Monday’s Friday Reads – 1 June 2020

1. The YouTube video on the class 158/159 has been taken down, apparently.

   [That’s bizarre, I was just rewatching it last night. I’m trying to contact the film-maker. LBM]

2. The article on the Kochs deliberately killing off “transit” schemes is interesting, if horrifying.
   The calculated use of deliberate misinformation to delude people into acting against theor own interests has many other parallels, of course.
   One niggle: The article referrs to “graaroots” campaigning”, which of course, it isn’t, it’s what’s called “Astroturf” campaigning.
   ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
   I wonder how long that Japanese information on the low risk of C-19 infection on trains will take to penetrate official minds here?

3. My favourite quote from the Streetsblog C-19 article:

   “There’s new evidence that the largest, most transit-rich cities on Earth are keeping infection rates low even while ridership remains high — not by shifting riders to cars, but by successfully promoting widespread mask use on buses and trains.”

   Like a ‘pre-fitted handkerchief’, even a non-medical cloth or surgical mask can prevent most of the exhaled droplets and aerosol from leaving a potentially contagious wearer’s mouth when they speak, cough or sneeze. As long as the vast majority of people on board a vehicle or in a busy tube station wear a face covering, the air in that enclosed area inevitably must remain clearer of contamination than if masks were not used, thus protecting everyone present. As the likelyhood of infection and severity of disease seems to be strongly linked to the level of virus exposure, even imperfect source control masking must have some benefit. East Asian experience suggests this may be substantial.

   I applaud the Mayor of London’s clear imperative messaging to ‘wear a face covering for your entire journey’ although I’m frustrated this doesn’t apply to UK public transport on a wider basis, and can’t be enforced currently. While I fully support efforts to encourage walking and cycling, and reasonable measures to reduce peak loading on public transport, we can’t allow this pandemic to start to undermine the very arteries our large cities, in particular, have come to rely on by unrealistically low restrictions on their capacity and the promotion of much new private car use. Mandatory public face coverings could have a useful role to play in managing this more effectively, and safely.

4. It is, of course, crazy pursue a policy of ‘don’t use public transport except as a last resort’. Cities like London cannot survive unless public transport is sued to maximum capacity, however much active travel can be increased (and this, too must be maximised). Before lockdown, 1.25m people came to work in central London each day during the morning peak period. 90% of these came by public transport, 5% by car and 5% by active travel modes. If effective public transport capacity is to be reduced to about 20% of actual capacity, that would allow less than 0.25m to arrive by public transport. Car numbers seem impossible to increase significantly. Even if active travel was to increase 10-fold, which seems unlikely, the maximum capacity for people entering the centre during the morning peak would be less than 0.9m. At best, therefore, you might expect maximum capacity to be about 75% of the previous numbers.

   But it goes further. Over 0.5m people travelled by mainline rail into the central London termini during the morning peak. Of these, about 0.3m came from stations within Greater London and 0.2m came from outside Greater London. This latter group are all making journeys that are too long to be made on foot or by bike. With social distancing, the effective capacity of thee rail network into central London during the morning peak would be about 0.1m, so where are the remaining 0.1m to go?

   Working from home may reduce the pressure a bit. But many jobs cannot be done from home. So rather than running down public transport use, we should be focussing on how people can use it safely and up to capacity.

5. Re the Koch brothers.

   The main example they give is a plan for building light rail in Nashville. Honestly, while Koch brothers organizations may have lied, they were right that the Nashville plan deserved to fail. Nashville has less than a tenth the population density of Greater London, meaning extremely low ridership for any line. The plan was expected to cost over $40000 for each projected rider; meanwhile Crossrail with all its cost overruns will be only $33000/rider. And most of Nashville’s riders would be existing transit users who would would enjoy a marginally faster ride due to the project, while most of Crossrail’s users will be people who could not previously fit onto any transit vehicle. Nashville will be much better off simply increasing the frequency of its buses and building a few bus lanes in congested areas. The Koch brothers may be a stopped clock, but this was the one time of day where they showed the right time.

6. @ERIC – The Nashville proposals also included significant development of bus-based transit including BRT lines, and the 2018 rejection means the city will see no significant transit improvements for the foreseeable future. With no pre-existing infrastructure in the traffic-choked centre of this fast-growing city, any initial scheme is bound to be particularly expensive. Some of those central assets could be shared in future by further lines and extensions added later, but it is a particular tactic of these anti-transit lobbyists and pressure groups to attack initial schemes like this so a viable growing transit network can’t gain footing and achieve critical mass.

   Make no mistake, they will ALWAYS attack transit. When rail is proposed, they will say build bus instead, but they’ll attack that as well if its on offer and involves public money. As far as they’re concerned, transit is for poor people who have no choice, and that means the minimal provision of buses if anything at all. And in the south, we all know who they really mean by ‘poor’ people.

7. There is a popular narrative (eg Who Framed Roger Rabbit) of big business with an interest in private road traffic killing off public transit in the USA. It’s known as the General Motors streetcar conspiracy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_streetcar_conspiracy Unlike most conspiracy theories, the parties involved were in fact convicted in court of conspiracy, most notably General Motors, Firestone Tire, Mack Truck, and a couple of oil companies. But it was a conviction for conspiracy to monopolise certain companies. The allegation that they were doing it to close them down is the “conspiracy theory” part.

8. The class 158/159 video is back online with a different link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NDgh4X1IFtc

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