"The Transpo Intelligencia": recc'd reads, blogs, articles, etc.

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F-Line to Dudley

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Starting this thread because we're all going a little stir-crazy from self-quarrantine and not enough local dev news going on, and craving some relevant online reading we haven't seen before. Consider this a catch-all for blog recs, industry rags, "other cities' FCMB-like PowerPoints", way-back-machine finds that make you think, and other online resources about transportation/infrastructure issues. Any halfway-interesting or knowledge-expanding to share, since most of the choicest finds are discoverable by accident and only spread by word of mouth. I for one really need to cast a wider net, because everyone's suffering from the "No news is COVID news" effect and feeling the disappointment when the 'breaking news' sections of my usual issue-oriented websites are so much shorter and seldom-updated than usual.😒



FWIW...I think Alon Levy's been doing yeoman's work lately cranking up his Pedestrian Observations posting output during the crisis to more posts per week and being wholly topical to the crisis. Very unexplored territory like "How does one keep a transit system clean, and what is clean anyways?" then trying to take a stab in the abyss to find some baseline for best-practices. Nobody else is doing that right now. Love him or hate him, he does some of his best work when he acknowledges up front in the thesis that he doesn't have all the answers and is going to let scientific method take the inquiry where it goes.
 
Heres a couple reads:

California High Speed Rail, LA Metro announce agreement on Union Station project
Link

California approves $600m in bonds for high-speed rail project
Link

Letter: NH needs high-speed railway to combat climate change
Link

Watch 30-second drone footage of Virgin Trains USA’s Orlando extension project
Link
 
Oooh...that L.A. Union news is big. Thru running matters a ton for Metrolink CR and Amtrak corridor services as well, not just HSR. Right now it can very half-assedly chunk together thru service with a reverse move, and does exactly that with the Amtrak Pacific Surfliner. But the lead tracks from Mission Jct. a half-mile out are so congested that it's a lost cause trying to involve any other services in the mix. The "Link" build runs on an S-curve over US 101 back to the river, where a wye lets them go south or loop back north to Mission Jct. and hit every routing the current station leads afford. 7 out of 12 tracks would have access to the run-thru, which is a North-South Rail Link-level capacity boost allowing run-thru of every Metrolink pairing that makes sense to pair up.
 
Nice local Scituate High School kid has drone flight of the Greenbush train. (I never knew where to post this before, but this seems like a good catch all category!) Also, I believe this was filmed on March 16th, so after the stay-at-home recommendations, and that's why I'm assuming the parking lot is almost completely empty. Either that or it's a Sunday morning.
 
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Java King said:
Nice local Scituate High School kid has drone flight of the Greenbush train. (I never knew where to post this before, but this seems like a good catch all category!) Also, I believe this was filmed on March 16th, so after the stay-at-home recommendations, and that's why I'm assuming the parking lot is almost completely empty. Either that or it's a Sunday morning.
Click to expand...

There used to be a RR.net poster who worked in the Shawsheen office complex in Andover bordering the Haverhill Line tracks. He set up an automated webcam out his office window pointed 24/7 at the tracks set to snap a picture and auto-post it online every time it detected movement. For about the 2 years he worked there he had snapshots of every single train and MOW inspection truck that passed by. It was weirdly fascinating because you never expected such a weird variety of movements and unorthodox lash-ups...T non-revenue swaps with Bradford layover with odd number of locomotives pointing in different directions, freight cars that didn't correspond to any known MA customers, lite moves out of Lawrence Yard of single Pan Am locos heading points unknown, and strange work equipment moves (like...a lot of snowplows apparently get moved around in the dead of summer, apparently). Unfortunately he hasn't worked there in several years so the site is long gone, but I'd go to the homepage a few times per week to eyeball the thumbnails from the past several days of activity.
 
Umm, so apparently there's an entire news & views website dedicated entirely to. . .

railcolornews.com

Railcolor News

New trains made in Europe
railcolornews.com railcolornews.com

TRAIN PAINT PR0N!!! o_O

News section and Instagram pics are free...the rolling stock databases are paywalled behind subscription.


Proof that there's something for everyone...and I do mean everyone...somewhere on the Internet.
 
transitcosts.com

About

Why do transit-infrastructure projects in New York cost 20 times more on a per kilometer basis than in Seoul? We investigate this question across hundreds of transit projects from around the world. We have created a database that spans more than 50 countries and totals more than 11,000 km of urban
transitcosts.com transitcosts.com

Don't really know where to put it, so here it is: These guys, part of NYU appear to be compiling datasets about urban rail construction costs in a variety of cities and countries to contextualise cost drivers. It looks like early days yet, but I'm hopeful that the data once complete is useful. In fact, they ask people to
Correct us and expand our understanding of transit-infrastructure planning, construction, and financing. We are always looking for new projects, data, corrections, resources, and feedback
Click to expand...
 
Stlin said:
transitcosts.com

About

Why do transit-infrastructure projects in New York cost 20 times more on a per kilometer basis than in Seoul? We investigate this question across hundreds of transit projects from around the world. We have created a database that spans more than 50 countries and totals more than 11,000 km of urban
transitcosts.com transitcosts.com

Don't really know where to put it, so here it is: These guys, part of NYU appear to be compiling datasets about urban rail construction costs in a variety of cities and countries to contextualise cost drivers. It looks like early days yet, but I'm hopeful that the data once complete is useful. In fact, they ask people to
Click to expand...

That's one of Alon Levy's paid side gigs. Sort of a spawn of his blog which has been tackling this subject for years, and he's been incorporating these new datasets into his writing of late.

It's pretty fascinating stuff, because the results eschew any real broad-brush conclusions. It's certainly made Levy have to moderate a lot of his formerly dogmatic stances with a lot more nuance. The countries that are good at cost control in one type of construction almost always have a weakness in another type, and many civil engineering projects end up being a mix of types. It definitely underscores the need to search far and wide for world best practices (which North America writ-large and NYC region in particular does exceedingly poorly), but the sampling of practices needs to be a lot more precise and task-fitted than some two-dimensional "pull a Germany"...which may whiff on a cost target depending on nature of the project. Levy in this year's blogging has kind of been developing a new "assume Nordic costs" theory for how to approach projects from the widest-possible angle baseline...but then stepping out the construction specialty differentiation from there so there's some sort of roadmap planners can use. Because the data says that the countries that do deep-bore tunneling best may fare much more poorly with cut-and-cover tunneling or with the NIMBY tax on surface construction...and so on...and thus nobody seems to be as tight administratively in everything as they are in planning that one thing. Still very embryonic because the incoming results of this data collection challenge so much conventional wisdom, but Levy's hoping to refine that "assume Nordic costs" base theory into a set of step-out breadcrumbs on where to look for those more target-specific best practices so real planners can intuitively use this data dump sans wild-guesses in order to benchmark real projects of variable construction needs.


Very cutting-edge research. Will evolve lots of opinions...including moderating some of the transpo blogosphere's more caustic "fuck ____ ur doin it fail unlike this country I don't live in" hottakez when the truth is a whole lot more challenging.
 
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