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If the conversation about the end of the U.S. Postal Service sounds familiar, it’s not just because we’ve heard variations of it since 1970, when the old Post Office Department became a separate business. It’s also because the destruction of mail delivery closely parallels the wrecking of American passenger rail. Apparently the Congress has it [...]
Archive for the ‘Transportation’ Category
November 29th, 2011
This past Sunday, I flew home to Los Angeles from Thanksgiving with my relatives in Montreal (actually, it was a bat mitzvah since Canadian Thanksgiving occurred six weeks ago but you get the idea). The Sunday after Thanksgiving is the busiest flying day of the year, with millions of passengers criss-crossing the country. And I [...]
May 7th, 2011
Category: Transportation, Uncategorized
A commercial airline pilot mostly follows instructions from ground-based controllers, as can be confirmed by listening to United Airlines’ channel 9. But the job properly requires some distinctive qualities, including good judgment responsibility to the welfare of the passengers responsiveness to evidence and facts, rather than superstition and hunches understanding the rules of a common [...]
April 28th, 2011
Category: Built Environment, Energy and Environment, Infrastructure, Republican Party, Transportation, Watching Conservatives
The New York Times reports this morning: The Christie administration, lenders and a new developer have reached a deal to revive the vast Xanadu entertainment and retail complex, which sits forlorn and unfinished along a stretch of New Jersey highway after having burned through two owners and $1.9 billion, people involved in the negotiations said [...]
October 2nd, 2010
Ilya Repin´s painting of Volga boatmen is not one of serfs.
January 10th, 2010
New high-spped line under construction - in Morocco.
August 4th, 2009
Category: Transportation
Ed Glaeser has an interesting post attempting to run the numbers for high speed rail. For my money, the most important point is that the thing that makes high speed rail problematic in most parts of the country is the absence of a tightly concentrated central business district. High speed rail makes sense in the [...]
April 24th, 2009
Jon scooped me on this last night because I got home so late from the all-day meeting of the Air Resources Board that adopted the LCFS. I was there because my team at Berkeley (with another group at Davis and a subcontract to Purdue) did a large part of the supporting research for this innovative [...]
