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Total Members Voted: 2

Topic: Infrastructure (Read 101439 times)

Re: Infrastructure

Reply #301 –
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.



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

Re: Infrastructure

Reply #302 –
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 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.

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.

Re: Infrastructure

Reply #303 –
Finally somebody is addressing the topic of how to get away from airports after landing. Unfortunately for now, it is strictly by the measure of public transportation from the airport and only in USA.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y30Ln1ESGFs

What I'd really want to see addressed is walkability. Which airports in the world can you simply walk away from? I know two very good airports: Tallinn and Nice/Nizza.

Re: Infrastructure

Reply #304 –
In America the basic problem is that in too many places, you can't walk at all.[1]
1 The verge of the road only counts on small country roads. And if there aren't any signs saying it's forbidden to walk there.↵

Re: Infrastructure

Reply #305 –
By now the problem in the entire world is that either walkability has received zero attention specifically around airports or airports have been intentionally de-walkablised. For example, this is the only entrance to Malpensa

https://maps.app.goo.gl/YFnmCn5YpyGeSHvo8

How do you get there? Taxi or bus. Walking is strictly ruled out. Based on these kind of examples, also Malaysia has built up this century a series of ultramodern mega-sized "multimodal" or "intermodal" (at least bus+rail) stations where the regular feature is that you cannot approach them by walking. You get there by taxi or a bus, because this is the civilised way as taught by the West. Walking is for savages.

Re: Infrastructure

Reply #306 –
I must repeat, all airports in the Netherlands and probably in Belgium[1] are perfectly walkable. The reason you generally don't is because most people don't want to walk 15 km — or at least they don't want to take 3 hours doing it, whether they'd like to otherwise may be more variable. People who work at the airport who live nearby very well might, though I imagine most of those would come by bike.
1 I don't trust that to be true in Wallonia but then again it is 2025.↵

Re: Infrastructure

Reply #307 –
Quote from: Frenzie on
I must repeat, all airports in the Netherlands and probably in Belgium[1] are perfectly walkable. The reason you generally don't is because most people don't want to walk 15 km — or at least they don't want to take 3 hours doing it, whether they'd like to otherwise may be more variable.
It's a question of walkability, not of walking distance. And yes, by walkability I mean walking to the airport even from a considerable distance, such as 15 km. Otherwise the airport could still claim good walkability by the fact that people can walk there after being bussed/taxied in.

Good examples of walkable airports are Tallinn and Nice where residential housing (or at least walkable office blocks) are in immediate vicinity and there is no break to other quarters further away.

I live some 40 km away from Tallinn airport and I have gone both ways the entire distance by bicycle. On Google Earth I do not see that this is doable for Amsterdam and Brussels (edit: ok, found how it works for Brussels at least) airports. I will put them to test in person some day.
1 I don't trust that to be true in Wallonia but then again it is 2025.↵

Re: Infrastructure

Reply #308 –
Quote from: ersi on
It's a question of walkability, not of walking distance.
That's what I'm saying, they're perfectly walkable, it's just that the vast majority of people who go to the airport probably don't walk there.[1] There are also aggrevating factors, like that you might have to walk all around the runway(s). But if they're not walkable when you happen to be within a few km that's just utterly bizarre at best. I can only assume it's some misguided attempt at runway security or some such.

Quote from: ersi on
On Google Earth I do not see that this is doable for Amsterdam and Brussels
It goes without saying that for Amsterdam this is completely self-evident while for Brussels it may or may not be. Brussels is a bit like Montreal in that manner, by which I mean it'll be doable but you may not necessarily have the best time doing it. That being said, they've been hard at work over the past decade and the city I know and, um, don't really like has really changed quite a lot.

One thing foreigners don't tend to understand, especially from North America but even as close as Germany, is that you can simply go by bike wherever you like. The cycling network doesn't end. It does have holes though in the sense that if you're not in the know you might end up on the crappy street instead of the parallel good street.[2]
1 If only because if it's more than 1-2 km we bike. ;)↵
2 It's possibly worth noting that what I call the crappy street would probably be called the amazing street in North America.↵

Re: Infrastructure

Reply #309 –
Quote from: Frenzie on
One thing foreigners don't tend to understand, especially from North America but even as close as Germany, is that you can simply go by bike wherever you like.
That is, the thought of cycling from Amsterdam to Utrecht or Rotterdam, or to Schiphol Airport or whatever simply wouldn't even occur to them because over there cycling outside of the city center (or the extremely local part of the suburb) means you've probably got a death wish.

