Patrick Crozier

Every January in Britain, the rail companies put up some of their fares.  And every January in Britain this leads to outrage.

Which is odd, because most other businesses are constantly changing their prices but we don’t get anything like the fuss when they happen to put some of those prices up.

The reason, of course, is government.  In Britain the government regulates a certain number of fares, usually on the busy London commuter routes.  Or, to put it another way, in Britain the government uses violence and the threat of violence to regulate fares.  It is in January that the government allows rail companies to increase their fares in line with inflation plus or minus a small percentage.

Not only is this practice wrong but it also distorts the market leading to overcrowding (see A generic piece on overcrowding).  It also deprives rail companies of the sort of price signals they need to run their businesses successfully.  Because they don’t know how much people are genuinely prepared to pay for a seat, against how much they are prepared to pay to stand, companies don’t know what sort of mix of seating and standing they should be providing.  Nor do they know how many trains they should run and whether increasing the number of trains would justify the cost of, for instance, new signalling. 

Worse still, while allowing rail companies to charge something nearer the market rate is a step in the right direction so long as regulation and the threat of regulation exists, companies are unable to plan for the future.

So, you would allow train companies to charge whatever they like?
Yes.

But wouldn’t they charge the earth?  And when they do wouldn’t that mean that lots of people could no longer afford to get to work and end up unemployed?
What we have here is a conflict between the short term and the long term.  The advantages of market prices will for the most part only be seen in the long-term while the disadvantages (higher prices) will be seen almost instantly. 

One of the sad things is that we don’t know how severe the short term pain is likely to be.  It might indeed lead to the doomsday scenario but equally other things might happen.  For instance, in many cases employers may find that they don’t need all their employees to show up on the dot at 9 o’clock in the morning.  So, it may be possible for many of them to travel off-peak.  Equally, many rail companies may take the view that the profit-maximizing price isn’t that much higher than it is at the moment or that a better way to gain goodwill would be to approach it at only a slow pace, say 20% a year or so.

What sort of long-term gain do you see?
It is difficult to gaze into the future.  That’s one of the weaknesses being in favour of freedom.  You can’t predict with any certainty what will happen.  For instance, it may be the case that something comes along which replaces railways for good.

I could speculate on rail companies running longer trains or double-deck trains or having different classes of carriage: guaranteed seat, standing-room only etc or introducing seats that are locked out of use at peak hours, but I really have no idea what would happen.  All I can be sure about is that it is likely to be a lot better than the situation that we have at the moment.

Notes for the next version

“Outrage”.  We need a better explanation as to why.  I think a lot of it is to do with fear: “I’ve got my job, bought my house and if the fares go up too much one of them is going to have to go.  Hey, I could even end up destitute.” Hmm, actually that’s the fear of fare freedom.  The outrage at a rise is different.

We need something on the history of this.  Before 1940 there was almost no fare regulation at all.  Things seemed to work fine.  Certainly, there was nothing like the outrage we get these days.  OK, there were some problems immediately after the First World War with delays and overcrowding.  I’ve heard the explanation that this was to do with the introduction of an eight-hour day but I would like to get to the bottom of this.

“Not only is this practice wrong...” Weak.  What I want to get across is that the government is using violence and violence is wrong.  I want to point out the inherent niceness of freedom.

Price signals.  Too technical.  I think we need to imagine a situation where price signals would have an impact and avoid using the term entirely.

Could do with a piccie as well.

Actually, I’m not even sure this is the right article.  “A generic piece of fares” might be more appropriate.

Rob Fisher

This slightly odd BBC News video was linked on Google Plus with this description:

As President Raul Castro agrees to allow people to buy and sell cars in Cuba, there are concerns the move could spell the beginning of the end for many of the island’s classic American cars.

This sent flecks of spittle flying around me, but the text does not actually appear on the BBC site I wonder where it came from. Although Michael Voss sounds a bit sad, he does point out that Cubans will be glad to see the back of these cars. One man inherited a car from his father, but would rather have the money to start a business. Well, that’s kind of the point of free markets right there: you can swap stuff you don’t want for stuff you do.

Brian Micklethwait

Here.

Patrick Crozier

I see we have a new Secretary of State for Transport.  You know what? I’ve even met her! Long time ago, mind.

When I heard that news I started thinking about what advice I would give (fantasising that I might ever be asked).

I started coming up with a long list of sensible things like: ending the wheel/rail split, liberating fares, tearing up the Transatlantic air treaties, privatising the road network etc.

But then it occurred to me that what I am doing here is suggesting ways of making the world a better place.  That is not necessarily what politicians want.  What politicians want is to keep their jobs, be popular and climb the greasy pole.  In that case what you really want to be doing, as Ernest Benn said is to be: “...looking for trouble, finding it whether it exists or not, diagnosing it incorrectly, and applying the wrong remedy”

Fortunately, for Justine, most of the non-existent troubles already have plenty of wrong remedies.  Hence, we have CrossRail and HST2 and fare control.  About the only good solution is the proposal to raise the motorway speed limit to 80mph.  That is likely to be hugely popular even if (much to my annoyance) it comes from the EU.  Get your paws all over that one, Justine.

“But what about the economic crisis?”, I hear you say.  That’s the wonderful thing.  The Secretary of State can almost completely ignore it.  Sure, one day it will happen and it will happen to the Department of Transport good and hard.  HST will be cancelled, CrossRail will be abandoned, fares will go up.  It may even be so bad that the government sells the motorways to get it through the week.  But when that happens it becomes oh-so easy for a Secretary of State for Transport to say: “Oh dear, unexpected economic conditions, no money, nothing I can do etc, etc.”

So, just from a political standpoint (putting prosperity, wealth generation and morality to one side for the time being) I see no reason why Justine Greening shouldn’t promise the earth.

What has she got to lose?

Patrick Crozier

Some overcrowding

The reason for this is simple enough: plain ordinary supply and demand.  Normally prices adjust so that supply and demand are in balance.  But when fares are artificially held down by the government - as they are in London - supply falls and demand increases.  In this case it means less space and more passengers and thus, overcrowding.

[As an aside. I always find it funny how the same people who condemn high fares also condemn overcrowding which is a direct result of low fares.]

There is also an issue with investment.  Even if the incentives lined up there would be a problem.  Train operating companies (last time I looked) typically have a government-mandated franchise period of about 7 years.  But trains take 20 years to justify the investment so it makes no sense for operators to buy longer trains - let alone build the longer platforms needed to accommodate them. [Not that they could given that these are owned by Network Rail.]

Now the overcrowding situation in Tokyo is far from perfect but if I had to be overcrowded I would be overcrowded in Tokyo.  There is more standing room so you are more likely to be able to stand up straight and there are more doors per carriage so it’s easier to get out.  And if you are extraordinarily lucky and manage to get a seat it is at least comfortable.  I can’t help but think that this is due to Japan’s rather more sensible private railway system in which operators own both the trains and the track and can do more or less what the like with them.  [Except, incidentally, when it comes to fares which like London are held down.  Hence the overcrowding.]

Isn’t all this just a case for state ownership?
We tried that.  It was called British Rail and there was plenty of overcrowding there too.

Why was overcrowding so bad on British Rail?
Because politicians liked keeping fares down but disliked shelling out for new rolling stock.

But if fares were free wouldn’t the train companies put them up sky high?
I don’t know what would happen initially.  When markets are introduced overnight all sorts of funny things happen because the price signals aren’t in place.  It takes a while for things to adjust and (in this case) for train companies to work out just what their customers really want.  What you have is a choice between short-term pain and long-term gain or short-term gain and long-term pain.  There is no short-term gain, long-term gain option to my knowledge.  [Writing this I am reminded of Brian Micklethwait’s quest for examples of where freedom makes things better overnight.  Not here I’m afraid, Brian.]

It is worth remembering that in the days when fares were freer (before nationalisation) although people grumbled (particularly about freight rates - but that’s another story) it wasn’t that big an issue.

Isn’t it pretty obvious what people want? What they want is a seat.
Is that true?  Sure they want a seat but how much do they want it?  Let’s face it on many lines in London you can get a seat if you are prepared to pay the First Class fare.  But how many people are prepared to do that?  The truth is that people are prepared to forgo the comfort if it means saving some money.

For what it’s worth, my guess is that given enough freedom and enough time things will work out for the better for just about everybody.  Some companies will change their working hours for some staff encouraging them to travel outside the peak.  Train companies will have a variety of classes ranging from luxury to standing-only depending on what people are prepared to pay.  And standing will be nicer.  One of the worst aspects of standing in London is that you can never stand up straight.  You’re always standing at a slightly contorted angle.  Usually because you are bang next to a seat.

But I think you would also find that train companies would invest heavily on routes people wanted to use.  They would lengthen trains and platforms and improve headways and remove bottlenecks.

Rob Fisher

The South African budget airline Kulula has some amusing liveries:

Flying 101 livery

This Way Up livery

Snopes has a video of their quirky pre-takeoff announcement. Novel at first, but possibly annoying if you fly with them all the time. I do like the liveries, though. The side of a plane is an interesting canvas, it’s nice to see some imagination used to paint it.

Rob Fisher

The LA times has a nice picture gallery comparing the ways different airlines have used the space on their A380s.

I think Emirates first class wins on bling factor alone. The features sound nice, too:

Enclosed suites afford passengers in first class a high degree of privacy. The suites feature sliding doors, a personal mini-bar, wardrobe and a 23-inch wide viewing monitor. The seats recline to form a fully flat bed. A divider that separates adjoining suites can be lowered for passengers traveling together. Like business passengers, first-class fliers have access to an exclusive lounge.

Brian Micklethwait

In recent weeks and months I have been exploring the area around the big old East London docks, beyond the Docklands Towers, the ones that feature in the opening credits of Eastenders, and the ones which have London City Airport in the middle of them.

Here is the relevant bit of google maps.  Zoom in a couple of times in the middle of that, and you will see the area I’m talking about.  You will see it even better if you click on “satellite”, which I have only recently learned to do.  Do that and you can see actual railway lines and actual airplanes.

My most recent wanderings around there saw me trying to find a path beside the river, starting at the north end of the Woolwich Ferry, going west.  I didn’t get very far.  I soon came upon industrial estates and jetties sticking out, places where actual work was being done, and actual transport, on the river.  (A surprising amount of freight still seems to move up and down the river these days, in among all the more eye catching and frequent pleasure boats.) In the industrial estates pedestrians are not encouraged, although I did venture into one of them, until I got to a wall and had to turn around and go back.  As for the jetties, random pedestrians can’t get anywhere near the river near them.  Basically the Thames footpath stops.

On an earlier expedition, I had started at the same point, north end of Woolwich Ferry, and travelled East.  For a while, fine, there was a rather nice park right next to the river.  But then it again stopped.  There does seem to be an aspiration to have a continuous Thames Path in that part of London, on the north of the river as well as the south (which already has such a path), just as there is everywhere else.  But it is taking a very long to time to join up in that particular part of London.  At present the path there exists only in rather forlorn and run-down little fragments.

So, anyway, on this most recent trip going west along the river, frustrated by industry, I turned right, northwards, back towards the docks and the airplanes.  And I bumped into Crossrail.

It’s pretty hard working out where all the various railways in that part of London go, just as footpaths are also hard to identify.  Maps are not always helpful, often showing stations but not the lines between them, especially if they are in tunnels.  (Although, as I have only just now discovered, if you click on “Public transport” in Google Maps, then things like underground railways become a lot clearer.  (No, scrub that.  It doesn’t become clearer, because the blue line calling itself the Docklands Light Railway does not appear where the DLR physically is.  It merely connects the stations, like a crow flying between them.  There are separate graphics, sometimes but not always, for where the railway actually is.  Very confusing.))

Basically, there are two branches of the Docklands Light Railway, one going north of the docks, and one to the south of them and then under the river to the Woolwich Arsenal.  Plus, there is also a defunct regular railway line, that starts off on the north side of the docks, but then goes under them, and then goes along the middle of a long straight boulevard called variously (depending which side of the boulevard you are on), Connaught Road, Factory Road and Albert Road, between the docks and the river, just south of the southern branch of the DLR, and then it too disappears into a defunct tunnel that goes under the river to the south.

However this defunct railway and its defunct tunnel will soon both be funct again, because Crossrail will be making use of it.  At present, the line is a charming rural wilderness trail, fenced off, and dividing the Connaught Factory Albert boulevard down the middle.  So make up your mind good and early which side of the Connaught Factory Albert bourlevard you need to be on.

But although this means that although Crossrail will be going within a couple of hundred yards of the City Airport, which is right in among the docks to the north of where Crossrail will be, there are not now any plans for the trains to stop at this spot.  It will stop at the top left of the docks, as it were, at a station called Customs House, nearly half a mile’s walk to the airport, and it will stop on the other side of the river, but, so far as I can work out from the www, not near to City Airport.

There already is a Docklands Light Railway stop at City Airport, on the southern bit of it.  However, the DLR is, for users of City Airport, very slow and frustrating.  It takes an age to trundle its toy train way, stopping at every little stop on the way, from real London out to these docklands, which are beyond even the regular Docklands that people mean when they say that.  I imagine most users of City Airport arrive by car, typically driven by someone else.

The relationship between City Airport and Crossrail seems to have been quite acrimonious (sorry I read this on the www recently but I forget where).  The impression I get is that Crossrail is perceived by City Airport almost as a bug rather than a feature, which seems a bit strange.  It’s as if Crossrail is threatening to flood City Airport with Ryanair plebs, rather than the genteel taxi-delivered suits it now caters to.

Or, maybe all this Crossrail activity is driving up local land prices and threatening to complicate various expansion plans that City Airport has.  City Airport is certainly very busy.  Airplanes land or take off there pretty much continuously.  So I guess they figure that getting yet more people to their airport is not their problem.  Their problem is making their airport shift more people to and from the air.

I have lots of photos of this part of London that I have taken on my various trips.  I hope to post some of these at my personal blog in the nearish future, but promise nothing.  If any such snaps do materialise, I will put a link to them here.

Rob Fisher

I am a fair weather motorcyclist. I tend to tax my bike for 6 months of the year. For the other 6 months I have to declare SORN—statutory off road notification. This is onerous enough. And if we get some freakish good weather in November it takes considerable effort to get it taxed and then SORNed again. Since tax refunds are only given for whole months, if the good weather only lasts a week I lose.

To add insult to injury, there is a new rule that you must have insurance unless your vehicle is declared SORN, even if you are not using it on the road. It so happens that my insurance expires tomorrow but I have no plans to use the bike for a few weeks. I don’t want to pay for insurance I don’t need, and if I do SORN the bike in the middle of the month I won’t get the full refund. Perhaps more importantly, I don’t have time to research insurance quotes and I don’t have time to visit the Post Office for SORNing and re-taxing.

Politicians and bureaucrats do not consider the full costs of their interference in people’s lives.

Brian Micklethwait

A friend recently journeyed to the Hebrides, for one of those team-bonding, business-building get-togethers.

She had an interesting journey.  If, like me, you like small airports, you’ll love Barra.  It’s a beach with a bungalow on it!  Well, a bit more than a bungalow, but not a lot more.

So, presumably you can only land when the tide’s out.

Indeed:

The schedule is still governed by the ebb and flow of the tide …

Here’s the plane she rode in on, on the beach, snapped with her iPhone:

It’s a British European de Havilland Canada DHC-6 Twin Otter, or so I presume.  I like these obscure planes you’ve maybe not heard of, that do so much of the quiet donkey work in the world’s out-of-the-way places, of which, I surmise, there are a very great many.

Here’s a video of the same (or an extremely similar) plane landing at Barra.

And here’s an iPhoto my friend took from inside her plane, of that bizarre propeller effect that you get with mobile phone photography of propellers:

It’s fun the first few times you see this.  Ah the romance of propellers.  It’s like there are still real steam trains everywhere, rather than just pretend ones for tourists and for weekend loonies to play with.

Rob Fisher

Virginia Postrel reports on Bent Flyvbjerg’s studies into the costs of public infrastructure projects:

On average, urban and intercity rail projects run over budget by 45 percent, roads by 20 percent, and bridges and tunnels by 34 percent.

And the averages tell only part of the story. Rail projects are especially prone to cost underestimation. Seventy-five percent run at least 24 percent over projections, while 25 percent go over budget by at least 60 percent, Flyvbjerg finds.

By comparison, 75 percent of roads exceed cost estimates by at least 5 percent, and 25 percent do so by at least 32 percent.

Promoters of rail and toll-road projects also tend to substantially overstate future use, making those projects look more appealing to whoever is footing the bill. Rail projects attract only about half the expected passengers, on average, while in new research still in progress, Flyvbjerg finds that toll roads (including road bridges and tunnels) fall 20 percent short.

H/T Instapundit.

This doesn’t bode well for Crossrail. I’m also wondering how the M6 toll road is working out. It seems like a fantastic road to me, but is it making enough money?

