Patrick Crozier

...for a passenger transport executive (Greater Manchester in this case).

Hint:  In case you haven’t already spotted the flaw just imagine what would happen if you tried turning one of the gears.

Via: Association of British Drivers

When I hear of some funky, new idea which is going to revolutionise the world of transport - or anything else for that matter - I ask myself one question: who’s doing it?  Because, if it’s a finger-on-the-pulse, go-getting, business, the chances are that it will work and if it is something that’s being developed in an extortion-funded university it probably won’t.  Universities are, as Brian would have it (and me, for that matter) places where “...old ideas go to die.”

So what am I to make of this crash-proof car idea?

The engineers, working with DaimlerChrysler…

Sounds good.

...Glasgow University’s Centre for Systems and Control…

Sounds bad.

What is a girl to do?

Patrick Crozier

Now, why is it when our politicians want to spend huge amounts of our money on a transport scheme do they never think of trolley buses?

This was from about 1963.

Brian Micklethwait

Ferrari are seriously pissing on their brand.  Read about Segway (and yes there is now a Ferrari Segway) engadgetry generally here.  Early last month, a fat cop used one to catch a bad guy, or so it says here.

Are Segways sane or merely the latest manifestation of the Sinclair C5 syndrome?  Do they perhaps have a future in a world dominated (a) by flat pedestrianised surfaces and insanely long pedestrian ramps to anywhere higher or lower, and (b) by vast herds of old people who will otherwise hardly be able to move at all?  Maybe they do.

Patrick Crozier

Tinkering.  It’s deadly.  You start off trying to tart up the sidebar titles and before you know it you’ve:

• Designed a new banner
• Made it clickable (even in IE7, although it won’t admit to it)
• Turned off trackbacks (waste of effort)
• Redesigned the comments
• Added a comments feed (it’s down there with the others)
• And done various other stuff most of which you can’t remember

Oh well.

Mark Holland

It’s in Asmara, which is, as you doubtless all know, the capital of Eritrea.

The Red Sea country was an Italian colony from 1890 to 1941. Presumably, along with Libya, it was their bit of the “Scramble for Africa” that kicked off when the newly unified nations of Germany and Italy along with that other 19th Century new nation Belgium looked at the British, French, Dutch, Spanish, Portugese and Russian Empires and thought, “hey, we want some of that, what bit of the world isn’t yet taken?” Thus the city of Asmara has a distinctly Italian feel. But not only that. Mussolini let Italian architects loose on the place from 1936 onwards so it is therefore full of futuristic buildings celebrating and heralding the technological age.

From The Daily Telegraph:

Giuseppe Pettazzi was one of those architects, and took his passions to almost comic proportions in the building of the iconic Fiat Tagliero building - probably the world’s most beautiful petrol station, and also one of the world’s supreme examples of Futurism, its vertical and horizontal lines extolling speed and motion and urgency.

Basing his building on the contours of an aeroplane, Pettazzi was forced by Italian planning laws to include pillar supports for the two concrete ‘wings’. Legend has it that during the inauguration he demanded the wooden props removed, and when the builders refused, he took a pistol and threatened to shoot their headman, demonstrating absolute faith in his design by standing on the tip of one wing during the de-posting process

Although I’d have expected other such windswept and interesting places about which I know little such as Dakar or Algiers - and why does La corniche Oranaise spring to mind? - to have retained some of the architecture of the period: apparently there’s nothing else quite like it in Africa. 

Mark Holland

June 8, 1959

“Rocket mail” becomes “missile mail” when 3,000 pieces of mail are delivered by a cruise missile fired from a U.S. Navy submarine.

I wonder how they catch it? Can’t see a Nightmail style net apparatus standing up to a wallop from a missile!

"In the light of step twenty-three, I think now would be a good time to give up smoking."

Andy Wood contemplates the Google Maps instructions for the New York-Dublin journey.

