The DnD Sanctuary

Do we invest too little in public infrastructure, or too much? Should we spend more on new infrastructure, or in maintaining what we got? Should old infrastructure be replaced, upgraded, removed, or saved for posterity? Who should pay for it? Who should use it? What infrastructure should we have more of and what less? Is it good for your town, country, world, even if it is away from you? Where can we find good infrastructure and where bad?

We need infrastructure to import :wine: from France.

Belgium started charging tolls for foreign trucks (and cars) last year because according to the Belgium government, most are merely passing through and not actually paying any tax in Belgium. Yet, of course, the roads do get worn down by these foreign trucks.

I think good infrastructure means more than just cars. The Netherlands and Denmark have known for years; Antwerp is working on a big catch-up project for the so-called Masterplan 2020 (http://www.antwerpen.be/eCache/ABE/82/28/901.html) (direct link to more detailed PDF (http://www.antwerpen.be/docs/Stad/Bedrijven/Marketing_en_communicatie/MC_Com/Masterplan%202020/Masterplan_2020.pdf), 3.62 MB). It involves investments in new tram lines and cycling paths, with an "ambitious modal shift" as its primary aim. This means that by 2020, they want at least half of all movements to take place by public transit, bicycle, or foot. Information about new cycling expressways can be found on pp. 18-19.

Infrastructure decisions further off can definitely have a big impact. As mentioned in the report, the Netherlands intends to finally finish the A4.

(https://dndsanctuary.eu/imagecache.php?image=http%3A%2F%2Fupload.wikimedia.org%2Fwikipedia%2Fcommons%2Fthumb%2F9%2F98%2FRijksweg4_A4-A29.svg%2F508px-Rijksweg4_A4-A29.svg.png&hash=14f93f5189bdd660ae3124dd9d3d9fe3" rel="cached" data-hash="14f93f5189bdd660ae3124dd9d3d9fe3" data-warn="External image, click here to view original" data-url="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/9/98/Rijksweg4_A4-A29.svg/508px-Rijksweg4_A4-A29.svg.png) (http://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bestand:Rijksweg4_A4-A29.svg)
The northernmost missing piece has been in limbo since the 1950s, but in 2009 and 2010 the government finally managed to get all environmental and other concerns taken care of, or perhaps to push it through in spite of those concerns.

Here's a picture showing what it looked like in 1992.
(https://dndsanctuary.eu/imagecache.php?image=http%3A%2F%2Fupload.wikimedia.org%2Fwikipedia%2Fcommons%2F8%2F89%2FA4_midden_delfland.jpg&hash=4faee1c480d9c270735227eb23b12089" rel="cached" data-hash="4faee1c480d9c270735227eb23b12089" data-warn="External image, click here to view original" data-url="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/89/A4_midden_delfland.jpg) (http://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bestand:A4_midden_delfland.jpg)
It has been ready for being turned into a proper expressway since the 1970s.

This will definitely affect Dutch traffic coming into Belgium, which also has its consequences for the Masterplan 2020.

Edit: I forgot to mention, but most traffic currently enters Belgium using the A16.
(https://dndsanctuary.eu/imagecache.php?image=http%3A%2F%2Fupload.wikimedia.org%2Fwikipedia%2Fcommons%2Fthumb%2Fe%2Fe0%2FRijksweg16.svg%2F520px-Rijksweg16.svg.png&hash=619a59182c89f3e25d0e5da9afcdd587" rel="cached" data-hash="619a59182c89f3e25d0e5da9afcdd587" data-warn="External image, click here to view original" data-url="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/e/e0/Rijksweg16.svg/520px-Rijksweg16.svg.png) (http://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bestand:Rijksweg16.svg)

Edit 2: something I read just last week, Belgium is the worst in traffic jams (http://scorecard.inrix.com/scorecard/). In some ways, this of course simply means that Belgium and the Netherlands are some of the most densely populated areas of Europe and the world, but even so Brussels and Antwerp are hours ahead of Rotterdam, and e.g. Amsterdam or Utrecht didn't make the top 25.

There are pipelines for gas, there are pipelines for water, maybe there ought to be pipelines for  :wine:?

True that even walking as a mode of transport needs infrastructure, though foremost that takes city planning (https://dndsanctuary.eu/index.php?topic=300). There are quite a few tricks to cycling paths as well, Amsterdam, Copenhagen, and Stockholm have done quite well, while Oslo has failed miserably.

The northernmost missing piece has been in limbo since the 1950s, but in 2009 and 2010 the government finally managed to get all environmental and other concerns taken care of, or perhaps to push it through in spite of those concerns.

Here's a picture showing what it looked like in 1992.
(https://dndsanctuary.eu/imagecache.php?image=http%3A%2F%2Fupload.wikimedia.org%2Fwikipedia%2Fcommons%2F8%2F89%2FA4_midden_delfland.jpg&hash=4faee1c480d9c270735227eb23b12089" rel="cached" data-hash="4faee1c480d9c270735227eb23b12089" data-warn="External image, click here to view original" data-url="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/89/A4_midden_delfland.jpg) (http://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bestand:A4_midden_delfland.jpg)
It has been ready for being turned into a proper expressway since the 1970s.

[...] and e.g. Amsterdam or Utrecht didn't make the top 25.

The media industry talks about development hell, for movies or other projects being stuck in limbo for years or decades. There is a development hell for developers as well. If a project doesn't start in a reasonable number of years new people come in, or get children, and they start complaining, adding in another half-dozen or dozen years. In the latter case new people come in, or get children, and they start complaining... Sometimes that is a good thing.

Amsterdam has a good transport system, but they must have some of the slowest trams on the planet, going into the old town where the main tram terminus is.

And there are pipelines for BEER!
http://fall2012scmtransportationblog.files.wordpress.com/2012/11/beerline.jpg?w=584 (http://fall2012scmtransportationblog.files.wordpress.com/2012/11/beerline.jpg?w=584)
(https://dndsanctuary.eu/imagecache.php?image=http%3A%2F%2Ffall2012scmtransportationblog.files.wordpress.com%2F2012%2F11%2Fbeerline.jpg%3Fw%3D584&hash=e95f96b162fb869fb56e4c5da8a4e601" rel="cached" data-hash="e95f96b162fb869fb56e4c5da8a4e601" data-warn="External image, click here to view original" data-url="http://fall2012scmtransportationblog.files.wordpress.com/2012/11/beerline.jpg?w=584)

Doesn't make sense. The bipedes will anyway outrate any upgrades and improvements with their insatiable basic instincts to multiply indefinitely.
The ULTIMATE "infrastructure" will be looking like the following: bipedes sitting on each other and eating each other (having sex simultaneously, of course).

In this thread in that other place (http://web.archive.org/web/20130416003742/http://my.opera.com/community/forums/topic.dml?id=1599982) I linked to some maps of undersea Internet cables. Here is a more information dense map over international Internet routes, click on it for more glorious details and the legend.

(https://dndsanctuary.eu/imagecache.php?image=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.telegeography.com%2Fassets%2Fwebsite%2Fimages%2Fmaps%2Fglobal-internet-map-2012%2Fglobal-internet-map-2012-m.png&hash=f51a5f005c66ce2c328ae5f9cd48b74d" rel="cached" data-hash="f51a5f005c66ce2c328ae5f9cd48b74d" data-warn="External image, click here to view original" data-url="http://www.telegeography.com/assets/website/images/maps/global-internet-map-2012/global-internet-map-2012-m.png) (http://www.telegeography.com/assets/website/images/maps/global-internet-map-2012/global-internet-map-2012-x.png)

It covers international routes, and not physical cables or domestic traffic, which particularly for the US and China is the predominant part of the traffic. Even so, you cannot be a global phenomenon without crossing some borders, this is an essential part of the Internet topology.

Pay attention to the circles and the pretty colours. The circles show the traffic pattern of each continent, North and South America, Europe, Africa, Asia+Pacific. The innermost circle the traffic in 2007, the outermost in 2012. The colours show the communication of the continents.

Curiously enough European traffic is larger than all other international traffic put together, but this is largely because of Europe-Europe traffic. Ignoring this Europe would be little more than Asia and little more than half the size of North America. Soon I would expect this to switch into Europe being a little more than North America and little more than half the size of Asia.

This has to do with geography. More than half the population in the world lives in Asia, and Africa is the fastest growing continent in the world, and Europe lies between those two. Geographically the West Coast of North America is part of the fast growing economy of the Pacific Rim, but the distances are larger and all underwater, so it would be cheaper to cable up Eurasia.

Africa is at a similar position to Europe as the world used to be to the US, most African international traffic goes through Europe, preciously little through Africa. Traffic between African countries  is most likely to go through Europe, then the US, finally Africa. Africa is connected through the Middle East as well, but the Middle East in turn is closest connected to Europe. There were no African-South American links at the time this map was drawn, I believe there is now. Not that it matters much.

And there are pipelines for BEER!

These ones? Beer Pipelines of Europe (http://fall2012scmtransportationblog.wordpress.com/2012/11/28/beer-pipelines/)

A Trans-Atlantic beer tipeline would be both hurrah! and 4℃ cool through the sea. Only question would be in which direction the beer should flow.

I refuse to use cycle paths.
Can't bicycles perfectly ride in the existing streets and roads just as any other user? Course they can, streets and roads aren't exclusive for automobiles.

Cycle paths are made for justifying to charge taxes over cyclists, that's what's going to happen in a near future that people can't see. Taxes and forcing people to have registration plates, insurances, helmets, and so on.
Always the same shit.

They most often are in the street, typically between the outermost car lane and the pedestian pavement. That doesn't always work well, in Oslo a bicycle lane has often been taken as a convenient parking space for drivers with such urges.

Bicyclists tend to get into fights with cars, and they don't play nice with pedestrians either. Pedestrians mill wherever they want to go, as is their royal prerogative. Ideally you'd end up with three types of streets, pedestrian streets where non-legged creatures are forbidden, public transport streets where trams and busses have their lanes, bicycles have theirs, and pedestrians have pavement, and car-centric streets separate from the rest, preferably underground.

Ideally you'd end up with three types of streets,

I don't agree.
One type for everybody.

No one has to pay so cars have streets just for themselves (unless you create a 1000% tax over automobiles for financing roads so they pay for their needs). If streets are public and publicly financed then anyone can use it.

Horses are good and these days less expensive than owning an automobile, I don't know why no one rides horses.

True that even walking as a mode of transport needs infrastructure, though foremost that takes city planning (https://dndsanctuary.eu/index.php?topic=300). There are quite a few tricks to cycling paths as well, Amsterdam, Copenhagen, and Stockholm have done quite well, while Oslo has failed miserably.

There's nothing special about Amsterdam. It's just a Dutch city like any other.

Amsterdam has a good transport system, but they must have some of the slowest trams on the planet, going into the old town where the main tram terminus is.

A new metro line is under construction in Amsterdam, the North-South Line (http://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noord-Zuidlijn). It might help with some of your concerns. Building a metro in Amsterdam is a bit of a horrible idea in the sense that it's a wet, wet place.

The bipedes will anyway outrate any upgrades and improvements with their insatiable basic instincts to multiply indefinitely.

The population growth rate around these parts has been less than 1% since the 1970s and is projected to go negative within a decade or two for the simple reason that most of the population is older than me. Russia has a birth rate of 1.5 children per woman — lower than here.

The population growth rate around these parts has been less than 1% since the 1970s and is projected to go negative within a decade or two for the simple reason that most of the population is older than me.

The planet is gonna stay the same size, and you're not the only people on it. Others could get left with no other choice than come to you.:devil:

Russia has a birth rate of 1.5 children per woman — lower than here.

What about per man?
:rolleyes:

The planet is gonna stay the same size, and you're not the only people on it. Others could get left with no other choice than come to you.

Africa will normalize as conditions improve. Also, I'm pro-immigration.

From another thread.

(https://dndsanctuary.eu/imagecache.php?image=http%3A%2F%2Fbioval.jrc.ec.europa.eu%2Fproducts%2Fgam%2Fdownload%2Faccessibility.png&hash=e0236c5a3f67b0c88699eed856c5e27e" rel="cached" data-hash="e0236c5a3f67b0c88699eed856c5e27e" data-warn="External image, click here to view original" data-url="http://bioval.jrc.ec.europa.eu/products/gam/download/accessibility.png) (http://bioval.jrc.ec.europa.eu/products/gam/download/accessibility.png)

As interesting are the datasets used (http://bioval.jrc.ec.europa.eu/products/gam/sources.htm) to generate this map.

This is the road network, basically showing that we've got road traffic covered.
(https://dndsanctuary.eu/imagecache.php?image=http%3A%2F%2Fbioval.jrc.ec.europa.eu%2Fproducts%2Fgam%2Fimages%2Flarge%2Froads.png&hash=8117b4930f7bf39444dacb43d6e46776" rel="cached" data-hash="8117b4930f7bf39444dacb43d6e46776" data-warn="External image, click here to view original" data-url="http://bioval.jrc.ec.europa.eu/products/gam/images/large/roads.png) (http://bioval.jrc.ec.europa.eu/products/gam/images/large/roads.png)

A little more interesting is the rail network, rjhowie pay attention.
(https://dndsanctuary.eu/imagecache.php?image=http%3A%2F%2Fbioval.jrc.ec.europa.eu%2Fproducts%2Fgam%2Fimages%2Flarge%2Frailways.png&hash=a9fea0fc5e882cbedb3cf5ccfeaa159d" rel="cached" data-hash="a9fea0fc5e882cbedb3cf5ccfeaa159d" data-warn="External image, click here to view original" data-url="http://bioval.jrc.ec.europa.eu/products/gam/images/large/railways.png) (http://bioval.jrc.ec.europa.eu/products/gam/images/large/railways.png)

Navigable rivers, the old-style superhighways.
(https://dndsanctuary.eu/imagecache.php?image=http%3A%2F%2Fbioval.jrc.ec.europa.eu%2Fproducts%2Fgam%2Fimages%2Flarge%2Fmajor_rivers.png&hash=996e1a3ed7518addc0b2b5d28afb9419" rel="cached" data-hash="996e1a3ed7518addc0b2b5d28afb9419" data-warn="External image, click here to view original" data-url="http://bioval.jrc.ec.europa.eu/products/gam/images/large/major_rivers.png) (http://bioval.jrc.ec.europa.eu/products/gam/images/large/major_rivers.png)

Shipping
(https://dndsanctuary.eu/imagecache.php?image=http%3A%2F%2Fbioval.jrc.ec.europa.eu%2Fproducts%2Fgam%2Fimages%2Flarge%2Fshipping_laness.png&hash=3b3ccd0eeec012b1151b53ec8aeb92f7" rel="cached" data-hash="3b3ccd0eeec012b1151b53ec8aeb92f7" data-warn="External image, click here to view original" data-url="http://bioval.jrc.ec.europa.eu/products/gam/images/large/shipping_laness.png) (http://bioval.jrc.ec.europa.eu/products/gam/images/large/shipping_laness.png)

In an earlier thread (http://web.archive.org/web/20131110202929/http://my.opera.com/community/forums/topic.dml?id=358901) one of the possible future links was the Fehmarn rail&road tunnel between Denmark and Germany, which is now under preparation (http://www.femern.com/).

[video]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_XUiMncXp7A[/video]

[video]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D0xYCaPJFQo[/video]

There's a fair amount of blather early in this video, but original footage of the late 1920s project is interesting.
[video]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9okcAR-zivk[/video]

Initial blather is a problem with many videos, I think most of the videos I've posted had a weak start. Maybe we should support the t parameter (time parameter, so that we can skip the boring intros).

I've seen a few 20's videos. A lot of western infrastructure was made then (or earlier, but the films/videos mostly started that decade).

There's a fair amount of blather early in this video, but original footage of the late 1920s project is interesting.

Nice, but the background music got a bit maddening after a while.

Remind me about the time thing sometime in June or July. :P

I've seen a few 20's videos. A lot of western infrastructure was made then (or earlier, but the films/videos mostly started that decade).

You might be interested in this video on Isambard Kingdom Brunel.

[video]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_K00xt_cxbI[/video]

Links to parts 2 through 6:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IPvSFIqIfCk
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FgbiARGvFvg
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UNpChakF0lw
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3gDjim1W2Xs
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FIUAB63-90o

Quote from: jax on 2014-04-25, 07:08:41

There are quite a few tricks to cycling paths as well, Amsterdam, Copenhagen, and Stockholm have done quite well, while Oslo has failed miserably.

There's nothing special about Amsterdam. It's just a Dutch city like any other.

It was part of a much longer list. Very many (most?) German cities would be on the list of "quite well" as well. 

This is supposed to be an (oldish) map of Dutch bike trails.
(https://dndsanctuary.eu/imagecache.php?image=http%3A%2F%2Fi.imgur.com%2FMdWrxKP.jpg&hash=260b0b7f5afe1c25f880314c0e6aab89" rel="cached" data-hash="260b0b7f5afe1c25f880314c0e6aab89" data-warn="External image, click here to view original" data-url="http://i.imgur.com/MdWrxKP.jpg)

It was part of a much longer list. Very many (most?) German cities would be on the list of "quite well" as well.

Many of those lists are based more on recent improvements than on the actual situation. Cities like Antwerp and most cities in Germany score well, but realistically you'd have to rate the entirety of Denmark and the Netherlands significantly higher. Additionally, they often seem to forget about cycling beyond the inner city and the attitude of drivers.

The Statistical Man doesn't like bicycles.
Bicycle paths are not deign of being considered "infrastructures".

You were spot on there jimbro. Correct abou the voice over however still an interesting video of both ends of the link.

Map of the Netherlands was interesting and a reminder that I hope to visit the Netherlands for the third time. Will also re-visit the Royal palace outside Apeldorn as it has a special connection for me!

The Statistical Man doesn't like bicycles.

When I can walk through this one traffic artery in a little less than 10 minutes, while beating the cars that were at the beginning, that suggests cycling could win out in time and frustration (not to mention exercise) for distances possibly up to as much as a whole hour. Plus that way you don't have to do silly things like take the car to the gym so you can cycle on a cycling machine. Inside.

Will also re-visit the Royal palace outside Apeldorn as it has a special connection for me!

I've been there once. Pretty nice.

The Statistical Man doesn't like bicycles.
Bicycle paths are not deign of being considered "infrastructures".

I suppose it all sort of depends on where, exactly, this "Statistical Man" is. In some areas, cars rule the day and roads for cars are the infrastructure everybody concerns themselves with. In other areas of the world, the bicycle rules the roost and bike paths are the infrastructure of choice.

Chicago is slowly but surely becoming a "Bicycle Friendly" city, and bike paths and lanes are part of the infrastructure as a result. Tell a North-Sider that bike paths aren't worthy of being considered "infrastructure" and you're likely to have a demonstration of the superiority of the bike over the car in city traffic. In life in general, for that matter.

(https://www.scmp.com/sites/default/files/2013/09/01/7fad09c87b34fdc48fe51fdf3153e245.jpg)

I guess a road bridge would be more statistically manly then. I have a thing for international bridges and tunnels, and the Hong Kong – Zhuhai – Macau  tunnel-bridge to open in 2016 kind of fits the bill. Though Hong Kong and Macau are no longer British/Portuguese colonies, they will not administratively join the mainland for at least another 33 years, while Zhuhai is part of the mainland.

[video]http://youtu.be/zTIQpYWDtRU[/video]

The bridge joins the outlying Lantau Island of Hong Kong (with the airport, Disneyland and a very tall Buddha statue) with the casinos of Macau (Macau is the Las Vegas/Atlantic City of Asia), and a branch to Zhuhai north of Macao. Macao (and Zhuhai) may branch out to the west to the (soon former) island of Hengqin, which is going to be a special economic zone, and which Macau may partially lease, increasing the size of Macau substantially (Hengqin is three times the size of Macau).


Just as one huge project is finishing, they are planning the next, connecting Shenzhen and Zhongshan. That too doesn't seem to include rail, so at some point a third bridge, for better high-speed rail to connect the lines on either side, will probably be built.

By the look of things all the cities in the neighbourhood are congealing into a Pearl River megacity (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pearl_River_Delta#Pearl_River_mega-city).

(https://dndsanctuary.eu/imagecache.php?image=http%3A%2F%2Fsi.wsj.net%2Fpublic%2Fresources%2Fimages%2FWO-AN591_ZHUHAI_G_20130501173308.jpg&hash=9c19bc4cf133a62737fe2b68970d2b01" rel="cached" data-hash="9c19bc4cf133a62737fe2b68970d2b01" data-warn="External image, click here to view original" data-url="http://si.wsj.net/public/resources/images/WO-AN591_ZHUHAI_G_20130501173308.jpg) (http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424127887324392804578361893390685444)

I suspect not piling everything up in one single super-booperbridge is not at all bad for security reasons. (However, nothing will help if Katsung visits the neighbourhood.)