Rob Fisher

She has a folder of information. Everyone has folders for their car stuff? How can the whole world be so organized? How can the government require that you be this organized to get through life? Why is no one protesting?

That’s from a post by Penelope Trunk who has Asperger’s syndrome, about struggling with registering her car at the DMV, which is presumably one of those rituals people in the USA take for granted. We have similar rituals here in the UK, and I can relate to a lot of what’s in that post, particularly the above quote.

Brian Micklethwait

This, on the other hand (see immediately below), looks like it might have its uses.

When I was a kid I used to have a lot of fun throwing rulers through the air, while imparting a massive amount of under spin, like one of those hovering slices you do in ping pong, releasing the ruler sideways on.  Hope that makes sense.  The result was a whirring tube of physics activity that used almost to hover motionless.  I’m guessing that the FanWing concept makes use of the same principle, and gets it seriously organised.  The principle seems to be that, since an aircraft gets its lift from air passing fast over its wings, the more “wing” you can contrive to get air passing fast over, and the faster it can pass (even if the aircraft itself is moving very slowly, like my rulers), the more lift you get.

On the other hand, they’ve been messing around with this thing for over a decade, and it still seems like little more than a toy.

But then again, I presume it took them quite a while to get those other contraptions based on similar principles, helicopters, working usefully.

Brian Micklethwait

When someone invents a totally new kind of transport, usually with not enough wheels, they tend to release a video which at least tries to suggest that, although actually mad, the new means of transport has glimmerings of sanity, and might have its uses for something other than sport, where the new mad machine merely competes against itself.

But this video, of EDWARD the Electric Dicycle, seems to be going out of its way to prove that EDWARD the Electric Dicycle is completely insane, and has no uses whatever apart from turning its insane occupant upside down for no reason.

Strange.

Brian Micklethwait

I recently spent a week in Brittany (see various postings here, staying with friends who live in the city of Quimper, which at the south west end of the Brittany peninsula, just before you get to the final southern tip.

I’ve stayed with these friends before, and on every trip before this latest one, I’ve flown Ryanair from Stansted to Brest, Brest being about an hour by car north of Quimper.  But the bad news is that Brest airport has recently constructed a swanky new Norman Foster type building, with lots of sloping glass and metal struts everywhere and a general absence of rectangles.  Somewhere in among all these new arrangements, there was a fight with Ryanair, the upshot of which was that Ryanair no long does flights from Stansted to Brest.  Strangely, though, Ryanair still does flights from Brest to Marseilles.

I’m guessing that this either has to do with money or with time, or perhaps a bit of both.  Maybe Brest airport wants to be paid more, or Brest itself wants to pay less, for Ryanair flights to and from London.  Or, the new airport arrangements mean that Ryanair can’t turn its planes around as quickly as it used to be able to.

Also, you can’t help suspecting that perhaps Brest built itself a posh new airport terminal because it wants a better class of persons to come to Brest from London, and from many other classy spots, and the dribble of Ryanair riff-raff to stay away.  Maybe some day soon there will again be flights Brest/London flights, but more expensive ones, containing richer and better dressed persons.  But those are just guesses.

Anyway, whatever may have caused the Brest/London Ryanair flights to end, for this latest visit I had to go from Stansted to Dinard, which is the airport of the port city of Saint Malo, which is at the other end of the Brittany peninsula, to its north west, about four hours drive from Quimper.  Very tiresome.  My hosts kindly collected me from there on the way.  And on the way back, I and Mrs Host were both going to London, so we went by train from Quimper to Saint Malo (changing at Rennes), and then took a bus to Dinard and a taxi from Dinard to the airport itself.  All very cumbersome.

It did give us a chance to wander about in Saint Malo, which was good, and I got to go by train in France, which I’ve not done for decades, unless you count Eurotunnel trips to Belgium, Germany, etc.

While we relaxed in the small bar at Dinard airport, Mrs Host and I agreed about how agreeable these small airports are, compared to huge designer cattle shed airports like Stansted, and such as Brest seems now to want to be.  Mrs Host reminisced about a cheep and delightfully informal flight she once took from a tiny airfield in Kent, to a similar airport not very near to Paris, for about £45 in about 1990, in a propeller driven plane.  Our preference was confirmed hideously when we got to Stansted, at about eleven o’clock at night, to find ourselves at the back of a vast hoard of incomers to London, waiting while too few people indolently looked at everyone’s passport.  Were they seeking a terroristic pin?  If so, we were the haystack.  It was bank queue hell multiplied by a hundred.  Actually, it was over rather sooner than it at first looked like it would be, but first impressions were deeply unpleasant, and are hard to forget.

This experience makes me think that the long-term future of air travel is lots of small airports rather than a few big ones.  The big ones can’t get any bigger, or nastier.  And the bigger the big airport planes (I’m thinking A380) get, the naster it will get to use these airports.

Dinard airport, meanwhile, was a delight.  It’s not quite just the one shed.  An architect was involved at some point in making the ugly boxy building where you congregate, but this feels more like a railway station than an airport, and what is more a railway station that is quite a bit smaller and more relaxed than, say, Rennes railway station.  Dinard airport is small, and shows no sign of wanting to get any bigger.

Indeed, if that bar we relaxed in is anything to go by, they positively glory in their smallness.  There are pictures there of old airplanes, with propellers, and of people in goggles posing in black and white or sepia in front of byplanes.  There were things like this ...:

… and this:

Boeing having bet their farm on the Dreamliner, a two engined go-anywhere improvement on the now ubiquitous Boeing 737 (which is what Ryanair now uses for most of its flights, including all my Brittany trips).  Airbus have bet their farm on the A380, a four engine enlargement of the Boeing 747.

In the short run, maybe Airbus have a point.  If the current question is: How can we get more cattle through the big cattle shed airports?, then the A380 may well be the answer.  And if the question is: How can we give more legroom to more money-no-object globetrotters, trotting globally from one huge financial centre to another?, ditto.

But what if, in the longer run, the question turns into: What’s the best way to get little clumps of people, inexpensively, from a small airport somewhere in the world but nowhere in particular (like Dinard or for that matter Quimper, which also has a small railway station type airport) to another small airport somewhere else in the world, for the tiny number of people who want that particular journey, yet who don’t want to be treated too much like a herd of cattle?

Maybe if you run the air passenger business, and run airports, the first two questions are what you now obsess about.  But speaking as a passenger, I can tell you that I greatly prefer the latter question.

I want a Dreamliner world, rather than an A380 world.

I see that I have blogged here before about this great commercial Confrontation Of Our Time.  In that earlier posting I quoted someone saying this:

How would you like to line up at customs having just gotten off the back of the second or third A-380 to arrive? Would passport control take longer than the flight?

Exactly.  What I feared was going to happen at Stansted on the night I passed through this week, would happen, at a truly mega-airport like Heathrow, for real.

I could ramble ever onwards, but instead I will say: over to Michael Jennings for more detailed answers to all of my questions, and for many more facts to back up or contradict my speculations.

Michael Jennings

Prepare yourself for the full horror.

Brian Micklethwait

Last week, in the London Evening Standard, the now free London evening paper, hard pressed commuters (commuters are always hard pressed – it’s the law) were able to read this, about some not so lucky fellow commuters:

Rail commuters were trapped on a train for up to six hours and then threatened with arrest when they tried to escape overheated carriages.

Tens of thousands of people - including a woman who is eight months pregnant - were caught up in the chaos that left 60 trains stranded last night in the middle of Transport Secretary Philip Hammond’s Runnymede and Weybridge constituency.

The crisis, caused by thieves who stole power cable, brought the line to a standstill at 6.30pm and left passengers trapped until after 11pm. Today commuters attacked rail company South West Trains as a “shambles”, as they described how they tried to escape from carriages only to be told they were breaking the law.

The heavily pregnant woman, Emma Firth, 35, told how she and a group of passengers decided to “make a bid for freedom” at 10.30pm after being trapped on a train from Clapham Junction since 6.30pm. But as they tried to climb down on to the track, guards made an announcement saying they would be arrested for trespass if they did.

A severe delay.  Harassment of travellers, no doubt for what seemed like very good reasons (safety, basically) when the rules being followed so charmlessly that night were put in place.  So far so routine.

But later in the same report, this:

A train spokesman said a review of how it responded to train disruption has been ordered.

“We are very sorry for the significant impact last night’s signal problems had on a large number of our passengers.

“We would like to thank them for their patience during some extremely difficult circumstances.

“We appreciate that many passengers spent several hours on trains while Network Railengineers worked hard to rectify the major signalling faults. Network Rail has confirmed today that the signalling problems were caused by an attempted cable theft.

“We are extremely angry and frustrated that mindless and irresponsible vandalism meant that many of our passengers had a terrible journey last night.

“Our station, train and customer service teams did their very best to keep passengers updated at the main locations across our network and to help get customers home through the night.

“We will be working with Network Rail to review how we responded to this incident. We are committed to learning any lessons, including taking any steps required to improve the flow of information to passengers.”

My blog posting title has already given my game away, but honestly, had I not done this, would you have spotted what I spotted?  “Passengers”.

For years railway people in Britain have been calling us “customers”, a usage that I do not like for reasons I find tricky to explain even to myself.

It’s something to do with the fact that the word “passenger” describes the true relationship.  We are at their mercy.  When they called us “passengers” they were acknowledging this fact.  Calling us “customers” attributes to us a spurious degree of autonomy, like we could get out at any moment if we didn’t like the journey.  Which (see above) everyone knows we actually can’t do.  And if we got off at an earlier station because we didn’t like the journey we were being subjected to, we’d not be given our money back.  Besides which, once you’ve committed to a train journey, the only logical course is to stick with it.  If you don’t like it, you don’t do it again.  But while it lasts, you must simply endure.

I see what they’ve been trying to do with all this “customer” talk.  They want all concerned to realise that market disciplines are in play, especially their own staff.  The last thing they want is for their staff to act, in a bad way, on the idea that we are totally at their mercy.  Trouble is: we are.  This is a fact which all concerned ought to be facing, not dodging, even verbally.

I have similar feelings about the word “patient” as used by health services.  If a hospital started describing its charges as “customers”, I think I’d feel that the same kind of verbal dishonesty, the same kind of falsehood about the real relationship involved, was being perpetrated.

My guess is that this reversion to the old word was a mistake, made in stressful conditions, rather than any kind of major policy shift.  But even so, interesting, I think.

Rob Fisher

Once upon a time the trains were so punctual you could solve murders just by looking at the timetables.

H/T Brian who related this sketch to fellow transport bloggers this evening over a beer.

Brian Micklethwait

Today I received an IEA email newsletter, which drew my attention to a (fairly) recent (May 24th) blog posting by Richard Wellings at the IEA blog, calculated to confirm all our prejudices here about privatisation (good) and government regulation (bad).

First paragraph:

The recent history of Britain’s railways has undoubtedly brought the whole concept of privatisation into disrepute. But this is unfair. Rail privatisation was a pastiche of genuine privatisation - in many ways it actually increased the level of state control.

Final paragraph:

A truly private railway would be efficient, innovative, responsive to consumer preferences and would not require taxpayer support. It is time the critics (such as Will Hutton) stopped blaming privatisation for problems caused by government intervention.

The guts of Wellings’ argument is that in a truly free market, railway companies would have been free to integrate vertically, and being free to integrate vertically, they would have.  The irrational separation of ownership between track and trains would have ended.  The government did not allow this.

Maybe the new government will?

Brian Micklethwait

I photoed this yesterday afternoon, embedded in the pavement in the top bit of Horseferry Road, just past the Channel 4 building as I walked towards St James Park tube.

I was baffled, and despite visiting the website alluded to, I still am baffled.  It says: What is Legible London?  Those were my exact sentiments, and they remain my sentiments.

It is something to do with the fact that walking is often quicker, for short journeys, than using the underground.  But why this plaque in the pavement?  Is there some kind of electronic gizmo underneath, with feeds into iPhones or something?

I am sure there is a semi-rational explanation, but can anyone oblige?

(The fact that two of the screws are missing doesn’t bode well, does it?)

Patrick Crozier

Comparing socialism and capitalism:

It is necessary to compare the total costs and the total yields of both systems.  The fact that the electromobile needs no gasoline is no proof that it is cheaper to run than the gasoline-powered car.

Socialism, Ludwig von Mises p161 (in my edition).  First published in 1922.

Rob Fisher

Here is a comic strip about a handy device to make driving more pleasant.

Rob Fisher

I am currently watching the second series of Yes, Minister on DVD. This is a scene from the episode, Doing the Honours.

Hacker: How much further?

Bernard: A few minutes. This M40 is a very good road.

Hacker: Hm. So’s the M4. I wonder why we’ve got two really good roads to Oxford before we got any to Southampton or Dover or Lowestoft or any of the ports.

Bernard: Well nearly all our permanent secretaries went to Oxford, Minister. And most Oxford colleges give very good dinners.

Hacker: And the cabinet let them get away with it?

Bernard: Certainly not, they put their foot down. They said no motorway to take civil servants to dinners in Oxford unless there was a motorway to take cabinet ministers hunting in the shires. That’s why when the M1 was built in the ‘50s it stopped in the middle of Leicestershire.

Hacker: Oh, come on Bernard! Well what about the M11? That’s only just been completed. Don’t Cambridge colleges give as good dinners as Oxford?

Bernard: Oh yes of course, Minister, but it’s years and years since the Department of Transport have had a permanent secretary from Cambridge.

I wonder how much truth there is in it.

Rob Fisher

The government seems to be keen on changing the rules of the road.

Police will get powers to fine careless drivers on the spot, rather than taking them to court, as part of a government strategy to make Britain’s roads safer.

Ministers say motorists who tail-gate, undertake or cut others up often go unpunished and that introducing instant penalties would be more efficient.

Offenders would get a fine of at least £80 and three points on their licence.

The trouble with on-the-spot fines is that they are easy for the police to hand out, and your average law abiding citizen will just pay up, rather than risk the cost of a court case. Of course, “the proposals will have to go through Parliament”, but these things have a certain inevitability about them.

There are also plans to mess about with speed limits. The Lib Dems are against the proposal to increase the motorway speed limit because of global warming. I’m not happy about the proposal to reduce rural speed limits because driving fast on rural roads is fun. I quite like the notion of “Top Gear politics”, though: it sounds like an improvement on normal politics and green groups are against it.

Michael Jennings

I took this photo in the port city of Algeciras in Spain last Thursday. I was looking for a nice contrast of things, and I thought that the bullring in the foreground, an in some ways fairly typical spanish city in the middle, and a long line of cranes indicating that this is indeed one of Europe’s most important ports in the background was nice.

Algeciras, like Felixstowe, is one of those ports that is not historically very important but is a very major point now due to its strategic location. The really large ships on the route through the Mediterranean and Suez Canal to Asia are not going to divert to Valencia or Barcelona, so they stop at the very bottom of Spain. Containers can then be transferred to smaller ships to head north or elsewhere, or onto trucks or trains to be taken to other points in Spain. (When container shipping arrived in UK, another reason why much of the shipping moved from London to Felixstowe was that the Port of London was very heavily unionised and Felixtowe wasn’t. I am not sure if a similar factor came into play in Spain, given that the alternative of Cadiz is also famous for its labour disputes and militant union men. in any event, Algeciras is now the key port.

With respect to the photo, having taken it I then realised that I also had the Rock of Gibraltar behind the port, and it is always delightful to get more in the photo that you intended.

Of course, “hub” seaports (in which containers are unloaded from one ship to another, or possibly other modes of transport) are like hub airports. Location is important in the sense that they need to be very conveniently on the route from A to B, but local markets are possibly less important than the strategic location and efficiency of a port. The busiest container port in the world is in Singapore, which is a significant but not very large market in a perfect location at the end of the Straits of Malacca. (The two Chinese ports of Hong Kong and Shenzhen - essentially two parts of the same urban area with a border down the middle - are each individually close to Singapore in terms of size, however. Combined they are massively busier).

Algeciras on the Straits of Gibraltar is a perfect place for such a port, but so is Tangier in Morocco. (The Indonesian island of Batam is as good a place as Singapore, too, but building a major port in Indonesia is just too hard). And as it happens, there is an enormous project to build a gigantic port in Africa, directly opposite Algeciras, the so called Tanger-Med, port, actually about 40km east of Tangier. I visited it the day before I visited Algeciras.

Well, when I say visited, I mean “went past it in a bus”, actually, so my photographs are perhaps a little lacking because of this. However:

It’s actually a lot bigger than that - I was only able to get a certain amount into the photo. In fact, when complete, it will be much bigger than the port at Alegiras on the Spanish side.

There is a lot more under construction, too. Plus there is an extensive motorway system heading south. When the port is complete, it will be the largest and hopefully busiest in Africa. To some extent it is to compete with Algeciras - in terms of transferring containers from one ship to another, Tanger-Med will be more modern and will have lower cost and (hopefully) more flexible labour. As well as that, the port is about trade between Africa and Spain, Europe, and further afield, and this is all good too.

