• Croydon tram crash safety report watered down (BuzzFeed)
• Tube map of Roman London (Londonist)
• Accessible UK Travel Policy Guidance published (RailwayNews)
• Art Deco, Poirot & the Orient Express (ArtDecoSociety)
• Boston saved $5M with schoolbus routing algorithm (RouteFifty)
• NYC’s “radical traffic experiment” based on Toronto (TreeHugger)
• SFO beating fare evasion with tactics NYC abandoned (NYPost)
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Buzz Feed seem either ignorant of, or unconcerned with the relevant RAIB Report – which is shoddy journalism at best & cheap sensationalism at worst, even if their allegations are correct.
• Boston saved $5M with schoolbus routing algorithm (RouteFifty)
Supposedly this has actually been a failure, because by randomly switching around the start times of each school it cause huge amount of chaos for parents.
https://yro.slashdot.org/story/18/09/22/2228237/mits-elegant-schoolbus-algorithm-was-no-match-for-angry-parents
The Art Deco article does not mention that the opening Istambul cafe scene of the 1974 version of Murder on the Orient Express was shot on location in the foyer of the Rainbow Theatre, originally the Finsbury Park Astoria.
I remember being taken there at the age of 3 or so – my first ever film.
1. I was terrified.
2. I was disappointed that no other cinemas I subsequently went to had stars in the auditorium ceiling.
“Unrealistic” HS2 delayed by another five years as costs rise to £88bn
https://www.railway-technology.com/news/unrealistic-hs2-delayed-by-another-five-years-as-costs-rise-to-88bn/
How is it even possible for costs to be this high? That’s 166 million pounds per mile. About 5 times the international average for HSR.
Yes that’s a lot but you’re comparing with an international average; if the comparison was restricted to 400kph railways with significant tunneling and multi urban construction sites in countries of comparable land values, then I think you’ll get a more comparable figure.
@Eric I read an interesting analysis of this the other day on Twitter – see this thread: https://twitter.com/GarethDennis/status/1170070083449819136
@Eric
The article does talk about this. I think the point is, that it isn’t random. Switching the start times in a clever way allows both sleep for teenagers and the logistics of transporting them to and from school to be optimised.
What stopped it from happening is what all too often stops public transport projects in their tracks – rampant NIMBYism. Whether the proposed times will ever be tried (even as a pilot project) remains to be seen.
Such initiatives are rarely popular before they’re introduced, but in retrospect receive a lot of support. The congestion charge in London is one example. I don’t think you’ll find many people arguing for it to be abolished nowadays.
I don’t think a refusal by many parents to give up their jobs or homes to fit in with drastically changed school times for their children can be described as “rampant NIMBYism”. Being a parent and a full time worker is already hard enough, without having the goal-posts carted off to the far corner of the pitch half way through the game.
The $5 million savings are about $92 per student per year in the Boston Public Schools district. It wouldn’t take much disruption to parents’ lives to outweigh those savings entirely.
Looks very much like a classic case of get some get some consultants in who don’t fully understand all the issues or reasoning.
The elementary school hours are shorter hence they always tend to start later to enable parents greater opportunities for part time work. If you start the elementary school day earlier then parents have to finish much earlier too…
Not including parent working hours and impact thereon as part of the project is a bit of a major “oops”.
Teenage sleep patterns will become more out of sync with adult work hours if the UK selects the continuous BST option in October 2020. This will introduce an extra hour of darkness on winter mornings.
I was a teenager during the British Standard Time experiment. Arriving at school well before sunrise was bad enough. Getting up in the dark to go to school was miserable.
The main reason that the experiment was not implemented permanently was simple. Nothing to do with energy requirements or road safety. Everyone just hated it.
I always thought it would be easier for Scottish farmers and schools to change their start times instead, if it was too dark.
Ref Nameless:
Not everyone hated it. I much prefer not having a time change. Getting up in the dark is no problem when a lighter evening results. Personal preference, we are not all the same!
@Nameless: on the mainland where they are an hour ahead, getting up in the dark and going to school in the dark in winter is normal.
Further North in places like Stockholm 9:30 sunrise and 14:30 sunset is quite normal. People “deal with”….
