglosphere, of building infrastructure, is the absurd delays in deciding to build it. The reason we didn't build that HSR 40 years ago is that the Federal Treasury demanded it be cost-neutral over 4-year Budget forward-estimates; I kid you not.
I don't see why tunnels or ROW would be needed. Just go north from Melbourne, then northeast when the land gets flat, then east along M31 to Sydney. This route is basically all rural farmland.
Eric: "I don't see why tunnels or ROW would be needed."
That is what a lot of people, including some engineers, think. It has become a political imperative that the route through cities be in tunnels because politicians are too gutless to propose resumption of private homes & land in cities. Thus the "official" plan (by AECOM) includes 67 km tunnels in Sydney alone. There is a total of 144 km of tunnels or 8% of the total length and 29% ($33bn) of total cost ($114 bn). The problem is that Sydney is a vast sprawling mess that is geographically hemmed in by the sea and mountains, and not enough rail ROW to anywhere to be able to squeeze in a HSR in addition to suburban trains.
In the UK, the same issue of refusing to widen suburban rail ROW is driving up the cost of Crossrail 2. Crossrail 2 is three separate projects: the cross-city tunnel from Victoria to Kings Cross, the tunnel from the Lea Valley Lines to Kings Cross, and the tunnel paralleling the South West Main Line. The South West Main Line has four tracks and is near capacity, so it's not possible to just dedicate the slow lines to Crossrail and let the fast lines handle everything else – it really needs four slow tracks and two fast tracks. There's room in the ROW for six tracks, but it requires replacing the earthen berm with brick retaining walls; keeping the berm means there's only room for five tracks. So instead of doing above-ground improvements TfL wants to build a new tunnel with a bunch of stations inside.
Suburbanites will airly say "just put it in a tunnel". So someone has to do the study that tells everyone that tearing out the berm will cost a gazillion and building the tunnel will cost ten gazillion. The suburbanites will be unimpressed. Then complain that it costs too much. When it's built, they will complain that the new stations are in an icky tunnel. Why wasn't it just across the platform?
It's 2018, the wall would be reinforced concrete with a thin veneer of brick to make it look pretty. If it's even brick. The people applying synthetic stucco can do all sorts of things these days. They could make it look like Victorian navies wrestled granite into place.
Somewhere above, I wrote the following somewhat rude comment about The Bridge:
"(I'm also ten years beyond being a bit bored with autistic or whatever main characters in tv shows. I preferred the all-too-human fat philandering cop but he was written out … )"
The actor is Kim Bodnia and I caught him recently in Killing Eve (which was ok, not overwhelming, and actually does involve yet another "on the spectrum" or at least highly-damaged psychopathic anti-heroine). He was one of the best things in the show, playing Konstantin Vasiliev who was the Russian FSB controller of the autistic (or whatever) contract killer, Villanelle–though at least she had taste, lived in Paris in some style! He dominated any scene he was in. Of course this is confirmation bias but it does confirm my original observation re The Bridge: should have kept him and written out the autistic lady.
The Bridge worked exclusively when it was about the interactions between the two cops. The plot, let's face it, sucked.
Alon Levy, 2018/11/26 – 07:50
Maybe for the first series but the whole autism thing pales very quickly for me. Especially as the screenwriters in many cases mix incorrect elements, in this case the trauma of her sister's death (as if autism or Aspergers can be induced in some way; no it can't). In fact the Franco-Brit clone (The Tunnel) was better in that regard.
But at least we got to see the glorious bridge up close and personal. I'm hoping for a Chinese remake based on the Hong Kong–Zhuhai–Macau Bridge that opened last month.
Of course these involve subtitles so no Americans watched to see some actual modern infrastructure 🙂
What should appear overnight (a few select extracts):
http://www.bbc.com/capital/story/20181122-the-cost-of-the-bridge-between-two-nations
The Cost of the Bridge Between Two Nations
This brooding Nordic Noir backdrop has its own dramatic, twisting tale.
By Maddy Savage, 26 Nov 2018
In 2017 a record average of 20,361 vehicles passed over the bridge each day and approximately 14,000 commuters took the train, despite temporary identity checks lengthening journey times during the first half of the year. Prior to the bridge opening, around 6,000 people a day commuted by ferry.
Both nations supported a stronger regional identity for the Oresund area (home to more than 3.5 million people at that time) by encouraging closer ties between businesses and educational institutions. Locally, there was an urgent need for Malmö to evolve following the collapse of traditional industries such as textiles and shipbuilding.
Firstly, more than 60 companies from a wide range of industries have moved their Nordic headquarters or specialist offices to Malmö since 2000, helping to fulfil the city transformation goals that Swedish government set in the 1990s.
Secondly, he says that the bridge has "improved individual livelihoods" by offering locals subtle changes. Danes can access more affordable housing in southern Sweden, cheaper shopping due to currency differences and can enjoy southern Sweden's coastline and forests.
Malmö has also experienced a boost, especially in more recent years. There were 480,000 overnight visits from foreigners in 2008, increasing to 820,000 in 2017.