Spanish registered truck, there.

One hopes that this is actually a sensible project, and that it will aid African development and international trade in a significant way. This of course requires efficient management, relatively free markets, the rule or law, and reasonably low levels of corruption. The port is apparently being built with government money, and run by “a private company with public sector privileges”. That sounds like an invitation for trouble, but is probably no worse than the arrangements by which many ports are run. One does also wonder from who the Moroccan government has borrowed the money. There is a reservoir of cheap capital that is used to fund Arab infrastructure (and other) projects that is ultimately based on the huge oil wealth of the Emirate of Abu Dhabi. Like all mispriced capital, such money can be useful if you are trying to borrow money to finance and build a sensible business, but the mispricing also tends to encourage bubbles, rentseeking, excess, and an ultimate collapse under a mountain of debt. Given the strategic location of Tanger-Med, a sizeable port is sensible, but one hopes that massive overbuilding has not occurred. The story of EU aid for infrastructure projects in Spain and Portugal was starting off with sensible projects, and ending up with absurdity, and one hopes that this is not similar.

Brian Micklethwait

As a Grumpy Old Man, I believe it is my duty to note some good things as and when they happen, if only to establish my bona fides when grumping about bad things.  And one of the trends in human affairs of recent years that I have liked is the way that really quite informative electronic signs have multiplied in railway stations concerning the next bunch of trains, and if you are even luckier, at bus stops concerning the next bunch of buses.

They could be better, mind you.  The railway signs typically tell you all the stations that the next train will be stopping at, but it doesn’t tell you anything about what stations the one after that will be stopping at, or the one after that. They only tell you the final destination.  Not knowing whether the 13.36 will stop where you want it to might seriously affect how you feel about the 13.25.  Yet, as it is, you have to wait until the 13.25 has come and gone before you learn for sure where the 13.36 will be stopping, at which point you could already have placed a bad bet, by not getting on board the 13.25.

So, these signs are not perfect.  But anything is better than ploughing through an idiotic Dead Sea Scroll timetable, which tells you the entire contents of some gink’s head last October, concerning all the railway trains that he believes will be in motion in the south of England, this entire May.  Talk about a needle of information in a haystack of too much information.

Another imperfection of these signs, from my point of view, is that they can often be impossible to photograph.

Take this sign, for instance, which I snapped yesterday:

That was actually quite informative, yesterday, when I looked at it for real.  It told me, while I was waiting at Vauxhall on the way to visit my brother, that there had been a fatality on the line at Clapham Junction, and that I and all my fellow travellers should expect delays and rearrangements.  And no, since you ask, it was not moving.  Or, it didn’t look to the human eye as if it was.  Only when I looked at my camera screen did it start jumping about manically.

An unusual fatality sign is just the kind of titbit that you want on a blog, is it not?  But, all my photo can do is illustrate a rumination about the weirdness of how digital photography sometimes interacts with reality.

Sometimes, such weirdness can be entertaining, but here only a frustration.

Although, interestingly, you can tell from the above photoat exactly what time it was taken.

This sign, on the other hand, proved to be entirely photoable:

Under what circumstances might the photographability of an electronic sign be of significance to someone other than a mere blogger?

Brian Micklethwait

Here.  Reading the whole thing is much recommended.

Money quote:

This month, I rode the bullet train from Beijing to Tianjin in half an hour - then returned by bus, which took two hours. Next to me on the decrepit, but packed, vehicle was a 17-year-old girl migrating to Beijing to search for work. She had never heard of the high-speed train, but when informed it cost $9, as opposed to $5.40 for the bus, expressed no regret at missing it. The bus driver assured me the girl was typical of his working-class clientele; to them, even a little money is more valuable than a lot of time. Small wonder that the Beijing-Tianjin line, built at a cost of $46 million per mile, is losing more than $100 million per year.

A mobile version of all those overpriced apartments and shopping malls, in other words.

The state of the world is now such that, if you want to be optimistic about your own country, don’t whatever you do look at your own country.  Look at all the others.

Happy Easter.

Patrick Crozier

I’m watching F1 and as usual wondering how you could make it better.

One of the things that bugs me is that it is not clear what question the sport is trying to answer.  In most sports it is clear.  In the 100 metres it’s the fastest sprinter.  In football the best football team.  But in F1 it’s never clear whether it’s the car or the driver.

What if, I wonder, manufacturers were obliged to sell their vehicles for a fixed sum (say, £1m) at the end of each race?  That way any team/driver who thought they were fastest would not be denied the opportunity to prove it simply because they didn’t have the right car.

The other good thing about this is that it would encourage manufacturers to keep costs down.  If you build a car for £10m and have to sell it for £1m you’re going to go out of business pretty quickly.  And if costs are kept down that will reward the best engineers.

I suppose there might be a problem with manufacturers not telling the new owners everything in order to preserve cosy relationships with favoured teams.

Is F1 a legitimate topic for Transport Blog?  I think we can just about get away with it.

Brian Micklethwait

And about how, as a consequence of airport security, he missed his flight to Italy yesterday.

Brian Micklethwait

Today Instapundit linked to a report about how the HondaJet recently flew for the first time at its maximum speed of close to 500 mph.  Later (or maybe I just missed it the first time around) he added to his posting a link back to a piece he himself wrote a year ago about this airplane.  Good, I thought, because I had been wondering why he considered the HondaJet so worthy of his linkage.

Here is why:

The HondaJet is the brainchild of Honda Aircraft president and CEO Michimasa Fujino. Fujino told me that his first job in the United States was in Mississippi, back in the 1980s, and that he found that wherever he traveled by air - even elsewhere in Mississippi - he usually wound up having to change planes in Atlanta. This seemed wasteful of time and fuel, and made travel iffier, since it created the risk of a missed connection. To Fujino, the hub-and-spoke system makes sense for a country like Japan, where Tokyo is at the center of everything, but much less sense for a country as big as the United States, where important places are widely distributed. For this, point-to-point travel is much better.

This is no secret, of course, to the people who travel by private jet now. But private jet travel is very expensive, which is why it is the domain of CEOs, celebrities and the like. The HondaJet represents an effort at changing all of that, by using technology and design to bring costs down and allow private-jet travel at costs that approach commercial ticket prices. (Fully loaded, Fujino says, the cost per seat on the HondaJet should be roughly comparable to a first-class commercial ticket). To keep costs down, the Honda folks have put a lot of thought into ways to make the plane as small and inexpensive as possible, without sacrificing comfort or speed.

I’m intrigued by the way the jet engines are above rather than below the wings.  This enables the landing gear to be directly under the engines, which means the wings need to do less structural work.  Hanging the airplane from its jets, so to speak, enables everything else to be nearer to the ground, which is convenient in all sorts of ways.  Including, I guess, that it makes the landing gear less bulky, because it has to reach down less.

Clearly, billionaires are a big part of the target market.  Billionaires may buy more - and more expensive - stuff than the rest of us, but at their own spending level they are presumably just as price sensitive as the rest of us.  That they have so much money suggests to me that they have a history of being careful with it.  So, I’m guessing lots of them will like this cheaper private jet, and lots of others will reckon this to be the first private jet worth buying.

But Honda are not expecting everyone who flies the HondaJet to be an owner of a HondaJet, or an employee or friend or relative of such an owner.  They also anticipate something more like a taxi model of USA air travel to develop.

It all sounds very promising.

It’s sort of the opposite extreme to the A380, the ultimate hub airliner.  That is trying to make air travel cheaper by making the biggest planes even bigger.  The HondaJet makes air travel cheaper by making the smallest and most convenient planes, that can still go fast and over long distances, cheaper.  The HondaJet is, you might say, the Dreamliner, only more so.  Or to put it another way, the HondaJet, it is hoped, will do to travel within the USA what others hope the Dreamliner will do for travel worldwide.

Brian Micklethwait

So says Bruno Waterfield:

The European Commission on Monday unveiled a “single European transport area” aimed at enforcing “a profound shift in transport patterns for passengers” by 2050.

The plan also envisages an end to cheap holiday flights from Britain to southern Europe with a target that over 50 per cent of all journeys above 186 miles should be by rail.

Top of the EU’s list to cut climate change emissions is a target of “zero” for the number of petrol and diesel-driven cars and lorries in the EU’s future cities.

Siim Kallas, the EU transport commission, insisted that Brussels directives and new taxation of fuel would be used to force people out of their cars and onto “alternative” means of transport.

“That means no more conventionally fuelled cars in our city centres,” he said. “Action will follow, legislation, real action to change behaviour.”

A bunch of people who think that’s mad respond by saying that that’s mad.  Maybe it is, but how will the anti-maddists stop it?  That argument hasn’t worked all the times it’s been tried before.

The trouble with the “that’s mad” argument is that it doesn’t lay a finger on the “yes but wouldn’t it be nice?” argument.  Opponents of the EU look like grumpy believers in surrendering to “reality”.  The EU, meanwhile, comes across as boldly changing mere “reality” to something nicer.  So, the real argument is: would this actually be nicer?

My argument against might go something like this: it sounds nice, but it would drain all the life out of cities and turn them into museums, rather as the centre of Paris already has been turned into a museum, in that case by not allowing any new buildings other than Presidential follies like the glass pyramid thingy or the Pompidou Centre.  London, in contrast, is a living, growing place, all over.

But then again, although the Kallas plan would drain much of the life out of London that is now there, life of other sorts would move in.  It might indeed be quite nice.  For some, like tourists and tourist crap shop owners, street marketeers, electric motor makers, paving stone makers, road demolishers, etc. etc.

I look forward to comments from fellow TBloggers explaining why this really is a mad plan.

Brian Micklethwait

I have a piece up at my personal blog, about the sheer number of signs there are in the average railway carriage (i.e. the one I was recently in).  It went chez moi rather than here because it contains lots of photos, and I know what I will put up with at my place photographically but am less sure of the limits for here.  Patrick has already left a quite long comment there.

Brian Micklethwait

Yeah, just take the “tran” off the front.

I’m watching the Boat Race on the telly, and Gryff Rhys Jones has just said something rather interesting about what began it all.  The railways, he said.  The reason the railways made the Boat Race possible is not that they transported people to it, or anything like that.  No, what the railways did was empty the River Thames of commercial traffic, passenger and freight.  That left the river free for sport.

Is that true?  That wikipedia piece has the first Boat Race happening in 1829, at Henley.  It moved down river to west London for the second race in 1836.  Then there was apparently some disagreement about whether to hold it at Henley or in west London.  That seems a few years early to have been kicked off by the railways.  I can certainly see how the railways might have accelerated such a trend.

The horse definitely went from being mostly transport to being mostly sport.  The automobile now looks to be deep into the same transition.  Certainly as regular cars become ever more slow and boring, the attraction of sporty cars gets ever greater.  Sporty cars have long taken on a life of their own, in terms of how they look, how fast they go, and so forth.  It’s the difference between a carthorse and, well a race horse.

Another speculation: Will the rise of remotely controlled airplanes cause personally driven airplanes also to become merely sporty?  Certainly planes are already a bit sporty, but, like cars, they always have been, a bit.

Rob Fisher

The Taxpayers Alliance are complaining that Phil Hammond, the minister behind a high speed train project called HS2, is ignoring the real arguments against it in favour of calling its opponents NIMBYs.

The real arguments being that it is too expensive and won’t make any money. 

Patrick Crozier

I haven’t yet watched Richard Wilson’s programme on British railways that was on Channel 4 the other day but I’ll stick my neck out and guess that it makes the following claims:

Fares are really expensive
Trains are frequently delayed
Subsidy is high
Trains are frequently overcrowded
This is all the fault of privatisation

I’m going to stick my neck out again and guess that it won’t be saying any of the following:

Railways are highly regulated
Rail fares are highly regulated
The wheel-rail split is the source of many of the industry’s problems and is mandated by the EU
That trains are much cleaner, brighter less vandalised and more reliable than they used to be
That many fares (restrictive as they may be) are extremely cheap
Overcrowding is a classic example of price controls causing shortages
That railways are expensive
That most of the subsidy goes to little-used rural lines
That railways are capital intensive, that it takes a long time for investments to become profitable and that franchises are typically short-term thus removing any incentive for rail operators to invest for the long-run.

Or, to put it another way, a lot of the things that get blamed on freedom are, in fact, the result of state violence.

Rob Fisher

Somewhat old news, but news to me via the Risks Digest:

A UK immigration officer decided to get rid of his wife by putting her on the no-fly list, ensuring that she could not return to the UK from abroad. This worked for three years, until he put in for a promotion and—during the routine background check—someone investigated why his wife was on the no-fly list.

This story comes from the Daily Mail:

The Home Office confirmed today that the officer has been sacked for gross misconduct.

This bit is Kafkaesque:

His wife visited family in Pakistan but when she tried to return to Britain she was not allowed onto the aircraft. Airline and immigration officials refused to explain to her why.

But it’s very interesting that one man was able to meddle with the list. We are so often told about these things that there will be “safeguards”.

Michael Jennings

Animated map of London created from Boris bike movements during a tube strike.

Brian Micklethwait

The Indy gets its priorities straight:

Libya action hits Ryanair flights

Via EUReferendum.

Patrick Crozier

Rail up the spout. Roads unaffected.  There’s a lesson in there somewhere.

Brian Micklethwait

Here.  Via here.

Brian Micklethwait

Yes, I am starting seriously to notice signs.  Especially the Health and Safety obsessed signs concerning the obligations of building workers.  It’s as if it is now obligatory to erect a complete building trade version of the Highway Code on the fencing of every building site in the land.  Buts signs of any kind can be extremely evocative, as well as informative of course.

Road signs, however, mostly don’t feel as annoying as those H&S signs.  This is because only a small percentage of them are nagging you to drive more safely.  Most are telling you how to get where you want to go, and motorists would feel seriously let down if signs like these were to start disappearing, or to be twiddled around like they were, according to the legends I have heard, during the War.

Here is a particularly excellent road sign photo, which I found here:

And here are some photos that I myself took, of a strange place, on the south side of the river, just upstream from the Thames Barrier, next to the riverside foot and cycle path.  Whether this is where temporary road signs go to rest and recuperate, or simply to die, I do not know.  The fierce yellow sign threatening round-the-clock CCTV stardom to all malefactors suggests that these signs have futures as well as pasts.

These are road signs associated with, like the little square above says, diverted traffic, caused by roadworks.  But the signs are not the annoyance.  The roadworks are the annoyance.  The roadworks without the signs would be even worse.

Bollards are a different matter.  Often, there are bollards, and signs, but no roadworks.

Click to get the bigger pictures.

Brian Micklethwait

Indeed:

“We don’t want anybody to complain that we were late …”

I don’t know quite what “late” means.  Was that the pilot speaking, and did the pilot himself offer everyone free drinks?  Feels more like a private jet with a dozen business execs on board than an “airliner”.

Anyway the upshot of this lateness was that all on board got to see another upshot, in the form of the latest Space Shuttle launch.  The very last one, I think, yes?  Anyway, one of the passengers did a vid.

The latest NASA effort, however, was not so good.

Further to that talk by James Bennett that Michael and I attended, I was reminded that Bennett also focussed on the contribution of private sector near earth orbit flights to scientific research.  It turns out that experiments work a lot better if there’s a guy up there with the experiment.  Private sector space travel doesn’t stay up there as long as clunky old government space rockets, but it is much cheaper.  Think about it.  Little and often and cheap probably makes a lot more sense than one big expensive Hail Mary, have-to-get-everything-right-first-time mega-project.

Rob Fisher

I keep complaining that trains have a terrible user interface for payment: tickets. For example: if you get to the station and there is a very long queue, you might miss your train.

The Register is reporting that two German rail networks are interlinking their payment and ticketing systems:

Frankfurt’s regional travel authority is to merge its NFC infrastructure with the national rail operator, creating an interoperable network for travelling across Germany with a tap of the phone.

The cool part is NFC. Near field communication uses magnetic induction to send data over short distances. This is how Oyster works, but it is also appearing in phones, especially Android phones. This means you could buy a ticket using an app on your phone, then use your phone to touch-in at the gate. No queuing or ticket printing required.

The Reg article also mentions that thetrainline.com are doing something similar in the UK with barcodes. It’s early days: one recent press release suggests that this will work “when rail operators start supporting this feature in the coming months”.

I think NFC is a better long term bet. NFC readers should be cheaper than barcode readers, and easier to use. Around London we already have Oyster readers everywhere, and people are familiar with them. It should only require an electronics upgrade at the gate to the existing Oyster reader, rather than larger physical changes that barcode readers would need. It might take a while for NFC to be ubiquitous in phones, but phone technology moves very fast.

Brian Micklethwait

George F. Will has evidently been reading Transport Blog.  No, not really, but he does give an answer to the question at the bottom of my previous posting.  What, I asked, is the lefty fascination with high-speed trains?

