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Metro testing suggests that a single-point failure in the block control system caused Monday’s fatal crash. This is an unacceptable design and Metro should shift to a positive location model with the block control system as back-up.
Archive for the ‘The Built Environment’ Category
October 6th, 2008
Category: Economics, Garbage pail, Good news, Macroeconomic Policy, Politics and Leadership, The Built Environment
This is written as the Dow is sinking almost 7% through about 9600, after a similar day on foreign markets. The judgment of investors isn’t the rousing endorsement of the bailout some had hoped for. And Floyd Norris passes on the following CNN poll result:
As you may know, the U.S. [...]
August 1st, 2008
Lots of chatter over the last few days in the blogosphere about Los Angeles’ new ordinance banning new fast-food restaurants in south LA. (Not “South Central”: we don’t call it that anymore). And everyone is wrong.
My friend and colleague Steve Bainbridge, whose picture is in many dictionaries next to the word “curmudgeon“, sees [...]
April 3rd, 2008
Category: Commerce and its discontents, Most interesting thing I learned today, The Built Environment, urban policy
L.A. would be great if not for the billboards. That, and teenagers driving Hummers. Oh, tourists, also.
October 28th, 2006
Category: Energy and Environment, The Built Environment
The homeowner whose house four firefighters died protecting in the Esperanza fire has a profile in the LAT today. It’s a second home, in which he invested years of work and where he stored a collection of Indian artifacts and antique cars even though, in his words, “there are quite a few fires up [...]
October 28th, 2006
I have to weigh in to the Wal-Mart discussion, because if we only talk about the retail and labor economics of this institution, we are missing something that may be even more important. I’m thinking about the degradation of everyday life Wal-Mart, and all big-box stores and malls, enforce as an inseparable condition of [...]