"It's weird when people exotify your own culture or your own environment," laughs The Bridge actor Pontus T. Pagler, who says he was shocked to meet fans from as far away as Australia at the Scandinavian premiere of the fourth season. "But I think it's cool…The southern part of Sweden has gotten a boost now, which we haven't had before."
2018/02/25 - 09:39 andrewla
"Such a government entity does not exist in the realm of American public transportation. "
But this is true for all topics. The most productive thing that could be done for American transportation is relocate all the people to France and Japan.
That would make it difficult to eat in places like Japan and France when the when the corn, soy and wheat belts in North America go back to forest and prairie.
Nah, just let them eat cake.
(Someone had to say it.)
By "mixed-enterprise" I'm thinking of how the new Shinkansen lines and other railway projects have been planned, financed, built, and operated in Japan since the 1980s "privatization". There other examples around the world, Britain's rail system today for example. I think that Chiltern Railways could be a good example of what could be achieved in the US, especially the Northeast. The Taiwan Shinkansen is another example, although it also is an example of how you really got to get the finances right and be very conservative in estimates.
How would "mix-enterprise" work in the USA? Let's say for example that Nevada decides that a high-speed railway to Southern California is needed to secure the economic future for Las Vegas, the state could create a new cooperation, of which the state would be an equal shareholder with a private partner/consortium (like an overseas state railway). The state would contribute public funding and other resources like land or right-of-way, while the private partners would bring private financing and expertise in railway construction and operations. If Texas Central was working like the above, I would have more faith in it, right now I don't know how it can succeed with out strong state and federal support, including some sort of capital subsidy or other financial aid.
Most modern economies are "Mixed-Economies" including that of the USA and there are a lot of examples public-private cooperation, partnerships, and interdependence including highways, waterways, and aviation. Historically in the US a lot of public aid was given to the railroads, including local, state, and federal capital subsidies. I just read a history of the New York Central Railroad, a lot of public money and other support was given to the early railroads that were eventually merged into the New York Central. Look how the first transcontinental railways were built in the US and Canada. My question is, why can we do the same with high speed rail?
On the definition of "High Speed Rail" … I think many of Britain's Intercity services due qualify even by the UIC which includes services running at 200-km/h on pre-existing upgrade lines like the West Coast Mainline or the Northeast Corridor. Certainly, decades ago the Intercity 125 and Swedish X2000 were considered "High Speed Rail". Why HS1 is not HSR is beyond me, it's a brand-new line with trains running up to 186-mph connecting London with Paris and several other European cities… but it's not HSR???
What is High Speed Rail?
https://uic.org/highspeed#What-is-High-Speed-Rail
I have been watching the closing ceremonies for the Winter Olympics, and I noticed how in the "Welcome to Beijing 2022" video how China's HSR services were prominently featured. Of course for the PyeongChang Games the South Koreans built an entirely new high speed railway. It really puts the USA to shame. Our "welcome" video would I suppose feature a school shooting or maybe a crashed Amtrak train. SAD!
Concerning the NEC, what might could be a solution (other than just improving existing Amtrak management and increasing its capital funding) is "regionalization" and a "dedicated trust-fund", like in Japan. This would mean spinning the NEC and the connecting state corridors in Virginia, Pennsylvania, Upstate NY, and New England off from Amtrak to a new federal corporation in the model of the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA). Since passenger rail is not self-supporting, a dedicated regional funding source could be created, perhaps a small dedicated sales tax in the counties served by passenger rail service. With better management and a stable predicable source of funding, perhaps real progress could be made to fully realize the potential of the NEC.
Sounds like a fabulous idea. We get our Federal highways too. North Dakota gets theirs. Then we can have a little chat about when there is a round of military base realignment things move to red states. OOOOwwh rural cell phone subsidies. OOOO yeah. They can get satellite phones. And be 90 miles from a hospital because those gooey Federal subsidies to rural health care ended.
A sixth of the population lives in the Northeast, generates a quarter of the GDP and third of the Federal budget. Northeasterners should have nice long discussions about who pays for what and that the local yokels should finance it locally.
But 'dacker, you're looking at this as a glass half-empty. The other approach is to do exactly the Eisenhower thing: to avoid all that red-v-blue, rich-v-poor, populous-v-sparse etc malarkey, just do it nationwide. Can it really cost more than another little war (he sez as the USS Carl Vinson and the Third Fleet today is preparing to challenge those sand islands in the South China Sea).
2018/02/26 - 17:22 smooth indian
I think 'dacker is being sarcastic here.
First, HS1 is not what takes you to Paris. HS1 is about 20% of Eurostar's route to Paris.
Second, HS1 is a mere 108km, from London-StPancras to Dover. It only does its top speed (300 kmph) on the 74km of section 1 (the part in Kent) whereas it does a max of 230 kmph on the rest (partly because a lot of it is tunnel; note that the Chunnel itself has a max speed of (160 kmph?), which in retrospect was a bit of false economy–if we looked at the history we could probably blame that on Thatcher too*). Both are a lot better than when Eurostar first began operation in November 1994 and the trains crawled from Dover to Waterloo at 160 kmph. HS1 opened in November 2007 exactly 13 years after Eurostar began operation.