Re: Infrastructure

Reply #310 –
Quote from: Frenzie on
But if they're not walkable when you happen to be within a few km that's just utterly bizarre at best. I can only assume it's some misguided attempt at runway security or some such.
This is exactly the case with Case Nuove residential quarter and Malpensa airport. The residential quarter with its decently walkable quiet streets ends next to the airport entrance at the fence, but the airport entrance is controlled strictly allowing only motor vehicles from the highway that surrounds both the airport and Case Nuove. I tried my best to walk to the airport for test. The highway was survivable (even though not meant to be), but the thorny bushes, steep mottes and high fences definitely put a stop to all pedestrian approach.

And Malpensa main terminal building is not even surrounded by runways from all sides the way e.g. Brussels is. When it's a busy airport such that the terminal is surrounded by runways on all sides, the missing walkability is somewhat understandable because all non-flight access to the terminal is necessarily restricted. Malpensa does not have this excuse.

NCE has a straight shoreline to the south side, the terminal on the land, and the runway in between the two. They could have restricted the bejeezus out of the land access, had they wanted to, but instead there are tram stops immediately at the exit/entrance doors and the streets are walkable to the residential area + railway station nearby.

Quote from: Frenzie on
One thing foreigners don't tend to understand, especially from North America but even as close as Germany, is that you can simply go by bike wherever you like. The cycling network doesn't end.
Infrastructure helps you get to places, if the asphalt and you have the same way and the asphalt is not taken by reckless machinery. Infrastructure can also prevent you from getting to places, for example if the ditch beside the road is so wide or steep that you cannot jump over it. I strongly hold to the opinion that lack of infrastructure is a form of accessibility, especially for pedestrians.

When you build specifically for bicyclists, you are taking away from other modes of transportation, and often not even providing for bicyclists if the bicycle roads end up patchy and broken, which is always the case in and around Tallinn, so much so that it is safer to avoid them. The problem with infrastructure is that only engineers design it and engineers drive cars. Or worse, they are riding with chauffeurs.

Re: Infrastructure

Reply #311 –
Quote from: ersi on
When you build specifically for bicyclists, you are taking away from other modes of transportation
It's not specifically for cyclists. In what I write about Brussels there's the underlying knowledge that pedestrians and cars have it okay while cyclists don't or didn't.

It takes away from cars if you don't think about it too hard but in reality the opposite is true. Driving is significantly better when people who don't really want to aren't forced to drive.

I don't know how the bicycle paths in Tallinn could be patchy and broken. There's virtually no wear & tear on them, which increases exponentially with weight. That sounds like a construction error.

Quote from: ersi on
The problem with infrastructure is that only engineers design it and engineers drive cars.

This may be a major factor why Dutch infrastructure isn't too bad. Nearly everybody uses every means of transport some of the time.

Re: Infrastructure

Reply #312 –
Quote from: Frenzie on
...the thought of cycling from Amsterdam to Utrecht or Rotterdam, or to Schiphol Airport or whatever simply wouldn't even occur to them because over there cycling outside of the city center...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8m1M33B353c

At 10m50: You cannot pay by Mastercard... Why would a business (pretend to) have an e-payment option when Mastercard is missing?! Do they accept cash at least?

E-payment solutions are a whole topic by itself. Every country, even every city, has its own silly app that does not interconnect with anything else, not to mention that when you are a tourist abroad then you are often without internet access. Come on, this is now the second quarter of the 21st century. Issues like this were solved in principle by the end of the last millennium. It should not be a problem to both interconnect with everything plus accept cash.

Quote from: Frenzie on
I don't know how the bicycle paths in Tallinn could be patchy and broken. There's virtually no wear & tear on them, which increases exponentially with weight. That sounds like a construction error.
I mean the network of bicycle paths is patchy and broken. The bicycle paths/lanes start and end abruptly in random places.

Where a bicycle path exists, it's nice good asphalt/tarmac, but from the bicyclist point of view it's rideable for, say, 90 seconds and then it ends abruptly either against the wall of some building or in a highway crossing where the traffic rules expect you to get off your bicycle and become a pedestrian so that it's literally throwing you under the bus. It is honestly safer to not use such bicycle lanes/paths unless you live in the area and know how they end up. This is the way bicycle lanes are in the city centre.

Then there are longer more contiguous bicycle lanes outside city centre, especially in and around nature parks and between towns, i.e. in the middle of nowhere where you cannot do everyday things such as go shopping or to school.

Re: Infrastructure

Reply #313 –
Quote from: ersi on
At 10m50: You cannot pay by Mastercard... Why would a business (pretend to) have an e-payment option when Mastercard is missing?! Do they accept cash at least?
I doubt it's an e-payment option but just a regular contact-free option. Credit cards are a hobby for foreigners,[1] but with Maestro being phrased out[2] and being replaced with Debit Mastercard and Visa Debit these differences will soon disappear.

Cash is the only thing that's always guaranteed to work. Technology can fail.