So why is America’s “win the future” administration so fixated on railroads, a technology that was the future two centuries ago? Because progressivism’s aim is the modification of (other people’s) behavior.

Forever seeking Archimedean levers for prying the world in directions they prefer, progressives say they embrace high-speed rail for many reasons - to improve the climate, increase competitiveness, enhance national security, reduce congestion, and rationalize land use. The length of the list of reasons, and the flimsiness of each, points to this conclusion: the real reason for progressives’ passion for trains is their goal of diminishing Americans’ individualism in order to make them more amenable to collectivism.

To progressives, the best thing about railroads is that people riding them are not in automobiles, which are subversive of the deference on which progressivism depends. Automobiles go hither and yon, wherever and whenever the driver desires, without timetables. Automobiles encourage people to think they - unsupervised, untutored, and unscripted - are masters of their fates. The automobile encourages people in delusions of adequacy, which make them resistant to government by experts who know what choices people should make.

Time was, the progressive cry was “Workers of the world unite!” or “Power to the people!” Now it is less resonant: “All aboard!”

For me the problem of railways has always been that they need things to be arranged in lines.  Cars (as I prefer to call them) enable a whole area to come alive.  Trains only really work when, for some fortuitous reasons like a dominant river or river valley, or a coastline with a hostile interior, things are naturally linear.

Or, see below, when you are trundling goods from A to B, also a linear thing, and are not in any hurry about it.

Or if, as was the case for a few decades after trains were invented, there is no other way to travel even slightly fast.

Brian Micklethwait

Later today, assuming all goes well, I will be doing an interview with Sam Bowman, who blogs and is the blogmeister for the Adam Smith Institute, among other things.  During my homework for this interview I came across this blog posting by Sam, which featured this graphic:

As Sam says:

This is why we like deregulation.

This piece of graphics began life as one of the illustrations in an Economist report entitled “High-speed railroading”, and, more to my present point, subtitled America’s system of rail freight is the world’s best. High-speed passenger trains could ruin it.

Indeed.  High speed rail achieves little, in terms of speeding up rail travel by regular humans, and even less in terms of making money for any humans.  But if unleashed anywhere, a point I am reading here, there and everywhere is that its most significant impact is upon the one thing that long distance rail does really well, which is transport stuff over long distances at low cost, but rather (sometime very) slowly, for customers who value the cheapness and don’t mind the slowness.

The word “trundle” always comes to my mind whenever I observe some exotic cargo train … well, trundling through a passenger station I happen to be waiting at when this odd circumstance occurs.  But the real pay-off comes when goods trains trundle, not on the urban and suburban lines I travel on, but for hundreds upon hundreds of miles.  They become the sort of land equivalent of supertankers, another notably efficient form of transport that has been doing very well recently.

Superimpose on those same long, long railway lines trains which are very fast, and with the political demand attached that they run on time, bugger the cost and the havoc caused, and there goes your profitable and efficient freight network.  And it all then has to go by road.  There is nothing intrinsically wrong with roads, of course, but the kind of people who are most manically in favour of high-speed trains tend also to be manically against roads.  What the hell are they thinking?

Seriously, what is the lefty fascination with high-speed trains?  Is it just that the child in all of us loves fast trains that look and behave like rockets, and lefties are the people who are most inclined not to care about the cost of things?  Is it really that simple?

Rob Fisher

The 2011 census is looking...interesting...from a civil liberties and privacy perspective. The Office of National Statistics is keen for everyone to know the postcodes of their places of work for transport reasons. Spyblog has the story. Quoting an ONS press release:

Knowing their workplace postcode is a key piece of information that feeds into the overall picture of life in England and Wales. Details of where people live, where they work and how they travel to their place of employment provide important statistics for transport planning and other strategic decisions.

Spyblog adds:

Note that the ONS makes no provision for simply filling in, say only the first 4 digits of the Post Code, which would be more than adequate for such planning purposes.

[...]

Previous Census data has not succeed in producing “the right transport infrastructure”, in the past, due to all of the other political and financial factors, so why should it be any different with the Census 2011 ?

The claim seems dubious at best. A one-off snapshot of this information does not seem very useful. It’s based on the delusion that such things can be centrally planned if only perfect information was centrally available. But this is impossible. Any changes in transport infrastructure will affect people’s behaviour. There are all kinds of non-linear feedback effects at play. The problem is distributed. The only way to get the correct transport infrastructure to meet people’s needs is to distribute the organisation of transport. And the best information to be had is price signals.

Wasn’t all this figured out in 1776? Someone should tell the ONS.

Brian Micklethwait

On Wednesday of this week, both Michael Jennings and I attended a talk given by James C Bennett at the IEA, organised by the Economic Policy Centre, about private sector space development.  I was curious about where the money is either now being made in space, or is about to be made, and asked about that.  Military espionage, communications satellites, tourism, and (eventually - but how soon?) mining the solar system for physical stuff, right?

Nearly.  It will be some time before off-earth mining gets seriously going.  But the big immediate omission from that list turned out to be: transport!

Basically, low earth orbit is an economically rational way to do what Concorde did but failed to do rationally.  Getting money-no-object business execs, and high value cargo like urgent legal documents, from A to B in two hours rather than six or ten, basically.  I had assumed that the only people who would soon be “going into space” would be doing this purely for the fun of it.  Not so.  No need to land where you took off from.  Why not go somewhere?

Very fast.

Brian Micklethwait

Buried in the middle of this excellent piece by Allister Heath about the top ten causes of the banking crisis is a fascinating point (number 3) about transport (and also energy) infrastructure:

3) There was no bankruptcy code for failed multinational banking groups. Regulatory stupidity meant that they were treated like ordinary firms: the choice was either a disorganised collapse, or a bail-out. Other network industries – airports, nuclear plants – have long operated under special bankruptcy codes, ensuring an orderly wind-down and handover of assets. Unlike every other private businesses, big banks knew they would never be allowed to go bust. So they took too many risks and leveraged themselves to the hilt, to maximise returns on capital (and hence profit and pay); while lending criteria were slowly loosened.

I thought that was interesting when I read it.  Antoine Clarke picked up on this point also.  “I never knew that” says Antoine.  Me neither.

So, what are those “special bankruptcy codes” that are in place for big airports (I’m guessing not for all airports), but not for big banks?  Anybody know about that?

It’s an important issue, because the fact that airports, railway networks (and energy supplies) must be “protected” by the government - must, basically, be kept going no matter what - is one of the big arguments against the private ownership of such enterprises, with all the competitive benefits that this brings to customers.  Maybe it isn’t true that such things “have to be kept going”. But almost everybody thinks it is true.  So that opinion has somehow to be separated by libertarians like ourselves from the argument about private ownership.  That hasn’t happened with banks, but has with airports.  How?

Rob Fisher

In the USA you can walk through the naked scanner or you can choose instead to get your junk touched. In the UK, if you decline to walk through the naked scanner, you get to talk to the police for half an hour and told you can’t get on your flight.

Passengers, who are selected at random for the virtual strip search, were at first allowed to opt for a traditional ‘pat down’ check.

But a government rule change now means anyone who refuses to be scanned is barred from flying.

There does still seem to be a workaround:

Mr Bradshaw [...] now says he will fly from an alternative airport which does not use the technology.

Brian Micklethwait

Matthew Sinclair, Director of the TaxPayers’ Alliance, is not a fan of Britain’s high speed rail plans:

It is incredible that while the Government are imposing higher taxes on ordinary families, and making necessary cuts in spending on services like education, they are planning on throwing billions at a new train line that will only benefit a well-off few. Passengers on the new high speed line are never expected to pay enough to cover the project’s costs in fares, and it will depend on massive subsidy at the expense of millions who never use the line. This just can’t be a priority with the massive scale of the fiscal crisis and huge pressure on family budgets. Politicians should focus on making commuter journeys more convenient and affordable, not a flashy new train set that will be a huge white elephant.

The scheme will cut journey times at a cost of £500 million per minute saved, says the TPA’s report.  It will never produce a financial return.  It will not cut greenhouse gases.  It embodies highly unrealistic assumptions about usage.  It will favour the rich at the expense of the less rich.

Report, by Chris Stokes (a man which plenty of railway industry experience - scroll down to “About the author"), here.  Press release (issued last Friday) here.

Rob Fisher

The Açu Superport is a big port in Brazil. And it’s private. We’re not used to such things being private in the UK.

Located in São João da Barra, in the north of the State of Rio de Janeiro, the Açu Superport is a private mixed-use port terminal that will have 10 docking berths; four for iron ore, two for oil-handling, one for coal and three for steel products, slag, granite and pig iron. With a depth of 18.5 metres, reaching 21 meters in a second stage, the Superport will have a bridge 2.9 kilometers long and will allow the mooring of Capesize vessels with capacities up to 220,000 tonnes. The port has great potential for the Oil and Gas industry due to its proximity to the Campos Basin.

The project is currently under construction and is scheduled to begin operations in 2012.

It’s being built by Brazil’s richest man.

Eike Batista, a mining mogul and Brazil’s richest man, dreamed up the idea for the Acu Superport because he was fed up with the delays in getting iron ore from his mines onto ships bound for China.

[...]

“Brazil is a gigantic opportunity to arbitrage inefficiencies,” he said.

That mindset gives me a sense of how he got to be so rich. And he gets things done:

A logistics corridor of 45 km, consisting of transmission lines, water, gas and telecom pipelines, railroad and highway, will connect the Açu Superport to the city of Campos. his logistics corridor will be able to handle up to 100 thousand vehicles per day, equivalent to 36 hours of traffic leaving Rio across the Rio-Niterói Bridge.

The port is for trading with China. The BBC has an unsurprisingly negative attitude.

A recent study found that more than 80% of Brazil’s manufactured exports are being adversely affected by competition from China.

That is a real danger to the Brazilian economy because mining and commodities are not very labour intensive. The bulk of the Brazilian workforce is employed in manufacturing industries.

The problem is that, natural resources aside, Brazil has a similar competitive advantage to China - cheap unskilled labour.

It could be that Brazil is on its way up, and will leave its manufacturing behind like other rich countries.

Brian Micklethwait

The surprise for me, in this story about how the Road Hauliers of Britain Saved Christmas, came right at the end:

Between December 24th and 27th, the Department for Transport made the decision to temporarily relax the hours of EU drivers and working-time rules for hauliers directly responsible for the delivery of food to UK distribution centres and shops, to ensure that supplies were received on time.

So, what about the rest of the year?  Does our local government have greater powers to “suspend” EU regulations than it usually lets on?  Was this not the worst time of year, from the road safety point of view, to be relaxing safety regulations?  Were there lots more accidents, and if not ...?

Rob Fisher

Spotted on the back of a commuter’s Evening Standard last night, an article about Green London mayor candidate Jenny Jones:

“You have to raise the congestion charge by more than £10,” she said. “It’s quite an elastic amount people are prepared to pay it. You have to put it up to a level where people will think hard about paying it. If you put it up to £25, or £50, I’d say you’re starting to get to grips with the problem.” Ms Jones set out plans for a road pricing scheme that would cover the whole of London with a sliding price structure, charging £5 to travel around Zone 6 but up to 10 times that to travel into the city centre.

It’ll never happen…

Rob Fisher

Instapundit links to a blog post on The Truth About Cars which analyses GM’s sales figures. It argues that while some of bailed out GM’s brands do well, Chevrolet does not, and relies on fleet sales which are not as reliable. I don’t know about this, although I do notice that GM has lost market share and has not grown sales as much as other car makers over the last year.  What I find really interesting, though, is this comment:

How sick is it that the President’s press secretary is promoting GM through Twitter?  Does anyone else not see what a slippery slope this is, and how unfair it is to other privately owned car manufacturers? I’m sure other car companies can expect a fair shake from the US Government.

Indeed. Here is the tweet, which only mentions GM, even though the article it links to is about all car makers’ sales. Is this normal in America?

Patrick Crozier

The annual rise in train station tea and coffee prices will see an inflation-busting average hike of 6.2% while some prices, particularly for popular lattes and double espressos will rise by a whopping 10%.

A spokesman for train station cafe-operator, National Espresso said that the price rises, which are regulated on an inflation plus 1% basis, were needed to pay for the new high-speed coffee machines.

But these remarks were condemned by the drinker watchdog, Frappucino Focus.  In a statement they said: “This will simply drive more people out of stations and into roadside cafes.”

Meanwhile the junior beverage minister explained that government cut backs meant that more revenue had to come from consumers.  “While we regret these rises, caffeine-addicts must understand that we are all in this together in these straitened times.”

It wasn’t difficult to find outrage among consumers. “This is outrageous.” said one.  “I am outraged.” said another.  A commuter said: “They have the cheek to put up their prices like this and we still can’t find a seat.”

Patrick Crozier of TeapotBlog said: “This was never a problem before the government got involved with its subsidies, regulations and fare controls.  The choice and quality of teas and coffees available to commuters were second to none and no one had a problem getting a seat.  Thank goodness we don’t have any of this nonsense anywhere else on the railways.”

Michael Jennings

In January this year, I was visiting my parents on the Gold Coast, a city on the beaches approximately 100km [That’s about 60 miles, Ed] south of Brisbane. I have both friends and relatives in Brisbane, and one morning I therefore caught a train from Helensvale station on the Gold Coast to Brisbane. I purchased a ticket, and towards the end of the journey, there was a ticket inspection.

I could not immediately find my ticket. I explained this to the inspectors, but rather than giving me a moment to look for it, they assumed instantly that I was lying. I was asked where I had got on the train and where I was going, asked for identification, told that I was going to be taken off the train at Brisbane Central, etc etc. When I produced ID with a British address on it rather than an Australian address, this was received with contempt, as if I were trying to avoid complying with them rather than because I lived abroad. The same questions were asked of me over and over, presumably in the hope that I might say something inconsistent. I was given no time to actually find my ticket. It was pretty standard behaviour from law enforcement officials who think that if they harass you for long enough you will say something that will incriminate yourself in some way of something. Eventually though, I did manage to look down the side of the seat, where I found my ticket, which had fallen out of my pocket. When I thus presented my ticket, I was told curtly that “You were lucky”, with clear annoyance. No apology for accusing me of being a criminal when I was not - just clear heavyhanded arseholery and annoyance that they had not managed to catch anyone. This sort of thing is sadly common in Australia, and is one of the reasons why I do not live there. Heavyhandedness of this kind does not endear the place to foreign visitors.

I was struck by a contrast to this when I was in Budapest last week. I had made an error when checking out transport options to get to the airport, and had assumed that I could get a bus directly from Deák Ferenc Square (the centre of town) to the airport. Having got there, and failed to find any airport buses, I walked into the local metro station (where three lines come together) to try to figure out what I was doing wrong. As it happened, a group of ticket inspectors were doing a sting at that station, and were acting together to attempt to catch fare evaders. I started looking at a map of metro lines and bus routes on the platform, clearly a little confused. One of the ticket inspectors saw this, stopped the fare evasion enforcement for a moment, and came up to me and pointed out where I was on the map. I explained that I was trying to get to the airport, and she explained to me in broken English that I needed to get a metro train to the end of one of the lines, and then I could get the bus. I was then practically dragged to the correct platform. When I attempted to walk towards a ticket machine, the inspector instead pulled a book of tickets out of her bag and sold me the necessary ticket. She then presumably went back to catching fare evaders. I then made my may to the airport with little difficulty and in plenty of time for my plane. Budapest 1, Brisbane 0.

As it further happened, I was flying from Budapest to London last Sunday. There was snow on the ground and very cold temperatures in both cities. I was flying on the Hungarian based discount airline Wizzair (a company that deserves a post in its own right) to Luton airport north of London. Both Budapest and Luton had been closed the previous day, but both were open again on the 19th. I got to the airport and looked at the departure board: British Airways to Heathrow: CANCELLED. Easyjet to Gatwick: DELAYED. Wizzair to Luton: ON TIME. I went through security, and purchased an overpriced beer in the bar. I started talking to a couple of young English women at the next table. One was a PA for a financial firm. The other was a schoolteacher. Yes, Budapest is beautiful. No, they had not seen much of it because they had stayed inside in the freezing weather. Yes, they were hoping they would get home so that they could go to work the next day. This was followed up with “We are lucky to be going to Luton, as it is not run by BAA, who are a really crap company”.

I think this was probably a little harsh. It is true that Luton is always one of the last of London’s airports to close, but this likely has as much to do with the local geography of Luton as it does management. (Stansted was long controlled by BAA, and is always fairly robust to weather, for similar geographical reasons). I think BAA probably does deserves its bad reputation in other ways - they are a fairly typical opportunistic monopolist who are lazy in terms of customer service in general - but they cope with the weather about as well as do other British airport operators. However, a bad reputation filters through to all areas, even those where it may not be relevant.

As it happened, the flight home was about 45 minutes late in all. In the circumstances, not much to complain about. Well done Wizzair. Well done Budapest and Luton airports.