Thus, technically only part of HS1 is HS (definition of 250 kmph), thus perhaps "HS2/3".
*Joking, kinda. The reason for the speed limit in the chunnel is to not run pax HST mismatched to freight trains. HS1 in Kent has long passing loops to allow freight trains a separate route so as to not impede Eurostar. However, having said all that I think if they were building it today, they would do it differently (not least because the cost of tunneling is lower, and doing a bigger tunnel is not proportionately more expensive, a topic covered by Alon). You'd probably have twin two-track tunnels to separate freight and pax, while also a bigger tunnel might allow doubled-stacked containers?–maybe not, as too much of UK rail loading gauge won't allow it.) There is perennial talk of building another tunnel(s) for exactly these reasons.
2018/02/26 - 00:36 Joey
Nitpick: there was an intermediate period between 2003 and 2007 when HS1 was open as far as Fawkham Junction so between there and Dover was fast but the approach to Waterloo through the London suburbs was still slow.
2018/11/24 - 14:33 TunnelVision
The lower speed in Channel Tunnel was predominantly driven by a reduction in tolerances and quality to get the tunneling finished as quickly as possible. That means after the wriggle survey that speeds had to be decreased a tounch due to dynamic envelope
Considerations. The other issue is that the entire system is designed to be self
Ventilating with piston relief ducts spaces according to train length and speed to
Cause constant circulation of the air in the two tuning tunnels…..
TunnelVision, 2018/11/24 – 14:33
The lower speed in Channel Tunnel was predominantly driven by a reduction in tolerances and quality to get the tunneling finished as quickly as possible.
Could you post some credible links for those assertions? They may be some truth to them but I have never read anything claiming those are the reasons, and frankly ….
Well, answer these questions: is there anywhere that the freight trains which use the tunnel travel faster than 140-160kmph? Do they share the HSR track from Calais to Lille where the trains run at 300kmph? Or the 'new' HSR track Dover to, say, Ebbfleet where the Eurostars also run at similar high speeds? Obviously I refer to standard (container) freight trains not the car + truck trains which, AFAIK, load/unload at Dover and Calais.
I don't find your "predominantly" to be credible, and that the overwhelming reason was the sharing with freight. Now it is possible that once sharing was going to happen (and throughout the day, ie. not just freight restricted to nighttime) then they may have built the tunnel to match. Another consequence of Maggie's short-termist edict on 'no government funding'. It may be why there is constant rumours about building a new tunnel to sever this unfortunate co-dependence. I note that the approx. 40km of tunnel for HS1 were not so compromised on speed.
2018/02/26 - 08:49 Aaron M. Renn
Alon, I don't know if you've written about this before, but what about the idea of separating infrastructure ownership and maintenance from operations? Don't many European countries do that these days? Right now the NEC isn't even owned and operated by a single entity, has multiple power standards, etc. And the various owners don't necessarily play nice with each other as you know.
That sounds like a "Network Rail" for the NEC. From what I read in 'Modern Railways' the UK's rail infrastructure state-owned company as a mixed record, specifically thinking of the issues with the electrification of the Great Western Mainline. It is a int resting idea thou, but the biggest issue is funding. I wonder if things would be different if like the PRIIA Section 209 state-supported corridors, the cost of the NEC was charged to the state governments. I think looking to Washington is a bad idea, given the political mess the national government has been for more than a decade.
2018/02/28 - 08:32 Ed
I will say no
2018/02/28 - 19:51 ethanfinlan1028
One crucial difference with the UK model is that this would not include the franchising scheme, which is the source of much of the controversy around British rail privatisation.
To draw lessons from the sorry British story you really need to understand it. Here is my summary:
Network Rail covers 20,000 miles of track, signaling and 40,000 bridges and tunnels. NR retains ownership of all stations but almost all are leased to the TOCs (Train Operating Companies).
1994-1997: Privatised as Railtrack under John Major government (replaced Thatcher as PM, before Blair elected PM in 1997).
2000: disasters mount as maintenance and status decline.
Oct-2002: Pending collapse causes it to be re-nationalized as Network Rail. (Despite both pending physical collapse and financial collapse, in the months before this, Railtrack paid its management multi-million bonuses and paid a dividend to its shareholders!)
Oct-2003: Network Rail announced that it would take over all infrastructure maintenance work from private contractors, following concerns about the quality of work carried out by certain private firms, and spiralling costs.
Since 2003 Network Rail has been building up significant in-house engineering skills, including funding of apprenticeship and foundation degree schemes. Network Rail reports significant savings resulting from the initial transfers of work away from contracting companies. Additional contracts were taken back by Network Rail after the serious accident at Potters Bar and other accidents at Rotherham and King's Cross led Jarvis to pull out of the track repair business. Shortly after this, and due to other failures by maintenance companies, Network Rail took control of many more maintenance duties.