Quote from: ersi on
I mean the network of bicycle paths is patchy and broken. The bicycle paths/lanes start and end abruptly in random places.
Ah well, you have to start somewhere. Hopefully it'll start to come together in a few years.
1 I've had a credit card — or rather what Americans call a charge card, meaning it's automatically paid back in full every month — for over 16 years now, but the purpose is to buy things abroad (online) and to have it as a backup when traveling abroad.↵
2 I understand that under the hood Maestro is nearly completely identical to Mastercard, other than being set up as a separate system.↵

Re: Infrastructure

Reply #314 –
Quote from: Frenzie on
Cash is the only thing that's always guaranteed to work. Technology can fail.
You mean you haven't heard of the push for "kontantfritt samhälle" in Sweden, a campaign that has radically reduced the number of ATMs, bank offices and post offices outside major cities? Govts think it's hip and trendy to make cash inaccessible. Estonia has followed this cue in such an extreme manner that we even did an overhaul of the municipal map, making every municipality superlarge so that we can say that each one of them has an ATM again (even though probably still not).

Quote from: Frenzie on
Quote from: ersi on
I mean the network of bicycle paths is patchy and broken. The bicycle paths/lanes start and end abruptly in random places.
Ah well, you have to start somewhere. Hopefully it'll start to come together in a few years.
The current situation is the fruit of over ten years of strategies, planning, visions, and projects. The most recent addition of a bit of bicycle lane in Tallinn city centre was accompanied by a scandal (in October or so). After the completion it was clear to every ordinary citizen (but not to any planner, municipality official or auditor) that the construction was an embezzlement scheme for the benefit of the company that makes traffic signs (this much embezzlement is instantly obvious, but the embezzlement is likely much larger).



While looking at this image, think what could possibly lie immediately outside of it. That's right: Immediately outside of the reach of the photo on both ends the bicycle lane abruptly ceases to exist. In the photo you see the entirety of it.

Re: Infrastructure

Reply #315 –
Quote from: ersi on
You mean you haven't heard of the push for "kontantfritt samhälle" in Sweden, a campaign that has radically reduced the number of ATMs, bank offices and post offices outside major cities?
What I said doesn't relate to what the government says, Swedish or otherwise. It's a simple truth. If you add servers and communication infrastructure into the mix you introduce more points of failure. A cashless society is more vulnerable to payment outages by logical necessity.

For what it's worth the Dutch government organization Nibud (National Institute for Budget Information) says a citizen and by extension the Swedish government is a bit of an idiot if they don't have sufficient cash on hand for at least several days. Dutch banks are working on a related piece of advice because as part of the war Russia took out payment infrastructure in Ukraine with a cyber attack.

Everybody already knew that could happen since the very concept of paying by card was first introduced, but presumably it was merely theoretical until recently. Of course at the same time insurers say that they consider more than some 250-500 euros to be taking unnecessary risks. I wonder how that goes at the banks that are also insurers… But I suppose 250-500 euros is enough for a few days, so there's that.

The old advice was to keep € 50 on hand for short interruptions. That always struck me as ridiculously low. For example, not that long ago, about a year, there was a payment system malfunction in Belgium and we had to scramble together € 250 or so. That was a bad coincidence. I rarely keep less than € 100 on me but right at that moment I only had about half that. Granted, we could've just left most of the items in the store; most of them weren't essential food or anything. But it still would've been rather inconvenient.

https://www.denkvooruit.nl/bereid-je-voor/stel-je-noodpakket-samen
https://www.nrc.nl/nieuws/2024/12/11/banken-adviseren-consumenten-vanwege-cyberdreigingen-bewaar-contant-geld-in-huis-a4876278
https://www.rtl.nl/nieuws/economie/artikel/5484638/advies-banken-houd-cash-geld-voor-noodgevallen
https://www.vrt.be/vrtnws/nl/2024/12/11/komt-er-advies-van-banken-over-cash-voor-crisissituaties/

Quote from: ersi on
While looking at this image
Wow.

Re: Infrastructure

Reply #316 –
Quote from: Frenzie on
For what it's worth the Dutch government organization Nibud (National Institute for Budget Information) says a citizen and by extension the Swedish government is a bit of an idiot if they don't have sufficient cash on hand for at least several days.
Based on my local experience such government guidelines do not matter. It routinely happens that laws contradict each other or they smoothly change "as reality demands" (i.e. when banks, the EU or whoever come up with new ideas).

In Estonia it used to be the law of the land that every business should accept cash. Then it was changed to "must accept the official legal tender" so what if the legal tender becomes some crypto? What if digital transactions will be considered equally valid official legal tender as cash and businesses begin interpreting that they accept at least one type of legal tender therefore they are fulfilling the law?

Quote from: Frenzie on
Dutch banks are working on a related piece of advice because as part of the war Russia took out payment infrastructure in Ukraine with a cyber attack.

