walkitout | Entries tagged with transportation

Three sets, actually. Maybe this will help with my allergies. Probably not, tho!

H. recently posted on FB that a scammer she is unfortunately aware of has been running an electric plane company in Colorado for a few years (not actually producing any planes, obviously). This got me thinking about electric planes.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_aircraft

The earliest electric flights involved dirigibles, and yes, Pathfinder 1 is still undergoing development, but other than this BBC link, I’m mostly focused on heavier-than-air options, of which there are literally hundreds supposedly under development now.

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20250214-pathfinder-1-the-airship-that-could-usher-in-a-new-age

This a glider that you can get a motor as an option:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lange_Antares

There are other self-launching, electrified gliders / sailplanes in production, such as:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pipistrel_Taurus

Here is a solar plane that has circumnavigated.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_Impulse

Obviously, none of these are in any way intended to replace the kinds of planes we are familiar with.

Retrofits are one way that electric cars and hybrids got started. The same is true with aviation.

https://www.ainonline.com/aviation-news/futureflight/2025-04-09/magnix-electric-aero-engine-reaches-key-milestones

China is doing a bunch of stuff, obviously, such as:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liaoning_Ruixiang_RX1E

Honda is exploring hybrid options with its eVTOL development, so if you hear about “flying cars” from some enthusiast, at least push them in the direction of electric or hybrid. (Obviously, none of us really want people flying cars. We know what people are like.)

I will note that the capacity of these things is very low, in terms of number of people and amount of stuff (other than battery) that they can carry. In addition, the range is very low (like, 100 miles low). Getting the capacity up to a viable level and the range up to a viable level is going to be challenging.

Here are efforts in that direction:

https://www.aerospacetestinginternational.com/news/electric-hybrid/wright-electric-validates-motor-safety-at-high-altitude.html

And:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heart_Aerospace

The Wright Spirit is a retrofit; the Heart is a full design, and has both all-electric and hybrid operation. The Heart has orders, which I find mildly confusing but you know, startups.

ETA:

Sheets are now on two of the beds. I had a delightful phone call with J. I dusted my room, and decluttered the PJ drawer and the drawer of drawers. I’ve been attempting to figure out bras that I don’t hate for the last couple years, and have gone through multiple attempts before finally settling on some of the TomboyX styles, and I’m now experimenting with things like HoneyCloudz as a supplement. Needless to say, while I’ve gotten rid of things that definitely were unworkable, I kept a lot of things that kinda worked until I settled on something repeatable that was definitely better. And then I didn’t clear out the so-so stuff until today. This is a predictable pattern for me, and I figured it would be easy enough to sort through the drawer.

A large box from Amazon arrived so bath mats are now airing out in the garage, the new curtains are up in the green bathroom, and I have set one package of Fomin soap sheets out for A. to try to see what she thinks of them. I was reminded that there used to be dispensers for these things at some point in the past — I’d forgotten, and seeing them in person reminded me, and J. confirmed that he remembered those, too.

This is a 2021 piece about privacy concerns and tap-to-ride systems.

https://transitcenter.org/publication/do-not-track-a-guide-to-data-privacy-for-new-transit-fare-media/

Earlier this month (the first and second), I posted three times about tap-to-ride, because I’m super excited about it, and I’m also confused about the lack of news coverage. Also, because when I brought it up on Friday cocktail zoom, the discussion kept haring off onto account/card based systems, rather than staying focused on what I thought the winner was, which is the occasional user who would otherwise taxi/uber/lyft. In tourist destinations, getting tourists out of taxi/uber/lyft/rental vehicle and onto public transit is Huge. The combination of things like google maps including transit information down to the when the next bus/train/wtf arrives and tap-to-ride can easily make getting from point A to point B faster and easier for an occasional user than tax/uber/lyft. Also, cheaper, and you don’t have to figure out how to park. And frequently gets you closer to the door you are aiming for, compared to driving, since you probably have to walk from parking (and in some contexts, you may well have to public transit from parking).

Anyway. I was NOT looking for tap to ride stuff this time; I’m currently poking at implicit vs. explicit account creation. That’ll be the next post.

So, there will be linkage!

Readers who’ve been at this blog a few times will recognize “A Few Remarks” as an intentional understatement.

https://www.mastercard.com/gateway/expertise/insights/closed-open-loop-transit-payments.html

This is a genially written article describing contactless public transit payment systems and the difference between The Before Times of Transit Payments and the two major categories now: closed loop (Orca Card and similar, where you have to set up a card — can be virtual, can be in an app / in a wallet / on your phone — and you manage balance through that) and open loop (OMNY’s tap to ride and similar). (I’m trying to stick to just one example of each type, and ones that I and/or my readers are likely to have experienced or talked to someone who has experienced. Yesterday’s post included a partial enumeration of systems around the world that I found when I went looking for them.)

The opening of the article is profoundly relatable for me, in that the inconvenient version presented first is “normal” for me over decades of riding public transit while traveling, and the second was my revelatory experience of OMNY a few weeks ago. The balance of the article covers what we discussed on FF last night: closed loop systems like ORCA, especially if they let you do everything on the phone, are an improvement over making you use a kiosk. I was happy to set up the app for our local commuter rail and use it to buy train tickets when I took the train to TD Garden for a concert. I am completely fine using the Amtrak website and app to buy Acela tickets ahead of time, choose seats, etc. Honestly, I don’t think I’d be comfortable planning plane travel and expecting to tap to pay! Weird! (I wonder if it exists? I mean, obviously, the major Tap to Pay efforts involving planes are for buying snacks or alcoholic beverages or whatever inflight.) I do understand — and value! — that more airlines are letting you pay for your tickets using Other Than Giving Them the Credit Card Information (Various Pay systems, but also PayPal, Venmo, etc.). But Open Loop systems mean that you don’t have to set up a card to traverse a city or a country as part of a longer trip. Back In the Day, you didn’t need a different system for getting a taxi everywhere, and the reluctance of the taxi industry to adopt a universal standard led to our world of Uber and Lyft. You don’t need a different Uber for every state / city / country.