Then there are the TOCs and their sorry history. Despite the raison d'etre being that private industry will run the trains more efficiently, and stop bleeding public money, it turns out they run it less efficiently, while–get this–still costing central government more than pre-privatisation via convoluted subsidies, and the fact that Network Rail is not allowed to pass on all its costs (including the cost of its £35bn debt) to the TOCs. If the TOCs are making a "profit" it is entirely false accounting and at the public's expense, both as direct and indirect subsidy plus the deterioration of its services. Just google Southern Rail for a taste of the public rage at what neo-liberalism has done to BR. Of course this massive failure had a 50 year preceding period of gross under-investment in the system. But it was always a fantasy (nightmare) that privatising was going to magically cure this problem.
Comments on this blog continue to mention JNR (which actually is the name of the pre-privatisation entity) as if it were a success. While some of the various "private" entities such as JREast are operationally competent, it is false to paint a rosy picture of 'privatisation' in Japan. The original concept was that a JNR entity (ie. a continuing government body) would hold about US$300bn in debt while about $200bn would be held by the privatised entities and they would progressively pay back this debt out of profits. But this failed and JNR (the wholly-government owned JNR Settlement Corporation) had to resume the debt (and meanwhile over the period the debt increased, leaving taxpayers to pay off nearly ¥24 trillion/US$195bn as of 2009). The only reason the privatised entities like JREast show positive balance sheets is from the capital gained by their stock offerings (and the fact that they were literally gifted about $1 trillion in very good infrastructure for which they didn't even have to pay interest on.)
While all this may not be an entirely undesirable outcome (the debt was going to be paid by the Japanese public one way or another; meanwhile they maintained an excellent rail network) how many reading this (especially Brits or anyone in the Anglosphere) think it could work in their country? The UK is a particularly bad (ie. good) example of how disastrous it can get but is still a learning experience for everyone else (outside Asian societies like Japan, China, Hong Kong, S. Korea, Singapore).
The JRs have to pay interest on Shinkansen debt. The debt that was wiped was operating debt from JNR's losses in the 1970s, like SNCF's debt today.
Sounds like a great plan. New Jersey can say "110 is good enough". New York can say "90 is good enough". Connecticut can say "80 is good enough" Massachusetts can say "wires? we don't want wires" Rhode Island, Delaware and Maryland can say "we ain't paying for that stuff we don't use, buses will do" Fabulous!
Or they can get together and say "Fine you don't want to spend billions on icky railroad, here's our plan for widening I-95 to provide the capacity" And the new airport for New York City is going to be difficult to place. I'm seeing artificial island in Long Island sound with rail connections to the Port Washington Branch and New Haven line. And a widened I-287 continued through to Long Island. that cockamamie plan to have the containers get off the slow boat from China in Port Newark and use railroad to get to distribution centers in New England, let 'em truck it across the third span of the Tappan Zee.
Multi-State authorities can work, yes sometimes with hic-ups, the Port Authority of NY & NJ for example, or you can go for a federal corporation like TVA with a multi-state jurisdiction . The key is funding, you need a reliable and dedicated source of annual funding, like a dedicated sales tax, which is how a lot of regional rail transit systems are now being partially funded, for example Denver. As a rail advocate in Upstate NY the biggest issue I see with improving and expanding intercity rail service is the lack of institutional knowledge and of secure multi-year funding. Perhaps a public corporation with an independent stream of dedicated funding could solve there two problems. For regional rail transit, the creation of authorities and dedicated sales taxes (quarter or half-penny) is well established in the US, so why not for intercity rail?
I could imagine a the NEC being spun off to the rail equivalent of a TVA, with a board with members appointed from the states served, and a chairman nominated by the US President and approved by the US Senate. This brings up the question about what happens to the rest of Amtrak, but with PRIIA Section 209 the non-Northeastern corridors would continue to be funded by the states they served. That leaves the long-distance trains, but several of those serve the Northeast, so there would remain the same incentive for the Congressional delegations there to support the rest of Amtrak. Some assets between Amtrak and the new NEC Authority would likely work best if shared, including the Bear and Wilmington shops.
There is strong political support for commuter and HSR in the Northeast, so its unlikely a state would convert their portion of the NEC to a bike trail. The main point I think would to make rail infrastructure and service in the Northeast less vulnerable to politics. That was the one big purpose of the "privatization" of JNR in the 1980s. Ironically from what I have read about privatization in the UK, the opposite as occurred, the politicians and civil servants in Westminster are more involved than other in running the nation's railways.
Hmmm A regional transit authority with a dedicated tax base… They can call the New York City one the Metropolitan Transportation Authority. If Connecticut decided that they would rather contract stuff out they could hire the MTA. And when the MTA decides they would rather contract out stuff on the New Jersey side of the river out perhaps they could come to arrangement with whatever gets formed in New Jersey! Perhaps whack the bridge and tunnel users to generate extra revenue! A small payroll tax!
The one for Boston could be called something like the Massachusetts Bay Transporttion Authority. Philadelphia's let see, something like the South East Pennsylvania Transportation Authority. That sorta leaves New Jersey out. How about Transport of New Jersey? Or New Jersey Transit? Hmmm. The interegional/interregional one could be called something like the National Railroad Passenger Corporation. NerrrPuch isn't very melodious. Something catchy for every day use instead? Hmmmm.