It seems like for such ultra-long bridges, the costs/benefits ratio would quickly lean toward doing both at once. Around here many (not all) river bridges are separate for road and rail traffic, but I suspect that's partially because they were (originally) constructed decades or in some cases centuries apart. Rail infrastructure goes back a long time.

There are supposedly huge cost savings to do rail and road simultaneously, especially high-speed rail and those super highways, but also for more modest projects. Construction is easier and cheaper, you cut the land once instead of twice, their requirements for curvature and gradients are similar. The rail lines are usually in the middle, but alternatively may be elevated into viaducts.

That definitely goes for bridges and tunnels as well. Arguably it may sometimes make sense to pre-emptively include rail capabilities to a bridge. If the rail project fell through or is delayed the space could be used for more road capacity. Bicycle and pedestrian path should be there as well, though not on a 30+ km project like this.

The problem is that the agencies responsible for the construction and maintenance of roads usually are wholly separate from the agencies responsible for the construction and maintenance of rail.

There is a difference in how the Chinese, Koreans and Japanese build and the Europeans build, (which in turn differs from how the Americans build, but they don't build rail and are unlikely to do so in the medium future, so rail/road integration is moot).

The East Asians are very fond of building viaducts, especially for high-speed rail, while the Europeans haven't built that many since the Romans. There are cost reasons, they actually can be cheaper as the elements are mass fabricated and machine controlled in huge factories while there is a greater degree of manual labour on the ground. They are less vulnerable to the environment. They are less disruptive locally as farms, roads, bridges go under them, while a regular rail (or motorway) track is one big impenetrable wall. On the other hand they are much more visible and somewhat more audible than rail on the ground. A railroad passing through a forest is fairly invisible. A viaduct passing through it is not, though for the passengers it is a lot more exciting passing above the tree tops than below it. Travelling through the endless forests of Canada, Scandinavia, and Russia is incredibly boring.

There are supposedly huge cost savings to do rail and road simultaneously, especially high-speed rail and those super highways, but also for more modest projects. Construction is easier and cheaper, you cut the land once instead of twice, their requirements for curvature and gradients are similar. The rail lines are usually in the middle, but alternatively may be elevated into viaducts.

Yup. For instance, in the Netherlands roads and railroads are made by first dumping a lot (A LOT) of sand in place to make them stable. Tossing in a bit more while you're doing it anyway is much easier to do.

That definitely goes for bridges and tunnels as well. Arguably it may sometimes make sense to pre-emptively include rail capabilities to a bridge. If the rail project fell through or is delayed the space could be used for more road capacity. Bicycle and pedestrian path should be there as well, though not on a 30+ km project like this.

Same for the expressways. No railroad after all? Well, you just go yourself a nice secondary road, or some extra future potential lanes or whatever.

Nice video about the bridge's construction process.
I can imagine the headaches the Director of Project will have...

I suspect that's partially because they were (originally) constructed decades or in some cases centuries apart. Rail infrastructure goes back a long time.

That in a sense seemed to have happened here, even though the time difference would be less than a decade. When the Hong Kong–Zhuhai–Macau was conceived, it was a project at the edge of possibility. They looked at adding rail, but that would take it over the edge. Hong Kong had their airport express trains, but at the time there were only one high-speed line in Mainland China (though many more were planned). Otherwise rail would have obvious, there is a need for speed, no need for flexibility (basically you don't drive into Hong Kong or Macau), and the volume would probably be there, though the west side of Pearl River is relatively sparsely populated.

Remember, a decade earlier at the Hong Kong takeover from Britain in 1997 the Chinese government was furious at the British for what they considered their gigantic and insanely expensive airport project in the barely inhabited island off Lantau (where the bridge will be going). The old airport was overcrowded both inside and outside the airport, quite challenging for the pilots and not the favourite of nervous passengers (this landing was in good weather).

[video]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RIvbm2ZlsnQ[/video]

These three in crosswinds:
[video]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6RqveclPP6M[/video]

Now 17 years later this "insane" British project is still a big one, but no longer at top. Beijing is bigger (the current one, not the the much bigger one that will open in five years), Shanghai Hongqiao is similar or bigger, as is the new airport in neighbouring Shenzhen (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shenzhen_Bao'an_International_Airport) that opened half a year ago. It has integration with high-speed rail (when the construction is finished), metro (when the construction is finished), intercity motorways, and this road bridge going from the airport across Pearl River to Zhongshan. It reportedly has 8 road lanes and no train tracks.

[video]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mPY-KPNwT2U[/video]

There were plans for a airport-to-airport line going from inside the security zone of Hong Kong airport to inside the security zone of Shenzhen airport, which would make transfer from one airport to the other more convenient, at least in theory reducing three security checks (two airports and crossing one international border) into one. I haven't heard anything since, but the plans may pop up again.

Bicycle and pedestrian path should be there as well, though not on a 30+ km project like this.

Why? An hour's trip.

Travelling through the endless forests of Canada, Scandinavia, and Russia is incredibly boring.

For you?
I reckon it's romantic. Let alone the popping time to time up of small semi-rural stations when babushki wait for you to jump out and buy a packet of hot potato and some other snack.:)

I suspect not piling everything up in one single super-booperbridge is not at all bad for security reasons. (However, nothing will help if Katsung visits the neighbourhood.)

Having two bridges make sense, but when this outer bridge started it was at the edge of feasibility. Now, before the first bridge has finished, they will start another (Shenzhen–Zhongshan). What I said didn't make sense to me was that they didn't include rail tracks on the second bridge (too bad on the Hong Kong–Zhuhai–Macau, but different times).

There is a 200 km/h track on the west side of the river and a 350 km/h track under construction on the east side. If you wanted to cross the river from Shenzhen to Zhongshan with a car or bus, you would go straight across the river, but if you wanted to do that with rail you would have to go all the way to Guangzhou. There is little point in going three times as fast as a car if you have to travel more than three times as far.

The two bridges have different uses. Going Shenzhen–Hong Kong–Zhuhai–Zhongshan would make no sense anyway, today you would rather take the existing bridges further inland, but particularly it would make little sense considering that Hong Kong, Macau, and Mainland China are three different entities. Hong Kongers and Macanese can enter each other territories freely, but mainland Chinese need a visa-like permit to enter either, and the Hong Kongers and Macanese need a permit to enter mainland China. That, plus the queue in the border control, means that mainland Chinese wouldn't go by either territory if the final destination is the mainland. To a less extreme extent a Hong Konger going to Zhongshan or a Macanese going to Shenzhen wouldn't use the inner bridge either.

Why? An hour's trip.

Agreed. The 32km long Afsluitdijk is very popular with cyclists (http://www.vogelvrijefietser.nl/hetblad/2012-08/artikel/80-jaar-afsluitdijk). The cycling path was an integral part of the original construction plans, as it is in the 2016 renovation plans. jax shows that he is neither Dutch nor Danish, despite my earlier emphasis on cycling outside of the (inner) city. :)

Another nice example of a cycling path can be found at one of the most impressive feats of 20th century Dutch engineering, the Oosterscheldekering (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oosterscheldekering).

(https://dndsanctuary.eu/imagecache.php?image=http%3A%2F%2Fstatic.panoramio.com%2Fphotos%2Flarge%2F3627408.jpg&hash=ba530959b988edfda8202b307886b112" rel="cached" data-hash="ba530959b988edfda8202b307886b112" data-warn="External image, click here to view original" data-url="http://static.panoramio.com/photos/large/3627408.jpg) (http://www.panoramio.com/photo/3627408)

(https://dndsanctuary.eu/imagecache.php?image=http%3A%2F%2Fupload.wikimedia.org%2Fwikipedia%2Fcommons%2Fthumb%2F2%2F2a%2FOosterscheldekering-pohled.jpg%2F800px-Oosterscheldekering-pohled.jpg&hash=d314f5ab9e4e58aa582f62aaa4019236" rel="cached" data-hash="d314f5ab9e4e58aa582f62aaa4019236" data-warn="External image, click here to view original" data-url="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/2/2a/Oosterscheldekering-pohled.jpg/800px-Oosterscheldekering-pohled.jpg) (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Oosterscheldekering-pohled.jpg)

The structure itself is a mere 8km, but if you look at it on the map you'll realize the distance from e.g. Middelburg to Zierikzee is 42km.

This is why cycling actually works in the Netherlands. Infrastructure. Saying a bridge is 30km so people won't cycle there is just a Catch 22. One that's easily disproved by 80 years of Afsluitdijk. Take note, China.

For you?
I reckon it's romantic. Let alone the popping time to time up of small semi-rural stations when babushki wait for you to jump out and buy a packet of hot potato and some other snack.:)

Yes, for me. But for some reason road is much worse than rail, possibly from the worry that the driver will fall asleep. Perfectly straight roads with hardly any height difference and a perfect wall of trees 5 meters from the road on each side is at best slightly hypnotic.

In a train car it is a lot less intrusive, probably because the train car is much bigger and the fact that the outside tapestry doesn't change much, if at all, isn't that much of a concern. The Swedish rail company handling Northern Sweden had kind of a double decker restaurant/view car, where you actually got a bit of a view from the top, which made a huge difference.

Likewise if you should travel through Finland the advise is to go from the north to the south rather than south to north. The north is slightly higher up, so you will see more on your trip. I couldn't find a video of that, so here is the closest thing.

[video]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-DJs8JcGBKc[/video]

The problem, Jax, is that the train's engineer is not immune to falling asleep. If it can happen to drivers of cars, it can happen to the operator of the train's controls.

Note: We had it happen not long back here in Chicago. You may have heard about the CTA train that tried to climb the escalators a couple of months back. The operator was asleep, the train had overshot the auto-braking system and-- it made for great photos and much comment on Reddit. Turned out the engineer had a bit of history of falling asleep at the controls, she had overshot a stop sometime earlier because she was asleep. She got fired for the incident at the airport escalator.

The problem, Jax, is that the train's engineer is not immune to falling asleep. If it can happen to drivers of cars, it can happen to the operator of the train's controls.

Over here the standard safety system is some kind of lever the driver has to push every two minutes, and otherwise the train stops automatically. Trains also slow down automatically if they come closer than 2km to another train in front of them, etc. The only difficulty is that these systems vary per country, but it's slowly being normalized.

On a related note, there's already e.g. a driverless metro in Lille and a driverless terminal train thingy in Detroit Wayne Airport. And that's just two I personally came across.

Take note, China

If there's anything Chinese wants is not having to cycle anymore...
They prefer Mercedes.

On a related note, there's already e.g. a driverless metro in Lille and a driverless terminal train thingy in Detroit Wayne Airport. And that's just two I personally came across.

If I remember correctly, the Dockland Light Rail in east London was at least experimenting with going driverless in the 1990s.

Just remembered Frenzie (as an afterthought) that when I visited that Royal Palace at Het Loo, i took my regalia with me and a Royal attdenet was more than happy to take my picture at points of interest. I can smile now but some other tourists thought I was something to do with the palace and wanted to take pictures. I often laugh at the reaction! It is as you say a nice place and intend to renew my acquaintance with it again.

Agreed. The 32km long Afsluitdijk is very popular with cyclists (http://www.vogelvrijefietser.nl/hetblad/2012-08/artikel/80-jaar-afsluitdijk). The cycling path was an integral part of the original construction plans, as it is in the 2016 renovation plans. jax shows that he is neither Dutch nor Danish, despite my earlier emphasis on cycling outside of the (inner) city. :)

Another nice example of a cycling path can be found at one of the most impressive feats of 20th century Dutch engineering, the Oosterscheldekering (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oosterscheldekering).


The structure itself is a mere 8km, but if you look at it on the map you'll realize the distance from e.g. Middelburg to Zierikzee is 42km.

This is why cycling actually works in the Netherlands. Infrastructure. Saying a bridge is 30km so people won't cycle there is just a Catch 22. One that's easily disproved by 80 years of Afsluitdijk. Take note, China.

No, I wouldn't. Even when I was still bicycling I wouldn't go more than say 10 km in general, but specifically I wouldn't do it in Guangdong (Canton), southern China. The climate is hot and humid on a good day. The longest bridges tend to disallow bicycling anyway, the best reason is that if there is a sidewalk, it is usually not wide enough for comfortable cycling. Wider would cost more money, and there would have to be enough bicyclists to justify what would in effect be a ninth lane.

Your example is a structure that would be there anyway, the cost is sunk. There is a similar example with the metro in Prague. The end of one line is an elevated tube, with pedestrian and bicycle paths on top.

(https://dndsanctuary.eu/imagecache.php?image=http%3A%2F%2Fprahamhd.vhd.cz%2FMetro%2F2006%2Fcmost5.jpg&hash=2a7493c88a2bda6202a06db08a0eb7d3" rel="cached" data-hash="2a7493c88a2bda6202a06db08a0eb7d3" data-warn="External image, click here to view original" data-url="http://prahamhd.vhd.cz/Metro/2006/cmost5.jpg)

Worse, for Hong Kong–Zhuhai–Macau link is a bridge-tunnel. Tunnels rarely allow bicyclists and pedestrians in. Some have some kind of sidewalk or painted bicycle path, but these are neither safe nor comfortable, and generally extremely narrow. Physically separated paths would be considerably better, but would add to the expense immensely. Service/escape tunnels could be used as bicycle tunnels, but they are not really suitable for that.

Norway is riddled with tunnels. Typically when a new tunnel is dug the old road is turned into a tourist road/bicycle path. However the tunnel was made for a reason, so the old road is typically meandering and often steep. This is what passes for a bicycle path in Norway, but at least one where a bicyclist may bypass a driver [jaybro warning: This video displays height, but not in a way to induce vertigo]:

[video]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fSszjpcYXf4[/video]

Sometimes the tunnel replaces a ferry, then the conditions for the bicyclist gets even worse. Essentially the bicyclist will have to go over or around a mountain, or around a fjord, while a driver can drive straight through. The bicyclist gets the better views, but not a good alternative  for the daily commute.

This is what a similar location (not same place, but same region and same purpose, connecting Oslo with Bergen) could look like for a driver. This is the longest road tunnel in the world (25 km/ 15 miles), speeded up for your convenience (or in normal speed (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eoGqBPX5zXY)). The artificial sky three times in the video is to keep drivers sane.

[video]http://youtu.be/GZ-iJH5I9eM[/video]

For long bridges like Shenzhen–Zhongshan, just like in parts of Norway, travelling by bike would be a massive detours. I'd rather take the bike train, only that there won't be any. Of course one of the eight lanes could be repurposed for bikes and motorbikes, another for rush direction traffic, leaving 3+3.

Just remembered Frenzie (as an afterthought) that when I visited that Royal Palace at Het Loo, i took my regalia with me and a Royal attdenet was more than happy to take my picture at points of interest. I can smile now but some other tourists thought I was something to do with the palace and wanted to take pictures. I often laugh at the reaction! It is as you say a nice place and intend to renew my acquaintance with it again.

:lol:

I hope at least that they were foreign. :P

Your example is a structure that would be there anyway, the cost is sunk.

I occasionally use the dedicated pedestrian tunnel (http://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sint-Annatunnel) to go to the other side of the Scheldt. There are also dedicated bridges (http://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pythonbrug) to be found in many places. Besides, we are talking about a structure that's going to be there anyway. In Chicago I've actually seen a solution that might help. I believe it's on the I-90, where the middle lane or two of the road vary their direction depending on the time of day. In the morning that makes the road into Chicago something like 6 lanes, while at night it results in the reverse. I think it also had signs saying those express lanes were reserved for people who were carpooling, but that aside.

The Dutch equivalent is so-called rush hour lanes. During rush hour, the shoulder becomes part of the road.

Cycling express ways (http://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fietssnelweg) exist in the Netherlands, Belgium (well, the province of Antwerp really), and Denmark. They're currently developing a couple in the Ruhr district, as well. I repeat, this is what infrastructure means. You just can't go around saying "why aren't people cycling more?" when you're not doing anything to make cycling (or walking) more pleasant. Here in Antwerp (city and province) they're working hard on catching up to the Netherlands. They quit saying stupid things and are acting in ways concordant with their words.

All that being said, a train (with the option to take a bike along) would probably be better on that bridge.

The problem, Jax, is that the train's engineer is not immune to falling asleep. If it can happen to drivers of cars, it can happen to the operator of the train's controls.

Note: We had it happen not long back here in Chicago. You may have heard about the CTA train that tried to climb the escalators a couple of months back. The operator was asleep, the train had overshot the auto-braking system and-- it made for great photos and much comment on Reddit. Turned out the engineer had a bit of history of falling asleep at the controls, she had overshot a stop sometime earlier because she was asleep. She got fired for the incident at the airport escalator.

This one? I think I heard of it, I didn't really see it.

[video]http://youtu.be/3-E0tQp5dN4[/video]

The Swedish line (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inland_Line) I think have fail-safes as well, in any case it is a line with very low and slow traffic.

The Saltsjöbanan commuter rail to Stockholm didn't. Last year a run-away train derailed (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2013_Saltsj%C3%B6banan_train_crash) at the end station and rammed straight into a house (that seems to have been quite solidly built). The train company initially blamed a cleaner for joyriding the train, but it was later determined that several important safety mechanisms had been deactivated and that she accidentally started the train by cleaning it.

(https://dndsanctuary.eu/imagecache.php?image=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.metro.se%2F_internal%2Fgxml%210%2Fr0dc21o2f3vste5s7ezej9x3a10rp3w%24b2jq1kqg3goyzkj0a4een14cx3budfo%2Fsaltis.jpeg&hash=b20508c1f445232b598593245c0515fc" rel="cached" data-hash="b20508c1f445232b598593245c0515fc" data-warn="External image, click here to view original" data-url="http://www.metro.se/_internal/gxml!0/r0dc21o2f3vste5s7ezej9x3a10rp3w$b2jq1kqg3goyzkj0a4een14cx3budfo/saltis.jpeg)

There's an alternative to bicycles: (https://dndsanctuary.eu/imagecache.php?image=http%3A%2F%2Fi01.i.aliimg.com%2Fwsphoto%2Fv3%2F509829107_1%2FNew-Toys-High-Jump-Pogo-Stick-for-Children-and-Kids.jpg&hash=2006ed0039ccdff804b038fef01d1391" rel="cached" data-hash="2006ed0039ccdff804b038fef01d1391" data-warn="External image, click here to view original" data-url="http://i01.i.aliimg.com/wsphoto/v3/509829107_1/New-Toys-High-Jump-Pogo-Stick-for-Children-and-Kids.jpg)

I occasionally use the dedicated pedestrian tunnel (http://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sint-Annatunnel) to go to the other side of the Scheldt. There are also dedicated bridges (http://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pythonbrug) to be found in many places.

Pedestrian tunnels are plenty. My personal favourite may be the tunnel connecting the two different Prague city districs of Žižkov and Karlín.

(https://dndsanctuary.eu/imagecache.php?image=http%3A%2F%2Fstatic.panoramio.com%2Fphotos%2Flarge%2F72737795.jpg&hash=dfd4524cfdd17188e4a52b084562127b" rel="cached" data-hash="dfd4524cfdd17188e4a52b084562127b" data-warn="External image, click here to view original" data-url="http://static.panoramio.com/photos/large/72737795.jpg)

But the longest and most impressive tunnel (and connecting elevators and stairs) I've been to must be the old Elbe tunnel running under the river in Hamburg.

[video]http://youtu.be/4r2oCL0WiKk[/video]

The Vítkov hill in Prague actually has two pedestrian/cycle tunnels now. In addition to the pedestrial tunnel on top, as the railroad has been upgraded a couple years ago, the old rail tunnel has been turned into a bicycle path tunnel. In other words you have one tunnel on top crossing the one on the bottom.

All these tunnels are fairly short though, half km or less.

[video]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LkmoMdMb4Js[/video]

Check out the original 1930s wooden escalators:

[video]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p7Cz1y5yodI[/video]

Also check out the Maastunnel in Rotterdam (designed for both cars and cyclists/pedestrians, in separate tubes):

[video]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dVa1lie0Wag[/video]

Forcing cyclists to use bicycle dedicated paths it's social racism and apartheid and a plan to force cyclists to wear helmets, have matriculation, pay insurance and not being allowed to ride drunk.
I'm totally against bicycle paths.

Bicycle paths are for sissies. I have all the right in this world to use streets and roads that I've paid for as much as automobilists did.

Bicycle paths are for sissies. I have all the right in this world to use streets and roads that I've paid for as much as automobilists did.

They only exist so assholes can park their cars on them :right:

Bicycle paths are for sissies. I have all the right in this world to use streets and roads that I've paid for as much as automobilists did.

A motorist who is determined not to appear as a sissy and is determined to assert his rights might miscalculate and come into contact with a similarly-minded motorist and suffer embarrassment, rueful smiles all round or even fisticuffs.
An arrogant cyclist's contact with an arrogant motorist, secure in his steel carapace, could be his last.

An arrogant cyclist's contact with an arrogant motorist, secure in his steel carapace, could be his last.