Tourist and business travel destinations like NYC, Las Vegas, and similar work really hard to try to get travelers to use public transit instead of renting a car or taking a taxi / Uber / Lyft. Congestion is real and roads are expensive. Convincing commuters is one set of skills; convincing travelers is a different problem. Open Pay conceals a fair amount of complexity behind the simplicity of buy-a-ride-like-you-would-a-coffee. (To be fair, buying a coffee _also_ has a closed loop option in many cases, but again, you don’t need a different Dunkin or Starbucks app in every city you visit.) Complexity exists in several forms: discounts associated with under an age or over an age, paying for more than one person, and pay-at-start vs pay-at-end, and whether payment requires checking in, or checking in and checking out (I suppose there’s a transit system that is only checking out, but I haven’t found it yet).

OMNY supports passback (pay for second, third, etc. person using the same card or device) only after first use. Most systems do NOT support passbacks in any form. If you want the kid or senior or some other discount, you usually need to register your card or device in an account that validates your access to that discount. But the checking in vs checking in and checking out is deeply embedded in the idea of using public transit in a system and is pretty mind-boggling when first encountered. In systems where you check in, do your thing (including potentially multiple transfers) and then check out, and checking out is where you are charged for all those legs, errors can accumulate for a variety of reasons (system failures, user error, etc.), and recourse is generally by editing the route charge in an app. I just don’t know what to think of any of that.

At least one system addresses the kid issue by just letting kids ride free, altho I have no idea how that works, altho it looks like it’s mostly buses so presumably just waving them through?

Discounting schemes actually can become more flexible, and align very well with regional incentives to reduce use of personal vehicles. OMNY and many other systems charge less per trip to use tap to pay, and cap total fare over a period of time. This approach helps convert commuters, occasional users who live in the area, and people who are traveling in the area for work or leisure. Both Google Maps and Apple are working to integrate up to the minute (second?) arrival times for public transit and include that in their itinerary recommendations. THIS IS CRUCIAL! No amount of discounting is going to convince me to use public transit when I’m not sure I can actually get through the entire journey successfully (with an acceptable amount of walking and arriving in an acceptable time frame).

I have not yet seen any discussion of how EMV payments become viable for public transit as a result of reduction in interchange fees — still waiting to see that go by. It’s clear that a lot of systems, at least in the 2021 era, were very concerned with consolidated daily trips into a single charge at end of day. Judging by my experience of OMNY, at least when using Apple Pay, there is less concern, or they are relying upon the *Pay services to do the consolidation for them. For a very long time in the US, credit cards and cash co-existed, but legislation around debit card transaction fee charges (and interchange fees in general) tipped things pretty hard and we now live in a largely cash-free environment. While EMV works best with realtime internet access, it kinda worked in a batch version, but was subject to certain types of fraud. With internet access much more consistently and broadly available, it’s easier to rely on it for public transit payment purposes.

Germany has this odd closed system and you can buy a Deutschland Ticket or a 49E ticket.

https://handbookgermany.de/en/mobility#

It doesn’t work for intercity trains and buses but it does work for trams, in-city buses, subway, light rail, etc. They seem light on turnstiles and checking but if you are caught without a ticket more than once they really might prosecute you. Feels very German somehow. Everyone over 6 has to have their own ticket. It’s monthly, and you can cancel every month but it is a subscription. I just don’t get it, altho it is less weird than Swiss systems, which is also on brand.

ETA:

This article is a “white paper”, so less enjoyable as a read than the Mastercard one, and less Here’s How You Do Things than the Germany handbook. It includes a naming system for the different check in / check out schemes that I describe above: Known Fare (check in only), Accumulated (check in and check out), and a Pre-Purchase model (this is where you have discounted fares for people on social support, or kids or seniors who get a discount or to reflect the value of a pre-purchased pass, etc. And you have to use the same device to use as you did to acquire or registered on).

https://cms.uitp.org/wp/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/WhitePaper-OpenLoop-10June-online.pdf

Wording in this thing is at times unintentionally hilarious. For example, many real world systems warn about what the rider should do to avoid card clash.

“When a contactless terminal is correctly configured, it will ensure that it is impossible to charge two cards or more if multiple cards are presented. This process then ensures that only the card that the passenger intends to pay with is charged when presented to the terminal.”

Somehow, that just feels both blame-y and optimistic.

Similarly, the Accumulated Model gives me the heebies, because I have no idea what the charge at the end of the journey is going to be, and knowing that recourse is possible does not reassure me when it’s an unfamiliar system and I have no idea whether I will be able to figure out the recourse system or how seriously that place will take my request for redress, if I’m only passing through. And yet here is the description:

“Accumulating multiple journeys into one financial transaction helps reduce costs for payment processing and also offers the best customer experience through clarity of fare charges.”

Yeah. I doubt it. I mean, I believe the payment processing, sort of, altho maybe only sort of, depending on how often people seek recourse. And I really doubt it on the clarity of fare charges, given how much website space is devoted to explaining to people the importance of checking out, and how to fix things when you didn’t check out (or where you needed to check out was broken, and now you have some open-ended trip and possibly an awful charge associated with that).

Then there’s this bit of confusion:

“Processing of the Pre-purchase Model approach is in any case a totally different scenario in terms of through- put since the passenger needs to interact with the validation device or the bus driver to identify the desired fare product to purchase.”

I don’t know what’s going on here. I assumed the Pre-purchase model was as I mentioned above (discounted bus passes, senior discount, kid discount, etc.). But maybe not? ETA: From the GenFare sales pitch, I think this answers my questions: “ The only time the driver may need to press a button with open payment is for the approval of student, senior, or other discounted fares. ”

Here’s a bus centric sales pitch, focused on the costs, equipment and employee requirements of handling cash, and how tap-to-ride can reduce all that:

https://genfare.com/blog/open-payments-operational-benefits/

It also mentions pandemic era logistics and cost pressures and provider collapses in the closed loop media space:

“The cost of smart cards rose considerably during the pandemic, when the demand was low, and several vendors shut their doors. The lead time on ordering cards also grew to months rather than weeks. With open payments, banked customers will no longer need to use dedicated fare media, so not only will you need to buy fewer cards, but your workers can also spend less administrative staff time distributing cards and performing customer service functions.”

