Friday Reads – January 5, 2018

10 comments

1. The LTM article says; “Transport is the lifeblood of London” – currently being strangled by lack of both integrated planning & the subsidy-collapse, as document elsewhere …

   The moving *gif’s* for the “subway” maps is utterly fascinating & hypnotic

   Melbourne ramps – a lot of time & a lot of money, but spent over that long time, not “all at once”. Something some “accessibility” campaigners might like to appreciate?

   The NYT article is very important. Not just for people like the new Governor of New Jersey, or the NYC legislators in Albany, jealous of NY.
   But for us, here in London – see also the very recent remarks on-line (linked elsewhere here) about lack of subsidy for TfL & the desperate foot-dragging over CR2.
   Meanwhile: A passenger is killed on the tracks pretty much every week. Did I just read that?
   The whole thing makes London – even when just after the King’s Cross Fire – look positively benign

2. The NY Times photos of Chambers St (J) are particularly choice, but in my experience most stations are not as bad, and at least keeping the train cars clean and graffiti free still make for decent travel experience. The sheer scale of the iron/steel columned and girdered cavern spaces containing quad-tracked and multi-levelled running tunnels is probably like no other metro, and must also present a major maintenance and investment challenge in its own right. When it comes to track closures, they are fortunate that some services can be modified to handle line diversions, and I was impressed that trains with electronic in-car strip diagrams were able to cope with visiting stations on a foreign line accordingly.

   The Melbourne ramps are interesting – definitely making for better circulation flows than staircases, but as the end of the article points out, much steeper/longer than useful for wheelchair users (think of ex-London Bridge), so future equal access improvements will still raise the same challenges.

3. @GREG TINGEY the average for London is 80, in Tokyo 200. Rate in Oslo is higher but smaller system.

   @NICKBXN Chambers looks like the movies “come out you Warriors”.

   $100bn upgrade = £70bn HS2 for perspective

   “Transport is a right” The stimulus effect is worth Reconnecting London;s Transport infrastructure.

4. Superficially, the idea of transport as a right seems very attractive. It’s not until you begin to think it through, however, that you realise the impossibility of it meaning anything useful. What quality, speed, coverage and price is implied by a right? Do I have a right to transport direct to my restaurant of choice at the time I have booked lunch? Do I have the right to a first class train from Oxford-to Milford nd a cab waiting at the station to avoid the drag up Station Lane at the dead of night? And so on.

   Even the more practical accessibility measures used by transport planners leave these questions unanswered, especially frequency, interchange, service quality and price.

5. Graham: The same objection could be made to the notion of any other right. It is usually dealt with by having some sort of minimum standard. So for the right to food, it would be enough to keep you alive and healthy, but no champagne trifle. For shelter – no right to a palace.

   So the right to transport would just mean that you must be able to get to any reasonable destination for any reasonable purpose arriving somewhere around your reasonably-desired time. Of course, all these “reasonable”s provoke debate, that’s what politics is for.

6. @Malcolm – I disagree – whereas for most rights it’s easy to identify the modalities, and to quantify them, that isn’t so for transport, especially public transport. The point is a logical one: in the case of food,the supply of food is based on individual needs;in the case of public transport, the basis of the provision is the bundling together of individuals’ needs in a compromise. Again, in the case of food, the individual’s needs can be objectively assessed; for transport, how do you evaluate my need to go to lunch against your need to go to work?

7. @Malcolm
   But we don’t have any other ‘rights’ where the exercise of the right costs money and must be paid for (except, perhaps for the NHS and primary education). Rights to things such as free speech or assembly are generally seen as absolute rights with, perhaps, a few exceptions (so that free speech does not include the right to make hate speeches). There is no ‘right’ to food or shelter, for example. In one sense there is already a sort of ‘right’ to transport but this is only the right to pass and repass, on foot, on the public highway. I think any other idea of a ‘right’ to transport is pretty meaningless.

8. We were discussing the reads article. NYT good read.
   In summary the city is stitched together from disparate communities. There is no city without the connecting network

   In New York, movement — anywhere, anytime — is a right. Transit dictates opportunities.
   The case for the subway is the case for mobility: physical mobility, economic mobility, social mobility. The business leaders, politicians and engineers who made the subway all those years ago understood that promise, and it remains the most profound message of the system even in its decline: The city can be built, and the people can come, and they can thrive

9. Rights: I may not have made it clear, but I do not necessarily believe that anyone has a right to transport. Just that the concept of rights is a feasible one to be used by someone advocating certain provisions. About the only right about which there is little or no dispute is the right not to be killed (and exceptions are claimed even to that one).

   But the concept of a right to education (say) is a powerful tool which can be deployed against those who try to diminish educational provision. Similarly, the concept of a right to transport can (in my view) be usefully used in arguments. Whether those arguments are accepted in any given case is another matter.

10. @Malcolm – I’m not sure that this discussion is going to go anywhere. I understand where you are coming from but I can’t see how you can apply “feasible” to something that cannot be defined. I appreciate that the UN talks of the right to shelter and some other thing,s but if they can’t be described their value to real people, leading real lives is limited to moral debating points. The practical effect of leaving such “open” concepts hanging around for every passing demagogue to interpret is quite dangerous (in every possible way) as the various followers of Rousseau, Paine and Marx demonstrate.

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