Everybody already knew that could happen since the very concept of paying by card was first introduced, but presumably it was merely theoretical until recently.
No, it has been a real threat all the time https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2007_cyberattacks_on_Estonia

It keeps amazing me how little the people of EU know about each other's countries. A rock-solid sign that EU unity does not exist and will never be had.

Re: Infrastructure

Reply #317 –
Quote from: ersi on
In Estonia it used to be the law of the land that every business should accept cash. Then it was changed to "must accept the official legal tender" so what if the legal tender becomes some crypto? What if digital transactions will be considered equally valid official legal tender as cash and businesses begin interpreting that they accept at least one type of legal tender therefore they are fulfilling the law?
I'd say whoever originally wrote cash instead of legal tender might not have thought that one through. Even when legal tender is cash the exact definition changes. Trying to pay € 5000 in 5 cents isn't legal tender.

Quote from: ersi on
It keeps amazing me how little the people of EU know about each other's countries. A rock-solid sign that EU unity does not exist and will never be had.

That will have been in the news. The fact that I missed it at the time or don't remember may say something about me, but given how long ago that was perhaps no more than that I could've done a cursory search. In any case it's well known that there are multiple unsuccessful attacks (or probes?) every day, they just don't normally amount to much.

What's more disturbing is that the supposed experts seem to have merrily continued the cashless push. They must see black money and potential for tax avoidance as a bigger problem than service disruption, which I'd expect to be at odds with how most of the population feels about it (depending a bit on the size of the tax avoidance).

Re: Infrastructure

Reply #318 –
Quote from: Frenzie on
That will have been in the news. [...] they just don't normally amount to much.
They amount to nothing where you live. They amount to a lot where I live. The disconnect between western EU and those who live next to Russia is insurmountable.

The 2007 cyberattack against Estonia was massive. It was combined with an orchestrated mass unrest.[1]

There's a major oil&gas&coal terminal of Ust-Luga just behind Estonia's border at the Gulf of Finland. Ukraine has been attacking that terminal every now and then. Our authorities occasionally need to issue statements to the effect that the Ust-Luga battle is not being waged via Estonia's airspace. But look up on the map how close Ust-Luga is to Estonia and by what route Ukraine needs to attack it.

There's no way to say it does not amount to much. Putin has already thrown a direct challenge to Article 5 in several ways, including drones falling in Nato member territories (Poland, Romania and Latvia), but the West does not see any challenge. Instead the Western powers who have the capacity to bring about the defeat of Russia dictate "realism" to Ukraine. This is the ordinary colonial sense of realism: The colonist is always right and the victim has an attitude problem or worse.

Edit: And if you have not heard about Russian-deployed ships cutting cables in the Baltic Sea either, here is a Russian Duma guy justifying it, beginning 4m40

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HQATDINMI-M

The guy is Alexander Kazakov, a Russian born and raised in Latvia who made noise in Latvia in the 00s (same time when Bronze Nights riots occurred in Estonia) for Russian-speaking shool education https://svpressa.ru/persons/aleksandr-kazakov/
1 It's the only unrest Estonia ever had. Estonians hardly ever demonstrate, and any demonstrations we have had have been very meek, perfectly ignorable for the government.↵

Re: Infrastructure

Reply #319 –
Quote from: ersi on
They amount to nothing where you live. They amount to a lot where I live. The disconnect between western EU and those who live next to Russia is insurmountable.
What I said is that all Western nations, including Estonia, successfully withstand nearly every single attempted cyberattack of the particular nature we're discussing,[1] of which there are quite a few every single day. Perhaps in large part thanks to the events in Estonia in 2007.

That statement could of course be mistaken, but one counterexample from over a decade ago supports it rather than refutes it.
1 Or in other words, they don't amount to much.↵

Re: Infrastructure

Reply #320 –
Quote from: Frenzie on
I must repeat, all airports in the Netherlands and probably in Belgium[1] are perfectly walkable. The reason you generally don't is because most people don't want to walk 15 km — or at least they don't want to take 3 hours doing it, whether they'd like to otherwise may be more variable. People who work at the airport who live nearby very well might, though I imagine most of those would come by bike.

Been to a few airports where the city is in comfortable walking distance (less than 30 minutes), and walkable. Bodø airport in Norway for instance. And more where it is in uncomfortable walking distance (say less than 90 minutes). Usually small towns or very small towns, but sometimes also megacities.
1 I don't trust that to be true in Wallonia but then again it is 2025.↵

Re: Infrastructure

Reply #321 –
European rail network is progressing. The rails (within rails) are there, only the trains are missing.



News item about Tornio-Haaparanta (Torneå-Haparanda) connection between Finland and Sweden https://yle.fi/a/74-20134730