GenFare white paper linked in that above piece: https://genfare.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/GenPayPaymentProcessing.pdf

The GenFare white paper includes a detailed description of how tap-to-ride works with bus fares:

“When a cEMV bank card or mobile wallet (“the card”) is presented
to the card reader on a farebox or validator, the reader confirms
the card is authentic and checks it against a locally-stored “deny
list” of declined cards. If the card passes these tests, the rider is
allowed to board, even though the transaction hasn’t yet been
approved by the issuing bank.
2. Meanwhile, the reader encrypts sensitive cardholder data (card
number, expiration date, etc.) using an encryption key. The
encrypted transaction is then sent to Genfare Link®, Genfare’s
cloud-hosted central data system, which passes the encrypted
transaction to the payment processor. The processor uses
a matching encryption key to decrypt the data and send the
transaction request to the issuing bank for authorization. It also
tokenizes the transaction for tracking purposes in Genfare Link.
3. The issuing bank returns an accept or decline message to
the payment processor, which relays it to Genfare Link. If the
transaction is accepted, Genfare Link records the transaction in a
central account database. If the transaction is declined, Genfare
Link adds the card number to the deny list, which it broadcasts to
all fare collection devices every few minutes. Cards on the deny
list are rejected the next time they are presented. To remove a
card from the deny list, the cardholder must pay for rides obtained
using the denied card.”

That last bit is a little horrifying. On the one hand, you maybe rode but didn’t have the money tp pay. Making you catch up makes sense. But if there was an error, or if someone stole your device or whatever? Especially given that a lot of this stuff works without PIN or face or anything? Hmmmm. Presumably there is some onerous recourse out there. But yikes. OTOH, I can absolutely imagine using low or no-balance prepaid cards to ride being used as a scam around this whole thing, too.

https://www.kittelson.com/ideas/the-benefits-and-drawbacks-of-a-cashless-public-transit-system/

This is a blast from the pre-covid past. Open Pay isn’t really described, and there’s a more explicit concern about inequity, and not everyone having smartphones.

In the course of this reading, I’ve learned about FitBit Pay (which is gone as of July 2024, rolled into Google Pay) and Garmin Pay. This is from Garmin about transit payments:

https://www.garmin.com/en-US/garminpay/transit/

I got my hair done.

I had a delightful phone call with K.

I walked with M.

I received some carpet samples, but I don’t think we’re going to go with that maker. Oh well! Looking at an alternative approach.

Lane Bryant order arrived and is awesome. Miss Vicky’s chips arrived. Color Kindle arrived!!!! Sooooo delighful.

FF was fun.

Last month, in NYC, I discovered the wonder that is tap to ride. More recently, I learned that it was rolled out in Boston for the subway back in August. I got curious today: is this happening more generally? The answer is: it’s really starting to be a thing. Terms you might find it under: Tap to Ride, Open Payments, Open Loop.

https://www.calitp.org/

They have a nice phrase: “making paying for a transit ride just as easy as buying a cup of coffee”

It’s funny, apps, cards in phone wallets have all been around for a while. But this is like one-click. It doesn’t _seem_ like it would make a difference, and if you live in the city in question, maybe it doesn’t. But if you are visiting, it is the difference between uber/lyft/taxi/rental car and using public transit. If you want people to use public transit, this is sooooo amazing.

ETA:

https://wjla.com/news/local/metro-tap-to-ride-open-payment-system-credit-card-smartrip-dmv-transportation-dc-maryland-virginia-public-transit-wmata#

DC metro might get this next year.

Seattle does NOT have this yet.

SEPTA: https://wwww.septa.org/news/contactless/

A bunch of things there that raised questions about how OMNY worked. I paid for multiple people on some trips using my phone.

https://new.mta.info/fares/omny

Looks like passbacks work just not on your first ever ride. I didn’t attempt a passback the first time I used it. I had not realized it capped fares over a 7 day period? Cool!

https://support.apple.com/en-us/118625

(And also: https://support.apple.com/en-us/105123, about “Express Mode”)

List of card-ful and card-less tap to pay / apple wallet pay public transit systems.

But it is not complete, because it does not mention the Dutch system:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OVpay

Paris has Bonjour RATP (official Paris area transportation app with Navigo card and you can do it all within the app and apple wallet apparently, so not quite what I want, but certainly no worse than Orca and similar).

Ooooh, Brussels has SEPTA level tap to ride (no passbacks)! Like NYC, capped, and even lower than NYC.

https://www.stib-mivb.be/article.html

Geneva / Switzerland: they have some weird tourist thing where your hotel emails you a QR code and you use that for public transport for length of stay. Alternatively, SBB app and turn on EasyRide, altho wow do I find that confusing.

https://www.sbb.ch/en/travel-information/apps/sbb-mobile/easyride.html

Vancouver BC: https://www.translink.ca/transit-fares/pricing-and-fare-zones

No passbacks, but otherwise pretty familiar; they solve the kid payment problem by not charging for kids. Seems reasonable.

I have been going out of my mind lately as I keep trying to complete what seem like minor tasks and they resist concluding. So I’ve decided the _real_ problem is I have a bunch of unrelated tasks that are stacked up waiting for the more important stuff to be dealt with. But since the nominally important stuff isn’t happening anyway, why not get the satisfying sense of completion on other matters.

https://www.trains.com/trn/news-reviews/news-wire/top-10-stories-of-2023-no-4-amtraks-ongoing-capacity-issues/

I ran across this back when I was contemplating travel by rail. I gave up on that for several reasons. First, not sure whether A. would be able to sleep on the train. I obviously have to try this, and equally, everything involving A. is ludicrously difficult right now so, just no. Even if I could book multi-day train travel, I’d be up against a serious problem in terms of food (low-sodium plus multiple allergies = ugh). I concluded that train travel may someday be possible for me, right now it’s just not workable. I was very pleased to see the Biden administration taking seriously equipment needs and then I ran across the current capacity issues.

So, where are those capacity issues 6 months after that article?

https://www.trains.com/trn/news-reviews/news-wire/venture-business-class-cars-debut-in-midwest-trip-report/

https://news.jrn.msu.edu/2023/04/amtrak-rolls-out-new-rail-cars-for-michigan-routes/

https://www.trains.com/trn/news-reviews/news-wire/venture-cars-officially-launched-on-amtrak-san-joaquins/

The Ventures are being rolled out more broadly, so that’s good. WiFi is included altho there are some complaints about the seats not reclining as much and being less comfy. No food service?

And for the longer distance:

https://www.trains.com/trn/news-reviews/news-wire/a-closer-look-at-how-capacity-impacts-growth-on-amtraks-network-analysis/

Also, Brightline continues to drop deals and features as their ridership continues to grow.