That's very true but doesn't justifies bicycle paths. There are no free lunches, soon a specific bicycle tax will be created for, allegedly, supporting the costs of such nonsense.

A few European cities are doing it the right way, low car's velocity to 20km/h inside the city. I's better for everyone, much safer for walking people, children and cyclists and has no costs. A sane convivial amongst all the different types of street users is the right way for civilized cities.
Besides, much more automobilists will use bicycles - less pollution, less oil dependence.

The Rahmfather is continuing Daley the Younger's quest for more bicycle lanes and paths. Seems the Rahmfather doesn't agree with you about bicycle paths not being part of the infrastructure.

Out here in the suburbs, bicycle paths happen on the "rails to trails" model. The CA&E became the Prairie Path several decades back, and now the Chicago and Western has become part of it when that old railroad became abandoned.

I could wish they'd used something other than crushed limestone for the paths though. Horses beat that stuff to death out on the outer legs of the path, you can hardly walk on them much less ride a bike.

Try these: (https://dndsanctuary.eu/imagecache.php?image=http%3A%2F%2Fi495.photobucket.com%2Falbums%2Frr316%2FDurhhhh%2FDC_Shoe_Bike.png&hash=8c95087a64cd17ab31718bd8d2de4c70" rel="cached" data-hash="8c95087a64cd17ab31718bd8d2de4c70" data-warn="External image, click here to view original" data-url="http://i495.photobucket.com/albums/rr316/Durhhhh/DC_Shoe_Bike.png) (https://dndsanctuary.eu/imagecache.php?image=http%3A%2F%2Fjerzygirl45.files.wordpress.com%2F2011%2F01%2Fshoe-bike.jpg&hash=fac047ac217ca8bfcae303d5cd7be6fa" rel="cached" data-hash="fac047ac217ca8bfcae303d5cd7be6fa" data-warn="External image, click here to view original" data-url="http://jerzygirl45.files.wordpress.com/2011/01/shoe-bike.jpg):)

Out here in the suburbs, bicycle paths happen on the "rails to trails" model. The CA&E became the Prairie Path several decades back, and now the Chicago and Western has become part of it when that old railroad became abandoned.

I could wish they'd used something other than crushed limestone for the paths though. Horses beat that stuff to death out on the outer legs of the path, you can hardly walk on them much less ride a bike.

Converting abandoned railroads seems to me a good idea, not as specific bicycle lanes but as a much more general concept, non motorized touristic infrastructures.

Certainly it needs a decent pavement where people can walk and ride but such infrastructures constitutes an investment for local tourism.

Nature and adventure tourism is growing much more than "traditional tourism", it makes sense to requalify those old infrastructures, create rural hotels unities and so on.

A few European cities are doing it the right way, low car's velocity to 20km/h inside the city. I's better for everyone, much safer for walking people, children and cyclists and has no costs. A sane convivial amongst all the different types of street users is the right way for civilized cities.

You're saying they don't have those in all of Europe? (Now that I think about it, I don't recall seeing many 30km/h zones in Italy, I suppose.) But this is exactly part of the kind of infrastructure I'm talking about. However, despite that cycling in Antwerp isn't terribly attractive because of all the cobblestones. I don't mind, but my bike can't stand 'em.

A perhaps typically American solution (http://victoriataftkpam.blogspot.be/2011/07/quaint-cobblestone-street-ripped-up-for.html) is to use big slabs of concrete:
(https://dndsanctuary.eu/imagecache.php?image=http%3A%2F%2F1.bp.blogspot.com%2F-zzkAx3Vr3xA%2FTiNI_kplLFI%2FAAAAAAAAFjw%2FtdUwAoTUaeY%2Fs1600%2F2011-07-16_16-09-31_764.jpg&hash=1f4161d5901dfde6c276884043bfe843" rel="cached" data-hash="1f4161d5901dfde6c276884043bfe843" data-warn="External image, click here to view original" data-url="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-zzkAx3Vr3xA/TiNI_kplLFI/AAAAAAAAFjw/tdUwAoTUaeY/s1600/2011-07-16_16-09-31_764.jpg)
Although I should add, those stones don't look so bad. Near me, you have these nasty stones (https://maps.google.com/?ll=51.209034,4.393694&spn=0.011104,0.013347&t=m&z=16&layer=c&cbll=51.209102,4.393794&panoid=CB0RimALMJCg_-sDsGoR2A&cbp=12,211.9,,2,13.49) (pic doesn't show 'em as that nasty), while the sidewalks are very nice.

Anyway, that just goes to show there isn't a one size fits all solution — even within residential areas.

Total car speed limiting to such a low as 20 won't be good for the air conditions.

Total car speed limiting to such a low as 20 won't be good for the air conditions.

On the contrary (http://www.nap.edu/openbook.php?record_id=9676&page=369#p20003296ttt00035).

Research in Germany has shown that the greater the speed of vehicles in built-up areas, the higher is the incidence of acceleration, deceleration, and braking, all of which increase air pollution. German research indicates that traffic calming reduces idle times by 15 percent, gear changing by 12 percent, brake use by 14 percent, and gasoline use by 12 percent (Newman and Kenworthy 1992, 39–40).

NB 20 miles per hour = 30 km per hour.

Damn' Germans must be right!;)
But still, Frans, Bel mentioned 20km/h, not miles.:P

Private cars are evil anyway. A net of public transport should exist, be developed and be attractive in terms of costs for the public.
In Britain I hear, public transportation will cost you more than a taxi in Moscow. It's insanity, don't you think?

In a (woon)erf (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Living_street),* the speed limit is at a footpace (although that actually means something like 15-20km/h, so more like a running pace). According to Wikipedia, about 20% of all Dutch homes stand in woonerven. The difference between a 30km/h regular street and a 15km/h (woon)erf is one of focus. I think the traffic sign (http://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bestand:Nederlands_verkeersbord_G5.svg) should explain that clearly enough:

(https://dndsanctuary.eu/imagecache.php?image=http%3A%2F%2Fupload.wikimedia.org%2Fwikipedia%2Fcommons%2Fthumb%2F3%2F3b%2FNederlands_verkeersbord_G5.svg%2F300px-Nederlands_verkeersbord_G5.svg.png&hash=756d5b7e34b5ab279568ceff94f265c5" rel="cached" data-hash="756d5b7e34b5ab279568ceff94f265c5" data-warn="External image, click here to view original" data-url="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/3/3b/Nederlands_verkeersbord_G5.svg/300px-Nederlands_verkeersbord_G5.svg.png)

It's a shared space where all road users have equal rights. On a regular 30km/h street pedestrians should stick to the sidewalks.

* I wonder how Canadians pronounce the loanword.

Private cars are evil anyway. A net of public transport should exist, be developed and be attractive in terms of costs for the public.
In Britain I hear, public transportation will cost you more than a taxi in Moscow. It's insanity, don't you think?

That would depend on the price of a London taxi and the price of owning a car in Britain. The price of a Moscow taxi doesn't exactly enter the equation when I consider whether my public transit subscription is worth its money or not. That aside, I've heard bad things about Moscow taxis.

You're saying they don't have those in all of Europe? (Now that I think about it, I don't recall seeing many 30km/h zones in Italy, I suppose.)

In the South, we are Fangios... :)

Things are changing and the mortality level at roads and streets has dropped consistently for the last years, that's a good thing, no need to have a deadly civil war at our roads.
More people used to die in the roads every single year than due to thirteen years of war in the colonies.

I don't know about Moscow taxis, but looking at our local chauffeurs, I'd prefer public transport - unless in "life&death" circumstances.

On that "Dutch street" matter, I guess a Hollywoodian action-movie car chase will kill there everybody anyway:) Remember those Terminatorial stunts on pavements and similar mouseholes at a speed of ~100mi/h, huh?

Bel, I suppose some bad-headed pedestrians are worth running over, huh?:)
Some stroll across the street not even thinking about turning their head or like that. Some with juniors in cradles. Should people be to have a WALKING permit too? Like a driver's license?

In the South, we are Fangios...  :)

:lol: But we have Jos the Boss. :P

Things are changing and the mortality level at roads and streets has dropped consistently for the last years, that's a good thing, no need to have a deadly civil war at our roads.

Speaking of which, it would be interesting to see this table (http://europa.eu/rapid/press-release_IP-13-236_en.htm) broken up into Flanders and Wallonia. You see, Wallonia has more traffic casualties in absolute numbers, despite being less populated.

(That being said, I do feel slightly safer on the road in the Netherlands than in Belgium.)

On that "Dutch street" matter, I guess a Hollywoodian action-movie car chase will kill there everybody anyway:) Remember those Terminatorial stunts on pavements and similar mouseholes at a speed of ~100mi/h, huh?

Dick Maas directs nice chases (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1167675/). The link point to Sint, a movie with an interesting roof/street chase. If you don't know the name, Dick Maas also directed Amsterdamned (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0094651/), the movie with what's probably the best canal chase I've seen, even if it was a bit jarring to see it cutting from canals in Amsterdam to canals in Utrecht. As a foreigner, that won't bother you.

YouTube provides:

[video]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z1PZAfdYwQ0[/video]

[video]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O7dHybpZ7Mc[/video]

see it cutting from canals in Amsterdam to canals in Utrecht. As a foreigner, that won't bother you.

It doesn't work for me.
I had a most entertaining night in Ultrecth were I managed to be expulsed from two nightclubs, so I know perfectly to distinguish cosmopolitan Amsterdam from the peasants of Ultrecht. :)

That was an historical trip by the way, I started discussing with a couple of Dutch idiotic policemen the moment I arrived at Schipoll.
You don't need no more infrastructures, what you need is to get rid of such people.

You don't need no more infrastructures, what you need is to get rid of such people.

They have 'em everywhere. But I thought EU citizens weren't given any trouble?

Quote from: Belfrager on 2014-06-02, 21:25:31

You don't need no more infrastructures, what you need is to get rid of such people.

They have 'em everywhere. But I thought EU citizens weren't given any trouble?

You don't seem to know me after all this time...
I had a discussion with those idiots because a) their faces irritated me and b) their metal machine detector kept on beeping and the idiots want me to pass again as if I had nothing better to do.

Besides I wanted to test their preparation for having real people showing them their place.
So I demanded immediately a pair of beautiful Dutch girls to offer me tulips to welcome my arrival to Holland instead of being importuned by a pair of idiots.

It was very interesting, I have to return one of these days.

Seems the Rahmfather doesn't agree with you about bicycle paths not being part of the infrastructure.

Of course they are.

[video]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TaNBuqSuNqk[/video]

That's because the Go Pro camera wide angle, it seems that the trail it's much more narrow than it really is.
Piece of cake.
Just can't do it with my bike because of the panniers...  :whistle:

Riding Beijing's subway end to end: 88km of queues and crushes on a 20p ticket (http://www.theguardian.com/cities/2014/sep/10/-sp-beijing-subway-china-metro-queues-ticket-investment)

In the next six and a half years, extensions to the Beijing subway will cover more ground than the entire London Underground network has in a century and a half.


Interactive graphic: the explosive growth of Beijing’s metro system. Source: Wikipedia
Work on the Chinese capital’s first line started in the 1960s and the vast majority of it opened in the last decade. Yet, at 465km long, it has already outgrown the Tube network by more than 50km. By 2020, an extra 400bn yuan (£40bn) of investment will see it more than double to 1,000km, according to Chinese media. The addition of 17 new lines will make it one of the world’s longest networks.

Each day 9.75 million passengers ride the lines across Beijing: nearly three times as many as take the London Tube and twice as many as use the New York system. The subway’s phenomenal expansion reflects that of the city it serves. Over the last decade or so, Beijing has grown by roughly half a million inhabitants each year – the equivalent of adding the entire populations of Sheffield or Tucson annually. The city is already home to 21 million; by 2020, a report warned last year, it is likely to have added another four million, on a conservative estimate.

[video]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ghHswD7oKVI[/video]

Maybe China could use America as an extension seeing the money owed?  :lol:

There is opening 8 more metro lines, and an interesting overture for a railroad to Nepal (http://www.ekantipur.com/2014/12/28/editors-pick/china-assures-rail-link-with-nepal/399603.html) (the mountainous country between China and India), we might take the train to Mount Everest soon, starting that airport, making an agreement on a railroad between Hungary and Greece, or Serbia for now.

It occurs to me that both jax and rjhowie might appreciate the Dutch television program Rail Away (http://www.eo.nl/tv/railaway/afleveringen/) (links usable with youtube-dl here (http://www.npo.nl/rail-away/POMS_S_EO_097890)).

Thanks for the link there Frenzie although it is not in English. Always been a railway fan since a wee laddie and still the same asIi am deep into rail simulator work. Have built the 6 surviving lines in Ulster and now well over the Border into Eire doing that so when done my offering will be the largest train sim thing for that island.

here in Gt Britain passenger rail continually breaks records and now the latest i came across is that there are now more travelling than in the previous hey-day in the time before WW2. On my two Dutch visits i travelled on their railway and will do the same when i return in 2015. Even travelled on what is left in the ex-colonies over the Atlantic on both my trips years ago. Give me a train than a bus or plane any day!  :)

The way cities are set up can determine whether we feel compelled to use a car or bus to get to work, instead of our legs or a bike. Opting for the latter, the public health argument goes, is hugely beneficial on a variety of fronts. There's good evidence that cities designed to be walkable and bike-friendly carry both health and environmental benefits. Researchers in Barcelona, for example, recently measured the risks and benefits of the city's bike-sharing scheme, Bicing. They found that it got more people cycling, and reduced carbon dioxide emissions in the city.

As a recent Lancet report summed up: "Active travel (walking and cycling) can reduce the risk of ischaemic heart disease, obesity, diabetes, some types of cancer, and all-cause mortality, while also averting costs to health systems and reducing greenhouse gas emissions."

Fifty percent of the world’s population now lives in cities and that's only going to increase — something the World Bank's Timothy Bouley, a health and climate specialist, sees as a huge global health opportunity. "If you build cities the right way — with bike lanes, clean energy, the right kinds of bus and rapid transport systems, buildings with stairs instead of elevators — you can really encourage healthy habits in people."

Helsinki picture from article:
(https://cdn1.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/bmZATZC-mU9mBHnJ5Tb-9Y-kmI4=/1200x0/filters:no_upscale()/cdn0.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/4317259/7478546072_d7cf09b192_k.0.jpg)

The "bicycle tube/snake" ("cykelslange" in Danish means both) in Copenhagen (http://www.theguardian.com/cities/2014/jul/14/bike-lanes-bridge-copenhagen-new-cycle-snake-cykelslangen) is cooler,
(https://dndsanctuary.eu/imagecache.php?image=http%3A%2F%2Fmultimedia.pol.dk%2Farchive%2F00895%2FkulCykelslangen_895869a.jpg&hash=c2d15817e9cf667c5b3c8d7367d3c83b" rel="cached" data-hash="c2d15817e9cf667c5b3c8d7367d3c83b" data-warn="External image, click here to view original" data-url="http://multimedia.pol.dk/archive/00895/kulCykelslangen_895869a.jpg)

Stockholm might beat both in a few years. There are already bicycle tunnels, like in the Netherlands, but when a major railway upgrade in Stockholm is finished, the access tunnels might be turned into the world's longest (barely) bicycle tunnel through central Stockholm.

Will you be able to cycle in using a slope or will this be using e.g. escalators or elevators?

With Stockholm that is one of the remaining questions (together with security and a number of other issues to be considered), the island in question is fairly hilly, and while the tunnel itself is reasonably level, the accesses could have often significant height differences to connect to existing bike network. Maybe something like this?

[video]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TANb2p-HwlE[/video]

Copenhagen on the other hand is reasonably flat.

[video]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c2XFh1K2uBU[/video]

Helsinki picture from article:

When I was living in Helsinki, there was a railway at the bottom of that ditch.

Making a city bicycle-friendly is very difficult. Most cities in the world have been built thoroughly wrong. Any optimism that they can be transformed into healthy places is unjustified.

Whereas to deride them for trying while they are trying to become relatively healthier just smacks of pessimism. ;)

That's an imbecility. Bycicles can and must dislocate in the roads and streets our taxes already payed for. There's no reason for building more.
All those lanes for cycles are a pretext to charge more money from the tax payers. You will pay it.

We (the US) invest much, much too little in infrastructure.

This has been the case since The Great Pretender took office in 1981, and is part of that worthless carcass' legacy.

As a result, if any of you are in the States, I highly advise not driving through the state of Alabama. I once thought MS had the worst roads, then traveled across Alabama on my way to Atlanta.

Fairly sure Ethiopia and Somalia have better roads than the bammers do.


And of course, bridges are beginning to fail across the country.


Will it change? Hell no.

No, instead we have to foot most of NATO's bill, prop up Israel's economy and defenses, pay for much of the UN, supply "foreign aid" across the globe, etc.

Our leaders post-Carter have made it clear that they don't give a damn about American infrastructure and American domestic needs, rather foreigner's needs must come first.

No, instead we have to foot most of NATO's bill, prop up Israel's economy and defenses...

http://journalistsresource.org/studies/international/foreign-policy/u-s-foreign-aid-to-israel-2014-congressional-report (http://journalistsresource.org/studies/international/foreign-policy/u-s-foreign-aid-to-israel-2014-congressional-report)
About $3.1 billion in 2015.

I watched a documentary yesterday on Frontline, Netanyahu at War, and like the man less than ever.

A substantial part of our fiscal problems has to do with our meddling in other countries beginning with WWI. Follow that with WWII, Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan and other smaller, less expensive, adventures.

Here is an article about the transformation of Amsterdam from a Brussels-like car-positive environment into the much more livable city it is today.

http://calgarybuzz.com/2016/02/sustainable-amsterdam-transformation/

Dinca and her Californian partner briefly moved back to North America for nine months in 2013, drawn by Vancouver’s reputation for world-class quality of life and progressive politics. But a frustrated stint into the bicycle advocacy scene – including the fledgling Streets for Everyone – would often end in the same reaction from local leaders: “This isn’t Amsterdam”. But, drawing on those archival photos she had collected over the years, Dinca reminded them that, as recently as the 1980s, neither was Amsterdam.

Here is an article about the transformation of Amsterdam from a Brussels-like car-positive environment into the much more livable city it is today.

http://calgarybuzz.com/2016/02/sustainable-amsterdam-transformation/

That's a nice story. The key statement seems to be "It wasn’t just about building bike lanes," insists Dinca, "But building streets that act as destinations rather than traffic sewers, and slowing everyone down to a speed where people will chose to walk or cycle."

I also thought that specific bicycle lanes here and there where they fit are the wrong approach. Such an approach widens the streets and roads more than ever. It assumes that there are three kinds of traffic - pedestrian, motor, and bicycle. What if in the future we discern four types of traffic in terms of city planning? This would complicate the matters further.

Bicyclists have a speed, so there should not be excessive angles on their way. Futile sharp turns I experience enough when I have to do my biclycling in the city. Insofar as bicycles need straighter paths, they are like cars. But in dense traffic bicyclists are slow enough to fit together with pedestrians and, whenever they stop, they are pedestrians, so I think they right approach is to fit bicyclists together with pedestrians, and plan broader and straighter paths for pedestrians so that there's enough room for bicyclists at the same time.

The result would be occasionally like jogging paths, occasionally like promenades. Tramways can be easily accommodated in the mix and crossing with car lanes have to be planned the way they are planned with tramways. Everybody will win, I think.

That mention colonel of the roads in that State was interesting and touching how widespread that is. It was just that well over a year ago I think Obama mentioned it but was mentioned that around 18,000 bridges are under question nationally? Phew.

"Shovel-ready" jobs :)

The "planners" always seem to know what they're doing, until after… Then they run for cover.

It's more fun, and gives more votes, to build new than to maintain old. Better to remember the bridge I got built than the one I ensured wouldn't fall down. Builders are remembered, maintainers are not.

Then, of course, sometimes new is better.

Builders are remembered, maintainers are not.

Destroying also seems to reflect some attraction.

Well you get out with the spade Oaky and get some fresh air!

How long would this trip take? And, what about Syrian infrastructure?
(https://www.google.com/maps/vt/data=RfCSdfNZ0LFPrHSm0ublXdzhdrDFhtmHhN1u-gM,OcYudUX9ec5FI0QLxFOU5CySKLYeTbV_vs-igky1_KliwfVc0bAgjYf4bGF457h60y_bAW9yigQYZ5Y5ib0TUlH24tWdm5KFdFU-3doVYwQJnWXh7L7A7vlhNASbBfkm_mPiPSqCLPxJencRoVES7Nw,YPUKAKYvsgPZh1g7_kV6pMLjRi6KIIE6WEzUuxgFp7j4QJtelL95_WLVRR9e9BlVR_uMKy_c_rXd9qHUHd-yaCKW23BKeGykGy8pjZk-87mXedpn7H02rOS-PkkAp8re2oouY9wEBdDrXHqh9sUM_3I4XCGO5o0ICtYDmvCG48RQfQsw24GnGSP_eYV5-9zNHi43lcNcwfJGXK2yGFwbng0jUlz4BNivKVO5d75exUzxEYYXZlnWxjbwAs8shqqfMqVyZ4ykS1yY7yEOIuy-1g9IMrUQgsXZkUcSH_itHyB3o9Gp5bu29XKRiclKSwFBoQzQo_GtbP5sqGFRG_CiF2VxbMu5J35WqRze8nfvllj8arYCSsiSYuJmFty-ZJiA2h_XfZBcedmxUoDjxLnlPvMiDuuI87EY3ry4wl7A6vkKx5OjZLT4yqAQgg0DNPe4b71kiCgF4FlN4_OBP3TcitENk_jM-Ro?scale=2&h=200&w=643)

Hope you are not taking the moral high ground on infrastructure my dear man.