Once at Luton, there remained the question of how to get home. The usual way is a shuttle bus to Luton Airport Parkway railway station, a train to St Pancras or London Bridge, and then a local bus to my home in South Bermondsey. Indicator boards indicated that trains were operating, so I purchased a ticket, and headed to the railway station. Indicator boards indicated that there was a train departing for London at 2133, so I went to the platform and waited. At 2135, all indicator boards changed to state that all train for the immediate future were cancelled. I was stranded. The ticket office was suddenly closed, and there was little opportunity to figure out what was going on or to obtain a refund for being unable to use train tickets. This was annoying.

On the other hand, the good sense of random people prevailed. A group of people near me (who I later discovered did not know one another before this) were discussing sharing a taxi to London. I walked up to them and explained that I was in the same boat, and asked if I could also have a share in their taxi. They were entirely agreeable. One of them called a local minicab firm, and fifteen minutes later we were all in a cab to London. We were going to various parts of the city, but this was okay: we had heard that local public transport in London was working fine.

An hour later I was at St Pancras. It is easy enough for me to get home from Kings Cross or St Pancras by local bus, and this is what I did.

So what can I say. Good work Luton Airport, Budapest Airport, Transport for London, and Transport for Budapest (or whatever the relevant organisation is called). Praise also to the good sense of ordinary Londoners and Luton based minicab firms. Less praise to First Capital Connect. No praise at all to Queensland Railways.

Brian Micklethwait

Nearly two months ago now, I went to a piano recital at the Wigmore Hall.  An American lady was visiting a friend.  Friend was busy during the day, and needed someone to show the American lady a good time, or at least to try.  American lady likes classical music, which made me the designated local.

The recital was given by the young Georgian pianist Khatia Buniatishvili, and the biggest piece on the programme was the first, Schumann’s Fantasie opus 17.

I have many recordings of Schumann piano music, but have never quite got him.  Oh, it’s nice and everything.  But only in a rather vicar’s tea party sort of way.  Schumann enthusiasts write about how revolutionary and disruptive his music sounds, and especially how revolutionary and disruptive it must have sounded to his contemporaries, but all I have tended to hear is what his music had in common with that of his contemporaries.  It just sounded to me like nice, classical piano music.  And I had never been able to understand the connection between all that well-mannered tinkling and the fact that Schumann died a madman, and before that had never been entirely sane.  Mad was the last thing his music sounded, to me.  Schumann lurches insanely, nay schizophrenically, between spooky serenity (the kind of music that accompanies attics full of dolls in horror movies) and explosive craziness!  Schumann is wild, man!  But I could never hear this.  It just sounded serenely serene to me.

All that changed when Khatia Buniatishvili started to unleash the Fantasie opus 17.  The American lady later told me that she admired the risks Ms Buniatishvili took with the tempos, speeding up here, slowing down there.  For me, that all helped, but it was the sheer loudness of it, when it was loud, that made the real difference.  Finally, I was hearing what I had been reading about Schumann for half a century, but had never heard before.

The Wigmore Hall accoustic is famous and much admired, but I don’t believe it would suit everyone.  The sound completely surrounds you.  And this is especially the case when someone like Khatia Buniatishvili is flaying a piano the way she did that lunchtime in early November of 2010.  I suppose I might achieve a similar effect in my own kitchen, if I were to go mad with surround-sound hi-fi and turn up the volume to maximum.  But were I to do that at all regularly, my neighbours would soon be pounding on my door.  Anything less than a detached house with a large surrounding garden and everyone else in the house away on holiday and it would be very anti-social.

My experience of listening to live classical music compared to listening to it dead, in my kitchen, has been that the fewer the number of the musicians involved, the greater the contrast between liveness and deadness. 

Strangely, the value added, so to speak, of a concert when there is an orchestra playing is far less than it is for much smaller ensembles.  It is as if, with orchestral music, the drama and the frenzy is packaged in a way that seems to survive the diminution involved in a mere recording.  The melodies, emphases, the contrasts, and above all the harmonies, the meanings of each passing moment, all get through.  But with chamber music, the loss is far greater.  With chamber music, a dead recording is merely nice.  Liveness enables you to experience all the nuances of the performance, including all the body language of the musicians, which of course means far more than it does when you watch a full orchestra all swaying about.  With chamber music, the difference between live and dead is the difference between being in a theatre, and listening to a bad sound recording of the same thing.

Some years ago, I experienced this difference with particular force when I attended a Wigmore Hall performance of the Shostakovitch violin sonata, given by Leonidas Kavakos.  Fantastic!  But then, unusually (Radio 3 broadcasts Monday lunchtime concerts live and then again the following weekend), I was able to listen again to the exact same performance on the radio that I had already witnessed live.  And on the radio it sounded … nice.  The comparison was, as the saying goes, no comparison. 

Since her recital was also a Monday lunchtime Wigmore recital, I would once again have the chance to listen again, to Ms Buniatishvili.  Would the same principle apply to her playing?  That Shostakovitch piece had involved two musicians, Kavakos and his equally excellent pianist, both striking sparks off each other.  Would the deadness-liveness contrast still apply, with only one musician?

Indeed it did, and if anything ever more so.  I listened, in particular, to that Schumann piece that had knocked my socks off in the actual concert hall, and it sounded … nice.  I was right back with the vicar, sipping tea.  Astonishing.

What a difference a journey can make.  As you can see, that’s been a preoccupation of mine here of late.

Rob Fisher

Stephen Smith, who describes himself as a libertarian urbanist, has a rather excellent blog called Market Urbanism. It’s about cities, and there are a lot of articles about transport. The most recent is called Japanese transit and what it can teach us. Another recent one is The “Systemic Failure” of US transportation policy.

Just give Access-a-ride users cash is interesting. This is New York’s scheme for subsidised transport for disabled and elderly people. Apparently it costs a fortune. $49 per door-to-door ride! I struggle to imagine how it has become so expensive. The MTA is planning to just give users subsidised cab rides instead, in an effort to cut costs. Stephen argues that it would be better to simply hand over cash.

But I think the more fundamental problem is that while cabs might at first blush look like good substitute for transit and paratransit, the truth is that people given cash grants could, oftentimes, think of much better and cheaper ways to spend the money. You could substitute some grocery store trips with walks to the nearest bodega, where you could spend a little more for your food. You could spend the money on rent to live in a place that’s more accessible. You could spend the money on having things delivered to your door from local stores, or shipped by internet-based retailers. And I know the city obviously can’t openly suggest this, but you could use it on cheaper gypsy cabs or informal drivers – something that is apparently already quite popular among Queens retirees, according to my great aunt Sylvia.

I wonder how that $49 per ride cost compares to London’s equivalent scheme, which just hands out free passes for free travel.

Rob Fisher

It’s been a while since my roundup of airport security controversy.

A mailing list called RISKS digest links to a letter from scientists at UCSF about the naked backscatter X-ray machines. The authors argue that the machines may be more dangerous than the government thinks, because the energy from the radiation is absorbed only on the surface of the body. Acceptable dosages from normal X-ray machines are calculated based on the fact that the energy is spread throughout the whole volume of the body. So the energy is more concentrated in backscatter machines, and will cause more damage to DNA bonds. Incidentally RISKS is a good read: there are many descriptions of the way all kinds of systems have failed, and you start to notice patterns.

CNET reports on Tammy Banovac, a retired dental surgeon, sometime Playboy model and wheelchair user, who, so annoyed at hear treatment by the TSA, turned up for her next flight in her underwear.

Remember the boy who was strip-searched? The TSA said that it was all a misunderstanding and the boy’s father was happy. Now the author of the video says he was asked by the TSA to delete the video, and that the father was not happy. There’s a written interview and a video interview with Glenn Beck about this, too. Beck says he found out the boy was autistic, which was why the TSA were having so much trouble patting him down, which they were doing because he was wearing a baggy shirt.

The Daily Mail has a couple of stories that suggest women are not particularly enjoying the TSA’s new processes.

Meanwhile, the Norlonto Review notices that pretty girls get groped, diplomats are annoyed and guns still get through security. The Norlonto Review also notices that part of the London congestion charge is being abolished.

While I’m in a linking mood, Angry Teen is talking about how UK Libertarian is talking about how rail privatisation wasn’t.

Rob Fisher

Northern Rail must be very concerned about all the jokes about the wrong kind of leaves, so they are making sure everyone understands the problem. This poster is displayed on one of their trains:

Leaves poster

I’ve heard anecdotes of trains overshooting the platform because of slipping on the leaves. Instead of opening the rear doors to let passengers on and off, or simply reversing, it seems trains are likely to simply continue to the next station.

Michael Jennings

From: Transport For London
To: Michael Jennings

Dear Dr Jennings,

I am writing to let you know that the ASLEF union have called a Tube strike. If the strike goes ahead, there is likely to be significant disruption to Tube services throughout Boxing Day, Sunday 26 December.

Bus, DLR, Tramlink and River services will operate, although some of these will have a reduced service. Cycling or walking may be practical options for many.
...

Yours sincerely,
Mike Brown
Managing Director
London Underground

Okay, so we have the coldest winter in living memory, and our buildup to Christmas has thus been difficult. We are cold, tired, and frustrated. Those of us without cars have the usual London Christmas experience of not being able to go anywhere on Christmas Day.

And, on Boxing Day, the tube workers go on strike. Transport for London provides us with the helpful advice that we might consider walking. Obviously the sympathy of the public is going to be entirely with the workers and their grievances. The poor petals.

Brian Micklethwait

Mayor of London, Boris Johson:

Well, folks, it’s tea-time on Sunday and for anyone involved in keeping people moving it has been a hell of a weekend.  Thousands have had their journeys wrecked, tens of thousands have been delayed getting away for Christmas; and for those Londoners who feel aggrieved by the performance of any part of our transport services, I can only say that we are doing our level best.

Almost the entire Tube system was running yesterday and we would have done even better if it had not been for a suicide on the Northern Line, and the temporary stoppage that these tragedies entail.  Of London’s 700 bus services, only 50 were on diversion, mainly in the hillier areas.  On Saturday, we managed to keep the West End plentifully supplied with customers, and retailers reported excellent takings on what is one of the busiest shopping days of the year.

We have kept the Transport for London road network open throughout all this.  We have about 90,000 tons of grit in stock, and the gritters were out all night to deal with this morning’s rush.  And yet we have to face the reality of the position across the country.

It is no use my saying that London Underground and bus networks are performing relatively well – touch wood – when Heathrow, our major international airport, is still effectively closed two days after the last heavy snowfall; when substantial parts of our national rail network are still struggling; when there are abandoned cars to be seen on hard shoulders all over the country; and when yet more snow is expected today, especially in the north.

Boris blames, in particular, the Met Office.  Everybody else believed them when they said it would be a warm winter.

More about the weather forecasting angle of this by me at Samizdata.

Brian Micklethwait

I have recently acquired a new computer, and that has caused me to spend much of the recent weekend rootling through all the data that got transferred from the old machine to the new, if only to get used to using Windows 7.  In the course of this rootling, I came across this photo, taken almost exactly three years ago, on December 19th 2007.  This at first got my attention simply because I thought it a striking picture.  I had been looking for something to put on my personal blog.  But then I realised, it’s transport related:

This kind of thing has become a much more regular part of the London scene than it ever was when I were a lad.  Partly (guess) it’s the Green thing.  Are there tax money and tax break bribes available for such enterprises, now, the way there never used to be?  Partly (another guess - Michael?) it’s that London, which used to be a First World city, now has First World stuff, Second World stuff (in the form of huge and ugly Sovietesque housing estates) and Third World stuff, like guys making a living riding bicycle-taxis for tourists.  I’m guessing that all the world’s cities are becoming like this, more varied within themselves, more like each other in there being the same kind of First-Second-Third World variety everywhere.

But I wonder, is there also a technological component?  Have things happened to bicycle design and bicycle technology that make it easier to peddle such things than used to be the case?

Bugbugs website here.  Note, judging by what is said there, what a big part advertising plays in their business.  I recently wrote here (here) about advertising on eye-catchingly weird vehicles.

Rob Fisher

Michael Jennings spooked a taxi driver in Vietnam by using GPS on his iPad to spot that he was going the wrong way. Some taxis in New York City have GPS on a touchscreen in the back:

Touchscreen GPS

You can zoom in and out, and select various other bits of information, such as the contact details of the taxi company. It draws the route you have taken in blue dots. You can see that our driver has taken to the surface streets to avoid a nasty looking freeway junction.

Brian Micklethwait

Here.

You have to be patient.

Brian Micklethwait

Mario Polèse has a piece about Why Big Cities matter More than Ever in, appropriately enough, City Journal.

He makes many worthwhile points.  My favourite one (i.e. I already strongly agree) is that the rise of electronic communication at a distance intensifies (rather than reduces) the demand for face-to-face contact, and hence for transport.  Not all information can be transmitted over wires or through the ether.  That much can increases the value of face-to-face meetings (like this one for instance), because quality face-to-face teams can now influence and trade with the entire world.

Sample quote:

What about the argument that falling communications costs actually undermine urban concentration?  For example, didn’t the existence of e-mail encourage Silicon Valley companies to outsource computer programming to Bangalore, India?  The truth is that this shift did foster urban concentration - in Bangalore.

Nice one.

As for falling physical transport costs causing physical dispersion, well, yes and no.  Consider the live theatre business.  Theatrical endeavour clusters in one spot (like Broadway or the West End of London), for all the usual reasons that businesses cluster (economies of scale - big pools of core professional talent - variety of ancillary professional talent - inside info - face-to-face contact (see above)), but good transport enables more punters to come to town, to witness these performances.  Transport enables a dispersed population all to benefit from the same services, which it thus makes more sense to be concentrated in the big city.

Transport, in other words, isn’t going anywhere.

Patrick Crozier

Heh.

Warning: some swearing.

Michael Jennings

In response to my recent post on Japanese airports, in which I mentioned that Haneda airport had had four new runways built since 1988, Patrick left the following comment

Huh?  And there must have already been at least one to start off with bringing us up to a minimum of five.

As it happens, Haneda has closed runways as well as opened new ones, and so Haneda at present has four runways.

But Heathrow, as I understand it a vast, if not the vastest airport in the world, has only two.

How come?

I will get back to the runways in a bit, but the belief that Heathrow is the busiest airport in the world is often heard in the UK. At least it was - I don’t think you hear it quite as often as you once did. As it happens, this belief is false, and it has been false for the 25 years of so that I have been paying attention to this kind of thing. The belief seems to have its origin in a somewhat disingenuous phrasing that was often heard in the aviation and engineering press a decade or two back, specifically “Heathrow is the busiest international airport in the world”. Note the word “international” in this. What was meant was that more passengers passed through Heathrow when flying on international routes than passed through any other airport flying on international routes. The reason for this is very simple. Britain is a small island with one giant city on it, and almost all of the places one might want to fly to from that giant city are in other countries. Domestic services make up a significant percentage of services from every other major airport in the world, but from Heathrow the percentage is miniscule. (In addition to this, for another reason that I will get to in a bit, a significant percentage of those domestic routes that do fly from London tend to be from airports other than Heathrow). Therefore, although more international passengers used (and still use) Heathrow than any other airport, there have always been other airports that handled more passengers in total.

However, many people have missed this distinction over the years, and have just heard it as “Heathrow is the busiest airport in the world”. (After all, aren’t most airports international airports? The phrasing of the stated statistic has often been deliberately misleading). Many people in the general media have made the same mistake, thus further spreading the misunderstanding.

As it happens, though, Heathrow is a massive airport. The most common legitimate statistic by which airports are compared is “Total passenger movements per year”. Every passenger who departs, arrives at, or passes through (transits) the airport countes as one passenger movement. By this measure, Heathrow has been number three in the world for most of the last twenty years. The only airports that have exceeded its traffic have been in the US: most notably the main airports of Atlanta (which has five runways) and Chicago (seven). In 2009, Heathrow actually moved up to number two in the world by this measure. Statistics for 2010 suggest that it will move down to number four, behind Atlanta, Chicago, and Beijing Capital, the first Asian airport to exceed Heathrow’s traffic. although Tokyo Haneda has at times been in the top five in the world.

However, although this is a useful statistic for determining how much terminal capacity is needed, this is still not the right statistic for determining how much runway capacity is needed. There are two reasons for this. Firstly, not all aircraft are the same size. An airport that hosts flights that use smaller aircraft is going to have more takeoffs and landings, and is going to need more runways. Long haul flights tend to use larger aircraft than short haul flights, and for various reasons Heathrow hosts almost all long haul flights out of London, whereas short haul flights are shared around London’s airports. (This has recently become even more pronounced with recent decisions of the EU to deregulate landing rights at Heathrow for foreign airlines, which led to most long haul traffic that had previously used Gatwick to switch to Heathrow). Plus there is a vicious circle. If runway capacity is at a premium but terminal capacity is not, and a lot of passengers want to use an airport, then airlines will use larger aircraft rather than putting on more flights. Since the opening of Terminal Five, Heathrow has been in this position. Heathrow has fewer runways than other airports. Rather than having fewer passengers use the airport, Heathrow simply hosts larger aircraft.