There’s a story here, and the story is that trains — at every ride distance, and in every type of rail network (Amtrak, commuter and Brightline, wtf that is) — are limited in their ability to serve more passengers by their overall capacity. Which is still kinda depressing to realize. This is not a problem that individuals can solve through their own choices.

Today, R. sent me a link to the Dreamstar Lines page:

https://dreamstarlines.com/

It’s a stub with pictures.

Last April, there was a flurry of news coverage of Dreamstar Lines and the big dreams of Vollebregt and company:

https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2023-04-18/night-train-san-francisco-los-angeles-dreamstar-lines

Other coverage mentioned the Union Pacific lines, and this one also mentions Metrolink and Caltrain. The LA Times reached out to UP and Metrolink who confirmed discussions were happening (so this isn’t completely fakey fakey), but here is a quote:

“Scott Johnson, a spokesperson for Metrolink, said Dreamstar representatives had recently “presented very high-level plans for the proposed service.””

I know what “very high-level plans” for “proposed” something means. It means, come back when you’ve got something to back that up, where the something to back it up is more than rates for rooms, number of cars and schedules. As near as I can tell, someone took seriously that “write the press release first” and then just started having meetings with people, which, honestly, it’s a couple of lawyers. Having meetings and signing contracts seems like the right place to start, and they are always mad when a bunch of nerds and engineers get together and build a thing and when you ask them about contracts and insurance they go, what? Meetings, contracts, nerds and engineers and lawyers are all important. And insurance, probably. You can’t get away with only part of that package.

Once I saw that coverage, I kind of quit trying to find details on a hypothetical contract between Dreamstar Lines and Union Pacific to use their line. The only way UP is going to agree to a contract is with dates, dollars and functioning consists, and while Dreamstar can imagine dates and they might even have dollars, nothing is happening without actual, inspectable equipment. I know very little about railroad equipment, but I do understand there is a lot of it parked in yards that no inspector will ever allow out on busy freight lines without a helluva lot of renovation being doing on it.

If I find more, I’ll come back. Obviously, I _want_ this to exist.

ETA:

The details in this event give some sense of how difficult it is to wrangle any functioning Pullman cars today.

https://www.trains.com/trn/news-reviews/news-wire/pullman-cars-return-to-their-birthplace-for-weekend-open-house/

This piece is where I learned that Dreamstar Lines was thinking of buying or leasing restored Pullman cars:

https://www.afar.com/magazine/dreamstar-plans-overnight-train-between-l-a-and-s-f

Somebody at Y-combinator has really dug into the private car stuff:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33460052

“For the less than 100 private cars in operation in America, why does Amtrak even offer this service?”

The answer they come up with is probably true and entirely misses the point; anyone familiar with the rail community knows perfectly well why private cars still get towed around by Amtrak — it is the pinnacle of The Dream and no one in the community wants to make it go away.

I had wondered about how many private cars there were — that’s fewer even than I had imagined.

Having established that any sleeper car operation is going to be buying new, let’s see what’s out there! Obviously, they will be buying it from Siemens Mobility, because that’s what everyone does.

https://www.railjournal.com/fleet/obb-unveils-new-generation-nightjet-cars/?utm_source=&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=34980

For people wondering about Nightjet and whether it makes sense economically:

https://mediarail.wordpress.com/nightjet-renaissance-of-night-trains-in-europe/

Other details in that piece: since discontinuation of night train service on that route occurred around 2015, Nightjet was able to acquire those for its initial startup. But they are making enough that they can now buy new.

So, you know, if you have had it it that, skip this one.

https://www.hsrail.org/brightline-florida/

I don’t really know anything about High Speed Rail Alliance, but this is there little More Of This Please page about Brightline. They list all the great things about it, but conspicuously do NOT mention the parking garages, the monthly parking passes, or the rental car agency in the parking garages open during the hours of service. Brightline interconnects well with Miami Airport (also not mentioned) and local commuter rail options as well, but still has its own parking garage and its own rental car operation (even tho this would probably be one of the easiest opportunities to mooch off the airport one). In Orlando, it _does_ mooch off the airport’s garages and rental car operations.

I’m increasingly convinced that planners, advocates and other policy types around rail really have absolutely no clue how much they are harming their own cause by being so opposed to private vehicle connectivity to rail.

Hilariously, the HSRA page has the Brightline picture displaying a bike hanging in a passenger car. They banned bikes sytem-wide last September.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgian_(train)

You can really tell you are starting to understand a network when you look at it and go, Why Isn’t There a Link Here? And then you go, Was There Ever a Link Here? And you can think of some reasons why there might never have been, but they don’t seem super compelling because there were some pretty strong reasons _to_ have that link, but then there were later some even stronger reasons to NOT have that link.

Anyway. That’s the link, and the history on it.

For the future, however!

https://www.wrdw.com/2023/12/08/amtrak-looks-rail-link-augusta-atlanta-airport/

This doesn’t really do anything in terms of the Atlanta / Chicago connectivity, but it does propose some cross linking that could be awesome. I should go look at that full list of possible rail corridors.

Also mentioned in the article is the (freight) Blue Ridge Connector. Here is more about that:

https://www.porttechnology.org/news/gpa-provides-insights-into-blue-ridge-connector-project-plans/

I promise you nothing about rental cars here!

https://www.bts.gov/national-transit-map

You can get to the map here, read about it, and also learn about the General Transit Feed Specification Standard. The feds are _actually_ working on making it possible to interconnect systems for long distance travel. Up until today, I figured stuff like rome2rio, google maps, moovit and similar were the best we were ever going to see, but this suggests the future could be much better.

Also!

https://geodata.bts.gov/

The national transportation atlas database! I’m pretty sure that the national transit map is a visualization of data in the atlas database, but I’m new to all this so I could easily be wrong.

https://www.bts.gov/archive/publications/america_on_the_go/long_distance_transportation_patterns/entire

Basically, this paper from 2011 confirms what we all know. Everyone gets _to_ the airport (or train station or whatever) in a private vehicle (their own or someone who is dropping them off or whatever) (not everyone, I know, but big majority). But on arrival, how you get from the airport varies. It’s still a lot of private vehicle (because they include rental car in that), but a mix of other things. _At no point do they look at what options are available_. I will note that people who leave a train station in a cab to go to the airport to rent a car will not show as left the train station in a private vehicle but may show up as left the airport in a private vehicle.

They asked the wrong questions. *sigh* Surprise.