Well you get out with the spade Oaky and get some fresh air!

Well, I did some of that when I was young, RJ. (I doubt you did…) I get plenty of fresh air! (Can't get the distributors to deliver my beer directly… :) I've asked; they won't!)
I still don't know where you get the idea that I'm a "hermit". Admittedly, my circle of friends is small; my ambit of acquaintances is considerably wider, but I'm always meeting new people: When I'm out and about, I often find "interesting" situations — and I often poke my nose in. (An old habit that I've yet to break, even though I know I should: Eventually, I know, I'll find myself in a bear-trap.) Luckily, I drinks a bit — so I'm often game for whatever…
Which is to say, Howie, I'm not as tame as you.

I imagine @jax should like this article about the new longest railway tunnel in the world, depending on whether he speaks French (but I'm sure there'll be English and German equivalents aplenty): http://www.lemonde.fr/economie/article/2016/05/31/saint-gothard-la-suisse-voit-le-bout-du-tunnel_4929482_3234.html

I'm more worried about the afterthought at the very end of the article. Apparently the new tunnel will be effectively diverting 20 L/s from the Rhine to the Adriatic, good for a total of 125,000 L/year.

Ah Oakdale, always dribble out with something when in a corner.  Your small circle is a hermit's problem dear man. As for fresh air as a boy was in a national youth organisation and later as a leader took boys on hikes and even myself have hiked through the Scottish highlands. my last job which I was in for 22 years seen me essentially in a walking routine and now have a new pair of hiking boots for drifts into the country. If you joined me I would have to slow down for you to keep up.

That new rail tunnel at Switzerland is something else and taken decades to complete and a wee while ago watched a documentary on the building which was clever and interesting me being a rail fan so i am glad i live in a country with a busy system.

RJ, I've hiked (among other, smaller ranges…) the Appalachians, the Rockies and the Sierras. You climb wee hills, and think you've done something — Are you telling me you spent 22 years "teaching" children to walk?! :)
I'd bet you don't drive. Too "complicated" and too expensive, on your earnings — which amounts to little more than the dole… When the North Sea oil runs out… Well, it won't matter to you.
And when your bile finally chokes you, I will shed crocodile tears.

Would you like to read a good book, written at your level? Try Dale Carnegie…

Subtle attempt at disproving my assertions..... :hat:

To you, assertion is the only way to support your contentions… Howie, so I guess you won't answer a simple question. Ah, well! What else would you expect from a Glaswegian? :) (Either a hooligan or a Nancy Boy, eh? What other options were there?)

Surely you know that if you keep attacking someone they will eventually fight back?
I ask you to stop you're fantastical attacks on me, RJ. Else I'll respond in kind… And I doubt you'd like that.

I imagine @jax should like this article about the new longest railway tunnel in the world, depending on whether he speaks French ...

I'm more worried about the afterthought at the very end of the article. Apparently the new tunnel will be effectively diverting 20 L/s from the Rhine to the Adriatic, good for a total of 125,000 L/year.

No Frankish spoken here, but the Gotthard Base Tunnel is a big, impressive and important thing, 20 years well spent digging a hole. Here in a more user-friendly language

https://youtu.be/UDrHNTB8wW4

The water I wouldn't worry about, that should be between 1/12000 and 1/30000 of the river flow, and Italy is in need of some nice tall Alpine water.

The water I wouldn't worry about, that should be between 1/12000 and 1/30000 of the river flow, and Italy is in need of some nice tall Alpine water.

Maybe so, but they wrote that it changed the water center of Europe by several cm.

it changed the water center of Europe by several cm

? where's the "water center" of Europe?

Going back to the original theme of this thread my own  country had to do something to modernise and during the thatcher years that started. In 1948 the labour party nationalised as much as could be take over by the State. Airlines, railways, several ferry companies, telephones, steel, coal, electric, gas,  large extended bus companies, tote gambling the national tourist company Thomas Cooks, etc. Many of these were over staffed and clumsily run. She reversed that as one government after another had not met the challenge. Why this was not done earlier is beyond me. Now we have competition in all of those areas and taken for granted but better run and more efficient. even the labour lot today know that the situation is here to stay an they even dropped the old State running everything stuff to the bin a while back. I am glad the State is no longer the neo-corporate thing.

You're living in a dream-world, RJ: The socialists are on the rise again, and you support them!
"The government powerful enough to give you everything you want is also powerful enough to take everything that you have…"

Quote from: Frenzie on 2016-06-04, 16:13:15

it changed the water center of Europe by several cm

? where's the "water center" of Europe?

Previously a few centimeters further to the northwest. :lol:

But the phrase "barycentre hydrologique" seems to be unique to Le Monde.

Presumably a tweak of the red line between "Rhein" and "Po".

(https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c4/Europ%C3%A4ische_Wasserscheiden.png)

Oak, you are dreaming boy. May I remind you that the Labour Party here has lost the last two General Elections and the worst result for decades? In Blair's time due to the previous work of Margaret Thatcher's Tories rolling back the State the Labour party dropped their rule on Nationalisation. We have only one single town Councillor Communist in the whole country and he is about 90. The present Labour leader is a Socialist but his MP's are not that keen on him and he has as much chance of being Prime Minister as me thinking the ex-colonies will get a decent and wide scale democracy!

Just nodded to my excellent picture of Her majesty above my fireplace and told her to forgive you and explained that routine ex-colonist have little knowledge of the outside world.  :hat:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jJNf4wbtw6s

Just nodded to my excellent picture of Her majesty above my fireplace and told her to forgive you and explained that routine ex-colonist have little knowledge of the outside world.   :hat:

You mean the delusional world the ineffectual now inhabit? :)

Well as you lot have been champions in the delusional world for so long I in fairness bow to your depth of involvement.  and experience in it. :blush:

Perhaps too much flicker and too little real data, this WSJ video claims China spends too much on infrastructure and the US/West too little.

http://www.wsj.com/video/the-cost-of-the-world-biggest-infrastructure-projects/E1020C70-8221-4288-9E61-AE7B4C0B7297.html?cx_navSource=cx_videoRhs&cx_tag=similar&cx_artPos=4#cxrecs_s

Too much of an infrasturcture can be a negative in itself.

Perhaps too much flicker and too little real data, this WSJ video claims China spends too much on infrastructure and the US/West too little.

A weird, a very weird video. It's conflating things like maintenance, safety and construction of new infrastructure all in one confusing goop. America's D+ rating is about maintenance, although from the video you'd get the impression that it's about constructing new railways and stuff. So while this is supposed to make America sound bad compared to China, the whole safety shtick in the video might well gain China an F.

I am pretty sure the goal was not to make America sound bad compared to China, but rather to make both look bad. WSJ has long had a negative slant to China as well, and I don't think this was meant to be a break with tradition. Rather, I presume, they placed the US and China on two extremes to put WSJournalism in the reasonable middle.

While the piece was fluffy, the sentiment is reasonable: Tooi much infrastructure could be harmful, or at least wasteful. That should be fitting for this topic, when is infrastructure bad for you.

Actually, at least up to date China doesn't have too much infrastructure compared with the US and Europe, actually considerably less on average (of course China is also considerably poorer).

The difference is the speed and scale at which new infrastructure is built. It is also scaled for the insane amount of traffic each spring festival, similar to a hajj on a national level. This makes Chinese infrastructure newer, more modern than anything, but also opens up many questions. What if, after they build it, they don't come?
What about systemic errors or misallocations? What, indeed, about maintenance?

Other emerging countries are likely to look to China, indeed they already do. Are really megaprojects what they need?

America's D+ rating is about maintenance,

I would give Las Vegas a D+ rating because of excessive maintenance. Everytime we think a road is finished, they start construction again. For instance, when I got off the freeway this morning, it took 17 minutes to navigate the off-ramp (frustrating as you can imagine.) Obviously, I was wondering what was going on. Was there a crash or something? But it turned out they blocked off three lanes of the newly completed surface road for no apparent reason and the blocked off lanes, having just been rebuilt, were in perfect condition.

I looked it up and 2 of the 4 dams I can think of off the top of my head (hour or so away) are considered a high risk for failure.

They were built after 1946 to relieve flooding but soon refitted with hydroelectric generators and had a 50yr life expectancy. D+ may be high for the TVA's system of dams. I was afraid to keep looking as lots were built under the same act - same time.

Investing in infrastructures is part of a plan destined to eliminate human beings, we should invest in the people not in the material things.
Monstrous concrete edifications are the modern world piramids built to the glory of the New Order's thecnocratic masters over the famine of populations.

the famine of populations

I'm not quite sure what you meant to say (I doubt you were, either…). But you've been an advocate of substance farming — which would cut the world's population by how mcuh? :(

They were built after 1946 to relieve flooding but soon refitted with hydroelectric generators and had a 50yr life expectancy. D+ may be high for the TVA's system of dams. I was afraid to keep looking as lots were built under the same act - same time.

That's one of my concerns with the speed of Chinese infrastructure. I am not overly concerned with quality, but quality issues are likely to be systemic. As an example a decade ago China had no running high-speed rail, now 2/3 of the HSR in the world is in China. This means that the whole network is the same age, and will likely hit the same maintenance stages at the same time.

The same applies to freeways and subways (metros). They have been there for longer, but especially the subways have had an even more intense construction spree lately than HSR, again all subways and most freeway have the same age. As have the airports. Water pipes. Storm drains. Power plants...

You make a frightening point, jax…

I'm not quite sure what you meant to say (I doubt you were, either...).

I said it perfectly.

But you've been an advocate of substance farming -- which would cut the world's population by how mcuh?  :(

Substance farming would cut infrastructures not population. As obvious.

The need for infrastructures is the modern equivalent of the need for plastic cans by savages, there's no difference except for the size of the plastic can.
Each new infrastructure is a new bar for imprisoning the human soul and I even see people very concerned with their own jail's maintenance...

There are no limits for the materialist greed. People should pursuit happiness not concrete slaughterhouses.

Substance farming would cut infrastructures not population. As obvious.

Btw, it's called subsistence farming. Africa will intensify its agriculture correctly, without duplicating our mistakes like pesticides killing fish, etc. That is to say, sustainable intensification without the great dependence on oil and pesticides..

Btw, it's called subsistence farming.

Indeed of course.
I found it weird when reading Oakdale's "substance farming" expression but decided to keep it for the fun... :)

Just one more thing about infrastructures, many pretend to see building infrastructures as a main engine for fueling economics. That way they justify such investments with an hypothetical return in benefit of the populations. That's a mistake, investment must be done always directly in people not in parasitic systems.

Sorry for the typo, guys…

Speaking of China and infrastructure, the Big One, the wiring of Eurasia (with pieces of Africa) is on its way: The Belt and Road Initiative (also known as One Belt One Road (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_Belt,_One_Road) or The Silk Road Economic Belt and the 21st-century Maritime Silk Road or sometimes Silk Road 2.0). 

Here is a Chinese take (with badly translated subtitles)


Part 1/7: 
https://youtu.be/4ULh0hjVQJg

Part 2/7: 
https://youtu.be/BySt7VohNJQ

Part 3/7: 
https://youtu.be/IbOlMpBSXEI

This infrastructure project, connecting East Asia with Southeast Asia, Europe and Africa through Central, South and West Asia,  is often seen as a political project, Chinese projection versus American containment. Perceived American naval blocade is countered with the dictum, Go West, Young Nation!

China is encircled in the East and South China Sea, and ambitions blocked at the Strait of Malacca. The new-old land route goes through some of the more fractious borders and areas on the road to Vienna, while the sea head for Venice. Power play, connectedness, business, 
waste, opportunity, or all of the above?

In an article in Foreign Affairs: China’s Infrastructure Play (https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/asia/china-s-infrastructure-play) Why Washington Should Accept the New Silk Road

Also called One Belt, One Road, the B&R is a massive undertaking that will shape Eurasia’s future. It will extend from the Pacific to the heart of Europe, stimulate some $4 trillion in investment over the next three decades, and draw in countries that account for 70 percent of the world’s energy reserves.

So far, however, the United States has either fruitlessly attempted to undermine the initiative or avoided engaging with it altogether. That is the wrong course. Washington should instead cautiously back the many aspects of the B&R that advance U.S. interests and oppose those that don’t. The United States does not have to choose between securing its global position and supporting economic growth in Asia: selectively backing the B&R would help achieve both goals. [...]

Driven by the belief that the B&R’s success depends on stability in the Middle East, meanwhile, China has recently taken an activist approach in the region that contrasts starkly with its historical reluctance to get involved there. In January, Xi became the first foreign leader to visit Iran after the lifting of international sanctions on that country; on the same trip, he met with the leaders of Egypt and Saudi Arabia. China has also attempted to mediate between the rival factions in Syria’s civil war; has supported Saudi Arabia’s efforts to defeat the Houthi rebels in Yemen; and, in December 2015, passed a law that will allow the People’s Liberation Army to participate in counter­terrorism missions abroad. [...]

Washington has not only refused to acknowledge the importance of the B&R; in some cases, the Americans have attempted to undermine it, as when the United States futilely opposed the creation of the AIIB.

This passive-aggressive approach is misguided: it allows China to shape Eurasia’s economic and political future without U.S. input; it denies American investors opportunities to profit from major infra­structure projects; and, insofar as it seeks to weaken the initiative, it could stifle a source of much-needed growth for Asia’s developing economies and Europe’s stagnating ones.

As the failed U.S. attempt to prevent its allies from joining the AIIB shows, resisting China’s regional economic initiatives puts Washington in an uncomfortable position with some of its closest partners, many of which see the B&R as a useful tool for pulling the global economy out of the doldrums. U.S. officials should also be mindful of history: transnational infrastructure projects have often bred hostility among great powers when not managed collaboratively, as the grandiose rail projects of France, Germany, and the United Kingdom did in the years leading up to World War I.

The United States’ failure to properly respond to the B&R is especially striking given that Washington inadvertently helped precipitate Beijing’s interest in the project. The “rebalance,” or “pivot,” to Asia that U.S. President Barack Obama initiated in 2011 has proved hollow, but it has nevertheless reinforced China’s sense of encirclement by the United States and its allies, as has the Obama administration’s de facto exclusion of China from the Trans-Pacific Partnership.

Those actions killed many of China’s ambitions in the Pacific, leading Beijing to seek strategic opportunities to its west. In addition, by opposing China’s calls for a larger voting share at the International Monetary Fund in the first decade of this century, the United States pushed Beijing to establish a multilateral lender of its own.

And by backing restrictions on projects that violated American environmental standards at the World Bank—where, in 2013, the United States supported a ban on funding for most new coal-fired power plants—the United States made room for Beijing to develop alternative institutions with the knowledge that it could find customers among its less scrupulous neighbors. Even the United States’ unsustainable federal debt played a role in the creation of the B&R: as it ballooned in the years after the 2008 financial crisis, the yield on U.S. Treasury bonds plummeted, pushing China, the world’s largest foreign holder of U.S. debt, to direct more of its massive savings to infrastructure instead. [...]

Instead, Washington should approach the B&R with an open mind. U.S. officials should publicly acknowledge China’s initiative and the potential benefits it offers, provided that Beijing leads the effort trans­parently and ensures that it works largely in the service of inter­national development rather than China’s own gain. The two countries should then find a bilateral forum—the Strategic and Economic Dialogue is just one option—in which to discuss a joint economic development agenda and come up with a role for the United States that plays to its strengths.

American defense contractors, for example, could provide physical security and cybersecurity services to B&R projects, and the U.S. military could help secure some of the more volatile regions where Washington already has military assets, such as the Horn of Africa. That would spare China the need to increase its overseas military presence and bolster the legitimacy of the U.S. forces working in those areas. The United States should reassure some of its allies, particularly those in Southeast Asia, where anxiety about China’s ascendance runs deep, that the B&R is largely a force for economic development rather than Chinese expansionism. And U.S. officials should seek a role for Washington in the AIIB, either as a member of the bank or as an observer.

The United States, however, should not give the B&R its blanket support, since doing so would pose serious risks. First, it would feed Russia’s fears of U.S.-Chinese collusion, triggering paranoia in the Kremlin, where there is already concern about China’s push into former Soviet states, and Moscow could lash out in response. India poses a similar challenge. It recognizes the B&R’s economic promise, but like Russia, it is wary of China’s motives; specifically, New Delhi is troubled by the commitments Beijing has made to Pakistan and by China’s growing presence in the Indian Ocean and the neighboring countries of Bangladesh, the Maldives, and Sri Lanka.

Any perception that China and the United States are attempting to change the status quo in the region might feed New Delhi’s anxiety and accelerate an arms race between China and India. In both cases, Washington should tread carefully, doing everything it can to avoid creating the appearance of unwanted collaboration between China and the United States. As for the Middle East, the Gulf states will chafe at the prominent role the B&R could give Iran as a land bridge between Central Asia and Europe. So Washington should make clear that its support for China’s infrastructure push will depend on Beijing’s commitment to preserving the delicate balance of power in the Persian Gulf, and it should try to ensure that projects that provide economic boons for Iran are balanced by investments of similar benefit to the Gulf states.

And to ensure that it is seen as a leader on global infrastructure itself, Washington should launch and promote its own infrastructure projects, such as the New Silk Road initiative proposed in 2011 by then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to connect Turkmenistan, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and India with roads and pipelines.

The greatest risk that the United States would face by supporting the B&R wholesale is that China could use American goodwill to advance its own ascendance to the United States’ detriment—above all, by attempting to change the delicate status quo in Southeast Asia and the South China Sea. If China is indeed pursuing a long-term strategy to supplant the United States as the world’s dominant power, as some China watchers contend, then giving it the chance to take such a course would be a grave mistake. In response to the recent rejection of China’s historical claims to most of the South China Sea by an international tribunal, for example, Beijing might try to build dual-use infrastructure that would further militarize the region and intimidate its rivals there. That is something the United States should not tolerate, as no degree of economic integration can justify compromising the United States’ Pacific alliances.

Chinese officials would likely recognize that U.S. involvement in the B&R would place some limits on Beijing’s ability to redraw the lines of the Eurasian economy. But for reasons of self-interest, they should still welcome American cooperation. Infrastructure projects tend to carry a high risk and produce only modest returns on investment; the B&R is too vast and expensive to rest on one country’s shoulders. American engagement would clear the way for co-investments by U.S.-, European-, and Japanese-led institutions, such as the World Bank, the Asian Develop­ment Bank, and the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development; it would attract private capital to China’s projects, as well. [...]

It will take a great deal of magnanimity for the United States to resist the urge to oppose such a grand strategic initiative as the B&R, especially since China’s westward push comes at a time when Washington is increasingly confused about its own role in the world. But the United States must remember that its response to the project will help determine the future of U.S.-Chinese relations and of the international order. And as the global economy slows down and hundreds of millions of Asians languish with few hopes of escaping poverty, the United States must recognize that its fate is linked to that of the developing world—and that it should give its blessing to initiatives that will lift all boats.

Will the materialist propaganda ever finish?
Yes, with bombs. Lovely materialist bombs.

Speaking of infrastructure and China, the world's now longest sea bridge (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hong_Kong%E2%80%93Zhuhai%E2%80%93Macau_Bridge) connecting Hong Kong, Macau and Zhuhai in Mainland China linked up last week. It will take another year for the bridge to finish, thus opening for traffic in 2017, but it already qualifies as "longest".


https://youtu.be/O0rfO0GiEgY

(https://www.scmp.com/sites/default/files/2013/09/01/7fad09c87b34fdc48fe51fdf3153e245.jpg)

I guess a road bridge would be more statistically manly then. I have a thing for international bridges and tunnels, and the Hong Kong – Zhuhai – Macau  tunnel-bridge to open in 2016 kind of fits the bill. Though Hong Kong and Macau are no longer British/Portuguese colonies, they will not administratively join the mainland for at least another 33 years, while Zhuhai is part of the mainland.

The bridge joins the outlying Lantau Island of Hong Kong (with the airport, Disneyland and a very tall Buddha statue) with the casinos of Macau (Macau is the Las Vegas/Atlantic City of Asia), and a branch to Zhuhai north of Macao. Macao (and Zhuhai) may branch out to the west to the (soon former) island of Hengqin, which is going to be a special economic zone, and which Macau may partially lease, increasing the size of Macau substantially (Hengqin is three times the size of Macau).


