Norway’s SlowTV film of the Bergen to Oslo railway is beautiful and deeply moving: nostalgic. Though I’ve never been to Norway, I’ve ridden trains. While I can count long train rides on my hands, my time commuting on MetroNorth Rail-Road, the New York City subway, and the London Underground are some of my favorite memories. […]
Category Archives: transportation
Dear Amtrak: Learn How to Price Your Service
Apparently you neglected to read my last letter, but with the fast approach of National Train Day and the increase in oil prices making your services slightly more competitive, I thought it might be helpful to bring up the topic again. Your pricing skills suck. Are you intentionally trying to lose money and ridership? Suppose […]
Dear Amtrak
You disappoint me. You don’t understand pricing. Or perhaps you simply have no experience of buying things with your own money. In any case, what are you thinking? I know that you stop in both cities, so I was hoping to take my family from Poughkeepsie to Montreal by train instead of by car. But […]
Competitive Pricing of Substitutes in Transportation
Nate Silver has an interesting, if partial, analysis of statistics comparing modes of transportation based on the National Household Travel Survey. He wonders why Americans prefer to drive long distances than fly, and calculates the costs to be generally cheaper if one flies. Today the Poughkeepsie Journal did the same thing for the costs of […]
The Impact of the Daylight Saving Time Change on Traffic Accidents
It seems to me that accidents would increase during the transitional period surrounding the switch between Standard Time and Daylight Saving Time. And apparently others have asked this question, and looked at the data to see if what effect the transition has. The paper Daylight Savings Time and Traffic Accidents, with related discussion of the […]
Public Works
I was listening to old shows on my TiVo while I repainted the sun room. NOW reminded me that the amount of money that governments spend on mass transit pales in comparison to the amount spent on roads. [links needed, but I’m just taking a short break from painting.] One wishes that Randal O’Toole would […]
Scooters
This morning I heard a piece on the radio about scooter sales in New York City. One of the comments piqued my interest. [The owner of Vespa SoHo, Zachary] Schieffelin says he hopes this means New York will start to look more like London or Rome — the streets buzzing with as many scooters as […]
Mice or Men?
Randall O’Toole‘s latest book, The Best-Laid Plans: How Government Planning Harms Your Quality of Life, Your Pocketbook, and Your Future argues that planners don’t know jack shit. I’ll agree with that. However, he’s got such a big bug up his ass about mass transit, that he completely ignores the fact that the highways were planned […]
Telephony Substitutes for Transportation
One oddity of visiting my family in Virginia is that there’s little to no cellular phone coverage in Highland County. This is partially due to the landscape, and partially to the lack of antennae, though some claim it is because of the proximity to the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in Green Bank, West Virginia and […]
Lesser of Two Evils
We live about five miles, 11 minutes, by car from the Kindergarten, but the Big Sister rides the bus for 30 minutes or more. Last night residents in the Mahopac Central School District voted on a bond proposition. The question before the people was whether the district could raise funds to purchase six new buses […]
Spare the Belt, and Spoil the Child
The Big Sister goes to kindergarten in the Fall. On Tuesday, I went to an orientation session about the school buses, where I learned an interesting thing. The buses have seatbelts. The drivers may “suggest” that the children wear the seatbelts, but the children are not required to wear them. At this tender age the […]
Amtrak Subsidies
Are Amtrak subsidies equivalent to the monies used to prevent the commercial airlines from going belly up after 9/11? If the government pays to maintain private air transportation companies, why not rail?