You can merge everything together in the Northeast, intercity and commuter services, to create something akin to JR East.
I'd be in favor of this, but this entity could not possibly be privatized, because it would have a monopoly over transportation at the regional and intercity scale.
We did, it was called Conrail. We sold it off.
I don't think you could do in politically. Yet merging all the commuter railroads and Amtrak's Northeast operations and infrastucture into one multi-state TVA/PANYNJ like entity, with a steady independent stream of revenue from a dedicated trust fund, like the smaller non-Honshu JRs are supported by the "Management Stability Fund"; could create overall a better, more efficiently run, seamless passenger rail system in the Northeast. But I think states would not want to give up their direct control of MARC, NJT, LIRR, MNR, or the MBTA. It would seemingly solve some management/operational issues with Penn Station! There be one railway instead of three! Hopefully there would be the "Red Team" vs. "Green Team" of Penn Central in JR NEC! LOL…
Uh… that is hopefully "NOT" the Red vs. Green of Penn Central.
I think this structure works iff the regional trains can break even operationally. As soon as they need subsidies, state politics come into play; even if they can be supported purely out of intercity rail cross-subsidy, the combined entity would end up prioritizing intercity rail and neglecting regional rail, as is happening under SNCF and as happened under British Rail. Given a lot of sustained effort into cost control, it's possible to keep operating costs down to $3-4/car-km, with very high all-day frequency, i.e. mostly empty off-peak trains; you can get away with an average fare of $0.10-0.15/p-km, so you need to average 30 passengers per car to break even, which is a little less than the LIRR, Metro-North, NJ Transit, and the MBTA average today with almost exclusively peak trains. It's plausible given TOD (the subway in New York averages 31.5 per smaller car), but it's nontrivial.
2018/02/28 - 19:04 johndmuller
With the toxic politics now in effect in the US, whether or not things make sense economically is apparently of little import – try making a cost benefit analysis of The Wall, for example. Unfortunately, the question of whether ANY rationality at all is in play is more the issue. Even the logic of politics is being twisted beyond self-defeating. Sometimes I wonder how the 3rd Reich got started; perhaps the kind of crazy behavior we are seeing here/now is part of the answer to that question.
On a slightly brighter note, I've also wondered for a long time how the people in the so-called Religious Right can live with themselves in this unHoly alliance they are in. I think is is mostly single issue politics over birth control and abortion; they seemingly just hold their noses over the rest of the package. Lately, I've heard that there are church groups in internal disarray where some feel thay would be better holding their noses over choice/right-to-life in exchange for the sweeter smell of the rest of the package on the other side. Despite the lack of a really overwhelming repudiation, that sort of thing did seem to happen in the Mississippi Senate special election – possible good sign.
I hate to say it, but until the Democrats get back some sort of real electoral clout in DC, it seems that the money is going toward xenophobic, war-mongering and oligarchic interests rather than transit or progressive social policies.
Meanwhile, if we think that the crunch is bad now, wait until the impact of the tax cuts starts to be felt in the Northeast – where taxes may really be going up for many – and the states start having to pay for more stuff that Uncle Sam had been buying.
2018/03/01 - 10:40 Pingback: News Roundup: Harmful Obsessions
Leave a Reply to Alon Levy Cancel reply
Transit and Scale Variance Part 3: Grids
Boston Regional Rail
Friends Don't Let Friends Build PPPs
Electronics Before Concrete, not Instead of Concrete
Streets Before Trust
Is Remote Work Viable?
Quick Note: Consumption and Production Theories of Berlin
michaelrjames on Electronics Before Concrete, n…
Lee Ratner on Friends Don't Let Friend…
Max Wyss on Electronics Before Concrete, n…
df1982 on Friends Don't Let Friend…
borners on Friends Don't Let Friend…
michaelrjames on Friends Don't Let Friend…
Paul Dyson on Electronics Before Concrete, n…
Erick on Friends Don't Let Friend…
seangillis78 on Friends Don't Let Friend…
James Scantlebury on Friends Don't Let Friend…
Reedman Bassoon on Friends Don't Let Friend…
Aaron Renn (the Urbanophile)
Alexander Rapp
Auckland Transport Blog
Better Institutions
Burning the Midnight Oil for Energy Independence
California HSR Blog
Caltrain-HSR Compatibility Blog
City Notes (Daniel Kay Hertz)
Corner Side Yard
Fbfree
Gateway Streets
Greater City: Providence
Greater Greater Washington
Green Caltrain
Humanity in Transit
Itinerant Urbanist
Larry Littlefield
Let's Go LA
Lewyn Addresses America
M1EK's Bake Sale of Bile
Market Urbanism
Pennsylvania HSR
Pittsburgh, Youngstown, Akron, Cleveland Arts And Livable City Blog
Public Transport at About.com
Queens Transit
Reason and Rail
Reinventing Transport
Richard Mlynarik
Stop and Move
Systemic Failure
The Austin Contrarian
The Black Urbanist
The LIRR Today
Train Star
Transit Futures
Places I write for
Baltimore Brew
Bay City Beacon
City Metric
DC Policy Center
New York YIMBY
Urbanize.LA
Andre Lot, research scholar in finance
Andrew Obus
Bruce Steinberg
D. W. Rowlands
Dr2chase
Gillian Gillett
https://buyer.bike/
Jim Aloisi, Trimount Consulting and Board Member at TransitMatters
Lawrence Velázquez
Lewis Lehe
Manuela Zoninsein
Matthew Danish
Michael Druker
Nicholas Ober
Varpilah K Chase
Good Transit
Good/Interesting Studies
Personal/Admin
Regional Rail
Shoddy Studies
Urban Transit


CELEBRATE THE END OF SUMMER TOGETHER!