Just as one huge project is finishing, they are planning the next, connecting Shenzhen and Zhongshan. That too doesn't seem to include rail, so at some point a third bridge, for better high-speed rail to connect the lines on either side, will probably be built.

By the look of things all the cities in the neighbourhood are congealing into a Pearl River megacity (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pearl_River_Delta#Pearl_River_mega-city).

(https://dndsanctuary.eu/imagecache.php?image=http%3A%2F%2Fsi.wsj.net%2Fpublic%2Fresources%2Fimages%2FWO-AN591_ZHUHAI_G_20130501173308.jpg&hash=9c19bc4cf133a62737fe2b68970d2b01" rel="cached" data-hash="9c19bc4cf133a62737fe2b68970d2b01" data-warn="External image, click here to view original" data-url="http://si.wsj.net/public/resources/images/WO-AN591_ZHUHAI_G_20130501173308.jpg) (http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424127887324392804578361893390685444)

While within one country, Hong Kong, Macau and Mainland China are separate territories, so there will be border controls between the three.

There's no infrastructure as phallic infrastructures. Stonehenge rules.
Who cares about Chinese bridges.

Bridges are not usually considered phallic (that aside the sidetrack on feminine/masculine gender of the word "bridge" in different languages).

Speaking of Trans-Eurasian infrastructure, Google kindly reminded us that it's been a century since B&R 2.0, the Trans-Sibirian Railway (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trans-Siberian_Railway), was completed:

https://youtu.be/Zik9bc9A-Es

Bridges are not usually considered phallic (that aside the sidetrack on feminine/masculine gender of the word "bridge" in different languages).

Longer bridges are meandering snakes. Doesn't seem that far-fetched. :P

(https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/564x/71/c3/bc/71c3bcfc9d216526e42c206d1f2b078f.jpg)
Chesapeake Bay Bridge–Tunnel (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chesapeake_Bay_Bridge%E2%80%93Tunnel)

Infrastructure porn :flirt:

(https://dndsanctuary.eu/imagecache.php?image=http%3A%2F%2Fl7.alamy.com%2Fzooms%2Fbc7abbf4b9454262aad063421afc5f9a%2Fbudapest-hungary-11th-dec-2013-the-car-tunnel-behind-the-chain-bridge-dmmm1n.jpg&hash=200b2c8206be8ef3eddb571d8014fd38" rel="cached" data-hash="200b2c8206be8ef3eddb571d8014fd38" data-warn="External image, click here to view original" data-url="http://l7.alamy.com/zooms/bc7abbf4b9454262aad063421afc5f9a/budapest-hungary-11th-dec-2013-the-car-tunnel-behind-the-chain-bridge-dmmm1n.jpg)

Google and Facebook to Lay High-Speed Fiber Optic Cable From LA to Hong Kong (https://sputniknews.com/us/201610151046353462-google-facebook-fiber-optic-cable/)

Dream on! :)
But SNL is the sine qua non of liberal argumentation… If it doesn't appear on Saturday Night Live, it doesn't matter. And if their juvenile humor doesn't sway Democrats than the "bit" has failed, and the writers need to be fired! (Or, at least, put on the "back bench"… That is, forced to earn an honest living.)

But SNL is the sine qua non of liberal argumentation... If it doesn't appear on Saturday Night Live, it doesn't matter.

Wrong thread? Or does infrastructure in the US have to be SNL-approved?

Oops! Yes, it must have been the wrong thread… But I'll go back and look.
____
Nope! Google and Facebook are going to lay high-speed cable… You are the one who's delirious, jax: These companies only spend money for frivolous purposes! :) (Like buying politicians.)

That headline was misleading, the two Trans-Pacific cables (60 Tbps US-Japan and 120 Tbps US-HK) have Google involvement, while the one with Facebook and Microsoft involvement is Trans-Atlantic (160 Tbps US-Spain). The misleading headline came from Wired, Facebook and Google Will Stretch Internet Cable from LA to Hong Kong (https://www.wired.com/2016/10/facebook-google-wil-stretch-internet-cable-la-hong-kong)

The below picture isn't exactly infrastrucure related. However it's an eye-catching, futuristic decoration of a house in Lithuania.

(https://dndsanctuary.eu/imagecache.php?image=http%3A%2F%2Fcdn1.spiegel.de%2Fimages%2Fimage-1067500-galleryV9-vgkn-1067500.jpg&hash=dcd6d80e91d85c202481a065e96d8a9e" rel="cached" data-hash="dcd6d80e91d85c202481a065e96d8a9e" data-warn="External image, click here to view original" data-url="http://cdn1.spiegel.de/images/image-1067500-galleryV9-vgkn-1067500.jpg)

I had a house like that once… But I put the pots on the floor, to collect the rainwater. :)

I had a house like that once… But I put the pots on the floor, to collect the rainwater. :)

So to speak, dual-use inner decoration. :)

I wonder when some humanist movement will appear with the only and sole desire and goal of destroying all materialist infrastructures.
That would be a major civilizational  breakthrough.

I wonder when some humanist movement will appear with the only and sole desire and goal of destroying all materialist infrastructures.
That would be a major civilizational  breakthrough.

No need for a humanist movement therefore. A humanitarian intervention disguised as a shock and awe campaign can do it.

[video]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R30cbnkMG3s[/video]

Aerial views of world's largest water transfer project (http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/china/2016-11/30/content_27525649.htm)

(https://dndsanctuary.eu/imagecache.php?image=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.chinadaily.com.cn%2Fchina%2Fimages%2Fattachement%2Fjpg%2Fsite1%2F20161130%2Ff8bc126e4b2319a8848b4f.jpg&hash=3bbffb91af3ca503205f5a12f16f84df" rel="cached" data-hash="3bbffb91af3ca503205f5a12f16f84df" data-warn="External image, click here to view original" data-url="http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/china/images/attachement/jpg/site1/20161130/f8bc126e4b2319a8848b4f.jpg)
(https://dndsanctuary.eu/imagecache.php?image=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.chinadaily.com.cn%2Fchina%2Fimages%2Fattachement%2Fjpg%2Fsite1%2F20161130%2Ff8bc126e4b2319a884d853.jpg&hash=3b012902456a83aff14eabb34dd5468d" rel="cached" data-hash="3b012902456a83aff14eabb34dd5468d" data-warn="External image, click here to view original" data-url="http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/china/images/attachement/jpg/site1/20161130/f8bc126e4b2319a884d853.jpg)

(https://dndsanctuary.eu/imagecache.php?image=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.chinadaily.com.cn%2Fchina%2Fimages%2Fattachement%2Fjpg%2Fsite1%2F20161130%2Ff8bc126e4b2319a884d957.jpg&hash=2af71b13ebcfc54590daf06aca027019" rel="cached" data-hash="2af71b13ebcfc54590daf06aca027019" data-warn="External image, click here to view original" data-url="http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/china/images/attachement/jpg/site1/20161130/f8bc126e4b2319a884d957.jpg)

(https://dndsanctuary.eu/imagecache.php?image=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.chinadaily.com.cn%2Fchina%2Fimages%2Fattachement%2Fjpg%2Fsite1%2F20161130%2Ff8bc126e4b2319a885485a.jpg&hash=ba0a89979f195549ba40952403e23e05" rel="cached" data-hash="ba0a89979f195549ba40952403e23e05" data-warn="External image, click here to view original" data-url="http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/china/images/attachement/jpg/site1/20161130/f8bc126e4b2319a885485a.jpg)

Very impressive.

Another crime against nature.

…it's odd, how Nature doesn't include human beings… You'd think Nature would have wised up, by now! :)

Nah! Gaia is the same bitch that killed the dinosaurs. (Weren't they magnificent!) You lizards just laying out in the sun should be able to tell the rest of us, huh? :)

...it's odd, how Nature doesn't include human beings... You'd think Nature would have wised up, by now!  :)

Does Reinhard Heydrich's committing of crimes against humanity mean he isn't part of humanity? Your argument doesn't hold up. :)

It certainly does: Unless we recognize that such is a potential part of humanity, we're likely to allow it again… And again. (Of course, he didn't commit crimes against "humanity"… That's just a European euphemism for "a really bad man who killed a lot of people"; otherwise known as what used to be your typical European ruler. You folk used to take it in stride! :) )
Indeed, had it not been for the Portuguese bringing potatoes back to the Old World, the 30 Years War might have halved the population of Europe…

It certainly does: Unless we recognize that such is a potential part of humanity, we're likely to allow it again... And again.

Apparently your argument is something else than I thought it was. Could you spell it out for me? Because humanity is rather obviously a part of nature.

[Crime against humanity is] just a European euphemism

Genocide is one crime against humanity. Heydrich did a whole lot more than that. Hence crimes against humanity, not a crime. But that aside. I see you've wholeheartedly accepted that Americans are Europeans. :) After all, George Washington Williams (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Washington_Williams) came up with the phrase to describe the state of affairs in the Congo Free State.

"Lafayette" Johnson, who might or might not have been there, might disagree… But what does central African atrocity at the hands of Europeans in the late 1800s have to do with the Wiki sentence you'd like to quote, other than to fuel anti-American sentiment?

In this letter, he [GWW] condemned the brutal and inhuman treatment the Congolese were suffering at the hands of Europeans and Africans supervising them for the Congo Free State. He mentioned the role played by Henry M. Stanley, sent to the Congo by the King, in deceiving and mistreating local Congolese. Williams reminded the King that the crimes committed were all committed in his name, making him as guilty as the perpetrators. He appealed to the international community of the day to "call and create an International Commission to investigate the charges herein preferred in the name of Humanity ...".

Good rhetoric! Very good! Silly and pompous and ineffectual; but good!
Think about the things that have been done, in the name of Humanity! Surely you'll relent… Your position is untenable.

Each crime is cognizant; else there are no humans. Where such crimes are both numerous and condoned by governments, then war is the likely result —if there are any moral regimes— and we all (don't we?) hope for better arrangements?

Indeed, had it not been for the Portuguese bringing potatoes back to the Old World, the 30 Years War might have halved the population of Europe..

First time I see someone mentioning us as the saviors of half of European population... :)

The 30 Years War affected mainly the German territories not the rest of Europe and potatoes were originary from the Andes civilizations therefore imported by the Spanish. We were much more interested in gold from Brazil, not potatoes from lake Titicaca.

Sorry to disappoint you, we didn't save half of Europe and I doubt very much that we would ever do it even if we could, that half didn't interested us too much, we were precisely attacking it. :)

I stand corrected! And abashed…

If your opinions are common, the EU should finance "shovel-ready" jobs: Sever Portugal from the continent! :) Dig, Dig! Send it off into the Atlantic Ocean…
(Who knows? You might repeat Columbus's feat!)

But what does central African atrocity at the hands of Europeans in the late 1800s have to do with the Wiki sentence you'd like to quote, other than to fuel anti-American sentiment?

Um, what are you on about? You said it's a European euphemism. I think you're slightly confused about what a euphemism is, considering that we (as in people who use language, not as in Europeans) don't say things like Holocaust or crimes against humanity to hide anything. A euphemism would be to say that Heydrich gave people special treatment. Anyway, I ignored that because I thought it was rather amusing that the originator of the phrase appears to be an American. Your counter-argument is to say that no, actually another American came up with it first?

Setting aside the question of whether I would fuel anti-American sentiment (I mean, why would I do that exactly? unlike some people *cough*krake*cough* I quite like America), how would anything relating to the Congo Free State fuel anti-American sentiment anyway?

Think about the things that have been done, in the name of Humanity! Surely you'll relent... Your position is untenable.

Which position is that? I've said that:

• Whether or not an act is a crime against a construct doesn't affect the perpetrator's membership of that construct unless it's part said construct's definition (e.g., a criminal is not a law abiding citizen). Or more concretely, whether an act is a crime against nature is a separate question from whether that which commits the act is a part of nature.
• Man is part of nature.
• The phrase crime against humanity was effectively coined in 1890 by an American.

I did not say that sticking a label on a problem will somehow magically solve it.

And a special note on Reinhard Heydrich?

Right, and Heydrich is part of humanity. I did say that. :P

...how would anything relating to the Congo Free State fuel anti-American sentiment anyway?

Don't you see? The whole world is in American interest, so at any given time anything negative implied about anything means implying something negative about America - when it serves a purpose for the time being. Trump is the president now and Putin has said nice things about Trump, so if you say anything negative about Putin, you are being anti-American. See, it all fits! Trump is coming to get you and he will make America great again.

I have already noticed that both Putin and Trump have adopted Obama's phrase: There are people who wish us harm...

Setting aside the question of whether I would fuel anti-American sentiment (I mean, why would I do that exactly? unlike some people *cough*krake*cough* I quite like America), ...

No need for pushing me forward as justification for your own statements. :left:
In case you don't agree with some of my statements you are entitled to reply directly.
You know that when you point a finger at someone, there are three more pointing back at you.

I'm not quite sure what that would justify or how. Nevertheless, mentioning you by (nick)name was a faux pas and I apologize for that. I didn't mean to imply that you would post something solely to fuel anti-American sentiment.

(https://dndsanctuary.eu/imagecache.php?image=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.animatedimages.org%2Fdata%2Fmedia%2F2146%2Fanimated-cheers-and-toasting-smiley-image-0012.gif&hash=cc25836c000009ab8190b4a7543bb3b7" rel="cached" data-hash="cc25836c000009ab8190b4a7543bb3b7" data-warn="External image, click here to view original" data-url="http://www.animatedimages.org/data/media/2146/animated-cheers-and-toasting-smiley-image-0012.gif) (http://www.animatedimages.org/cat-cheers-and-toasting-smileys-and-smilies-2146.htm)

I didn't mean to imply that you would post something solely to fuel anti-American sentiment.

But I'll do it very happilly in case you don't have the courage for doing it, :)
The same way, sometimes, I like to fuel anti European sentiment. :)

Centuries ago Belfrager your corner was fuelling "heretic" fires. :D  Well frenzie the only thing about Heydrich was that he was intelligent and had he not been sacked from the navy well history might have been different for him!

The world is waiting to see what transpires after America's new and most un-political one at that.

Centuries ago Belfrager your corner was fuelling "heretic" fires. :D 

Many countries have their own Wikipedia page like this one https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Witch_trials_in_early_modern_Scotland

Oddly enough, people remain ignorant to this day… Here, there and everywhere.

Isn't that the "infrastructure" that won't erode…? That can't be replaced?

And may you also add ersi the following.

There were witches who suffered in the good ole US of A. Plus blacks were done in, hung, burned out for being inferior.

Centuries ago Belfrager your corner was fuelling "heretic" fires

I know the Holly Office records and files. You know nothing rjhowie.

So I let you talk as a parrot, a protestant parrot. Specialized on witch burning and not only.
Protestant Inquisition, the decay of European civilization. Burning in the name of money.

Burning in the name of money.

Not much has changed since, except that we have Napalm now. :)

I know the Holly Office records and files.

Oh good, there's an office for that. I was needing ideas for my holiday reef. I hate it when there's just a cluster-fuck of red berries. A record/files of proper ornaments and dispersion methods should come in handy... 

Hhm, Belfrager.......just shows how limited awareness is in Papist Portugal. Maybe I should remind of the following dear man.

Portugal a dictatorship for decades and so too was Spain. Add on the hard truth that Nazi Germany was heavily weighted on RC leaders and so to was Mussolini's Italy. Heavens even the Vatican did a dance with Benito back in the early years. So three out of three for your corner making a mark and just a pity the kind of mark!  :cheers:

(https://walizahid.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/One-Belt-One-Road-OBOR-China-projects.jpg)

It seems that we stopped them, it finishes in Madrid. No acess to the Atlantic Ocean.
Maybe we should send the bill to our American friends. :)

Hamburg and Rotterdam are the European ports. The disruptive change is in the South-East. The port of Piraeus (Athens) is upgraded, as is the railway line Athens-Budapest, and from there the European trunk route, including the Belgrade-Budapest section currently under construction (http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/business/2016-09/10/content_26759286.htm). Assuming a rail upgrade Belgrade-Sofia-Istanbul (by the EU, China or both) the Balkans in the South-East of Europe will have their rail backbone much like the North-West and South-West. 

Looked askew there is a slight historical irony to this. The Port of Piraeus is right next to Salamis, the history-changing battle where the Athenians broke the Persian fleet and thus their full-scale invasion and will be hooked on by rail to the trunk route through Istanbul and Anatolia (Turkey) to the traditional arch-enemy Persia (Iran). Of course Persepolis is long gone, burned down by Macedonian pyromaniacs, but this Chinese-initiated project would join some of the oldest enemies in history. (More challenging this project would also join some much fresher enemies, the biggest headache would be between Iran and China, the Central Asian Republics, the -stans, where Russia wouldn't be a disinterested party.)

The sea road ends in Venice, a relative rail shortcut to Piraeus, the Gotthard Base Tunnel, which opened a couple days ago (http://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/hurtling-into-history_first-full-day-of-service-for-gotthard-rail-tunnel/42753636), and all. Shorter rail route means longer ship route, so there wouldn't be a time benefit, but in both cases the huge detour around the Iberian Peninsula can be avoided, and it is a whole lot cheaper than digging a Suez Canal through France.

The Atlantic is also reachable from West Africa, as well as the Northeast Passage (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northeast_Passage).

The American-Chinese favourite Djibouti will remain a strategic port for the Americans, the Chinese and the landlocked parts of the Horn of Africa. Mombasa/Kenya will have a similar role for East Africa.



Background: Chinese-built railways in Africa (https://furtherafrica.com/2016/10/30/background-chinese-built-railways-in-africa/)

All aboard! The Chinese-funded railways linking East Africa (http://edition.cnn.com/2016/11/21/africa/chinese-funded-railways-in-africa/)

(https://dndsanctuary.eu/imagecache.php?image=http%3A%2F%2F3.bp.blogspot.com%2F-Y7_Vh9eLJ2w%2FVlckcq57DMI%2FAAAAAAABEnY%2F83Oh6ClsytE%2Fs640%2Feastafricarailway.gif&hash=eecc76fd9f2c2762d69745d02477fd79" rel="cached" data-hash="eecc76fd9f2c2762d69745d02477fd79" data-warn="External image, click here to view original" data-url="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-Y7_Vh9eLJ2w/Vlckcq57DMI/AAAAAAABEnY/83Oh6ClsytE/s640/eastafricarailway.gif)

Strategically the three corridors Kashgar-Gwadar, Kunming-Singapore, and Kunming-Mandalay-Dhaka-Kolkata are the important ones.

Kashgar-Gwadar is why China and Pakistan are best friends forever. This route bypasses the Malacca Strait and a tortuous sea route from the East China Sea. The Strait and that tortuous sea route is what made Singapore, on the other hand Singapore's position is not getting less strategic with the growth of South-East Asia.

The Kunming-Mandalay-Dhaka-Kolkata corridor joins China, Burma, Bangladesh and India, and conveniently offers another alternative to the Malacca Straits from Dhaka/Chittagong

Strategically the three corridors Kashgar-Gwadar, Kunming-Singapore, and Kunming-Mandalay-Dhaka-Kolkata are the important ones.

Who would say it... I thought the Reno was an important corridor for the Germans and others like them. Poor Europe, no more corridors anymore.

Reno?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Xyp63MaSBs

There are plenty of European corridors to walk the line. Gotthard Base Tunnel has been mentioned a few times.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QAoQMvRVJPI

Here in Stockholm there's a new coridor opening opening in seven months that will be important for Sweden, though not the rest of Europe.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C78TmvrftHA

Six maps that show the anatomy of America’s vast infrastructure (https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/national/maps-of-american-infrastrucure/)

Map 2: Bridges (red in need of repairs)

(https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/national/maps-of-american-infrastrucure/img/bridges-1480.jpg?c=400)

This video is alright (not great, just alright):

Speaking of these Wendover videos, another one covers a crucial air transport paradigm shift, from hub-and-spoke to  point-to-point transport.

https://youtu.be/NlIdzF1_b5M

Fuel-efficient long-range planes like B787 or the A350 are taking over the world, reducing the need for global airport hubs (not that Dubai, Beijing and the others seem to care).

That's pretty cool, although it's odd that it was posited as some kind of Airbus vs. Boeing thing when Airbus has, what, the A350 or something competing directly with the Boeing airplane in the spotlights?

Btw, what about freight?

I would rather say that in the 1990's Boeing and Airbus each made their big bet, on the 787 and the 380 respectively (the 380 was a much bigger and costlier bet), and it is natural to compare them, particularly since they had such divergent visions of the future.

I remember the received wisdom in aviation in the 1990's was solidly that hub and spoke was the future, based on prognoses on congestion and economy.  Airbus 380 was a direct result of this thinking, and something to counter and supersede the Boeing 747 class of jumbojets. Boeing in turn had plans to nextgen the 747, something they later scrapped, and 747 looks set to retire in a couple years.