Secondly, there is an issue in the nature of the statistic: a passenger movemet is a passenger who starts a journey at the airport, a passenger who ends a journey at the airport, and a journey who changes planes at an airport. This last passenger is only counted once, even though he has both landed and taken off again at the same airport. Therefore, an airport that hosts lots of transfer passengers is going to have more take-offs and landings than one that is the start or the end of most journeys. As it happens, the airlines with the most dramatic hub and spoke systems in the world are the large US carriers, and their busiest airports are hubs in the middle of the US where vast numbers of passengers change planes. Due to a lack of political and airline consolidation and the preponderance of discount airlines, Europeans are much more likely to fly point to point. As it happens, the largest hub of the largest airline in the world (Delta) is Atlanta. The second and third largest airlines in the world (American and United) have hubs in Chicago. Atlanta and Chicago are still the two busiest airports by this statistic. Heathrow, on the other hand, comes in at number 12. The top six airports in the world by this measure and eight of the top nine are in the United States. With the exception of Los Angeles (which is a hub for traffic from the East Coast changing for aircraft to Asia - no such hub is necessary on the East Coast as modern aircraft can fly directly from anywhere in the US to anywhere in Europe) all of these airports are inland hubs where many passengers change from one flight to another.

By this measure, Heathrow is not the busiest airport in Europe. Paris Charles de Gaul has this distinction. This airport has four runways.

Before I bring this to a close, one more factor has to be mentioned. Not all runways point in the same direction. Some airports have runways that actually cross one another. It is not always possible to use all runways at the same time, or all runways at full capacity at the same time. An arrangement of parallel runways allows the highest flow of traffic, but this can make capacity dependent on weather conditions. If wind is blowing hard in the wrong direction, particularly perpendicular to the runways, this can reduce the number of flights possible, or perhaps even close runways completely. In places where weather is extreme and comes from unpredictable directions, having multiple runways pointing in different directions can make operations more robust to changes in weather conditions. In places where weather is less extreme and more predictable, this is not necessary. Heathrow has only two runways, but mild and predictable weather. Not all two runway airports are equal. Not all four runway airports are equal. All four runways at Charles de Gaul point in the same direction, which is a lot of capacity. Those four at Haneda consist of two pairs of parallel runways at an angle of 60 degrees to each other, meaning that total capacity is probably a little lower but robustness to changes in weather conditions is probably better. Proposals for another runway at Heathrow (theoretically cancelled by the coalition government, but they will no doubt be back at some point) are for another parallel runway, which is quite a lot of extra capacity. 

Rob Fisher

I’m visiting New York, and today I stumbled upon the Transit Museum Gallery Annex and Store at Grand Central Terminal.

Transit Museum Gallery and Annex

Mostly it’s just a museum shop, but it does have a rather charming model with working trains. There are cutaway sections that illustrate what’s going on underground.

Subway Cutaway

New York subway trains run just beneath the roads, so you can hear the trains when walking along the street, and you can hear the traffic when you’re waiting in the subway station.

Meanwhile I have been trying not to get arrested for taking pictures of bridges and tunnels.

Michael Jennings

Historically, state owned or state favoured airlines have very good at getting governments and even international law to protect them from competition. As monopolists often do, the airlines often justified their protection from competition by arguing what an important public service they were providing.

Approximately, “We fly to all these remote, out of the way places which are otherwise difficult to travel to, and if we had to face competition on our other, more major routes, we would not be able to afford to cross-subsidise our loss-making, but vitally socially necessary minor routes.

This argument was basically as big a load of crap as it sounds, but government often bought it, and thus we ended up with with restrictions on the number of airlines that could (say) fly between London and New York, and also often actual restrictions preventing low fares, in order that the profitable routes could be made more profitable, to supposedly allow cross-subsidies to occur.

Even when the single market came into being in 1993, state owned and favoured airlines obtained one last favour; the single market did not fully apply to aviation until April 1997. Only then could any EU airline fly any route it wanted to within the EU. However, after that, things changed rapidly. Mainly, this was the growth of the discount airlines, the obsessive compulsive leader of which was Ryanair.

The discount airlines figured out that short haul aviation is basically a different business to long haul aviation, and basically figured out that if you cut all the frills and just provide transport, cut costs ferociously, unbundle all the other services, charge fares that are highly variable depending on the flexibility of the passenger (and which can be very cheap), and always more or less fill the plane, you can make money on just about any route.

Even amongst discount airlines, Ryanair is something of a sociopath. As is often the case with highly successful companies that reflect the vision of a single man, it is probably better to say that Ryanair CEO Michael O’Leary is something of a sociopath. He is willing to outrage, offend, and piss off his own customers, governments, the BBC, and just about everyone, but he has been so willing to try almost anything that his airline is the one that figures out what innovations work and what don’t. Other discount airlines follow a little way behind, and are more pleasant to fly on. When O’Leary is no longer in charge of Ryanair it will no doubt turn into something more like Easyjet or Wizzair, as it really takes something extraordinary at the top to maintain an attitude like Ryanair’s. (It is easier to be nicer to people). For now it is the company that demonstrates just how low it is possible to make the cost base of an airline.

However, I have a point to make. At present, I am in Plovdiv, the second largest city in Bulgaria. Ryanair have been flying here from London for about a month. There have never been direct flights from Plovdiv to London before, and there have been few direct flights from Plovdiv to anywhere. However, the city has a runway, and has recently built a terminal, and that is all you need. The flight over here was packed with Bulgarians who were happy that they no longer had to travel via Sofia to get here. Several people over the last couple of days have commented how good it is that they now have direct flights.

Ryanair’s route map is something extraordinary. The airline flies to all kinds of places that bureaucrats would have missed back in the days when they were choosing routes that would be flown to and cross-subsidised on the basis that “social responsibility” required this. (It also flies a lot of domestic routes in Germany and Italy in particular, countries in which protected national airlines have traditionally served their people poorly with high fares and inadequate services) Not only has it been proved that a genuine free market will support routes where it has traditionally been argued that some kind of subsidy was necessary, but it has also been proved that a free market will find routes that can be made profitable, that few people even thought might be able to support air services.

Long haul routes are also being deregulated. The argument about how these cross-subsidise loss making but important routes is not heard much any more. For that, Michael O’Leary has my thanks. 

Michael Jennings

In Laos, you modify a motorcycle to carry icecream to the children of the village

In Singapore, you modify a Segway to carry carbonated drinks to the children of the shopping mall foodcourt.

Michael Jennings

As cities have expanded and their populations have become richer, and as the cost of air travel has dropped, airports have in many cities become overstretched, particularly if a city’s main airport was built decades ago in an area close to the centre of town, and now surrounded by populated areas into which the airport cannot easily be expanded. (Airports of course attract economic activity, so after a few years a major airport will always be surrounded by populated areas, even if it was initially built away from them).

There are two ways a city can deal with this. It can expand the original airport, which is costly, both financially and politically, and generally requires significant compulsory purchase of land and leads to public protest. Or it can build another airport.

If another airport is built, this will almost always be built a lot further from the centre of the city than the existing airport. Passengers and airlines will thus be reluctant to use the new airport in preference to the old airport, for reasons of convenience, and due to a “critical mass” factor. Airlines like to fly to destinations where there are lots of connecting flights, as passengers do not want to have to travel from one airport to another to change planes. This is especially so for high yield business passengers. All kinds of related businesses come into being around airports, and these businesses do not wish to move either.

Therefore, if you build a new airport and allow the old airport to remain open, it is quite conceivable that the new airport will remain largely unused, most flights will continue operating from the old airport, and airlines and related industries will continue pressuring government to allow further expansion of the old airport. This is more or less what has happened in London. Stansted Airport was expanded and the late 1980s. The intention was that Stansted would be mainly for long haul international travel, and would grow to rival Heathrow in this market. This entirely failed to happen, airlines continued to use Heathrow, those few airlines that attempted to run long haul services out of Stansted generally failed due to a lack of premium traffic, Heathrow was expanded further and pressure continues for more expansion still. Stansted was massively underutilised for a long time, eventually becoming a busy airport as a base for low cost airlines, an entirely different market to that originally envisaged.

Another option is to close the old airport. This is generally effective in terms of moving traffic to the new airport, but if the point of building the new airport is to make of for massive shortages in capacity, then closing down all your existing capacity seldom makes sense. There are cases where it does - Kai Tak airport in Hong Kong had a dangerous flightpath, and its location meant that there were major restrictions of the size of building that could be constructed in a large portion of the city. In this case, the move to the new airport at Chek Lap Kok was exemplary. Superb and fast transport links to the new airport were made available the day it opened. Truly spectacular engineering works turned a small but relatively tall island into the much larger but completely flat island on which the new, very large, airport was built.

This is an exception, though. Generally, what is desired is that the old airport will remain open but will not be greatly increased in capacity going forward. Hopefully most of the economies of scale and airport related businesses will move to the new site. What is desired is that the new airport will become the city’s main hub, and the older airport will fade to being the secondary airport.The trouble is that market forces tend to prefer the reverse.

Governments tend to attempt to solve this problem by regulating the activities that may take place at the old airport. The most common way of doing this is to insist that all international flights use the new airport, and that only domestic flights will be subsequently allowed to use the old airport. The idea is that people flying domestically are likely to be making short flights, often out and back in a day. On the other hand, traveling internationally is a big deal and often takes longer, and so travelers are likely to be less concerned about the time and distance getting to and from the airport.

This type of practice can often be a cover for protection of locally owned airlines, as these tend to be the ones who fly domestic routes, and as a consequence the practice is flat illegal in the European Union. (If it is legal to fly from airport X to London it must also be legal to fly from airport X to Paris, and Lisbon, and Bucharest). However, it has been common in other parts of the world. And it can backfire.

When discussing the question of just how much money various Canadian governments lost when hosting the Montreal Olympics, an argument that was used (and still sometimes is by people not paying close attention) is that “Many of the costs were not really about the Olympics. For one thing, the city of Montreal built a new airport, and they would have done that anyway”. As it happens, the first part of this sentence is true. Mirabel International Airport was indeed opened just before the Montreal Olympics. The original intention was that all flights into Montreal would ultimately use the new airport, but initially international flights only were forced to use it. Bluntly, everyone hated this, as the airport was a long way from Montreal, transport links were poor, and the existing Dorval airport was much more convenient. Rather than going to Mirabel, passengers would instead fly domestically to Toronto, change planes, and then fly on to international destinations. Eventually, plans to close Dorval were abandoned, and in 1997 international flights were once again allowed to use it. Today, Dorval has been expanded, and there are no scheduled flights from Mirabel to anywhere. So much for the airport dividend from the 1976 Olympics.

Of course, Montreal has been a city in relative decline, and Canada has a particularly uncompetitive aviation industry. In most instances in Europe or Asia, both airports would be used for something. A more interesting tale is the story of Tokyo, which has had an interesting development in the last month.

Tokyo International Airport was founded at a place named Haneda on the edge of Tokyo Bay in 1931, and is pretty much universally known as “Haneda Airport”. Haneda airport is extremely centrally located, being a 15 minute train ride from central Tokyo. In the mid 1960s, due to increased wealth and demand for air travel, it was decided that further expansion of Haneda was going to be difficult due to its proximity to the city and the difficulties of building further into Tokyo Bay with respect to landfill and the effect on shipping. As Tokyo is such an enormous city, the nearest suitable location was at Narita in Chiba Prefecture, about 60km from central Tokyo. The idea was to build an enormous four runway airport that could cope with Tokyo’s growth.

As it happened, though, building the airport in Narita turned out to be highly problematic. The land it was to be built on was mostly owned by rice farmers, who are an extremely powerful political lobby. Japan had virtually no history of compulsory acquisition of land for such projects, so the project was on shaky grounds both legally and culturally. Before the airport could be built, there were riots, demonstrations, legal challenges, sabotage, vandalism, and all kinds of other controversies. The airport opened in 1978, but its second runway did not open until 2002. The airport today is much smaller than originally planned. None the less, all international flights were forced to use Narita (with the exception of flight to Taiwan, which were kept from Haneda until 2002 in order that they avoid political controversies from using the same airport as flights from mainland China).

In the meantime, Japanese governments discovered that they preferred to confront engineering obstacles to confronting political obstacles when building airports. (This was aided by the fact that Japanese contruction companies are another powerful political lobby, and overengineered boondoggles thus became a Japanese specialty). Therefore, Haneda airport was further expanded. (Subsequent airports were built on artificial islands and such, to avoid the Narita controversy again). As the Japanese economy grew, demand for domestic air travel in and out of Tokyo grew, and Haneda airport became by far the largest and busiest airport in Asia, and one of the largest in the world. It remains one of the largest in the world, although Beijing Capital airport is now the busiest in Asia. Haneda retained its name - “Tokyo International Airport”, although it hosted no international flights. Narita officially became “New Tokyo International Airport” although this was all so confusing that the two airports were invariably referred to as “Haneda” and “Narita”. Haneda had a very curious character, though, for one of the busiest airports in the world. Virtually nobody outside its native country had traveled through it or even heard of it. International travel into and out of Tokyo remained much less developed than domestic travel, possibly due to Japan’s rather insular character, and partly due to the inadequate infrastructure, and great inconvenience of getting from Tokyo to its main international airport.

Over the last decade and some, though, things have changed. Japan has stagnated economically, as much of the rest of Asia has flourished. Japanese public finances have reached the point that expensive boondoggles can no longer be afforded. Cheap, discount air travel has become established throughout the rest of Asia, and Japan has been largely excluded from this due to its expensive, inaccessible airports.

This has led to a slow opening up of Haneda. The most obvious short haul international routes out of Tokyo that would benefit from flying from convenient airports in order to facilitate short business trips and the like are those to Korea. As it happens, Seoul also has an old, relatively central airport (Gimpo) and a newer, bigger aiport (Incheon) which all international flights were required to use upon its completion. Both airports made an exception for one another, however. From 2003, international flights were allowed from Haneda to Gimpo, which for a time were the only international flights allowed from either airport.

With the continued economic growth of China, however, routes from Haneda to China became more important. As it happened, Shanghai also had an old, relatively central airport (Hongqiao) and a newer, bigger airport (Pudong) which all international flights were required to use upon its completion. However, in 2007, an agreement was made to start flights from Haneda to Hangqiao. Flights from Seoul Gimpo to Hangqiao were commenced at the same time. This led to a truly magnificent rule for international flights out of Haneda. International flights out of Haneda were only permitted to other airports on short haul routes that did not allow international flights (Rumours that passengers were not permitted to fly on these routes unless they had done six impossible things before breakfast have never been confirmed).

In effect, Haneda, Gimpo, and Hangqiao airports (ie the domestic airports Tokyo, Seoul, and Shanghai) had decided that they would allow international routes between each other. If you have some familiarity with North East Asian geopolitics, there is one major destination missing: Beijing.

As it happens, Beijing has an older airport that only hosts domestic flights: Nanyuan. In 2007, Japan and China agreed that flights would be allowed from Haneda to Nanyuan, and Korea made a similar agreement with China. You can tell where this is going, can’t you?

Actually you can’t. Nanyuan is primarily a military airfield, and although there were governmental agreements to in theory allow flights from Gimpo and Haneda to Nanyuan, getting the Chinese military to agree to Japanese and Korean airlines flying into their base was another thing entirely. Flights therefore commenced in 2008, but flying to Beijing Capital airport on a “temporary” basis. They are still there.

The prohibition on international flights into Haneda was at that point more or less broken. This may have been the point.

Unlike Narita, Haneda airport has been expanded dramatically in recent years. The Tokyo Metropolitan government has (very conveniently) used the adjacent bay area as a landfill in recent decades, which has facilitated expansion of the airport, even though the national Transport Ministry has not always been supportive. New runways were opened in 1988, 1997, 2000, and 2010, and new terminals in 2004 and 2010. Government initially announced that some of this new capacity in 2010 would be permitted for international flights up to 1947km or less (the same distance as the longest domestic flight), which was a further concession to the existing flights to Seoul, Shanghai, and Beijing. Flights to and from any destination were allowed when Narita airport was closed, between 11pm and 6am.

A further concession to this was made before the new terminal opened last month, allowing flights from any destination to arrive (but not depart) between 6am and 8.30am, and to depart (but not arrive) between 8.30pm and 11pm. There is still a protectionist element in this. If a foreign long haul airline flies into Haneda at relatively civilized hour of the morning, the plane must sit on the tarmac until the evening before it may fly out again. Japanese airlines, on the other hand, can use the aircraft for domestic or short haul Asian routes during the daytime. This will not last though. Basically, Haneda airport is now a full international airport again. Long haul carriers to Europe and the US have commenced flights, as have discount and other airlines to points in South-East Asia.