R. tells a story of going to France (decades ago now), flying into Paris, renting a car, driving to the Loire Valley and then doing a bunch of day trips over the course of a week-ish with his dad, and finally returning to Paris (with very expensive tolls clearly trying to discourage driving into Paris). They did this, rather than take the train to the Loire Valley, because they could rent a car a the airport, and they couldn’t at the train station. So, you know, that’s four hours of driving each way that could have been avoided by having rental car at the train station.

It’s easy to second guess this and say, oh, but you could have. I don’t really know what the alternate rental car options were in the Loire Valley or points along the way or what the train schedule and plane schedule and so forth might have been. What I _can_ say is that there are absolutely people taking the train into Boston and NYC and other major cities, _renting a car there because you can_ and then driving right back out of the city. These are avoidable trips, if you could get off the train in a more compatible to your journey location, get your car there, and proceed. All these forum posts indicate this is a super common issue, and a lot of the policy papers are so hyper-focused on getting people _out of_ their private vehicles, that it doesn’t occur to them that making it nearly impossible to navigate from a train station to where you want to go and do the things you want to do without backtracking to the airport is actually the snarl preventing our future, less congested and less climate impacted world.

I ran into this kind of crazy-making calculation when looking at health care provision years ago. When you have preventative care paid for by one entity, primary care by others, and more complex care by others, it’s pretty easy for someone to “save” money while shunting massively increase cost onto other parts of the system. Operations like Medicare, VA and KaiserPermanente by being end-to-end operations can sometimes give us a glimpse into how that is happening. Similarly, if you try to make train systems some perfect mechanism where everyone arrives at the train station by walking, biking, or taking other public transportation, you may well succeed in that. But if you succeeded by having people take public transportation to the airport where they rented a car, rather than renting a car at the train station, how much of a win was that really? If you succeeded by people planning a train trip, realizing they’d be stuck at a train station with only bad choices, bailed on that in favor of a cheaper flight, you may never know that happened and your statistics will be beautiful but it is not a great outcome.

OK, I’ve been poking around at US, Washington State and Oregon policy papers on passenger rail. Rental cars are consistently categorized as “private vehicles”, and are strongly deprecated every step of the way, which, I _get_ and also, does not currently work in a way that routinely shunts people who want to make rail work back to air travel. I decided to look at a different level of advocacy instead.

https://www.fodors.com/news/photos/20-reasons-why-you-should-ditch-the-plane-and-ride-the-train

The _first_ argument here in favor of the train is: Avoid the Airport. Which, as we have seen, you can’t really do if you need to rent a car at your destination. But also this:

“The unpredictability and endless shenanigans encountered at the airport can be avoided altogether by taking the train. Train travel is far more predictable than flying, with fewer steps required from inception to completion, fewer encounters with people and protocols, and the freedom to bring along that life-giving bottle of water.”

You can avoid going through security when you go to the airport to rent a car, it is true. And yet, these two sentences feel exceptionally cruel.

The second argument is superior service:

“ On the train, the mood tends to be lighter and more laidback. The illusion of safety is not at the forefront, the dining car serves drinks, and the restroom is always open for business.”

No dining cars in a lot of trains. The point about the restroom is fair — no seatbelt sign on the train. I’m not sure what to say about the mood, other than to observe that a lot of that comes down to whether or not everyone showed up to work the car and shift you are riding on. Because if they didn’t the people who are there will be stressed, exactly as you would expect.

Third argument: “First class is attainable.” Well, it is on short-haul domestic flights too, and first class in a train means nothing on an overnight if you don’t get sleeping accommodations and those are more expensive than first class on the much shorter duration flight equivalent. Third argument is just a lie.

Better views, fewer fees, more leg room: all true. Less pre-travel time: true, but misleading.

“Less post travel time.” Again, cruel!

“Airports tend to be located far outside of a city, therefore additional transport is required to complete your journey. One huge perk of the train is that it stops right in the city center, cutting down, or eliminating the need for subsequent time and money to reach your final destination.”

I agree, if your goal is to go to a city and not drive around at all while on your trip, then a train to your city is better in terms of post-travel time. That’s a lot of ifs.

#11 is an absolute lie: “stay on schedule”. Weird paragraph backing it up, too.

A bunch of stuff about the restrooms being bigger, being able to walk around, less turbulence or at least you are still on the ground and similar. The stuff about train stations being better than airports, really? That’s a short list of train stations that can be said about.

Next!

First off, I’ve now read a ton of threads and the _expectation_ is that you go from the train station to the airport by cab if you want to rent a car, and you prefer Hertz because they will reimburse the cab fare (no idea if this is still true, but it really does seem to have been the case in the past at least) and Amtrak’s affiliated credit card has some Hertz related benefits as well.

Second, I noticed a zipcar at the Worcester train station on google maps. And then I noticed zipcars at some other train stations. Circa 2010, this existed and was an expanding program and may _still_ exist? This is _super_ unclear, but it may revive or may fall over and die in the future. It is essentially the organized, app version of the pick up the cars after hours solution to the problem — instead of hiding the key under the gas flap or whatever, you use your app.

I was pretty incensed by the idea that you should have to go into Back Back station in order to rent a car, however, apparently that car rental operation (Avis) is _in_ the garage next to the station. This is actually very close to both the Union Station DC solution, the general Brightline solution, the Schiphol solution, etc. Altho Schiphol actually has train stations, rental cars and airport all kinda stacked, which is ludicrously convenient and I love it so much altho it can be painful when crowded and even with the moving walkways it is a ways on foot with luggage to go from your gate to your car — and there are also pickup in the arrival/departure car lane services as well which work great, which is roughly comparable to Kyte, I believe, altho I never did actually use Kyte, I signed up and went through the process when I was planning a trip to DC Union Station that would arrive after the in garage rental car operation was closed.

I truly have run up against this problem multiple times, and so has everyone else, for decades.

None of this is helpful for those many Amtrak stations that are platforms in the middle of “nowhere”, whether that means “suburbs” or rural, but far from an airport and no rental car options and often these stations are served only once a day in the middle of the night. I understand that is reflective of decades of deregulated air travel in which everyone who could possibly fly did fly, leaving only the poor, the Amish, the railfans and similar on the long-distance trains. The ICCT article a few posts back confirms that other people are thinking about this from a climate perspective — which is what really got me going here — but it’s not clear from the ICCT article whether anyone at the policy level has figured out just how important it is to solve the rental car conundrum. There is an admirable degree of effort devoted to intermodal planes / trains, trains / trains, trains / bus. But the rental car gap is extensive and weird and clearly deterring people with resources (time and money) from taking the train. So today’s project is: find policy papers about train intermodal and look for references to rental cars.