Not that hub+spoke is completely dead (congestion is a fact, economy may in some cases favour the big), and global hubs like Dubai, Singapore and Hong Kong, as well as London-Paris-Amsterdam and Atlanta, are betting that they will stay relevant. But we are getting an internet of flight, not a minimal spanning graph of flight.

(https://blog.flightradar24.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/TATLTraffic.gif)

A350 is essentially a newer Airbus version of B787. That matters in the Airbus vs Boeing battle, but not in how we are flying in the near future. A350 is supposed to be quite nice, but I haven't gotten to ride in one yet. (For those willing to burn an excessive amount of money on getting more than "nice" a big fat plane like A380 can offer first class "apartments", something smaller jets can't).

a big fat plane like A380 can offer first class "apartments", something smaller jets can't).

It also can offer 850 proletariat small seats.
If one crashes... I believe to be the end of proletariat. What a strange win for the Marxist class struggle.

Or probably beyond 1000 in a vertical seat (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vertical_seat) configuration. 

(https://dndsanctuary.eu/imagecache.php?image=http%3A%2F%2Fgraphics8.nytimes.com%2Fimages%2F2006%2F04%2F25%2Fbusiness%2F0425-biz-webSEATch.jpg&hash=abd00c854c7df0a4e38d9d790219ab44" rel="cached" data-hash="abd00c854c7df0a4e38d9d790219ab44" data-warn="External image, click here to view original" data-url="http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2006/04/25/business/0425-biz-webSEATch.jpg)
That would assume there would be more A380s. 

Airbus’ jumbo A380 jet heading towards ‘certain death’ – analyst (http://gulfbusiness.com/airbus-jumbo-a380-jet-heading-towards-certain-death-analyst/)

The B787 'Dreamliner' is no commercial success yet, though presumably in (short) time it will be, but in 2016 58 B787 were ordered (71 the previous year). The number of ordered A380 was 0 (2 in 2015). By comparison B777 had 17 (58), B737MAX had 540 (409), A350 33 (-3). All the latter are long-range fuel-efficient point-to-point planes (the 737 series is short-range, but the MAX generation stretches range and fuel, and can be used transatlantic, for very carefully chosen points, or for that matter some Eurasian flights). 


With B747 retiring and A380 possibly dying before reaching break-even (that is production break-even mind you, when it costs less to produce an airplane than the sale price, never mind recouping the 25 billion euro or so it cost to develop it), that may be the end of big plane travel. The planes may fly for a couple decades more, Concorde-like, but will become increasingly obsolete and costly to operate.

There could be milk runs like the triangle Singapore-Bangkok-Hong Kong or Dubai-Mumbai, but probably not soon enough to save the model. Another obvious route, Beijing-Shanghai, faces competition from high-speed trains, and Guangzhou (Canton)-Beijing is running at a loss. Then of course there is the Doha-Dubai route (http://onemileatatime.boardingarea.com/2016/10/30/emirates-a380-doha/). As the wear on airplanes is dependent on the number of flights rather than flight length, it doesn't seem that Emirates are looking for a long-term future for the A380.

Or probably beyond 1000 in a vertical seat (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vertical_seat) configuration.

I think I've said it before: it sounds more comfortable to me to stand than to sit in your average cramped airline seat with no space for your knees and the beyond idiotic concept of reclining seats.^[1] They'll probably mess it up somehow, like how in the Thalys you've got these ridiculous "fancy" headrests that make everything a million times less comfortable for your shoulders than the el cheapo plainest regular train seats, but in principle I think it could be a godsend for flights shorter than about 3 hours.

If you stand on the airplane, then where will the hand luggage fit? Nowhere, obviously.

I prefer to sit on the floor.

Reminds me of something… :)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ktZ13le3waQ
(Hope you enjoy this bit! I've been "doing it since I was 12 years old… And haven't stopped yet. But Newhart himself does it better. :) )

Looked askew there is a slight historical irony to this. The Port of Piraeus is right next to Salamis

(https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/ueoeKeN2Re8RPx3jMlkeSHi95oNcZA2gtlEVvNzcc4hIGk95WcXGPupLSV045lpxSe8PeMX3kG0li0t7PdZdiK447Ry3VGgERJrKATeI1RY_NoirQVjDl2WasIwa9MVRkYbnLvo=w360-h203-no)
Yesterday from the battleground of Salamis with a view to Piraeus.

Construction videos can be edutaining, like this one, How the Dutch build a tunnel under a highway in one weekend

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DEa9jrkQm0c

Dutch infrastructure projects are very well executed.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XyV8RQMUJc8

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jevqtVeZQ3g

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kr1-TvIiCgU

In other countries, meaning basically the whole world, infrastructure projects are structured very differently. In the Netherlands it's all done by one centrally organized team. In other countries they hire a company that just sort of distributes their employees between infrastructure projects. Some here this day, some there the other day…

Yet the Netherlands spends very little on infrastructure. Five times less than the US, for example, where brownouts are commonplace.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3uerNeTnD04

And 25% of Dutch infrastructure is cycling-related to boot.

The Netherlands is equaled in power outage, or lack thereof, by Germany, Denmark, and Luxembourg. Belgium and Austria follow closely. Then there's the rest of Europe, and somewhere at the very rear of the so-called developed world there's the US (http://www.ibtimes.com/aging-us-power-grid-blacks-out-more-any-other-developed-nation-1631086).

Dutch infrastructure projects are very well executed.
=========
Yet the Netherlands spends very little on infrastructure. Five times less than the US, for example, where brownouts are commonplace.

A bit confusing. Netherlands' population is just under 17,000,000. The U.S. 324,118,787.

What comparison are you making?

And how is infrastructure spending linked to brownouts? I Googled 'infrastructure spending':
"Infrastructure is the basic physical systems of a business or nation; transportation, communication, sewage, water and electric systems are all examples of infrastructure. These systems tend to be high-cost investments; however, they are vital to a country's economic development and prosperity."
Brownout prevention is a tiny portion of infrastructure spending.

Infrastuctures are material things absolutely dispensable, better to give the money it costs directly to the people, the only needed infrastructure it's the Earth and that was for free.
But of course that way there would be no corrupt fortunes for the politicians.

A bit confusing. Netherlands' population is just under 17,000,000. The U.S. 324,118,787.

What comparison are you making?

If I were being nonsensical and talking about absolute values then by any sensible measure the Netherlands would be spending 3 to 4 times as much per capita or as a percentage of GDP. But you're right that I forgot to include a source (http://america.cgtn.com/2015/05/26/us-ranks-low-on-global-infrastructure-spending-scale) and I just went from memory.

(https://dndsanctuary.eu/imagecache.php?image=http%3A%2F%2Fs30.postimg.org%2F5fkf3lxn5%2Finfrastructure_spending.png&hash=503421fd276608d868d1507d62a3cf6f" rel="cached" data-hash="503421fd276608d868d1507d62a3cf6f" data-warn="External image, click here to view original" data-url="http://s30.postimg.org/5fkf3lxn5/infrastructure_spending.png)

It would take more sense to point out that the US has almost three times as much km per capita to maintain (http://www.nationmaster.com/country-info/stats/Transport/Highways/Total/Per-capita) (that applies to everything; with these things it really doesn't matter that much whether you're looking at roads, electricity, internet, sewage systems or whatever), but that should be adjusted slightly by the fact that 25% of Dutch road infrastructure is cycling-related (which also happens to be the very best in the world) and therefore part of the budget but not counted on that list.

And how is infrastructure spending linked to brownouts? I Googled 'infrastructure spending':
"Infrastructure is the basic physical systems of a business or nation; transportation, communication, sewage, water and electric systems are all examples of infrastructure. These systems tend to be high-cost investments; however, they are vital to a country's economic development and prosperity."
Brownout prevention is a tiny portion of infrastructure spending.

I mention it because I've found it to be surprisingly indicative of the state of infrastructure in general. Also the fact that you'd even think to utter a phrase like "brownout prevention" speaks for itself. :P

(https://www.cleanenergywire.org/sites/default/files/styles/large/public/images/factsheet/average-annual-interruption-power-saidi-eu-ceer-5.2-2015.png)

The only infrastructure in which the Netherlands isn't top of the line is the roll-out of next-generation Internet-communications technology like fiber to the home. Perhaps it's no surprise that this is the most privatized, least regulated part of Dutch infrastructure.

But this topic is probably better suited to a link like https://www.reddit.com/r/InfrastructurePorn/

Infrastuctures are material things absolutely dispensable, better to give the money it costs directly to the people, the only needed infrastructure it's the Earth and that was for free.
But of course that way there would be no corrupt fortunes for the politicians.

Dutch infrastructure management and the so-called polder model (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polder_model) in general grew from dispensable medieval public water defense initiatives. Let's just say Dutch people would beg to differ. :P

I wondered what the infrastructure graph was based on, and followed it back to the source (http://www.itf-oecd.org/). There were caveats on the numbers not necessarily being internationally comparable. Apart from that they show investment and maintenance for inland transport infrastructure, that is presumably not non-transport (like electricity) and not maritime or aviation. 

A good infrastructure is crochet.
Only old ladies knows it's secrets.

(https://freestylegeographic.files.wordpress.com/2015/05/expressways4.png?w=800) (https://freestylegeographic.files.wordpress.com/2015/05/expressways4.png)

Wow, South Korea has a lot of expressways. But what makes the Russian federal highways not expressways in our sense of the word? By which I basically just mean a controlled-access highway (i.e., no intersections), regardless of whether it's a provincial or state road, even if in Dutch only the latter is properly a snelweg (fastway, i.e., expressway). Wikipedia has some vague statements about Russian federal highways not being motorways without clarifying why that would be the case. They sure look an awful lot like them.

Shaping the Future of Construction: A Breakthrough in Mindset and Technology (http://www3.weforum.org/docs/WEF_Shaping_the_Future_of_Construction_full_report__.pdf)

The construction industry serves almost all other industries, as all economic value creation occurs within or by means of buildings or other “constructed assets”. As an industry, moreover, it accounts for 6% of global GDP. It is also the largest global consumer of raw materials, and constructed objects account for 25-40% of the world’s total carbon emissions.

Multiple global megatrends are shaping the future of construction. Consider just two developments: first, 30% of global greenhouse gas emissions are attributable to buildings; second, the population of the world’s urban areas is increasing by 200,000 people per day, all of whom need affordable housing as well as social, transportation and utility infrastructure. 

Compared to many other industries, the construction industry has traditionally been slow at technological development. It has undergone no major disruptive changes; it has not widely applied advances in processes such as “lean”. As a result, efficiency gains have been meagre. In the United States over the last 40 years, for example, labour productivity in the construction industry has actually fallen.

Building Information Modelling (BIM) plays a central role here, as it is the key enabler of and facilitator for many other technologies: the building of a bridge, for example, can be greatly facilitated by combining robotics and 3D printing via a parametrically designed 3D model. 

Large productivity improvements can be achieved by optimizing existing processes: the broader use of “lean” principles and methods, for instance, could reduce completion times by 30% and cut costs by 15%.

A minimal increase in upfront costs of about 2% to support optimized design will lead on average to life-cycle savings of 20% on total costs.

(https://dndsanctuary.eu/imagecache.php?image=http%3A%2F%2Fi.imgur.com%2FWYEeRp0.png&hash=7a606867d5381655665b687624f65e87" rel="cached" data-hash="7a606867d5381655665b687624f65e87" data-warn="External image, click here to view original" data-url="http://i.imgur.com/WYEeRp0.png)

(https://dndsanctuary.eu/imagecache.php?image=http%3A%2F%2Fi.imgur.com%2FNXIB3V4.png&hash=ac12098b1ec8920be5345d967c88086c" rel="cached" data-hash="ac12098b1ec8920be5345d967c88086c" data-warn="External image, click here to view original" data-url="http://i.imgur.com/NXIB3V4.png)

Wikipedia has some vague statements about Russian federal highways not being motorways without clarifying why that would be the case.

Pedestrians and cyclists are permitted.

Even for regular highways (70/80 km/h) that's potentially somewhat eyebrow-raising on account of the speed difference. On the other hand, I went to take a quick peek at the Tour of Flanders yesterday. The speed limit for cars is 50 and those cyclists sure seemed to go by a fair bit faster than that. The fastest I've personally gone on a regular city bike, with medium-strong wind in the back, was about 56 according to the bike's speedometer. I'm not entirely sure if I peaked in how fast I could've physically gone, but I peaked in speed I dared to go. I stopped pedaling because I became scared, not because I was used up. But what about the limited intersections?

even if in Dutch only the latter is properly a snelweg (fastway, i.e., expressway).

A German would associate snelweg (snel+weg) with Schnellstraße.
What's then the Dutch term for Autobahn?

OK, Google translate gives me autoweg for Schnellstraße and  snelweg for Autobahn.  :insane:

In Belgium they call it an autostrade. Btw,

Mit der Änderung von 2006 des Bundesstraßengesetzes 1971 wurden sämtliche Unterscheidungen von Schnellstraßen und Autobahnen aufgehoben.

Anyway, sounds a bit like what I said about provincial vs national roads. I don't think of provincial expressways as "expressways" (snelwegen) even though many of them effectively are. I think there's an element of distance involved as well.

But actually I got my wires crossed. Wikipedia says it's a freeway I'm thinking of:

The term expressway is also used for what the federal government calls "freeways".[74] Where the terms are distinguished, freeways can be characterized as expressways upgraded to full access control, while not all expressways are freeways.

I guess that in the places where I've been there's no distinction or (just as likely) people just aren't aware of the technical brouhaha.

But what about the limited intersections?

Nothing special https://youtu.be/xr0r0_Tv-YA?t=140

The way they see it, there is always enough sidewalk. Non-cars stay on the sidewalk. Bicycles are legally permitted a meter towards cars from the painted edge of the driveway, but those insane enough to use this right are not among us anymore.

Nothing special https://youtu.be/xr0r0_Tv-YA?t=140 (https://youtu.be/xr0r0_Tv-YA?t=140)

Right, but definitely expressway/freeway-style as opposed to regular.

Bicycles are legally permitted a meter towards cars from the painted edge of the driveway, but those insane enough to use this right are not among us anymore.

I'll bet the shoulder of the road also tends to be full of all manner of debris.

Quote from: ersi on 2017-04-04, 08:12:44

Nothing special https://youtu.be/xr0r0_Tv-YA?t=140 (https://youtu.be/xr0r0_Tv-YA?t=140)

Right, but definitely expressway/freeway-style as opposed to regular.

Yes. This is why Westerners may confuse it with motorway.

In Belgium they call it an autostrade.

That's an usual term for some Romanic languages such as Italian or Romanian - autostrada (auto+strada).

http://www.asfinag.at/newsroom/wssarchiv/-/asset_publisher/3037242/content/autobahn-versus-autostra%C3%9Fe-%E2%80%93-der-feine-unterschied
Mit der Änderung von 2006 des Bundesstraßengesetzes 1971 wurden sämtliche Unterscheidungen von Schnellstraßen und Autobahnen aufgehoben.

That's from Austria. :)

In Germany there are distinct differences (https://www.frag-den-fahrlehrer.de/2016/02/20/wo-sind-die-unterschiede-zwischen-autobahnen-und-kraftfahrstra%C3%9Fen/) between Autobahn and Kraftfahrstraße. The latter we usually call Schnellstraße.

That's from Austria.  :)

Right, it's obvious from the URL. I actually didn't know Austria was a Bund as well.

That's an usual term for some Romanic languages such as Italian or Romanian - autostrada (auto+strada).

Autostrada, autoestrada, autopista it's all the same thing - a fenced, at least with two lanes each direction, high velocity road with no leveled cross.

If not fenced, it's not an autoestrada but a "via rápida" (fast road) with a lower velocity limit and it can have leveled crossings.

Those autostradas are the responsible for the death of entire regions, the desertification of the interior and should be immediately destroyed.
Besides, tolls are the reminiscent of medieval ages.

Mega-canals could slice through continents for giant ships (https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg23431210-200-megacanals-could-slice-through-continents-for-giant-ships/)

(https://d1o50x50snmhul.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/mg31210201.jpg)

While the Nicaraguan canal promises to vastly expand the Central American shipping corridor, a further two mega-canals are being negotiated. They would offer alternatives to two other major sea routes, namely the Bosporus – Russia’s sole southerly maritime access to the outside world – and the narrow Straits of Malacca, the gateway to China. Their advocates have watched the Nicaragua protests with interest, and their mood may well have been lifted by developments there.

Bypassing the Straits of Malacca would mean cutting a 50-kilometre notch through a finger of land called the Kra isthmus, in the south of Thailand (see map). This would give China, the region’s superpower, the option for its ships to avoid the congested straits, shortening a route used at present by a third of all international cargo shipping. Container ships sailing between Shanghai and Mumbai, for example, would be able to shave more than two days off an 11-day journey.

The environmental impact of the project has not been studied but could be considerable, says Ruth Banomyong of the Thammasat University in Bangkok. However, as in Nicaragua, political will is unlikely to bow to environmental concerns. With an estimated cost of $20 billion, the Thai canal will be the cheapest of the proposed mega-canals, as well as the simplest to build. Another plus is that it would fulfil a promise made in 2013 by Chinese premier Xi Jinping to create a “maritime silk road”.

Both the Thai and Nicaraguan canals are dwarfed by a project being plotted to connect the Caspian Sea with the Persian Gulf. Its route would cleave right across Iran, stretching some 1400 kilometres. But length is hardly the biggest challenge. It would also need to traverse mountains up to 1600 metres high, requiring more than 50 giant locks, says Peyman Moazzen, a marine engineer based in Singapore, who has studied the scheme.

But the geopolitical prize might be worth the effort. Such a link would give Russia a long-desired sea route to east Asia that avoids the circuitous journey via essentially Western-controlled seaways like the Bosporus and the Suez Canal. Any environmental concerns would probably be trumped by the fact that Iranians think one of the proposed routes could double as an irrigation canal, watering the desert sands of eastern Iran.

Recently a goods train service was started from the south of Gt Britain to China.

Both the Thai and Nicaraguan canals are dwarfed by a project being plotted to connect the Caspian Sea with the Persian Gulf. Its route would cleave right across Iran, stretching some 1400 kilometres. But length is hardly the biggest challenge. It would also need to traverse mountains up to 1600 metres high, requiring more than 50 giant locks, says Peyman Moazzen, a marine engineer based in Singapore, who has studied the scheme.

I'm not opposed to these feats of engineering.
But I question the political savvy of those who'd suggest a route through Iran…

The only megacanal going on was made by climatic change, the artic passage. Destroying the world.
All the rest has no interest but to get richer governants and construction companies.

Strong lobbies we've here at DnD about such industries and defending corrupt politicians.

So: The world was destroyed! (I didn't notice… Perhaps from Portugal it looks different? :) )

Belfrager, have you anything -beyond your garden- that interests you? (Indeed, are you even a little bit interested in your garden? I doubt it; you probably buy your groceries at the local market, just like everyone else.)

So: The world was destroyed! (I didn't notice... Perhaps from Portugal it looks different?  :)  )

Destroying, not destroyed. Perhaps you still disagree, but it's a slight distinction. :P

Belfrager, have you anything -beyond your garden- that interests you?

Not too much these days. Thanks for asking.

Then I hope your garden is a continual joy.

Iran already has some transnational infrastructure, we can expect that to increase greatly. Iran is politically among the least risky among all the countries in between. That said, infrastructure can go both ways, it can make the region more reasonable, or it could lead to local blackmail and warlordism.

Then I hope your garden is a continual joy.

My "garden" is a revolution.
Everyday people joins it.

Urban metros/subways networks in China.

(https://i.redd.it/vjdy375yxiyy.gif) (https://i.redd.it/vjdy375yxiyy.gif)

lucky China.

My city has the third oldest subway in the world and goes round in a roughly six and a half mile circle. Always talk about extension but never happens!

It looks like Glasgow is the only city on this list (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_metro_systems) with a metro built before the 1990s that hasn't had an extension.

But extension is one thing, actually using it another. In the time I've been living in Antwerp a whole new tunnel and various tunnel segments of the metro have been added to the metro network.^[1] Those tunnels had been lying in wait since the late '70s. Brussels also has at least one ghost station (https://www.rtbf.be/info/regions/detail_une-station-fantome-au-secours-du-futur-metro-nord-de-la-stib?id=8226114) dating from 1988.

Until recently Glasgow was among the few cities that have shrunk in size, while most cities have grown, many by a lot.

Anyway the same guy as with the Chinese metro growth has made mini maps for most metro networks (http://pdovak.com/projects/#/mini-metro-maps/) in the world, including Glasgow (sorted by English name of country, then city, so Glasgow is near the bottom). 

(https://static1.squarespace.com/static/57b86d7d03596e6c59b0f1ec/58424aca46c3c4f2f7d6053f/5844842fbe6594fbdebcc0da/1480885314501/glasgow.png)

They are worth a look btw. Here's Stockholm. Can you say "Single point of failure"? I knew you could (that will improve in a couple years from now).