There will be overwhelming pressure to finish derestricting its operating hours. Narita will become the secondary airport. It won’t go the way of Montreal Mirabel - airport capacity is still at too great a premium in Japan - but the premium traffic will all return to Haneda.

It is interesting to see how western journalists and western publications have reported the reopening of Haneda as an international airport. There is discussion of the facilities, and variability in understanding what was actually going on. This, I think is my favourite. No, Haneda is not Tokyo’s second biggest airport, it is by far the biggest, and always has been. The question is not whether Haneda is Tokyo’s second major airport, but whether Narita ever managed to gain that role itself. As was often the case, Japan was somewhat closed to the world, and opaque to foreigners, but if you are going to write about it, you need to have a proper explanation of how things reached the state they are now in.

As I hope readers of this blog now have. 

Patrick Crozier

Lane discipline is much better even on French non-toll roads

There are an awful lot of lorries on the continent.  Seriously, much more than in the UK.

And they all seem to come from Slovenia.

Yes, that is an exaggeration.  But only just.

They are much hillier.  Michael tells me that this is because they are so old.  One of them even split as it went round a mountain.  One carriageway one side, one the other.

Most are only two lanes.

Autobahns and toll autoroutes are in good condition.  Ordinary toll-less autoroutes less so.

I much prefer driving on the toll autoroutes.  It was the only place I could set the cruise control.

Which is really nice.

Contrary to popular belief you can’t drive at any speed you like on the autobahn.  Sometimes you can but as often as not there are limits and these vary frequently.

Sat nav is both a god-send and a menace.

Driving as fast as you like is great until the car starts to vibrate in an alarming way.

I think one of the reasons lane discipline is so much better is because there are usually only two lanes.  These become a normal lane and an overtaking lane.  The flaw in this argument is Australia (isn’t it always?) There, according to Michael, they also have mostly two-lane highways and poor lane discipline.

Driving in a right-hand drive vehicle in a right-hand side of the road country is not nearly as difficult as you might think.  And it makes parking a whole lot easier.

Some Germans don’t half bomb along in the outside lane. 130-140 mph easily.  This is quite scary when they are coming up behind you.

Surfaces are not quite as good as in Britain.  Not even in Germany.  But some German surfaces are really quiet.  I think it may be some kind of experiment.

Slip roads and off ramps tend to be much tighter than in the UK.

Oh, by the way, whenever and wherever I hit an on-ramp, I floor it.  It’s the only way to get yourself up to the right speed.  I think that’s the right thing to do.

Autobahns are really busy.  So are France’s non-toll autoroutes.

Roadworks are everywhere on the autobahns.  And lanes alarmingly narrow.

The French have (how shall we put this?) a much more “relaxed” attitude to roadworks.  A sign, a few cones and that’s it.

Brian Micklethwait

This sounds good:

Technology entrepreneur Elon Musk’s California-based space launch firm has become the first commercial company to receive a Federal Aviation Administration license to allow an orbiting spacecraft to return to Earth.

I did a piece a while back for Samizdata, speculating about why Obama’s space policies are so bafflingly sensible, which would have been linked to from here, I dare say, had here been in business at the time.

LATER: More transport related bloggery from me here, including (at the end) a question which I would love to have answered, and in particular see (in a picture) answered.

Rob Fisher

Not so long ago we were looking forward to a new era of sensible airport security. Now everyone is getting their junk touched.

This all started when backscatter naked X-ray machines were introduced in US airports recently. If you don’t like it, you can opt-out, but you get an “enhanced” pat-down. Then John Tyner coined a phrase when he told a TSA officer, “if you touch my junk, I’ll have you arrested”. He is now a Legendary Internet Hero and everyone is having a go. Since then he’s made a few more posts on the subject. They are sensible and articulate. He makes a point I’ve made myself, which is that people don’t really want maximum safety at all costs. Citing an article in reason, Tyner writes:

if a plane was hijacked and crashed once per week, one’s odds of dying would be 1 in 135,000. One would be almost three times as likely to be killed crossing the street, eight times as likely to be murdered, and over twenty times as likely to be killed in a car crash. Really think about that for a second. If a plane was hijacked and crashed once per week, you would still be more likely to be killed driving to the airport to get on that plane. The takeaway from this should be that terrorism (in the air) just isn’t that common. However, it has certainly achieved its intended end, to terrorize.

He goes on to say that since 4 out of 5 people walk through the metal detector anyway, molesting the remaining 1 out of 5 doesn’t do any good anyway. It’s a lot of cost for no benefit. Oddly enough, the Daily Mail (via Angry Teen) thinks you’re just as likely to die from the radiation from the backscatter machine as to die from a terrorist attack.

Really it’s worth keeping an eye on Tyner’s blog. There are a few other articles so far in which he defends himself from various criticisms, including the old ”flying is a privilege” line, in which post he analyses the situation from the point of view of his contract with the airline.

Since then, blogs have declared open season on the TSA:

• I first became aware of the new security procedures via Samizdata, wherein we learn that Andrew Ian Dodge got his junk, and his scar from surgery, touched.
• Eric Raymond does not want to fly any more.
(He thinks the real solution to air terrorism is to arm the passengers.)
• One of his commenters links to a cartoon showing a spoof cover of a book titled “My first cavity search: Helping your child understand why he may pose a threat to National Security”. The cartoon turns up displayed in a TSA office.
• People don’t like their children being patted down by the TSA. Angry Teen links to a video of this happening. The TSA say that the boy’s father removed his shirt to expedite the screening and no complaint was made. However, a video taken in 2008 of a three year old girl who screams ”stop touching me” has resurfaced. Her father *was* complaining.
• TSA agents don’t like being called “molesters” and “perverts”. They also don’t like feeling inside the flab creases of obese people. Imagine what it must be like for the obese people! The Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler has no sympathy.
• It’s not just fat people who suffer indgnity: One poor chap was left soaked in urine after a TSA agent broke his urostomy bag. A poor woman was forced to show her prosthetic breast.
• All kinds of people are likely to be *really sensitive* about being groped by strangers. A rape victim reports being traumatised by the TSA.
• Somebody is selling backscatter-machine thwarting underwear.
• NickM at Counting Cats has a good old rant.
• Plane full of soldiers returning from Afghanistan. They’re all carrying rifles. The TSA confiscates one soldier’s nail clippers.
• Heresy Corner points out that since security theatre only works when everyone plays along, a large scale backlash will be a huge problem for the TSA. He also links to a story about a porn star who mocks the TSA, insisting on being examined while wearing see-through underwear. It’s the sexualisation of airport security which is fuelling the backlash, he says.
• In a similar vein, Nate Anderson at Ars Technica suggests wearing a kilt in the traditional manner.
• An organisation called We Won’t Fly wants people to opt-out of backscatter machines en masse.
• Slashdot has a discussion about ways to make backscatter machines less objectionable by using computer vision. One commenter argues that planes can’t be used as missles any more, that blowing them up isn’t cost effective for terrorists, and best of all:

I don’t even think the TSA should be the one scanning the people at all, it should be the individual airlines. That way you can choose to pay for your security if you really want it, and competitive practices can find the optimal solution.

That’s all for now. I have a feeling there is going to be much more.

Brian Micklethwait

Great news!  Carrying animals in vehicles that you would think would be far too small also happens in America.  (Via David Thompson.)

Brian Micklethwait

Some while back I started accumulating links to interesting transport things, concerning events during the recent spell of Transport Blog outage, by googling “transport” and ignoring everything boring, which is a hell of a lot.  (Mostly politicians moaning about how they aren’t being allowed or should be allowed to waste public money on transport crap of various sorts.)

But then I got ill and forgot about this.  Today, just to clear my decks, I give you this file of links.  There aren’t actually that many, but for what they are worth, click and enjoy:

Inside the world’s biggest private jet.

Is Google the most significant transport enterprise of twenty first century?

Passengers break out of train.

Germany gets across the channel.  It’s taken seventy years for the big arrows at the beginning of Dad’s Army to get here, but now they are about to.

The mobile web is bigger than transport.

Video of train spotter failing to spot the train.  It’s behind you.

Buy more salt.  I.e. for the roads this winter.

And finally, what with Michael’s recent writings here on the subject, a couple of motorcycle links: Motorcycles - miracle or menace?, and The tireless motorcycle museum curator.  Tireless.  Get it?  Oh never mind.

See also this excellent Vietnam motorbike picture.

Patrick: please feel free to re-edit the categorisations below.

LATER:  I also agree with the commenter who reckons that this bit of road building video is BRILJANT!!!

Rob Fisher

Incoming text message from Michael Jennings, who is currently in Germany with Patrick Crozier: “Patrick is driving at 120mph. Freedom!?” Replied me: “I’m sure Patrick knows what he is doing. You will most likely be ok.” Replied Michael: “Patrick responded with a sinister laugh.” Then later: “Europe is full of stupid bloody windmills.”

Indeed. The same thing that causes those windmills might also cause Patrick to slow down, sooner or later. German watermelons want to slow people down to reduce CO2 emissions.

Brian Micklethwait

The new British Coalition Government is scrapping the M4 bus lane from London to Heathrow:

“Scrapping the M4 bus lane is symbolic of this Government’s decision to end the war on the motorist,” the Transport Secretary, Philip Hammond, said yesterday. “It ends the injustice suffered by thousands of drivers who sit in traffic next to an empty lane day in, day out.”

But not everyone is pleased to see the bus lane disappear. Taxi drivers now face being stuck in the same queues as other motorists, ...

In a total transport free market, there would be no “wars” against this or that form of transport, merely rational economic calculation.  If taxis paid enough for their own lane, they’d get it.  If buses assembled enough poor people to outbid richer own-car-users, ditto.

Meanwhile, all there is is politics.

Brian Micklethwait

At Londonist today, I learned for the first time of a scheme to build a ski lift across the Thames, from the Dome to the Royal Docks.

Exactly how serious this scheme is, I do not know.  But I must say, as transport infrastructural follies go, this one does seem to me to be remarkably unfoolish.  The technology, thanks to the snow-based tourist trade around the world, is well understood.  Compared to the digging up of London involved in things like Crossrail, the cost of this thing will be peanuts.  They’re now saying £25M, so make that £100M.  With luck, corporate sponsors and operators will pick up the tab.

Best of all, this being transport and not just a static Big Thing, they will want people to go on it and will make that easy, and the views from it should be excellent.  In that part of London the views are especially good, what with the towers and the curviness of the river and view west at sunset time.  (I will believe in my right to take photos from half way up the Shard when that happens, but not a moment sooner.)

If it’s a success, maybe they’ll build other such erections, as apparently they planned to in the nineties.

The one thing it will absolutely not do is “relieve congestion”, as I saw being speculated/ridiculed by various commenters, here and there.  Create more congestion is far more likely, as people journey into London to have a go on it, or, more mundanely, travel to it and from it in order to use it.

Wanky architectural fake photo here.  TfL’s (very boring and non-committal) take on it here.

Michael Jennings

What is this guy selling?

When I recently wrote about taxis, Brian drew attention to my observations about the utility of motorcycles in the developing world. The most obvious part of this comes from their low cost, both to buy and to operate. Another part comes from the fact that they require less surrounding infrastructure than do larger vehicles. Motorcycles can use narrow roads with relatively rough surfaces, and if you have a wide road a great many more motorcycles can use the road than can larger vehicles. The motorcycle infrastructure can have an ad-hoc quality to it, also. Disused railway bridges will be converted into bridges carrying cyclists and motorcycles. Used railway bridges will have an extra carriageway for motorcycles attached to the side. The weight and size of cars and trucks is such that they require much more dedicated infrastructure. When you take into account that the average number of passengers on a motorcycle in many developing countries is higher than in developed countries - a motorcycle somehow carries a husband, wife, and two small children is almost a cliche in some of these places - the toll in terms of congestion is much lower than for full sized cars. (There is a disgustingly congested an polluted stage that cities go through when their middle classes do become rich enough to afford cars and the infrastructure has not yet caught up. Bangkok went through this stage 15-20 years ago. Hanoi and Saigon are going to go through it soon, if they are not careful). You see people on motorcycles carrying large amounts of luggage, barrells full of live fish, panes of glass of the sort that people carry across the road in chase scenes in 1960s Bond movies. Somehow they manage it. Motorcycles are modified into all other kinds of vehicles, too. The tuk-tuk is basically the front of a motorcycle with the back of a rickshaw or sometimes a light truck. Judging by the variation in design from place to place, they were initially an ad-hoc development and many of them still are. This sort of modification would not be legal in more developed markets, but in poorer countries it still happens.

In my recent sojourn in Asia I saw all of this.

Most charming, though, was perhaps the fellow pictured at the top of this post. I was wandering down a dirt road in a village on the other side of the Mekong from Luang Prabang in Laos. This fellow rode past with a motorcycle with an odd sidecarriage. He gestured to me, clearly selling something. I nodded politely, as people attempt to sell you things a lot in such places. My guess was that he was selling food of some kind, but I wasn’t really hungry However, he gestured that I come over and look. He opened the top of one of the metal barels, to make it clear what he was selling.

The answer was ice cream. His motorcycle sidecarriage had inbuilt refrigeration and was conveying ice cream. He gave me a free taste. He didn’t really need to, as it was hot and an ice cream was quite appealing. So I bought an ice cream, as I am sure he knew I would.

Although selling ice cream to any passing western tourists was no doubt a good sideline, the bulk of his business was local people. Or, to be more specific, local children, who clearly enjoy an ice cream just as much as children do anywhere else. (Not exactly a surprise). If you want to do this in England, you have much higher costs because you have to use a van, and no doubt lots of health and safety crap. But in Laos, you buy a motorcycle and adapt.

Oddly enough, while reading Bruce Sterling’s blog today, I found this slick, rather self-congratulatory video.

Although the people in it are clearly having a good time, the “hacker spaces” in it strike me as close to being something resembling native reservations. In the poor world, the whole country is the hacker space. While a bicycle that makes ice cream may be cool, the poorest countries of the world have managed it long ago, because their children like ice cream and people like making a living.

Why have we lost this? How have we lost this?

Losing this is going to cost us. 

Rob Fisher

The air passenger duty is due to increase. It’s a rule that taxes like this always increase ("passengers now being asked to pay up to ten times more tax since APD’s introduction"), and always get more complicated:

The new APD places foreign destinations in bands, depending on how far they are away from the UK, increasing the amount of air tax paid as the distance increases.

That smells like a recipe for politicians to engineer their favoured outcomes.

However, the Caribbean is complaining that it has been unfairly hit after it was put in band C despite being only eight hours from the UK. Los Angeles in the USA is in the cheaper band B even though it is 12 hours away.

Malice, incompetence, or trade winds?

The current government wants to double the revenue it earns from aviation tax in the next four years from £28.9bn to more than £56bn. Of course, extra costs to airlines eventually find their way to customers too.

Back to the 70s we go: cheap air travel is doomed. When will the Laffer curve kick in?

Reading through the search results for “air passenger duty” on BBC News gives some sense of the inevitability of it all: Air passenger duty was invented in 1994, and in 2003 the greens were calling for it to be increased. In the 2004 budget it was frozen. There was constant clamouring to increase it, which finally happened in February 2007. Just one year later, MPs were calling for it to increase again. The current increases were planned by Alastair Darling shortly afterwards. The first of these happened this time last year.

Update: Tim Worstall says that airlines who complain that this tax is bad because it will dissuade people from flying are forgetting that this is the point of the tax. So I suppose airlines have to say something like, “dissuading people from flying is bad because the planet does not need saving”. For some reason large companies are reluctant to say such things.

Brian Micklethwait

I photoed that earlier in the week, yards from my home.

Are any laws being broken?  I’d like to think: not.

After all, there seem to be thingies sticking out from the back axle, to enable such passenger transport.  Presumably the Law would have been all over that, if the Law says no to this kind of thing.

I give it three years.  If only to stop private enterprise competing with Boris bikes.
 
 

Brian Micklethwait

Internet connections when on the move are nice, but increasingly, as Michael J told me would happen several years ago, people now have their own.  What they don’t have is their own everlasting mobile power supply.  Or not yet.  So, the fact that these are now appearing in more and more British train carriages is very welcome.  Few use them.  I seldom use them myself.  But I like it that they’re there.

That’s not so difficult to arrange.  But in the air, where every ounce counts, supplying electricity is, as James Fallows reported some days ago, a lot harder.

Question: will ever cheaper and more fequently used international travel, combined with arrangements like this, eventually create demand for a global standard in electric plugs?  Or are we stuck with state-imposed confusion for ever?

Remember when it was said that only Government could sort out the mess of conflicting computer and computer plug and computer storage (etc. etc.) standards.  Imagine the permanent bedlam that actually existing governments might have imposed upon all that, also.

RELATED: Tube Wi-Fi trial at Charring Cross.  The point being, presumably, that our regular internet connections don’t work down there.

Glasgow is there already.

Brian Micklethwait

Boris bikes (named thus after Mayor of London Boris Johnson) have gone from non-existent to ubiquitous, seemingly in no time.

