Railzone

The best part is when the third driver bursts out laughing, who also seriously looks like Baló György.

via VEKE.

One of the reasons why ensuring alternatives to driving is so important is that road fatalities are the number one cause of non-natural death in developed countries (see for example table here) and increasing in developing countries.

Highway interchange in Dubai (photo: Paolo Keller)

The underlying causes of road accidents can be several from infrastructure to speeding  and alcohol/drug use, but one topic gaining attention especially in the US media is distracted driving (see e.g. http://www.distraction.gov/), the effects of which have been severely underestimated in the previous years.

I.e. in many U.S. states talking and texting on a mobile phone is legal and talking with a headset is legal even in most of Europe. However. not so new research shows that talking on the phone, whether with or without headset, is comparably dangerous to drunk driving.

Last week, “thanks” to Blackberry, evidence have been collected that texting on the phone is indeed probably a major cause of distracted driving and accidents. During the Blackberry network outage, accident rates dropped significantly in Dubai and Abu Dhabi, an area where otherwise road fatalities are shockingly frequent.

via Elsevier Transportation.

Have a look at how Schiphol airport looks like from above in the night in the following short video about the air traffic control room in the control tower.

By schipholtv.com

I have just spent four great days with fellow engineers/consultants working for the Dutch rail sector.

Dutch engineers happy to have just had Wiener Schnitzel for lunch (photo: Daniel Sparing)

We have been to the transport authority of Zürich, visited the commuter rail system of the canton of Zug, the main factory of Stadler: the famous David among the train manufacturing Goliaths, as well as the Gotthard base tunnel.

I am still here for the weekend to meet friends and to cycle in the Alps enjoy the rain, maybe more pictures later.

Update: here is a video about the trip.

RET is the municipal transit operator of Rotterdam. (photo: Daniel Sparing)

Rotterdam has just opened a brand new tram depot in Beverwaard to replace an older workshop which was too expensive to maintain. The Beverwaard remise is along the East leg of the motorway ring, on line 23, which itself was laid in 2004.

The depot project was subsidized by an EU programme TramStore21, just the future Starr Gate depot in Blackpool, UK. The conditions of this subsidy required that the new depots become symbols of sustainability (buzzword alert!), so quite a few innovative solutions in terms of water, heating and spatial use were planned.

There is covered outdoor space for trams on some 18 tracks... (photo: Daniel Sparing)

...plus indoor workshops and offices. (photo: Daniel Sparing)

The use of rainwater to wash trams is reality, but the P+R on the roof remains a bit empty (it still takes a good 30 minutes ride to reach central Rotterdam from here, as opposed to e.g. 10/15 min train ride from Rotterdam Alexander/Barendrecht) and it turns out that there are better locations in the region to install wind turbines.

Smart energy and resource usage is understandably a requirement given limited budgets, competition, etc. But when talking about going green et al., it is a good idea to look at the forest and not at the trees: a tram depot is as “sustainable” as many car trips an attractive service can replace, so power up those trams

More pictures below. Thanks to Jonge Veranderaars and RET for hosting us.

The vacuum cleaner for trams! With a wind power of 6. (photo: Daniel Sparing)

The vacuum cleaner is attached to the open last door, other doors closed (photo: Daniel Sparing)

The vacuum cleaner sucks yesterday's news out (photo: Daniel Sparing)

Into the tram wash (photo: Daniel Sparing)

Electric and HVAC boxes on the roof can be fixed in this section without overhead lines (photo: Daniel Sparing)

Here we learned what we knew already: it is not a good idea to fall under a tram. (photo: Daniel Sparing)

"Together for less carbon emissions in transit". No comment.. (photo: Daniel Sparing)

This small project in Budapest was already practically completed earlier this year, but some great new before vs after pictures have just been published.

The street is called Károly körút (see in Google Maps), which is a ring road around the historic centre of Pest, exactly where a former city wall used to stand. It is a major artery for road traffic, including still too many through trips (i.e. trips neither originating nor ending in the city centre itself). It is also a tram route, which was almost discarded following a new subway line construction, but now, partly due to the reconstruction project itself, the future of the line seems certain and an extension to North is planned.

During reconstruction, the green area has been increased substantially, traffic lanes were removed (without reducing capacity for cars, as that is limited by the intersections anyway), bicycle lanes were added and some street level pedestrian crossings were added where there were only subway underpasses before.

I am proud of my hometown turning more livable step by small step.

The Swedish initiative to increase the share of public transport is called the Doubling Project, i.e. doubling the share. While this goal seems a bit suboptimal for me (more on that below in the notes), this umbrella covers quite some initiatives from small to big to improve transit attractiveness, such as marketing campaigns or through-city train tunnels.

The video below describes case studies from four cities:

Some notes:

• Gothenburg is introducing the congestion charge in 2013 and plans to fund transport infrastructure and vehicles from this revenue. Given the experience from previous city-scale road charges, such as London or Stockholm, this seems to be a very ambitious/fragile idea: when organized well, road charge revenues can cover the system costs and some more, and certainly beneficial on a societal level, but can hardly be used to build a huge infrastructure fund. — Also, it is a bit questionable whether the Gothenburg tram system is already prepared for the extra load, as the network is very congested already in the city centre and renewing the tram fleet goes slowly as problems arise with the new Italian trams.
• It is great to hear that Stockholm is “extending its tram network”, what this really means is that during the big subway works, most of the previous network was discarded — just like many other cities — and now the city struggles to reconnect the remaining pieces.
  

  Stockholm Metro (photo: Patricia Poon)

• Malmö: I covered the new City Tunnel on its opening day, an interesting note to those of us living in the Netherlands is that you can get for your ticket using “any means of payment” — good luck buying a train ticket here with a credit card or with banknotes.
• In Sundsvall, we learn a new sentence in Swedish: det är inte rocket science, and really, all speakers note that what is key is not some technological innovations, but the vision, commitment and to break away from the former bureaucratic attitude of operator companies.
• It gives some credit to this initiative that the minister is the last speaker. I can’t resist to notice, however, that the idea of doubling transit market share is not really a sound goal to set for yourself: (1) what about urban regions where the share of public transport is already around 40-50%? Barcelona, Vienna, Central London, Eastern Europe. It is clearly impossible to double the 55% market share, but investments and innovation here is just as important, regarding how many people already trust the transit network. (2) no matter how much some nerd like trams and buses, the real goals are safer transport, less emissions, higher land value/quality of life: no need to replace cycling or the occasional car trip with transit. If you need a simple goal, it is to reduce driving, be it by a shift to transit, cycling, Het Nieuwe Werken or Whatever Works*.

* just kidding, it is a bad movie.

I have already wrote once or twice about different “superbus” projects that claim to reach the capacity of trains and light rail on the public roads. In fact, Delft does have its own Superbus project, and the Batmobile was shown this week on campus. The photo credits are due to @adolfochaves.

Let’s just say that a strength of Dutch transport policy might be that the Netherlands is audacious in trying out brave new concepts and solutions, even if some of them undoubtedly fail. I am not the first to come to this conclusion, you can read about storm-torn shelters on the high quality (super?)bus line Zuidtangent or the Shared Space policy.