Oh, and the Back Bay Station Avis closes hours before the Lake Shore Limited arrives. So.

I’m kind of tickled to have figured this out. First of all, this looks like one of the most straightforward to solve of all the intermodal issues, once you have wifi/cellular data at all train stations. Second, it’s a network problem! Absolutely the thing I love best about trains is the network problems. This is 100% my jam.

ETA: R. just compared Amtrak to the cheese shop sketch in Monty Python. He’s not wrong.

I am still _struck_ by how I’d worked out what needed to change to make long distance trains work for more people and come up with three items: sleeping accommodations, schedule and wifi. But no. No, the biggest fucking problem is lack of access to rental cars.

ETAYA:

https://www.amtrak.com/track-your-train.html

I had been wondering if Amtrak even knows where all of its trains were in real time and if they were willing to share that and YES, yes, they do know and they do share and so that makes it possible to set up some kind of “will probably arrive in n minutes so get up now and go over to the station to do the thing to help people along to their next destination” alert.

I linked in a previous post to an amtraktrains thread about car rental and amtrak. It had just a _hideously_ long, detailed list of specific, personal experiences doing this. A _lot_ of times people had to somehow get from the train station to the airport to rent a car. A _lot_. People who figure out how to rent cars after getting off a train and then return them before getting on the train make use of all kinds of other transportation AND build extra overnight(s) in to make it all work out.

Meanwhile, here’s the reddit thread:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Amtrak/comments/174qxdc/somebody_needs_to_incentivize_more_availability/

Someone suggests enterprise pickup / drop off, which is a major feature over on the amtraktrains thead, but completely fails to notice the limited hours problem OR the fact that Enterprise is wicked expensive compared to other rental car options (not that there are competitors in this environment, just expect some sticker shock).

Then people start showing up saying, well, there isn’t enough volume of passengers. True! And also, _probably related at this point_. As in, if you notice when planning a vacation that you are going to be standing on a platform at 10 pm with no way to get anywhere else, well, you won’t go on that vacation. You’ll fly instead. They go on to add, but most cities only have two trains a day (one going each direction), and then if you are Seattle maybe you have four. Uh, but Seattle has 6 Cascades and a Coast Starlight. At least. And the Empire Builder. King St Station also has the Sounder (and light rail connections, but I figured we’re just talking heavy rail here). Anyway. There are actually at this point numerous similar regional Amtrak trains with multiple trains per day (Hartford Line, Capitol Corridor, Downeaster, Empire Service, etc.). There are an absolutely astonishing number of trains that run through Albany-Rensselaer. This poster then goes on to assert that there’s no reason to go to state capitols in most cities and really do you even need a rental car. Honestly, I’m kinda starting to feel like this redditor is wired up a helluva lot like my sister, far more interested in blaming the victim than making the situation better for everyone. Or, honestly, anyone.

Another helpful respondent suggests bringing a bike. Many, many, many Amtrak trains do not allow you to bring a bike on, unless it is a folder, folded and in its case. I checked.

Someone else wants to incentivize TOD near Amtrak stations. I don’t really know how I feel about this other than that it seems kind of off topic.

I mean, _the good news_ here is that someone on Reddit created the original Cry in the Wilderness for Rental Car options associated with Amtrak. The responses were really depressing, since so many of them basically assume that if you go somewhere on a train, and you get off in a city, you have no intention of going anywhere other than that city. That’s fine, except when we get on planes, we don’t assume we’re going to do everything within walking / taxi / uberlyft / bus / public transportation distance of the airport. We assume we’re gonna get off that plane, rent a car and drive to do whatever the hell we flew all that fucking ways to do. If we didn’t fly that far, we would have driven. Trains have the chance to get the cars off the road for the annoyingly longer than we really want to drive distance, and potentially encroach on the shorter end of the flying distance (basically, trips less than 500 miles, say). But they are not going to get those planes out of the air if you wildly inconvenience the fliers. The vast majority of fliers drive around at home, and they drive around at their destination, and on at least one end of that, they need to rent (on the other hand, they need to park, probably, altho you might con them into uberlyft/carservice/public transportation).

ETA:

In a different Reddit thread on roughly this topic, someone noted that some of the few Amtrak stations with rental car counters are in Glacier. I noticed this also, and I agree with the commenter who said that probably is significant. I suspect that the rental car agencies used to have counters in train stations, but gave up on them because a bunch of people didn’t like the train station rate and did things to avoid it, and now everyone has to do those things to avoid the train station rate, and then hours and goddess only knows what all else.

OK, FINALLY! This is a group of kind people who are genuinely trying to figure this out.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Amtrak/comments/tww6l6/newbie_transportation_at_destination/

I loved every single comment on it when I read it. And it gives me a little hope — not a lot! Just a little — that if we get enough new people trying trains, especially long distance trains to weird little places around the country, we’ll get some meaningful pressure to fix some things.

This was probably my favorite: “ I had to deal with this at Savannah & Charleston (honestly, no clue what the planners were thinking with those stations; no transit conn, can’t walk to town safely even if you wanted). I took uber/lyft to/from my hotels (was able to get them at 4-5am).”

It’s this energy that we need a whole lot more of.

I had a delightful phone call with K. She seemed to think that non-Tesla EV drivers had access to the Tesla charging network. I was surprised? I thought there were only a few that were available to for non Tesla drivers, but I hadn’t looked in a few months.

Based on what I read, I ordered one of the Lectron adapters, downloaded the Tesla app and will be experimenting at some point. This does not seem to get me Supercharger access? But at least it expanded the number of charge points I could use and might help with the Find a Hotel with EV Charging problem.

In unrelated transportation news:

https://www.trains.com/trn/news-reviews/news-wire/conway-scenic-railroad-forges-cruise-ship-partnerships/

Last fall, Conway Scenic experimented with running coaches from the Maine cruise terminal to the railroad and back (one way on the train, time for shopping). It was apparently successful enough for them to buy a bus company and make some other changes in support of running this all summer / fall as a regular thing. Pretty cool!