Patrick Crozier

Via Theo Spark

Brian Micklethwait

It’s fun to watch the rotting hulk of a bad government you never liked much finally sink beneath the waves, even if the next hulk that will heave into view will be just as unlikable.  So, I now regularly visit Guido and Iain Dale.  And Iain Dale is just now making much of a lobbying scandal that is now bubbling up from the stinking brine around Britain’s junior Transport Minister, a man called Ladyman.  I didn’t even know that Ladyman was any kind of transport minister, until this story erupted.  I knew of him, because he has a funny name, like some TV political sitcom writer invented but then discarded for being too obviously silly, but I didn’t know what he did.

Anyway, the story is that some lobbyists have been lobbying (three separate links there).  Something to do with planning permission for container ports.  Original Sunday Paper story last weekend here.

Meanwhile, it probably counts for rather more that Guido, who is now a political force in his own right, has placed his bet on Durkin being right about what causes Global Warming, with, as is his way, a piece of graphic trickery.

Patrick Crozier

This photo of a Russian highway - almost makes you proud to be British doesn’t it? - inspired this comment over on English Russia:

I drive truck in Russia, and very true that roads in bad bad condition. Something must be done! Just last week, Igor truck hit pothole in this very road, and make me spill bottle of premium Soviet Vodka. Sure only 2 or 3 sips left in gallon container, but it principle of matter that anger Igor. If roads good, Igor not spill Vodka when driving at double speed limit, and if Igor not spill Vodka, probably not lose control of severely overloaded nuclear waste transport truck and crash into full Elementary school, and if truck not crash into school and spill contents, children not grow third eye on back. It make Igor mad, and children too, because now they glow green. To fix roads would solve many problem, prevent many vodka spills.

Na zdorovje!
Igor

I think he may be taking the mick.

Brian Micklethwait

Okay, so far, it won’t go so far.  But this certainly seems fraught with transport possibilities.  Thankyou engadget

It just seems so much smoother and more itself, if you know what I mean. As opposed, say, to this (video here) which just mimics a person, very badly.  It’s the hydraulic leg extending which makes the difference, I think.

And while rootling around some more at engadget, I found this, where there is video of a robot car parking system in New York that I got interested in a while back.

Plus, I just clicked on engadget’s complete transport archive, for the first time.  Can’t think why I never did that before.  Rich pickings.  Plus lots of black boxes to tell moron motorists where they are.

Brian Micklethwait

Here at Transport Blog we have a tradition of featuring food that looks like transport.  We have, that is to say, had postings about food that looks like transport.  One anyway.

So, news of a cake mold that cranks out cakes in the shapes of a railway train:

This is one little locomotive no one will want to miss! Our ingeniously designed cake pan bakes a complete nine-car train that’s ready to decorate and eat. From engine to caboose, there’s no limit to the colors and decorative details imaginative young bakers can add to each train car. Made of durable cast aluminum by NordicWare, the pan bakes each little cake to perfection every time. The premium nonstick interior turns out cakes with beautiful detail and is easy to clean. Hand-wash. 6-cup cap.; 15 1/2” x 9 3/4” x 1 3/4” high. A Williams-Sonoma exclusive.

Cake tin

I stumbled upon this by a route so random that it does not signify, but once I found it, how could I not pass it on to TB readers?

On a more serious note, I now have a special category at my person blog for Bridges,and have dug up and thus categorised as many earlier bridge postings that I could find.

I’ve had a Transport category for some while now.  In my opinion, this quite recent transport related posting, about a dirty-looking vapour trail, is actually quite profound.

Brian Micklethwait

Do lifts inside buildings count as transport?  I don’t see why they wouldn’t.

Anyway, I have a problem.  The EU has just fined a cartel of lift makers nearly a billion euros (a new EU record for fines) for being a cartel, selling both lifts and maintenance for lifts for higher prices than they’d have had to charge if they had competed, instead of colluding which is what they actually did.  (I’m assuming that the facts of the case are as reported.)

Between at least 1995 and 2004, these companies rigged bids for procurement contracts, fixed prices and allocated projects to each other, shared markets and exchanged commercially important and confidential information. The effects of this cartel may continue for twenty to fifty years as maintenance is often done by the companies that installed the equipment in the first place; by cartelising the installation, the companies distorted the markets for years to come.