@Nameless – schoolage teenagers constitute about 6% (max)of the population, many of those have either not entered the dislocated timekeeping you mention, or have got out of it – and the time they would be “forced” by permanent summer time to spend out of sync would be no more than a few weeks a year (for the rest of the year, they wouldn’t have any sort of choice whatever the clock time said). Some of those weeks are taken up by half term. Perhaps no more than 8% of the year is implicated . So we are looking at 0.2- 0.3% of the country’s manhours being in play. Not at all a powerful argument compared with the savings in lives.
And in any case, there are many countries in the world where teenagers seem to cope. Having lived in Estonia, where daylight was down to a gloomy 3 hour period in the middle of the day, I can assure you that there was no problem. Teenagers adapted like everyone else.
There is no problem with leaving the UK’s clocks on UT all year round.
If it is such a good idea to shift your country one time zone to the East, why hasn’t Germany done so?
@GH
I don’t see your 8% of the year.
Sunrise would be after 8 am BST for half the year, from 21 September to 21 March.
What savings in lives?
@SH(LR)
Isn’t London on the mainland?
“Isn’t London on the mainland?”
These things are purely relative, as in “Fog in the Channel; Continent cut off”. Very apposite, given current politics.
Nameless – probably negative, actually.
I too remember the trial & even in London it was NOT welcomed
Nameless. “What saving in life”?
As I understand it, during the ’60s experiment (which I remember well – my florescent armbands and all) there was an increase in injury – accidents in the mornings but a much bigger decrease in injury – accidents in the early evening.
Proving causation is complicated because it corresponded to the introduction of drink drive laws, which undoubtedly has an effect too.
@ID
The experiment was undertaken at a time when very few schoolchildren were taken to and collected from school by car. I suggest that the results would be completely different today.
@Nameless – for much of the year, it matters not a jot when the clocks are moved – it will always be dark or always light at the specific hour, regardless. And you standard teenager will just have to cope with getting up in the dark in December The only time it actually makes a difference is a few weeks around the time the clocks change.
@Eric
There’s two things going on—the first is simply optimization with existing starting times, which saved the $5m. They have subsequently proposed changed starting times, which were rejected.
—–
My school hours, growing up in NA, were much the same in elementary and high schools, other than the existence of after-school activities to a greater extent in high school. Elementary kids got longer for recess and lunch, but the school timings were much the same.
—–
There are studies, many of them, that show that teenagers in particular will always perform better on a slightly later (an hour or two) schedule than the adults surrounding them. As someone that’s a natural night owl even as an adult I have much sympathy for them on a daily basis.
@EXCALABUR: You say you are a natural night owl… There have been several studies recently that seem to indicate that night owl or early bird (or whatever) is not a natural anything, but learned behaviour…
@Nameless 1303
I’m afraid you are an hour out. At Greenwich, sunrise is at 0600 GMT at the two equinoxes so that for half the year sunrise is later than 0600 GMT and for the other half it is earlier. On BST that would make it 0700 and not 0800.
@SHLR: other studies show a genetic basis… https://theconversation.com/morning-or-night-person-it-depends-on-many-more-genes-than-we-thought-110256
American high school start times tend to be very early, which parents like (because it lets the parents leave home earlier to get to work) and educators don’t (because tired kids don’t learn as well). Meanwhile the dependence on specialised school buses creates a desire to have different elementary and high school times so each bus and driver can do two trips in a morning. Add in the enormously contentious history of school bussing in Boston and you have a classic intractable situation – I remember they were discussing later school start times in the 1990s.
Ultimately having a decent public transport network for everyone, so that you don’t need an enormous dedicated school bus network, would allow schools to start whenever they see fit.
@IanJ …a decent public transport network for everyone smacks of “Socialism” and would never be tolerated in the Land of the Free.
@Quinlet.
Typo. Sorry.
But plenty of teens have to be up by 7 to get to school on time. I did. My children did.
Depends on the school start time, how far away the school is and how they have to get there.
American high schools tend to start early for another reason: so they can finish early, and allow the minority of students who play organized sports to do so in daylight after school. High school sports are a big deal in the US.