OPEN AIR KABAL ONLINE DJ CONTEST - THIS CONTEST HAS ENDED!
" So you really think you have what it takes? Allright then!
Check out the full regulations of the competition & how to sign up below! "
- All candidates must sign up with a personal made mixtape via e-mail (see below).
- Registrations open on 10.05.2018 and close on 28.05.2018 at 23.59 PM.
- The winner will be handpicked based on his or her mixtape and announced on our facebook page on 02.06.2018.
So what does all this work get you?
- 90 minutes of total creative freedom on OPEN AIR KABAL 12! (Friday 24.08.2018 from 21.00 PM till 22.30 PM).
- Playing at an event with a high-end professional light- & sound set that will later on the evening host several nationally famed deejays.
- Up to 10 spots on the guestlist.
- An addtional 20 free drinks.
- Your artist name on all of our artwork and promotion material.
- The Open Air Kabal Crew has the right to refuse certain candidates if they do not meet the requirements requested to sign up for the competition.
- The Open Air Kabal Crew has the right to refuse certain candidates if they choose to inflict a negative impact to the image of the organisation with their actions and/or visions.
- The Open Air Kabal Crew has the right to add/modify or discard any of the competitions regulations at any time.
- Candidates do not need any kind of (previous) experience to sign up for the competition (as long as they meet the registration requirements).
- Each candidate agrees to (if chosen as the winner of the competition) perform his/her live set at Open Air Kabal 12 (on Friday 24.08.2018 from 21.00 - 22.30 PM) with the necessary equipment provided by the organisation, which will be: 3x Pioneer CDJ2000nxs & 1x Pioneer DJM900nxs.
- Personal own equipment (except laptops) will not be accepted. This means -> NO CONTROLLER SETS!
- Every enlisted candidate must submit a mixtape he or she has created him- or herself.
- The mixtape must be of the same genre the deejay wishes to perform in on "Open Air Kabal 12".
- By signing up for the competion, each candidate accepts the competition regulations.
OKAY, SO HOW DO I SIGN UP?
- A mixtape (you made yourself), of at minimum 12 and at maximum(!) 25 minutes long.
- Make sure you include your artist name, your preferred genre, a short bio of yourself, a good photo (if possible while playing) and previous references/gigs (if you already have some).
- A valid e-mail adress AND cellphone number on which we can reach/contact you.
The Open Air Kabal Crew will always confirm each valid registration back to you via e-mail.
Any other questions? Send them to openairdjcontest@jhkabal.be!


text:
Q: How to pass authentication credientials to php application from a WPF app I have WPF app and Web browser control in it. I am opening a web page which is a  php application.
I need to pass my machine credential's to the php application.
The Web browser control opens a [http://app/login.php]. The user has logged onto the machine with his domain credential's.  The PHP website uses windows authentication..
Both the WPF application and php site are internal application(i.e. same domain)

A: You have a CakePHP application and a login.php? Then there is something seriously wrong with it.
You need to get your current logged in users identity and pass that on to the php application.
See Using windows authentication with php?
If you're using CakePHP 2.0 you might find an LDAP adapter for the AuthComponent. I guess you can use google to find more, I don't know if this one here is any good or not http://www.analogrithems.com/rant/2012/01/03/cakephp-2-0-ldapauth/

A: My answer covers the CakePHP part
Best practice would be to communicate using REST, between your wpf and cakephp. CakePHP provides a very easy way to connect your actions via REST. You will have to connect your authentication method using the REST.
Cake's documentation has a nice section on REST from CakePHP.

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaStackExchange


text:
>Conservation Tourism
>Gabon
>Max Planck Institute>
In 2005, the Max Planck Institute of Evolutionary Anthropology in collaboration with Africa's Eden, initiated a project for habituating wild lowland gorillas and chimpanzees within Loango National Park for the joint purposes of ecotourism and research.
Under the direction of Professor Christophe Boesch and Dr Martha Robbins, a team of researchers and ecoguides began the slow process of habituating these great apes with two objectives.
The first objective is to begin a scientific study of the sympatric populations of gorillas and chimpanzees that live side by side within the park. During the habituation process, emphasis is placed on differences in feeding ecology and habitat use between the two ape species. The researchers of Max Planck Institute (MPI) are also interested in differences in social behavior and grouping patterns between the two species and among other populations of apes in Africa.