(https://static1.squarespace.com/static/57b86d7d03596e6c59b0f1ec/58424aca46c3c4f2f7d6053f/58447bc4893fc0f82be34325/1480883175988/stockholm.png)

The smaller Prague network avoids that
(https://static1.squarespace.com/static/57b86d7d03596e6c59b0f1ec/58424aca46c3c4f2f7d6053f/58438b98ff7c507cc2188fad/1480821677843/prague.png?format=300w)


These icons don't include commuter rail (e.g. S-bahn) and tram networks (except one for Hong Kong New Territories, but that a cute one). Thus e.g. the Copenhagen network is pretty bare at the moment. Even including railroad Stockholm has a single point of failure (and often transfer), the Central Station stop. 

They are worth a look btw. Here's Stockholm. Can you say "Single point of failure"? I knew you could (that will improve in a couple years from now).

Such graphs can be deceptive though. It could just as easily mean three tunnels and stations that are close to each other as three lines that go through one tunnel.

These are three  tunnels (plus tunnels for railroad). 

(https://f.nordiskemedier.dk/2p0z3kptpdle078b.jpg)


Actually these may give a more correct tunnel-centric representation than line maps. Compare the Oslo map:

(https://static1.squarespace.com/static/57b86d7d03596e6c59b0f1ec/58424aca46c3c4f2f7d6053f/5844716fbe6594fbdebbc4be/1480880526211/oslo.png?format=300w)


with the line map:
(https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/d/d5/Oslo_Metro_Map.svg/532px-Oslo_Metro_Map.svg.png)
All lines share the common tunnel on the bottom. The top drawing is correct, while the bottom may be read as having more tunnels than there are.

These are three  tunnels (plus tunnels for railroad).

Doesn't that reduce the single point of failure-y-ness? :devil:

Yes, it definitely reduces it compared with a single set of tracks, but it doesn't remove it.

The local and regional trains are currently extremely vulnerable as there are only two tracks between the Central Station and the South Station, and there have been since the two were connected in 1871, only difference is that now there are 600 trains passing daily. Any disruption will disrupt the whole system, and of course there are many, and of course that has ramifications for Stockholm and Sweden (because of course most trains just have to pass that bottleneck).  Until 50 days from now (and counting), when a new double-track tunnel will open. 

(https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/1/10/Sammanbindningsbanan_1886.jpg/350px-Sammanbindningsbanan_1886.jpg)

The metro system isn't that pessimal, but a little worse than I mentioned above. Technically the red and green lines are in one tunnel at its most cramped/vulnerable by Central Station, two track one level above the other two. The blue line is separate, but doesn't go southwards at current (just one more station), so southbound there is only one tunnel.

More to the point the station itself is a single point of failure. Almost all transport systems go within a couple hundred meters of each other. Something station-wide, a fire say, would shut down everything. The old railroad tunnel, the new railroad tunnel, all three metro lines, and the airport train and regional busses for good measure. Now, the risk of something like that happening is orders of magnitude lower. To my knowledge it hasn't happened, while some track problem happens every other day.


The daily aggravation is rather that an insane number of transfers happens within the same location, making the Central Station stop Chinese-level busy, for a rather modest-sized city.

What was a damnable nuisance in the very old Glasgow subway was that it was not the same gauge as the suburban railways beside it so that would put off any idea of a linkage with such. Originally built in Victorian times it started as a rope drawn thing then taken over by the City Council who electrified it. Over decades odd passing things would come up about just basically extending from the circle rather than say initally convert to standard rail gauge (no doubt due to the massive cost of that alone). It is very modern and well used but so damn limited in size of the area.

This comparison of schematic metro lines with their actual geography is quite topical.

http://digg.com/2017/subway-maps-vs-geography
(https://thumbs.gfycat.com/FrayedSimilarDaddylonglegs-size_restricted.gif)

Schematic metro lines are considered a major invention, made by a guy I don't remember the name, that realized that when using the subway people don't need to know the geographical location but only the stop's succesion. Therefore, a virtual diagram can be much more useful than a real map.
With such insight very complex maps could be turned into easy to interpretate straight lines.

Schematic metro lines are considered a major invention, made by a guy I don't remember the name, that realized that when using the subway people don't need to know the geographical location but only the stop's succesion. Therefore, a virtual diagram can be much more useful than a real map.
With such insight very complex maps could be turned into easy to interpretate straight lines.

It's the way I drew maps when I was four.

It's the way I drew maps when I was four.

If at four you were drawing maps instead an house wiht a sun above and a tree at the side, you're a very strange creature... :)

Quote from: ersi on 2017-05-24, 04:33:08

It's the way I drew maps when I was four.

If at four you were drawing maps instead an house wiht a sun above and a tree at the side, you're a very strange creature... :)

I'm still strange that way. Now I even collect maps.

This video of fast Chinese trains passing each other has been going around the YouTubes:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3IJ99YdVtdc

Always been a bit of a railway fan myself and the Japanese situation very impressive. I have just spent some threeyears off and on building the 6 lines of Northern Ireland railways and a website on my rail sim. I have now crossed the Border into IrishRail all the way to Dublin (and 2 lines off it ) so the Belfast-Dublin Enterprises Expresses can be run too. Have even flown and got the ferry oer there from Glasgow to follow my hobby.

I digress......

Freeway intersection in Chongqing - China

(https://dndsanctuary.eu/imagecache.php?image=http%3A%2F%2Fcdn1.spiegel.de%2Fimages%2Fimage-1151710-galleryV9-bojd-1151710.jpg&hash=a61338093f2088577dbf9fa8f1791346" rel="cached" data-hash="a61338093f2088577dbf9fa8f1791346" data-warn="External image, click here to view original" data-url="http://cdn1.spiegel.de/images/image-1151710-galleryV9-bojd-1151710.jpg)

Chinese are really good... they only need a couple street signs for all those roads...

There are some green signs in the bottom right corner. They are misplaced, they should be there before the road separation, not after.

All in all, that structure is not really infra.

Amazing picture.

Here's one for @jax, although it might be a tad French. It speaks of a bridge between Crimea and Russia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kerch_Strait_Bridge), as well as that enormous bridge tunnel thing (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hong_Kong%E2%80%93Zhuhai%E2%80%93Macau_Bridge) the Chinese are building between Macao and Hong Kong.

https://youtu.be/XDe0fMjtFXU?t=2m38s

Chinese are really very annoying people, worst than insects.
I wonder what they think about Europeans. The only thing I know is that they say we smell as butter.
We need a Chinese poster, oh yes...

Here's one for @jax, although it might be a tad French. It speaks of a bridge between Crimea and Russia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kerch_Strait_Bridge), as well as that enormous bridge tunnel thing (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hong_Kong%E2%80%93Zhuhai%E2%80%93Macau_Bridge) the Chinese are building between Macao and Hong Kong.

A tad French it was. 


The politics of the Crimea bridge aside, a bridge makes good sense. Though by opting for a bridge, and not a bridge/tunnel link (like the Hong Kong-Macau/Zhuhai), the access to the Sea of Azov. In some ways reminiscent of the local Igelsta bridge (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Igelsta_Bridge), but here ships are constrained by depth and width as well.

The HK-M/Z link is in the finishing stage, though all the connecting infrastructure in Hong Kong isn't ready yet. 
(https://dndsanctuary.eu/imagecache.php?image=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.hzmb.hk%2Feng%2Fimg%2Foverview%2Fabout_overview04_p06l.jpg&hash=fb32e598f590e197c9856d171b7cd938" rel="cached" data-hash="fb32e598f590e197c9856d171b7cd938" data-warn="External image, click here to view original" data-url="http://www.hzmb.hk/eng/img/overview/about_overview04_p06l.jpg) (http://www.hzmb.hk/eng/img/overview/about_overview04_p06l.jpg)

In principle you could drive from Zhuhai to Hong Kong along the link road, pass the Boundary Crossing Facility island, continue straight on a short distance to Shekou (Shenzhen), It would be a strange thing to do though. You would pass two or three border controls, and change from right-hand drive to left-hand drive (Hong Kong is a good ex-British colony) and back to right-hand drive. 

And they are building a new link next to the Hong Kong-Macau/Zhuhai link, connecting Shenzhen (at the Bao'an airport) and Zhongshan. Should be ready about four years from now.

https://youtu.be/yuRKZZjI_tw


Now neither of these links are railroad links, so they are building a third one right next to the ShenZhong link, this one a tunnel all the way for the high-speed rail traffic, with a station at the airport. I haven't seen any firm date on this one, but should be ready at about the same time. 

Here's a little animation video about what they're doing where I used to live. I can hear the pile driving right now.

https://vimeo.com/139208135

You have my sympathies, central Södertälje is going through a piling process of their own, as they enlarge the sluice/lock of the Södertälje Canal. It's almost ending now, so we should get some more quiet soon.  (You came up with a French video, so this one's in Swedish)

https://youtu.be/Ids0xrAPQNo

Since I used to live there it's not loud. Just audible. ;)

Swedish is definitely easier to read than to listen to. Some words are 100% understandable (like installeren, or however you spell that in Swedish) while most is not. A slightly odd sensation.

Animal infrastructure

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ND0D3bVbM7Y

Animal infrastructure

A 2 km viaduct between mountains with a high of thirty floors, costing around 150 million euros, was built in a highway in North Portugal because a family of wolfs could not be disturbed.

With that money one could lodge each wolf at a luxury hotel, eating fillet mignon everyday for the rest of their lives. It would be less expensive.

Boris bridging the gap.

An Irish Sea bridge would be just another Boris Johnson folly (https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/feb/17/irish-sea-bridge-boris-johnson-folly)

If you let the Chinese invest in it, it will be great fun.

(https://interactive.guim.co.uk/uploader/embed/2020/02/archive-zip/giv-3902yDyOIyfPfzIK/Northern-Ireland---Scotland-bridge-mobile_300.png)

Urban metros/subways networks in China.

(https://i.redd.it/vjdy375yxiyy.gif) (https://i.redd.it/vjdy375yxiyy.gif)

The designer, Peter Dovak (https://twitter.com/pdovak), died not many months after (https://twitter.com/pdovak) drawing that map.  At least the map got to 2020, even though he didn't.

It feels like Mahjong.

Boris bridging the gap.

Quote from: ersi on 2020-02-21, 10:33:14

An Irish Sea bridge would be just another Boris Johnson folly (https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/feb/17/irish-sea-bridge-boris-johnson-folly)

If you let the Chinese invest in it, it will be great fun.

(https://interactive.guim.co.uk/uploader/embed/2020/02/archive-zip/giv-3902yDyOIyfPfzIK/Northern-Ireland---Scotland-bridge-mobile_300.png)

And a new thread (https://dndsanctuary.eu/index.php?topic=3859.0) on the topic.

In principle leading a transport tube through water should be a lot cheaper than digging it through rock. In practice it is not, at least not yet.

Recycling (of plastic) does not work. It never worked.

[video]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KXRtNwUju5g[/video]

The mild suggestion for improvement in the video - consumer choice - will not work either. The radical suggestion - shut the whole thing down, in the video as well - might work. I think it might also work to ban and punish the production of plastics, unless the producers accept the waste they have produced - not outsource it, but take the waste in the same factories that produce the products.

Recycling (of plastic) does not work. It never worked.

Sure it did, when it was profitable. But changes in business processes, supply and demand can make something profitable unprofitable or something unprofitable profitable. A resource can become a waste product and a waste product a resource. Now, these calculation make little or no considerations of externalities, side effects of trade. If they did the outcome would be different.

It's a dynamic system, and some products like these plastics are on the wedge between resource and waste.

Quote from: ersi on 2020-12-23, 02:35:33

Recycling (of plastic) does not work. It never worked.

Sure it did, when it was profitable.

No it didn't, because no country figured out a workable system. Dumping Western junk in developing countries is trade colonialism - profitable only to the West who got too much profit on their hands already.

It was more profitable than incinerating it. Which is profitable as well. Sweden and Norway are buying trash to feed their incinerators as we are not producing enough domestically. With its newest, and most stylish, incinerator add Denmark to the list. We might be facing a global trash shortage if this keeps going on.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pOqocj2h6EM


What goes for plastics also goes for ships. Luxury cruise ships or scrap? Depends on their relative value.

 https://youtu.be/qo-2gDg-37w

Or airplanes. Just a couple decades ago Airbus A380 was to be the flagship of the company with a list price of $450 million, while the older Boeing 747 had a price of $380 million. Both are now discontinued. Both had fuel economic and business model for an earlier age. So when the Hollywood movie Tenet was produced, they found it was cheaper and more fun to crash an old (non-flying) 747 than to hire a few CGI programmers in Bangalore. 

https://youtu.be/_lnwizgUbec

Do we invest too little in public infrastructure, or too much?

Here you have a simple answer: Manmade mass outweighs life on Earth (https://phys.org/news/2020-12-manmade-mass-outweighs-life-earth.html?fbclid=IwAR1HJnAJX4zf9dlWJ7BAcbh_IeWs3jjYzeHCfUXsla_tueRdPkXAE5SfANI)

It's interesting, but not particularly surprising. Total biomass, the amount of carbon in all living things, is a pretty small number.

The Earth's crust is the top 1% of the planet in mass (and the atmosphere about 0.01% of the the crust).  Carbon is actually a pretty rare element in the crust, about 0.02%, while oxygen + silicon comprises ¾ of the crust. In total there should be something on the order of 100 petaton of carbon, which is plenty, but also abstract because the vast majority is inaccessible to living things (including humans) and non-living processes.

Actual biomass is much smaller, in the order of gigatons (millionths of petatons). Our World in Data made a prettier version (https://ourworldindata.org/life-on-earth) of a PNAS study (https://www.pnas.org/content/115/25/6506) of total biomass (measured in carbon).

(https://ourworldindata.org/uploads/2018/11/Global-Taxa-Biomass.png)

So measured in biomass, life is largely plants, and to be specific trees, and even more specific wood. But wood is just scaffolding, the living, growing cells of a tree live in the thin layer below the bark, as well as in the leaves.

Then again, plants since the very beginning have been extremely good at fixing carbon, from oceans, atmosphere and soil. From CH₄ to CO₂, from CO₂ to O₂. That has had far greater impact on the surface of our planet than anything we animals have done. 

https://youtu.be/qERdL8uHSgI

And of course, like today's trees, they have fixed carbon for hundreds of millions of year, creating our massive stores of fossil carbon. Accessible carbon is easily hundred times more than the carbon bound up in currently living. If we look all the living things and piled them up, they would make a heap of about 200 km³, the size of a medium-sized mountain (or a very large mine). We also consist of a lot of water, enough to create a nice lake by that mountain.

Now, our construction use much more abundant materials on the surface like sand, stone, cement. Apart from the chemical process to make cement (a major CO₂ source), these are very inert materials. It takes long time for them to affect the environment. The comparably much smaller amounts of fossil carbon, metals and more are causing us far more trouble.

(https://media.springernature.com/full/springer-static/esm/art%3A10.1038%2Fs41586-020-3010-5/MediaObjects/41586_2020_3010_Fig5_ESM.jpg?as=webp)

(https://media.springernature.com/lw685/springer-static/image/art%3A10.1038%2Fs41586-020-3010-5/MediaObjects/41586_2020_3010_Fig2_HTML.png)

But getting back to the thread topic, both US and EU grids are dwarfed by Chinese grid projects, like this one:

 
https://youtu.be/_6pE0z5StI4


China’s Ambitious Plan to Build the World’s Biggest Supergrid (https://spectrum.ieee.org/energy/the-smarter-grid/chinas-ambitious-plan-to-build-the-worlds-biggest-supergrid)

(https://spectrum.ieee.org/image/MzIzMjQwNg.jpeg)

Europe

(https://www.hitachi.com/rev/archive/2020/r2020_04/gir/image/fig_01.gif)

Map courtesy of Hitachi (https://www.hitachi.com/rev/archive/2020/r2020_04/gir/index.html).

Today I discovered that Norwegian TV's Brennpunkt is (globally?) available without obstacles. So I took a look at how Norwegian recycling works. Namely, e-waste, tyres, and cars get dumped to Africa, where locals process it to something monetisable as best as they can. The journey of the waste to Africa is illegal every step of the way, but no authority takes any responsibility to check up on anything https://tv.nrk.no/serie/brennpunkt/2019/MDDP11000819/avspiller

Boris bridging the gap.

Boris Johnson's plan for Scotland-Northern Ireland crossing scrapped (https://www.thenational.scot/news/19578804.boris-johnsons-plan-scotland-northern-ireland-crossing-scrapped/)

Who could've guessed that would happen?  :whistle:

Airline banking

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ggUduBmvQ_4

America finally has a good railway: Brightline in Miami (I tend to trust this guy)
(I have explored almost the entire length Tri-Rail in Miami area and found it recommendable.)

[video]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AFZTVn0eTIs[/video]

Meanwhile, LA-SF high-speed rail line is getting nowhere (also the likely fate of Rail Baltic)

[video]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p__teJLmY3k[/video]

Will Brightline's CA-NV project (https://www.railwayage.com/news/brightline-west-project-advancing-in-california/) work out as nicely as their FL project has?

(https://www.railwayage.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/Map.png)

America finally has a good railway: Brightline in Miami (I tend to trust this guy)

I noticed priority boarding for premium passengers 15 minutes before departure. That's giving me a lot of bad airplane vibes. Anyway, looks decent.

I should not have said "I tend to trust this guy". I meant that I like his videos as he goes through the same points in every video, so his reviews are consistent and I know what to expect in terms of the level of information. I actually disagree quite strongly about class division in trains (and in airplanes). But there's apparently nothing to do about it. (Regarding Brightline, it's also suspicious to give first-class passengers free wine before boarding. Then again, I would surely take a cup of it myself if riding first class there.)

In Estonia, we even have noticeable price differences depending whether you pay for the same thing in cash, with a payment card, with the train operator's customer card, or with an online bank transfer. There used to be a law against such differentiation, but I don't know what happened to it. Maybe some day I'll get angry enough to look it up.

And here's the latest on the idiotic tunnel concept:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QZaRfNjTPx8

Elon Musk said, "Think of them as wormholes. You go in and woops out in the other end." Totally a thrill ride. Lovely how the reporteress puts her hand into his lap for sense of safety, at the speed of Boring.

I'll grant that a train traveling at 300 km/h isn't quite as comfortable as one traveling at 130-200 km/h, but I wonder if the thrill ride even went as fast as 50.

https://twitter.com/erQuipo/status/1479584392712441865/photo/1
(https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FIiKKeVXwAgBIDR?format=jpg&name=large)

I'll grant that a train traveling at 300 km/h isn't quite as comfortable as one traveling at 130-200 km/h,...

I wish I could experience that speed some day. (Well, I have in airplanes.) The thing is, Musk's main promise has always been speed - speed that obviously cannot be had, yet somehow important enough people fall for it so that they made him (almost) the richest man in the world despite his lack of merit.

Promise:

The Vegas Loop – Quick Facts

 - Includes the Las Vegas Convention Center Loop (LVCC Loop)
 - Total Current Cost: $52-million
 - Travel Speed: 155 mph

...but I wonder if the thrill ride even went as fast as 50.

Wikipedia says, (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Boring_Company) "The tunnel was unveiled in mid-April 2021 with regular Tesla Model 3 and Model X cars used for shuttling, running at about 35 miles per hour (56 km/h)" i.e. surface street level top speed - and that must be the top speed, because in the video the traffic looks congested to begin with and is 30 km/h tops (yes, I mean km/h). Also the promised capacity is orders of magnitude "not there yet".

Even though in my opinion it only adds to the shamefulness of the whole experiment, Musk's client references a money-back guarantee (https://www.reviewjournal.com/local/traffic/official-tunnel-project-could-speed-up-las-vegas-strip-travel-1681216/): "If the system doesn’t work, we will get all of our money back." In my opinion, these are the kind of projects where money back is not enough, because it cannot cover the cost of demolishing the failure.

I wish I could experience that speed some day. (Well, I have in airplanes.)

I think in the Benlux top speeds don't exceed 200 km/h, rarely 160 km/h even, and both of those are basically indistinguishable from a more typical 130 km/h in a normal intercity, ignoring for a second the obvious advantage that you might gain half an hour or more.^[1] Btw, Dutch Wikipedia says the intercity from Brussels to Ostend used to go at 160 km/h before the war, but that after the war it took another 60 years before it attained such speeds again.

I've only experienced 300 km/h in Germany, where you could notice the train feeling ever so slightly less smooth, indeed in some ways comparable to an airplane. The train to Paris as well as to London also goes at 300 km/h, putting Paris at a mere 2 hours and 5 minutes from here.^[2]

Anyway, I can endorse it as being perfectly boring. When we went on vacation to Nuremberg a decade ago we took the ICE. The trip was about 7 hours. Some people have brain damage or something and think that's a long time compared to the 1 hour flight, when it's actually 1 hour to get to the airport 2 hours early, a 1.5 hour flight, and some 1.5 hours to get from the airport to the center of Nuremberg. The total time is close to identical, except with a lot more stress and things to worry about when you could've just been reading or sleeping or something.