I write a weekly bit for CNE Competition, and I’d love to be able to write something very pro-free-market (as opposed to very pro-imposed-free-market) about all this.  Maybe to the effect that the EU should just stay out of this and let other competitors move in on this market.  Or maybe that the distortions are caused by other market distortions, for instance in the tall building market.  But I am too ignorant of such things.

Any suggestions?  The reason I ask this here is not just because lifts-equals-transport is an excuse, but because maybe other transport debates and dilemmas actually might shed some light on this case.

Patrick Crozier

Fascinating set of Russian postcards from 1914 predicting what travel would look like in the future.  The period just before the First World War was amazing for transport.  It had seen the birth of the car, air travel, deep-level railways, electrified railways, electrified trams and Zeppelins.  It must have seemed that anything was possible.  In a good sense, that is.  Sadly it didn’t turn out like that, especially for Muscovites.

Hmm… thinks aloud… could the revolution in transport and the outbreak of the First World War possibly be related?

Andy Wood

Carnegie Mellon University, in association with the American AA, has produced what looks like a nifty little tool for calculating the risks from various modes of travel. Quoth the New York Times:

...the risk of death for vehicle occupants who are 16 to 20 years old, on weekdays, is 13.86 per 100 million trips between 8 a.m. and noon. But between 8 p.m. and midnight it is 30.51 per 100 million trips, more than twice as high.

Is this because teenagers are driving their mums to the supermarket in the morning and playing games of chicken at night?

I’m not up to speed with the tool yet, so I don’t know if it can tell us whether Patrick’s claim of yore, that trams are the most dangerous road vehicle known to man, is really true.

Hat tip to Marginal Revolution.

Patrick Crozier

When I heard about the Blog Brother affair I was reminded of the time Tim Ireland got a name check here (February 23):

Tim Ireland gets chucked off a train - readers must decide for themselves whether he got chucked off as a consequence of a) the mendacity of South West Trains or b) because he was acting like a complete tit...link

Strangely enough that link no longer links to the original article.

Mark Holland

Naturally I hate to say I told you so, but not much: Use satellite navigation and you’ll miss the chance of finding your inner self thunders The Times.

But while they are considered a defining marvel of the technological age, the gadgets are destroying our ability to read maps and undermining our very sense of self, according to one of the nation’s leading geographers.

A little airy fairy perhaps. But I don’t mind. Just to have pre-empted “one of the nation’s leading geographers” is cause enough to award myself a chufty badge.

Brian Micklethwait

e-Cargonews Asia reports on a switch back from air freight to shipping.  Key explanatory quote:

Imbriani pointed to a combination of factors that have made shipping lines a viable alternative to air freight. Sailing schedules have become more reliable, capacity is up, and the use of special equipment and containers, such as temperature and humidity control devices, have made it possible to move electronics in ocean containers, he said.

And of course, this will help too.

Brian Micklethwait

So Crozier says: “So, Micklethwait, when are you going to stick up some crazy photos of crazy transport contraptions on Transport Blog?”

Oh.  You want crazy photos, do you?  Well, here’s a crazy photo:

And here’s some even crazier video of this amazing contraption in motion.  It won’t take long to look at this, and you really shouldn’t miss it.

Is it transport?  Well, it’s called the Animaris Rhinoceros Transport.

The Animaris Rhinoceros Transport is a type of animal with a steel skeleton and a polyester skin. It looks as if there is a thick layer of sand coating the animal. It weighes 2. tons, but can be set into motion by one person. It stands 4.70 meters tall. Because of its height it catches enough wind to start moving.

So, a wind powered mechanical walking machine covered in sand.

Does it explain things better if I tell you that it was created by an ‘artist’?  Animaris Rhinoceros Transport is ART for short, obviously.

Brian Micklethwait

On the other hand, if you think London (see below) has problems, try living in Bangladesh just now:

Crowds had attacked vehicles and stopped trains across Bangladesh earlier on Tuesday to enforce the transport blockade, intended to force the removal of the election officials before polls in January.

Ports remained closed and businesses called for urgent action to end the blockade as the shipment of most goods ground to a halt in the country of 140 million people.

That’s definitely politics.

Panama says yes to widening its canal.

Part of Sierra Leone's freight transport system.

According to Brian Micklethwait, who, incidentally, is threatening to re-enlist.