Also at trains.com was an article about Miami intermodal.

https://www.trains.com/trn/news-reviews/news-wire/tri-rail-increases-miamicentral-shuttles/

Because of my comprehensive ignorance of all things Miami, I don’t really understand all of this, but it sounds great. And I have so many questions now.

I walked with M.

Also today, R. wondered what RTE 128 was like in terms of car rental options. We’ve really appreciated the parking garage situation there when we took the train, but we live in the area. Having recently been stymied by how difficult it is to get a rental car at Albany-Rensselaer Amtrak station if you arrive on the Adirondack, it made sense to ask this question. It turns out that people ask this question and receive entirely unsatisfactory answers partly because people are assholes and suggest taking the Silver Line to Logan to rent a car (*shudder*) and partly because reality is pretty unsatisfactory in terms of getting a rental car from RTE 128 or really any other station you might be stopping at coming in on any number of Amtrak trains.

Pretty obnoxious.

ETA:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2023/11/23/pandemic-flying-normal-emissions/

https://theicct.org/aviation-rail-shift-lower-carbon-mar22/

Basically, whenever people talk about getting people off of planes and into trains, or out of cars and into trains, they focus intensely on making the trains really fast, which is expensive and difficult and requires a sustained commitment. However, I have been focusing on what actually prevents me, personally, from actually taking really any train at all anywhere. And I don’t really give a shit about whether it is high speed or not, whatever that means. Actually sticking to the schedule would be nice (getting stuck waiting for freight trains bites), but even that is not particularly necessary because I fly enough that I’ve had a flight canceled entirely and been auto-rebooked to a subsequent day, and I’ve had a _lot_ of flights that left hours after they were supposed to leave. Being stuck for hours on the train is way more comfortable than sitting on the tarmac for a couple hours, for sure. Being stuck at the terminal is more or less a wash one way or the other.

Neither the WaPo piece (which is basically, pandemic cut air travel, but while business isn’t back, leisure has more than made up for it, and as nations develop, more people are going to fly, just like more people eat meat and all of that is a climate problem but whatcha gonna do, and then links to the other piece), nor the ICCT piece really examines other components of travel and how that might influence willingness to shift modes, with the exception of this in the ICCT piece:

“These studies estimate only voluntary shifts from air to rail, but there are many ways to promote additional modal shift. On one hand, lower ticket fares and better service can incentivize travelers to choose trains over planes. Increasing the connectivity between train stations and local transport also helps. On the other hand, government policies can directly bring about modal shifts.”

I’m not 100% what “local transport” means in the ICCT piece. I have absolutely been going on about the impossibility of getting off a train and into a rental car without having to find the nearest airport in order to get a rental car. I have started to poke at Flixbus’ and other bus schedules and routes to try to understand whether or not there is enough going on there to be viable.

Honestly, what’s going on in Miami is looking more and more incredible by the minute.

I’m still trying to full understand the relationship between the airport, Amtrak, Brightline, commuter rail and all the other shuttles and so forth. But it occurred to me to ask: does Brightline have a convenient garage and rental car setup in Miami, as it does elsewhere? Or do they make you take some of that intermodal crap over to the airport and use the rental car center there. You could see it going either way, right? I mean, if all the Amtrak is a gigantic Fuck You We Are Not Helping You Rent a Car, if you want one of those, go to the nearest airport, then maybe Brightline, another train, would be the same. But NO! It’s _right next door_! Both the garage and car rental.

I’m now really curious. Have any of the many commenters lamenting the difficulty of getting people to take the train instead of flying or driving even formulated the problem as Give Them A Place to Park Their Car / Rent a Car Just Like an Airport Would? The WaPo and ICCT pieces did not (or at least, not beyond “local transport”).

ETAYA:

https://www.amtraktrains.com/threads/renting-a-car-from-an-amtrak-station.80992/

This is the mother of all threads on the topic of what you have to do to make a rental car work with amtrak. Everyone is _very_ specific; it is an amazing thread. Holy shit.

Even for King St Station they say “go to the airport”. I’m trying to think what I would suggest otherwise. Sodo Budget or maybe one of the clusters downtown, but everything is closed up tight by 5 or 6 at the very latest.

Oddly, even tho I and friends have taken Amtrak from Seattle to Portland, I’ve been unable to find anyone who then rented a car (we all walked or whatever). But there are actually several car rental places within easy walk and easier public transportation ride (third of a mile). I gotta believe that’s because the schedule is so frequent?

A lot of this is about transportation. It’s January, so I’ve been engaging in a lot of travel planning for the year. I’m also trying to be a lot more conscious about long-standing areas of conflict and unhappiness. So I’ve been doing things, for example, like very consciously shopping for bras to see if the kind of bra that I think I would be comfortable wearing even exists. Anywhere. Not just a bra that I can tolerate when I have to, but one that I actually am completely okay with wearing. It’s a high bar, I know.

Another area is airports specifically, but also how to make travel be more of an enjoyable experience for all the participants. We’ve really made significant progress over the years, but we’re in the middle of a huge transition right now because T. says he won’t be traveling with us (as much) any more, so it’ll be three of us again instead of four. We also caught up on our big commitments (go to Seattle and the Netherlands and the UK) last year, so while I’d love to get back to Seattle some time this year, I don’t feel like I _have_ to, and I’m not flying over an ocean this year. We had talked about Quebec for a long time (I’ve never been to Canada east of Alberta, and R.’s ancestry is Quebecois on his dad’s side), planned a road trip for August 2020 and you can guess what happened to that. I’m in the process of bringing that trip back from cold storage — possibly literally all the same stops in the same places on the same dates, altho some of what we will do in each place will be different because restaurants go out of business sometimes, alas.

I did look at cruise and rail options for the Quebec trip, and there are really interesting possibilities for both, but I drew back because they wouldn’t give us any time in Rimouski and Trois Pistoles and R. really wanted that. But I did start to really develop some familiarity with Amtrak and Via and I started asking a lot of questions and thinking about what would it take to get most passengers out of planes and onto trains instead.