There is a clump of them (with a regular bike in the foreground) which I encountered in Lower Marsh, just beyond Waterloo Station.

Another example of vehicles as adverts.

So, okay, Boris bikes are transport, but how are they themselves transported?  After all, you can’t rely on the punters exactly balancing everything out, can you?  Excesses will accumulate here, dearths there.  How is that corrected?

Moments after taking the above snap, I found out:

Cue comment from our very own Lord of the Carbon Footprint, Michael J, about all the other such schemes there are in the world.  Like in Melbourne.

Michael Jennings

Bangkok, Thailand. October 2010

Is it a car? Is it a motorbike? Is it a truck? Is it a bus? Is it a rickshaw? Is it a bird? Is it a plane? Is it Superman?

Of course, the only real answer is that it is a tuk-tuk, a class of vehicle that is highly useful in many parts of Asia and Africa, but which is largely unknown in the rich countries of Europe and North America. It is interesting how cultural factors differ from country to country even in Asia and Africa, though. Tuk-tuks are ubiquitous in Thailand and Laos (although the design seems to vary depending on where in the country you are, so I am intrigued to know just how home-made these things are) but much less common in Vietnam or Indonesia.

Or are the differences regulatory rather than cultural? I need to do more research. 

Brian Micklethwait

One of my favourite means of transporting myself is to go for walks, in London, and in particular beside the River Thames in London.  It is surely a significant transport issue that walking alongside the Thames in London has got steadily easier as the decades have passed, as more bits of riverside path have been added to what was already there.  I would love to learn more about who exactly set this process in motion and how it has been kept going.  Clearly, nobody is allowed to build anything next to the river now without a piece of riverside walk being included, even if it will only join up with the rest of the riverside walk years later.  Is there an office where all this is “coordinated”?

As I walk along next to the river, I see things, especially things in (or should that be “on") the river (and a lot of things go by river these days), that puzzle me.  Like this:

I’m talking, in particular, about these:

You see these all the time, being dragged up and down the river.  But what’s in them?

With the magic of computerised photos, I can take a close look at what looks like it could be a clue:

WRWA?  Indeed.  WRWA.  Western Riverside Waste Authority.  Inside all those yellow boxes is: shit, basically.

Cory Environmental Ltd, the Authority’s Waste Management Services Contractor, operate two waste transfer stations situated on the River Thames in South London; one in Wandsworth and the other in Battersea.

So now I know.

Brian Micklethwait

Will the Transport Blog revival continue?  To try to increase the chances of that being so, the four of us met up last night, at the Pizza Express that is near Waterloo Station:

Left to right, Brian (i.e. me), Patrick, Rob, Michael.  I (i.e. Brian) was holding the camera in my stretched out right hand and concentrating not on how I looked but on getting us all into the picture, hence me looking weird.  But the rest of them look like a sixties record cover, don’t they?

Once again, I think I see a big transport principle at work here.  People who do things together, however virtually and twenty-first-centurily and web-basedly blah blah blah, need to meet from time to time.  People will always want to meet.  To meet, you have to travel.  To travel, you need transport.

Rob Fisher

First liquids are to be allowed on planes, and now the chairman of British airways is complaining about security theatre. Taking off shoes and taking laptops out of bags is a waste of time, he thinks. The “aviation industry” agrees with him. Air travellers have had enough and the tide is turning. This is good news. And this is very funny, and typical of authorities unable to keep up with technology:

...confusion over whether the iPad is a laptop or not, thereby requiring further examination, was one example of inconsistencies.

Meanwhile, Airbus are getting in on the biodiversity bandwagon. Why?

Brian Micklethwait

Without doubt the strangest transport related picture I’ve taken in London in recent months was this:

That’s a rather ancient Rolls Royce, not a bus!

Later, I took a closer look at what it says on the door there:

And all was revealed.  Here‘s the website.  Recommended to all who like ladies in stockings and suspenders.

Is there a serious point to this?  Any serious point?  Well, perhaps that “transport” doesn’t just mean enterprises that are devoted wholly to transport, but also enterprises whose main focus is something completely other than transport, but who nevertheless get involved in transport, as part of the process of creating a satisfactory package-product for their customers.

Or maybe: that vehicles are increasingly being used to advertise such mostly-not-transport enterprises.  There’s nothing like a seriously weird vehicle meandering around its native city, with a big sign on it that makes little immediate sense but which sticks in the mind (while also making sure to include mention of a www dot something), to get people talking, and googling, and even blogging.

In this connection, I don’t think that me being able to photo this weird contraption is incidental either.  Cameras are not just things to snap pretty and artistic scenes with.  They are machines for taking notes, quickly, in a way that wouldn’t work nearly so well with pens and notebooks.  Moving vehicles, by their nature, are come and gone quickly.  Typically there isn’t time to read what they say on them, let alone identify the salient bits and write them down.  But there is time to photo them, and read about it all later.  It’s not just the internet.  The internet combined with cheap cameras, especially cameras in phones of course, have also helped to change how advertising works, and in particular how adverts work which are on the sides of lorries or vans or cars.

Brian Micklethwait

Looks that way.  About effing time.  Via Johnathan Pearce at Samizdata.

Michael Jennings

This is actually in Saigon

I was in Hanoi a couple of weeks ago. The Socialist Republic of Vietnam has been getting richer very rapidly ever since it de facto abandoned socialism, but is not yet rich enough to have metro systems in its cities, and private car ownership is still relatively rare. There are a few buses, but for a person unfamiliar with the local geography and the local language, riding a bus can be problematic as it is easy to catch a bus that will make an unexpected turn and take you to an unexpected place.

However, motorcycle ownership is ubiquitous. (Seriously, apart from the mobile phone, is there any invention that is more empowering for people in poor countries than the motorcycle?) People who in some countries would look to buy a stylish car here look to buy a stylish motorcycle or scooter - Vietnam is Italian brand Vespa’s largest market by far. This leads to one way of getting around. If you are a foreigner, men sitting by the side of the road next to a motorcycle will often look at you and either utter the word “motorbike” or make a gesture imitating the turning of handlebars. If you say yes, you explain to them where you want to go, agree on a price, you get on the back of the motorcycle and they ride you across town. This, of course, involves a certain amount of haggling over the price, is only good for one person at a time, and is not ideal if you have a lot of luggage or the weather is bad, Plus there is an element of danger. This is not perhaps as bad as you might think, as traffic speeds are relatively low, and there are relatively few larger vehicles on the roads. Colliding with another motorcycle at low speed is unlikely to lead to serious injury, whereas colliding with a bus at higher speed is more dangerous.

Motorcycle taxis are useful, but they have the various hassles just mentioned. Fortunately, the bulk of the larger vehicles on the road are taxis.

As a rule, I do not like using taxis. Having got in a car, you are then totally at the mercy of the driver. There are many, many, many scams by which taxi drivers will attempt to overcharge you, particularly if you are a foreigner, look tired, are hailing a taxi at an airport or other tourist destination, and are not familiar with the city. These can vary from the simple “We will go via the scenic route” trick to the at times enjoyably creative and baroque. Sometimes drivers will be insistent on taking you to where they want to go rather than where you want to go, possibly because the owner of the hotel or shop at that destination will pay them commission, and sometimes simply because they are going that way. Sometimes they will commit outright fraud against you - watch out for being given forged money as change if you are ever in Buenos Aires (and indeed watch for every other form of taxi driver bad behaviour if you are ever in Buenos Aires). The trick of the rigged meter which has a special setting for unwary foreigners is annoyingly common, too.

There are some places where taxis are more honest, and some where they are not. For instance, I have never encountered a dishonest taxi driver in China, but I don’t think I have encountered an honest one in Bulgaria. (My sample size is limited, as after a couple of dishonest ones, I decided to never get into a taxi in that country ever again). The trouble is that you can never really know which category the country you have arrived in fits into until you have some experience, which is why dishonest taxi drivers are attracted to airports, where they find customers who lack experience, and as a bonus are usually very tired and unfamiliar with the alternatives to taking taxis. There is probably a (weak) correlation with wealth, and there is certainly a correlation with the rule of law, but it is still not always easy to pick. (On the other hand, in Singapore, there is a sign in large letters in multiple languages inside every taxi giving the number of the taxi and a phone number to call if you have any complaint at all about the taxi driver. I do not know what the punishment is for being a dishonest taxi driver in Singapore, but I suspect it features loss of licence and a fine of many thousands of dollars and that it is strictly enforced. Singapore taxi drivers take you where you are going, by the most direct route, and charge what is on the meter. And I could have picked that).

Once a country is rich enough and/or the rule of law is strong enough, the problem of dishonesty does not entirely go away, but it is replaced by something else - the problem of regulatory capture. Governments feel the need to set fares, so that customers can be sure of what they will pay. (There is still lots of scope for refusing to turn the meter on, taking the passenger the long way, etc, just the same). Governments feel the need to restrict the number of licensed taxis, so that drivers are guaranteed a decent income, or something. In places such as Sydney and New York, this has simply led to taxi licences being sold from party to party for hundreds of thousands of dollars each, taxi owners demanding large returns on their immensely valuable licences and so lobbying governments (successfully) to set high fares and to further restrict the supply of licences, and drivers still making a pittance after paying most of their fares as rent to the taxi owners. Thus you end up with a situation where fares are high, supply is low, and taxi drivers are paid poorly. In London, we have restrictive licensing, in which what is actually a relatively low skilled job is turned into a high skilled one by requiring taxi drivers to train for several years (gaining “The Knowledge") before being permitted to drive a taxi. Supply is restricted by an artificial shortage of drivers, and high fares are justified. The drivers are well paid, but customers are again poorly served. In both London and New York, alternative classes of taxi have come into being outside the regulatory system, and these basically come down to the system you find in third world countries before taxis have been given meters. You approach the owner of the taxi (in London, the office of a minicab company), agree on a price in advance, and you are taken there. Of course, Transport for London recently noticed that minicabs were not regulated enough, and started imposing all kinds of onerous licensing requirements on them, too (accompanied by a publicity campaign aimed at scaring the public away from using any vehicle without a licence), so the cycle is unending.

Which gets me back to Vietnam. In Hanoi, there are very few actual regulations on the operation of taxis. There is no limit on the number of taxis. I do not know if the government requires taxis to have meters, but they all have them. There is a sign on the top of most taxis including the world “meter” in large letters, as it is understood that customers want meters. The flagfall and cost per kilometre of riding in the taxi is prominently displayed inside and outside the taxi. There are over a hundred taxi companies, and the name of the taxi company is displayed on the side of the taxi. Those taxis that have are known for being reputable have the name in more prominent letters. There is no regulation of fares. Different taxi companies charge different fares. More importantly, smaller taxis charge less than those using larger cars. Taxis in fancier cars charge more than in less fancy cars. In most places, taxi fares are regulated to a single rate. This leads to a uniformity of cars used as taxis, as passengers would generally choose a more spacious or more expensive car if the cost is the same. This means that in Hanoi there are lots of small taxis (which use less fuel, cause less pollution, and cause less road congestion), whereas in many other places they are rare. (The most common vehicle used for taxis in Hanoi is probably the Daewoo Matiz / Chevrolet Spark). There are lots of taxis in general, which is good if you are trying to hail one. I suspect that drivers still do not earn very much, but that is the nature of the profession, and a consequence of the fact that in Vietnam, a lot of people do not earn very much. There is fast economic growth, and economic opportunities come out of that.

And as a passenger, the experience was a good one. Taxi drivers always turn on the meter. Fares are low. Due to the level of competition, fares are very similar regardless of the taxi company. I am also told that fares change rapidly in response to changes in the price of petrol and/or interest rates. My guidebook said that there are a few “tourist taxis” which pick up passengers near five star hotels and charge exorbitant fares, but I did not encounter one. My only taxi driver incident was more amusing than anything else.

I had an iPad with me in Vietnam. When I first connected to a WiFi hotspot in Hanoi, its maps application downloaded a detailed map of the entire city of Hanoi. Once I had that, the assisted GPS in the iPad allowed me to see where I was at any time on this map. Basically, if I was moving, I would be able to look at the map, and a little animated blue dot would show me exactly where I was. After a nice dinner at James Waterton’s home (thanks mate) I got in a taxi, got out the iPad, showed the driver where I wanted to go on the map, and away we went. As it happened, he headed in the exact opposite direction to where he was supposed to be going. I let him do this for a couple of minutes, and when we were stopped at a traffic light, I showed him the iPad, and pointed out the blue dot to demonstrate that I knew exactly what he was doing.

After that, he took me straight back to my hotel. 

Brian Micklethwait

It’s good to be back.  I don’t really want to be muggins for Transport Blog, the one who is still posting when every one else is taking a holiday, but now that others are back posting, I am delighted to join in.  This first posting, i.e. this time around, is really just me checking that I still know how to do it.

And checking out also that I can still stick up pictures.  So, let’s see about that:

That’s one of my favourite items of London Transport, namely one of the fleet of yellow amphibious buses, for taking tourists both along streets and along the river.  They are named, as you can see, after Shakespearian heroines.

While googling for further info about these yellow ladies, I came across this blog posting, which reveals that a brand new design for a yellow amphibious bus has now been contrived:

This I did not know, until now.  Blog and learn.  This started out as a posting called nothing more than: “Good to be back”.  But it has turned into a real blog posting and now has a real title, about something.

I find myself pondering the economics of tourist vehicles, as opposed to regular A-to-B transport type vehicles.  I can’t believe that it would ever make sense to put commuters in a thing like this.  Commuters resent paying an extra few pence per journey, because, day after day after working day, that still adds up to a fortune, and because any fun would soon fade.  But tourists are happy to pay an extra few quid for the fun of travelling in a bus that can swim.  Just the once.

Which, come to think of it, makes tourism a massively important thing, transport-wise.  Tourists will pay for vehicles to take their first rather faltering and expensive steps, vehicles which may not have much of a present, as serious contributions to transport, but which may just have one hell of a future.

Permalink • Feedback (0) • Miscellaneous • Road Miscellany

My A380 flight

Rob Fisher

A few weeks ago I flew on Emirates EK002 from Heathrow to Dubai.  I specifically chose that flight to try out the A380.  From the front it looks a bit ugly.

Front of A380

Once inside, the first thing I noticed was the stairs.  They look like the entrance to a London night club.  Commoners like me were not allowed up the stairs.

A380 stairs

The seats were pretty spacious for economy class.  I am six feet tall and did not feel at all cramped.  I don’t think it was much different from 747s I’ve flown on, though.  The interior didn’t look much different either, although Emirates put tiny lights on the ceiling to look like stars, which was quite pretty when the main cabin lights were dimmed.  One odd thing is the entrance to the cockpit, which rather than being on the top deck like a 747, is on the lower deck but up a few steps.  There are two sets of steps: the left set leads to the cockpit and the right set leads to toilets.

The in flight entertainment system was the best I’ve used.  The screen is nice and big, there were lots of movies, every number one single ever and some slightly better than usual but not great games.  You can plug in a USB stick and view your photos.  I managed to send an email to Michael Jennings, but didn’t get his reply even though the system told me I would.

In-flight email

Best of all were the three external cameras.  The front one was best and offered a good view of the approaching runway while landing, the downward facing one was mostly useless except shortly after takeoff when the front one only showed sky, but the most spectacular was the tail camera, even though image quality seemed slightly worse on this one.  Unusually, the system was switched on from the gate until landing, so you get to keep an eye on everything.

Tail camera

If you’re not interested in planes and you’re flying economy, you won’t notice much difference.  But if you like planes or you get to try business class or better, you’ll have a lot of fun on the A380.

Permalink • Feedback (2) • Airbus

Mondo Spider

Brian Micklethwait

This evening I was watching a rerun of QI on Dave, and they mentioned something called the Mondo Spider, and showed a bit of it in action.  It’s an eight-legged walking machine, made by some Canadian artists:

Video here, complete with rather fine sound effects.  Website here.  The above picture, of Mondo Spider being driven by the Mayor of Vancouver, Gregor Robertson, found on flickr, here.

Clearly this principle of locomotion has very little in the way of a present, other than as entertainment on YouTube.  But does it perhaps have any kind of future?  Unmanned planetary exploration?  Domestic robots?  Small robots?  Helping oldies up steps and staircases?

Permalink • Feedback (2) • Miscellaneous

Review: Ian Hislop’s “Off The Rails”

Patrick Crozier

This was on BBC4 the other night.  I thought it was garbage.  In fact it was such utter garbage that there was no chance of me ever getting round to writing it all down.  So, I recorded a podcast instead.

Permalink • Feedback (2) • Podcasts • Rail History

Rail map

Patrick Crozier

I love this sort of thing: maps where area is proportionate to something other than territory.  Hey, I even designed one of my own way back.  This is the one for rail travel.

I think this is for passenger rail travel or else the US would be a lot bigger.  Look at China and India.  What does this say I wonder?

Permalink • Feedback (3) • Rail