There's also the interesting concept of night trains. I've never been on one, but to go to Vienna I can very much imagine it's much more comfortable to board a train at night, sleep while you're barreling towards your destination and to wake up near Austria. The fact that the trip takes 12 hours instead of ~5-6 is then completely irrelevant.

Wikipedia says, (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Boring_Company) "The tunnel was unveiled in mid-April 2021 with regular Tesla Model 3 and Model X cars used for shuttling, running at about 35 miles per hour (56 km/h)" i.e. surface street level top speed - and that must be the top speed, because in the video the traffic looks congested to begin with and is 30 km/h tops (yes, I mean km/h). Also the promised capacity is orders of magnitude "not there yet".

Hah, so my guess was pretty much dead on. It looked pretty fast because the tunnel's so claustrophobic, but it was clearly quite slow.

There's also the interesting concept of night trains. I've never been on one, but to go to Vienna I can very much imagine it's much more comfortable to board a train at night, sleep while you're barreling towards your destination and to wake up near Austria.

It's not an outlandish concept. There are also overnight ships and airplanes. And you can have an odd nap on the train or tram at any point, even during the day.

As it happens, the best night train ran Amsterdam-Prague. The compartments were practical, comfortable, and convenient without being excessively so, but more importantly the schedule was perfect. The ride needs to be right length, a full night's sleep, plus cleaning and (un)packing, plus an hour or two to relax in evening, wake up and have a breakfast. But not more, or you waste your time and risk getting bored. While daytime trains are (should be) home offices on wheels, night trains fail in that.

The Amsterdam-Prague train did that perfectly, in both directions impressively. The route just restarted, unfortunately with a less perfect (but still good) schedule. That is the challenge with night trains. Done well they are far less stressful than a morning plane run (especially those that you have to get up at 4AM to reach), but done badly they are useless. Paying premium for half a bad sleep is not attractive, or arrive at 6AM to a town that doesn't wake up until 8AM.

There are tricks for those not-10 hours rides. Short rides don't have to be too short if route is terminus to terminus. You can get on train an hour or so early and/or the train can stay on the track another hour. Whether that is an option depends on the terminus, many don't have spare tracks. (You could have trains ending central station – terminal station, where the latter is slightly less central, but still good for early/late sleepers, but not a usual configuration.) Breakfast can be served in station lounge instead of on-train.

If the trip is longer, the excess time should be in evening, not morning. Trains should arrive no earlier than 7 AM, no later than 9 or 10 AM. Here in Scandinavia we had an interesting three-way setup for coordinated night trains between Oslo, Stockholm and Copenhagen. At about 10 PM all three trains left the station for Gothenburg. There the cars from Stockholm headed for Copenhagen joined with the Oslo-Copenhagen train, likewise Oslo and Copenhagen to train going to Stockholm and Copenhagen and Stockholm headed for Oslo. Quite clever, if you didn't mind being woken up by huge clangs in the middle of the night.  Modern sets might do that smoother.

I'll grant that a train traveling at 300 km/h isn't quite as comfortable as one traveling at 130-200 km/h,

Not in my experience. The 380 Beijing-Shanghai trains are smooth. Classic coin test; you put a coin on its end, it shouldn't fall down. I don't think I have traveled 300+ trains in Europe. The trains I have taken in Germany, Spain, Italy were below 300, the Swedish barely 200. Have travelled in France, but not high-speed.

Anyway, the highest speed tracks are dedicated, while lower speed are shared. If those are good, then good. If not, then we have a little turbulence. Can't say I have experienced that lately, but then again I haven't travelled much by train (or at all) lately.

Not in my experience. The 380 Beijing-Shanghai trains are smooth. Classic coin test; you put a coin on its end, it shouldn't fall down. I don't think I have traveled 300+ trains in Europe. The trains I have taken in Germany, Spain, Italy were below 300, the Swedish barely 200. Have travelled in France, but not high-speed.

There are just the occasional minor vibrations that would drop your coin. Whatever it is, it's not there in regular (Dutch) trains. It's not bothersome.

This guy is more passionately and devastatingly anti-Musk.

[video]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_JDCBSNqZg8[/video]

00:00
oh yeah i had moved on from elon musk
00:03
but then the richest man on the planet
00:06
had to go and invent the underground
00:09
traffic jam

Minor sidenote, but I'm in an underground traffic jam pretty much half the time I have to drive through the Kennedytunnel (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kennedytunnel) for work.^[1] Which luckily is only once every few weeks or less. I spend most of my days happily cycling instead, which is relaxing and good for your body, while driving is the opposite.

Reminds me of the Simpsons Monorail episode  :lol:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZDOI0cq6GZM (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZDOI0cq6GZM)

What are you doing, mocking everyone's most beloved genius.

There is definitely a market for better, primarily cheaper, tunnels, and then it is disappointing with a hype brand rediscovering tubes (https://www.vox.com/2015/6/24/8834989/when-the-pneumatic-tube-carried-fast-food-people-and-cats). 

(https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/XWkRdia150yw7Rq6GlySGqWSK5c=/0x0:1500x1000/920x0/filters:focal(0x0:1500x1000):format(webp):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/3817692/austrianengineerpneumatic.0.jpg)

Volume extracted is a huge component of tunnel costs, mind you, but it is hard to come up with a less efficient transport concept than Teslas in tubes.

There are good reasons for double-bore tunnels, they may be practically mandated in the EU by now, but those are safety and ventilation. Cars function like pistons moving the air out of the tunnel, and ventilation is a major part of tunnel running costs, and very energy consuming. The risk of head-on collision is also minimised. But service tunnels and turns are necessary in case of cheese fires (https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-21141244), so all in all these are more expensive tunnels. 

Saw there was a clip on the Follo Line project (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Follo_Line), Oslo.  Good enough case of underground spaghetti.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bQYrqOXzdVo

There's been some progress on the high-speed rail between Las Vegas and Los Angelos, according to one of our local tv stations. The story also highlights the problems with the existing connection, the I-15 freeway, basically imagine the tiny town of Baker, California with a population of a few hundred but with traffic that can be worse than the urban freeways of Las Vegas. Clearly, the existing infrastructure is not adequate.

https://news3lv.com/news/local/high-speed-rail-takes-step-to-link-vegas-with-la-10-22-2021

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Clearly, the existing infrastructure is not adequate.

And very important, building more roads will generally just make things more annoying and expensive.

Had the same issue, but got it via Google (https://news3lv.com/news/local/high-speed-rail-takes-step-to-link-vegas-with-la-10-22-2021) (after some built-in cookie delay). 

Much greater confidence for the LV HSR line than the Californian line. Too many benefit from the latter one failing, too few from it succeeding. 

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That's weird, they wouldn't have geographically restricted it to just inside the US or something? But here's the text of the article:

Las Vegas (KSNV) — Julie Coppin and her dog Betty know all about the weekend trip.

"I hate driving on this road," Coppin told me, as she was escorting Betty, a rambunctious and vocal 3-year-old pooch, around a gas station south of Las Vegas. Ask her about I-15, "I've been stuck on that thing for 8 hours," she says, recounting past trips.

She and the thousands of other Californians on I-15 all have their own horror stories, especially the trip back.

Jeff 5pm



"It's horrifying. It's horrifying. So not a good experience. You just want to get home. So getting on the train would be great," Coppin said at the prospect of an easier trip.

The train that could do it is the high-speed rail line Brightline, which already has a line running in Florida. The California-Nevada line, called Brightline West, has already made some progress.

This summer, it bought land south of the Strip for a station.

RELATED | Tourism officials say California, Nevada border traffic jams need to be addressed

This week, Brightline signed a memorandum of understanding with California transportation officials to use 48 miles on I-15 between Victorville and Rancho Cucamonga for a high-speed line. The "MOU" sets in motion work on right-of-way agreements and designing to make the extension happen.

Until now, Victorville was as far as proposed high-speed lines went. Brightline's California agreement would take the high-speed link into the LA region.

At Rancho Cucamonga, the line is planned to hook up with Metrolink, the commuter rail line in LA. Brightline says this will offer "seamless and straightforward" access in the region, offering a travel time between LA and Las Vegas of three hours and two hours between Rancho Cucamonga and Southern Nevada.

Brightline officials were not available for comment Friday. No timetable has been announced for construction to begin.

This is the latest step the rail line has taken to get the project moving. It is also working on financing the high-speed rail system, something that the pandemic had postponed.

Last week, officials at the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority said they're now asking Washington to put I-15 traffic on the radar, worried interstate traffic backups could keep our customers away.

Brightline's proposed Las Vegas station is in commissioner Michael Naft's District.

"We need to be looking at multimodal transportation options. Just adding a lane of pavement isn't gonna solve all the problems. It's gonna help; it's gonna help move freight. It's gonna help move people. But we need high-speed rail to Southern California," Naft told me last week.

In the video, it looks like the rail will be the median of the freeway, which it makes sense.

Won't load for me.

Always be ready for American newssites not loading for Europe. Change your IP to any other continent and it works. This has been a huge problem ever since the EU cookie directive/GDPR nonsense, many years now.

Oh, because Channel 3 doesn't ask if you'll accept their stupid cookies :p

Why aren't we copying this awesome American street design?

[video]https://youtu.be/pL7qM7fBOmE?t=94[/video]

That's a scary combination of why is that even a thing and driver idiocy.

Meanwhile, in the Netherlands:

Invented in Rotterdam and spreading across the country, the fietsvlonder is a “bike platform” that temporarily swaps one car parking space for 8 bikes.

If successful, the curb is permanently adjusted, and it is moved to another location. The Hague Vice Mayor @RvanAsten
 explains.

https://twitter.com/Cycling_Embassy/status/1520780115277398016

Oslo has caught on, it's claimed:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k53JlxpXHs4

Note that at 8 minutes it shows painted gutters, not cycling infrastructure.

Here's a video from Amsterdam showing the problem with cars.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xn_mSqTrOUo

https://www.urban-transport-magazine.com/en/das-neun-euro-ticket-kommt/

The Federal Cabinet approved the wording aid submitted by the Federal Minister of Digital Affairs and Transport (BMDV) on April 27 for the parliamentary groups of the SPD (Social democrats), Bündnis90/Die Grünen (Green Party) and FDP (Liberal Democrats) for a draft of a Seventh Act to amend the Regionalisation Act to be introduced from the centre of the German Bundestag. With the amendment, which now enters parliamentary consultations, regionalisation funds are to be increased by a total of 3.7 billion euros in 2022. This is intended to finance both the implementation of the “9 for 90 ticket” and the federal government’s contribution to compensating the public transport companies for the loss of fare revenue due to the pandemic.

Oslo has caught on, it's claimed:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k53JlxpXHs4

Note that at 8 minutes it shows painted gutters, not cycling infrastructure.

Nice to see my old home turf again. The broad street in the beginning, Dronning Eufemias gate, is recently built and in reality a bridge camouflaging as a boulevard. Lived there decades ago "before it got cool" (that is, when it was industrial/harbour area by a motorway, not like now among the most expensive pieces of real estate in Oslo). It is constructed and owned by the national road autority, not the city, and almost immediately was criticised for its subpar cycling solutions. To drive that home a bicyclist was run over by a truck in the street and killed in 2018. Another bicyclist killing happened in Oslo less than a month ago when a truck turned to the right.  Of course, compared with the bad old days, there are huge improvements. Now there are only about three fatal traffic accidents a year, while back in 1975 with a population 2/3 of today, there were 41.

Between cyclists (motored and not) and oblivious Jaywalkers and rude discourteous drivers — I wonder that actual war hasn't broken out... :) (Who wrote that short story...? @jax, you're my go-to guy for SciFi arcanalia! Remember? :)

The Bicycle Wars? No, on this I draw a blank. 

I draw a blank.

Hm. Gotta dig deep in my closet (and cob-webbed memories... I can narrow it down to some few authors... I'll get back to you.)
My brain supplies what should be a helpful hint (to me, if not to you): Think Peds vs ...; Wheels?

And here's the latest from Paris:
https://twitter.com/mikehudema/status/1526644270152704000

Tallinn tried to ban cars in old town in the 90s. The decision was short-lived, lasted less than a year. Not only are many foreign consulates and embassies located in old town, but also many so-called high net worth individuals who can purchase laws, regulations and verdicts for themselves.

It is impossible to ban car traffic from ambassadors, but really the old town would win much from banning all other traffic besides service transports. The old town is the medieval part of Tallinn. Cars do not belong to medieval streets.

Electricity is now 20 times more expensive in Norway than in Sweden.^[1] You can see for yourself in Nordpool's market data https://www.nordpoolgroup.com/en/Market-data1/Dayahead/Area-Prices/ALL1/Hourly/?view=table

But in Lithuania it is a 100 times more expensive than in Sweden.

“In Sweden, electricity prices are almost 100 times lower on the electricity exchange than in the Lithuanian zone. And in our zone, electricity prices
are actually breaking records, reaching more than 400 euros per megawatt-hour, or about 40 cents per kilowatt-hour, which is a more usual
measure for households,” says Tomas Janeliūnas, political analyst and head of the Energy Research Institute.

The discrepancy, he says, is down to differences in infrastructure. Unlike Sweden, Lithuania imports most of its electricity, but the capacity of
electricity connections is limited and not enough to meet the demand.

On the topic of walkability, USA keeps outdoing itself. "So painfully American!"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XBCNJQe6_ZQ

Oh dear, painful is indeed the word.

Lithuania is leaving the Russian/CIS synchronised grid in favour of the Continental Synchronous Area, just like Ukraine did last year. So far only a test, but next year Lithuania will leave Latvia and Estonia behind with the Russians.


(https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/6/6d/ElectricityUCTE.svg/1024px-ElectricityUCTE.svg.png)



Lithuania Disconnects From Russian Power Grid In First Test (https://www.rferl.org/a/lithuania-disconnects-electricity-russia/32375040.html)

As far as I understood, the disconnection required Russia's cooperation. A joint test in all Baltic countries was planned in the beginning of last year, but postponed because of the war.

Anyway, if it can indeed be done regardless of Russia's cooperation, then Estonia and Latvia are not far behind. It's just that Lithuania needs to succeed first. Because geography.

It is more a practical than political, it was going to happen anyway, but it will have consequences both practical and political. The lag for Latvia and Estonia will probably be 1–2 years.

Kaliningrad has an interconnector to Lithuania, so either they will have to change as well, add some conversion equipment or break contact. For this test Lithuania did the latter.

(https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FueJpsbX0AErW-_?format=jpg&name=large)

Estonian connections to Finland and Lithuanian to Sweden are HVDC, so there aren't synchronisation issues as such.

Finland, Sweden, Norway and half Denmark is in a different zone anyway.

Paris banned rental e-scooters https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20230828-paris-bids-adieu-to-love-or-hate-electric-scooters

Berlin is rolling back bike infrastructure https://www.politico.eu/article/europe-bikes-cycling-backlash-berlin-germany-cycling-cars-emissions/

So the progress of urban infrastructure has reached a dead end.  In my opinion, the way forward (towards walkable streets) is by regression: Less cars. Not more electric cars or some dystopian "pods" or misguided non-solutions to traffic (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oUEiMaZXbVA), but simply less cars. Less, not more. Back to the way it was in 1920's or, even better, 1910's.

It's been that way since the 1970s, that's why making cities more liveable is slow progress. Almost every pedestrian street has been fought nail and tooth, including parts of the local business community. Then, in most cases, they realise afterwards that they make more money and get a better neighbourhood. In some cases the project is badly planned or premature. Then after a decade or so, a better or more timely project comes along, and it sticks.

Suburbia is never happy in this process. They are used to drive through the city, and leave nothing but exhaust and desolate parking spaces. But eventually suburbs too become more walkable. 

European rail network by 2040 (https://transport.ec.europa.eu/news-events/news/provisional-agreement-more-sustainable-and-resilient-trans-european-transport-network-brings-europe-2023-12-19_en), including new lines to Narvik, Odesa and Mariupol.

(https://www.skyscrapercity.com/cdn-cgi/image/format=auto,onerror=redirect,width=1920,height=1920,fit=scale-down/https://www.skyscrapercity.com/attachments/1703353350728-png.6434265/)

Here's a section of allegedly completed Rail Baltica proudly presented on the website of Lithuania's Ministry of Transport.

https://sumin.lrv.lt/uploads/sumin/news/images/852x536_crop/5302_a68ffd7ccf3316728f5199bbd7f64086.jpg

Note the single track and the combination with local rail gauge on the same track. And I note that in jax's chart there is no seamless connection from Tallinn to Berlin. Nothing is as was advertised to the public and nothing looks the way the CGI plans were drawn.

(https://info.railbaltica.org/storage/images/cache/fd7532db81e2c769359c42a599a22868ce24a3a3.jpg/887e2b8d75cdaf5044951854dd203732.jpg)

So the time to take another look at the status of this nonsense is about 2040 now? Okay.

The latest video by Not Just Bikes is more to my taste than other videos on the channel or on "urbanist" channels in general. Namely, a recurring theme in the latest video is that urbanists are wrong and they have eyes only for some shiny hipster elements, not for the whole picture. The video is about Montreal where the bike infrastructure is patchy, so it does not deserve as much praise as (other) "urbanist" YT channels have given to it. Those "urbanists" should really get some more critique!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_yDtLv-7xZ4

I'd go even further. An enormous problem with all "urbanist" channels is the disproportionate focus on bike infrastructure. The obvious major problem with bike infrastructure is two-fold:
1. It is for bikes (and not for other traffic, such as walkers or wheelchair people)
2. It is infrastructure, meaning it needs to be built and maintained. It is not something naturally arising from the landscape.

The point number two I direct against Not Just Bikes himself just a few videos back when he lavishly praised the Driebergen-Zeist train station (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HACaRm2KP6Q) in Netherlands. The huge problem that I have with Driebergen-Zeist train station is that it took lots of bulldozing to rework the landscape around the station. In the latest video he repeatedly denounces bulldozing, but in the train station video he did not notice that the landscape around the station used to be perfectly flat and it took lots of bulldozing and infrastructure constructing to give it its current design.

I am more radical than he is. I am anti-industrial in general. I prefer a more minimal infrastructure where everyone can coexist on the same road with necessary special infrastructure only for trains such as here (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KF9-_Bvx7_8).

Other good points in the Montreal video:

Walkable Islands

Every city has some nice patches to walk on. The real test is whether these nice patches are connected to each other. In Miami conurbation, generally a quite destitute car-centric wasteland, has some lovely walkable beach parks and cozy shopping centres, but when you try to walk from one such place to another, you definitely end up stranded on a sidewalkless road somewhere.

The reason for the walkable islands problem is political or administrative. An area, a block or two, is given to a single developer. This ensures a more or less coherent design for that area. It may be a good or bad design, but it will be more or less coherent as envisioned by the developer. At the same time it often also ensures that there will be no cohesion with anything around that area.

A related political problem is the current hype of bike infrastructure. When a city expresses willingness for bike infrastructure projects, they get funding more easily. In reality the city councillors are always far more concerned about preserving the car infrastructure: Talk about bike infrastructure is just to get the funding. So when it comes to actually building for bikes, the bike infrastructure is either placed incoherently in quiet streets that do not strictly need any special bike infrastructure or alongside highways that lead into bushes outside the city centre. The do *not* build infrastructure in busy highway-like central city streets where it is needed the most and where it would effectively moderate other traffic. And whatever bike infrastructure they build is uncontiguous and disjointed; there will be no unified network of bike lanes ever. All this is in evidence in Montreal and I have not seen "urbanists" take proper notice until very recently.

Hauptbahnhof test

This test involves walkability starting with a city's main railway station. I have mentioned earlier on this forum the walkability of airport surroundings for the same purpose. If main stations, ports and transport hubs are not approachable by pedestrians, then they are not meant for travelling. But main stations, ports and transport hubs are definitionally meant for travelling, so they should definitionally accommodate pedestrian travel also.

Privatised underground city

Sometimes in city centres traffic is deemed so dense that some of it is moved underground, be it rail, motor or pedestrians. When people are moved underground, it is rather hostile to let them walk in plain tunnels, so it is considered friendlier to surround them with some shops and the like. Moving pedestrians underground can be bolstered with the argument of saving them from weather, but plans of this kind transparently award a single firm a construction of what is essentially a massive underground shopping centre. This can have poor outcomes such as leaving the surface traffic unfixed or being even detrimental to it, if the entire idea is that constructing an underground shopping centre is in and of itself the fix. Shopping centres tend to hit smaller shops in the same area, meaning that the commercial atmosphere on the surface street may suffer. And finally, shopping centres tend to be closed outside shopping hours and in those times pedestrians would have to face the situation on the surface as it has become, even though the underground infrastructure was supposed to spare them from it.