The second objective is to habituate two groups of gorillas and one community of chimpanzees for ecotourism purposes, allowing visitors the opportunity to see these animals in their natural environment.
Research Team of the Max Planck Institute
The team includes 3 expatriate researchers, 3 ecoguides and 8 pygmy trackers. The trackers are a vital part of the gorilla habituation process, as they have the skills to follow the trail of gorillas in places where no signs are visible to most human eyes.
Number of gorillas and chimps in Loango
The research team of the Max Planck Institute estimates that there are 8 groups of gorillas and 3 communities of chimpanzees within this zone. Recent efforts have focused on 2 large groups of gorillas near the lagoon and a healthy sized community of chimpanzees closer to the ocean.
Great progress in 3 years time
Max Planck Institute is already three years into the study and great progress has been made with both ape species. Two research camps have now been set up some 10km apart (see below: higher density of gorillas in Yatouga area), one bordering the ocean and the other bordering the large Iguela lagoon.
The study site comprises the 80km² area between and around these two camps, which includes primary and secondary forest; swamp and savannah.
Study on food availability
In parallel with the habituation project, the MPI team has been conducting a study of food availability, specifically phenology studies (variation in fruiting patterns) and studies of vegetation transects on tree and plant studies eaten by the gorillas and chimpanzees:
9080 trees were measured in the vegetation study and 170 different species identified.
For the phenology study, 483 trees from 50 species are monitored on a monthly basis for presence of fruit / flowers / new leaves.
This allows researchers to gain a better understanding of the availability and abundance of fruiting species, and thus assists them in predicting the movements of the apes in relation to the current distribution of resources.
Gorilla habituation
Higher density of gorillas in the Yatouga area
In June 2007, the Max Planck Institute together with Africa's Eden set up a second research camp (Yatouga) beside the Iguela lagoon approximately 9 km northeast of our original camp site (Ozouga). The team explored this area and found there to be a much higher density of gorillas using the forest here than along the coast. Since the construction of this camp, the frequency of gorilla contacts has increased significantly.
Increase in gorilla contacts
An increase in contacts has brought about a change in the behaviour of the gorillas towards the researchers.
Whilst the females and juveniles are still shy of being visible to observers, the silverback frequently stays at close proximity (30-40 m away) for prolonged periods of time. The researchers advance until the silverback barks to warn them that they are too close, at which point they stop and remain motionless for 10 minutes.
The Max Planck researchers then begin the advancing process again until the male barks and so it continues. The rationale is that this allows the gorillas to understand that the researchers respect the distance at which they are comfortable in the presence of the researchers and trackers, and it should result in a quicker increase in their level of trust for humans.
The gorillas have also stopped fleeing for long distances following a contact with the MPI reseachers. When they decide to leave a contact, often they will only move 100-200m away before stopping to feed again. This is a very important step in the habituation process, as it is evidence of an increased acceptance of human presence.
Habituating gorillas is a slow process of gaining their trust and acceptance of humans at close proximity. We anticipate that it will take another 2-3 years before the group is habituated fully and tourism can begin.
Chimpanzee habituation
Chimpanzee habituation is very different from gorilla habituation, as chimpanzees do not leave enough trail signs for systematic tracking to be a possibility because they weigh less.
Fission-fusion community
Chimpanzees have a fission-fusion community structure, which means that they are not in constant contact with one another and often forage in small parties or even alone.
In order to keep abreast of the movements of the rest of the community (who may be over 1km away), chimpanzees use loud vocalisations and drumming on large tree buttresses as a means of communicating with the other members of their group. They are most vocal early in the morning and late in the afternoon, and researchers are able to take advantage of this fact for contacting them.
Vocalisation amongst chimps
During the day they also frequently vocalise for many reasons:
the arrival of another member of the community into a feeding party
excitement at the discovery of a heavily fruiting tree
a dispute between 2 or more individuals over females, food, or dominance
Vocalisations are advantageous for the researchers because they allow researchers to sit quietly in an area of the forest where chimpanzees were seen the day before and wait for them to vocalise.
While chimpanzee habituation is a slow process the project continues to make significant advances, and the Max Planck Institute hopes that in two to three years these apes may be comfortable enough with human presence to allow the first visitors into their special world.
Come learn about western lowland gorillas, discover what the bush meat trade is and learn more about conservation through responsible tourism.
Other conservation projects
In addition to the conservation activities together with our partners: Max Planck Institute and the Fernan-Vaz Gorilla Project, Africa's Eden also supports individuals researchers, mostly in terms of on-the-ground logistical support and accommodation. Below a few examples of supported research by Africa's Eden.
Forever Príncipe conservation alliance is part of the Conservation Tourism Programme on the island of Príncipe in the Gulf of Guinea developed by Africa's Eden. Read more


text:
Terumo Acquires Quirem Medical to Enhance Its Interventio...
Terumo Acquires Quirem Medical to Enhance Its Interventional Oncology Field
TOKYO and DEVENTER, Netherlands, July 15, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- Terumo Corporation (TSE: 4543) today announced it has completed the acquisition of Quirem Medical B.V., a Netherlands-based healthcare startup specializing in the development of next-generation microspheres for Selective Internal Radiation Therapy (SIRT), a treatment for liver tumors. Under the terms of the agreement, Terumo acquired 80.1% of the shares of Quirem Medical. This is over and above its current share position of 19.9%, making Quirem Medical now a wholly owned subsidiary of Terumo.
Terumo will make a one-time, up-front payment of USD 20 million with up to USD 25 million additional payments based on the achievement of future milestones by 2030. It will be funded through cash on hand and will not significantly impact the company's financial projections for the current fiscal year ending March 31, 2021.
Quirem Medical has developed and manufactures QuiremSpheres™, the only commercially available microspheres containing the radioactive isotope Holmium-166. Recent trials have shown the safety and efficacy of holmium microspheres for the treatment of unresectable liver cancer. To improve patient selection, therapy planning and treatment verification, QuiremSpheres can be visualized and quantified even in low concentrations by means of Single-Photon Emission Computed Tomography (SPECT) and Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI). This is unique and cannot be done with currently available Yttrium-90 based microspheres.
Furthermore, Quirem Medical also produces QuiremScout™, a low dose holmium microsphere that helps evaluate the biodistribution of microspheres prior to therapy, and a dosimetry software package, Q-Suite™, which is used to plan QuiremSpheres treatments based on QuiremScout dose imaging. Q-Suite is also able to determine SIRT success immediately after the procedure by converting SPECT and MR imaging into absorbed dose distributions. Together, these three integrated products (QuiremSpheres, QuiremScout and Q-Suite) make up the full Holmium SIRT Platform. The Holmium Platform equips physicians with the necessary tools to optimize SIRT outcomes through more personalized treatment, addressing the individual needs of each patient.
QuiremSpheres, QuiremScout and Q-Suite are CE-Marked and currently available in Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA). In the coming years, Terumo intends to launch the Holmium Platform globally as part of the ongoing expansion of its interventional oncology (IO) portfolio.
"The acquisition of Quirem Medical further strengthens our business, expands on our manufacturing and clinical development activities, and complements our comprehensive suite of offerings to support our customers," said Jim Rushworth, Chief Commercial Officer of the Interventional Systems Division of Terumo.
Using Quirem's innovative Holmium-166 platform technology, physicians are further empowered to drive treatment outcomes after SIRT. "By adding the Holmium-166 platform to our existing IO portfolio, we will further contribute to giving liver cancer patients a better future," said Laurent Domas, Vice President, Global Interventional Oncology Strategy & Therapy Development, Terumo Europe. "This acquisition reflects Terumo's commitment to build a broad platform of loco-regional treatment options for liver cancer and is another step forward as we aim to develop and provide treatment solutions for other organs as well."
"We are very excited with the acquisition of Quirem Medical by Terumo as it will further drive the adoption of our unique product offerings worldwide and accelerate our pace of innovation, reaching more patients that will benefit from our technology," said Jan Sigger, CEO of Quirem Medical.
The global interventional oncology market value is more than USD 1 billion, which is a rapidly growing field with a CAGR of 7%. Within this field, SIRT is one of the main treatments that is expected to help to drive this growth year on year.
Terumo has been building its presence in the interventional oncology field, with product offerings such as the micro catheter system (Progreat™), compressible microspheres for embolization (HydroPearl™), drug-eluting microspheres (LifePearl™), and biodegradable drug eluting microspheres (BioPearl™). In 2015, Terumo invested in Quirem Medical and became the exclusive global distributor of their technology.
About Quirem Medical B.V.
Quirem Medical develops and commercializes the next-generation Selective Internal Radiation Therapy (SIRT) microspheres based on the radioisotope Holmium-166. The company believes the treatment outcome of unresectable liver cancer with SIRT can be optimized with Holmium-166 microspheres, which can be visualized and quantified to improve SIRT patient selection, treatment planning and treatment verification. Its innovative Holmium-166 platform technology provides physicians a complete CE-marked SIRT solution including QuiremScout™, QuiremSpheres™ and the supporting dosimetry software Q-Suite™. The company is based in Deventer, the Netherlands and has approximately 30 employees.
About Terumo
Terumo (TSE: 4543) is a global leader in medical technology and has been committed to "Contributing to Society through Healthcare" for nearly 100 years. Based in Tokyo and operating globally, Terumo employs more than 25,000 associates worldwide to provide innovative medical solutions in more than 160 countries and regions. The company started as a Japanese thermometer manufacturer and has been supporting healthcare ever since. Now, its extensive business portfolio ranges from vascular intervention and cardio-surgical solutions, blood transfusion and cell therapy technology, to medical products essential for daily clinical practice. Terumo will further strive to be of value to patients, medical professionals, and society at large.
Logo - https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/1214359/Terumo_Logo.jpg
View original content to download multimedia:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/terumo-acquires-quirem-medical-to-enhance-its-interventional-oncology-field-301093385.html
SOURCE Terumo