I think the first, and most important thing, is the schedule. If you want to go from Seattle to Spokane, there’s a train, but it’s once a day, and it arrives in Spokane at 2ish in the morning and leaves shortly thereafter. That’s terrible. I mean, really, really terrible. We really need the continued spread of things like the Sounder, and maybe more of things like Brightline. If you can do the trip in a car, but it is an exhaustingly long drive (for most people, anything over 4 hours is probably more driving than they really want to do), it’s ideal for a train, because you don’t need to provide sleeping accommodations. But you also need to make sure that you’ve got some choice of arrival and departure. There will be some trains that leave late and arrive even later that will attract riders (I kinda wish they’d bring back the really late departures on Fitchburg line, for example, so we could listen to all the encores at a concert without worrying about missing our train home), but ordinary people wanting to get from Seattle to Spokane don’t really want to be arriving at 2 in the morning.

It’s a chicken and egg problem — a better schedule will attract more ridership and you need more ridership to justify more scheduling choices. There are also issues in terms of traffic on the line because most of these lines are shared passenger and freight.

The second, and possibly as important thing, is wifi and quality of wifi. To the extent that trains run through populous areas which have cellular data service, the train doesn’t need to offer wifi itself — people can use their phones. But as the train moves faster and the towers are spread out more, the handoffs become trickier and the lags worse and it’s annoying. A person who might take a train, so they can work instead of having to drive, might instead go looking for a flight, where they can work in the terminal, and possibly even work during the flight. There’s no obvious reason that trains couldn’t have the same kind of satellite based (typically Viasat) internet that some flights have, but of course Starlink is way better and Brightline has demonstrated it works great on trains. It’s a little weird that the way Starlink wound up on Brightline is that somebody experienced Starlink on a cruise and then went and got it for his trains. But whatever.

The third, and most unclear component of this puzzle, is sleeping accommodations. Pullman cars of yore had 2nd class accommodations in which facing double/wide seats could convert to berths that were 35” wide. This is substantially wider than either of the berths in any of the roomettes, altho not as wide as the lower berth in a bedroom, in any of the sleeper cars on current Amtrak trains. Then, as now, a popular choice was to book that pair of seats / berths for a single person so the upper berth was never pulled down; you got more headroom for getting ready before pulling the curtain back. It wasn’t a full compartment, the way a roomette is, but it was a “section”. If we intend to move a lot of people who travel cross country off of planes and into trains, and those are people who can afford to pay for a seat in Mint, it makes sense to offer them something along these lines. I mean, sure the Mint seat _is_ narrower even than the upper bunk in a Superliner Roomette, but at least in the Mint seat, your shoulders and feet are largely enclosed and you don’t have to climb up and down a weird not-quite-ladder.

Anyone who has repeatedly driven up and down either of the coasts has probably at least thought about taking the train instead (we did when I was a kid in the 70s — we drove it twice and took the train once and then we flew — the heat got stuck on in our car and it was horrible. We did not have any sleeping accommodations at all), and most people still wind up flying if they can’t face the drive. The flight is cheap, compared to driving and staying in hotels or sleeping accommodations on the train. The other factor is the amount of time involved. I would argue that really reliable internet access might make the train a more viable replacement for flying, especially if there are any intermediate destinations that one might want to stop. However, the current limited schedule makes it hard to stop for part or all of one day and then resume one’s trip. Further, the cost associated with getting off and then on a later train on the same route can be prohibitive unless you’re doing some kind of rail pass / coach only trip.

There are some auxiliary problems associated with rail travel that are probably much more straightforward to solve (altho maybe not!). The biggest is the intermodal problem. While there are cities large enough to have some kind of connectivity from the train to the airport, there are plenty of cities where, if you flew into them, you would rent a car as your next travel step. And when you arrive in the train station in such a city (or an even smaller city or town) there is rarely an open rental car service in that train station (there might not a station, per se, honestly, just a platform and if you’re lucky an automated ticket kiosk). To some degree, the existence of Uber/Lyft/etc. mitigates this problem, and sometimes there are shuttles to a rental car service located elsewhere or a number you can call to access such a shuttle or whatever. But it’s annoying as fuck. I am so happy that Brightline puts parking garages at their stations and incorporates car rental services within those garages. If you are going to move people out of airports and into trains, This Is the Way.

As I noted in a previous entry, I started doing this research in an effort to avoid airports, because I was operating under the theory that Airports Are the Problem. Of course, Airports are NOT the problem. R. is the problem. We’re working on figuring out how we can help him respond to the inevitable stressors of travel in some way that is less problematic to his travel companions (me and A., basically). However, now that I’ve started, I’ve gotten really interested in this conundrum for several reasons.

First, it really bothers me that I can go read economic projections for air travel extending out decades. I can also go read projections about climate and fossil fuel use and so forth. I’m not totally oblivious. I know that we are much further along the path to making boats and trains less dependent on fossil fuels than we are to having the kind of air travel we have now less dependent on fossil fuels. I’m not saying air travel is going to go away. I, personally, would _love_ to see a large scale return to airships. But I don’t think airships are going to go at the speeds that we are used to with current air planes. And the observations I am making above — schedule, internet/wifi and sleeping accommodations — apply to _all_ “slow mode” travel. Airlines and airplane manufacturers seem to exist in a planning universe that does not anticipate a systematic reduction in the use of air planes. However, climate projections really _want_ us to systematically reduce our use of air planes. We all exist in the same reality. Only one of these things is gonna be right.

Second, business travel on air planes has not returned to pre-covid levels, in part because of efforts to keep spending down during an inflationary period, and in part because covid normalized virtual meetings thus changing the nature of business travel. I absolutely knew people pre-covid who refused to fly because of the climate impact, and I absolutely was aware of the climate impact of air travel. However, it had not occurred to me that you didn’t need to replace air travel with other travel, but you could actually just not travel, if you had really good communications systems. Seems kinda like a duh thing now, but I sure wasn’t thinking about that in 2018 and it’s not like we didn’t _have_ zoom and things like zoom. It’s just that a lot of people had no experience with them. We all got a lot of experience with them in a hurry, and for the people that worked well for, they suddenly can avoid airports a lot more effectively.

Third, developments in multiple conflicts around the world have recently showcased just how effective small scale, no-human-aboard equipment (“drones”) can be at destroying large scale, humans-aboard equipment. It really is an indication that we don’t need to replace airplanes with less-bad-for-the-climate-airplanes. We use airplanes to accomplish goals. Thinking about the goals can lead us to alternatives that accomplish those goals in very, very different ways. Drones can be used to replace agricultural use of planes, too, which is a huge deal.

I’m not saying, get rid of planes, we don’t need planes, no one should ever fly, we should ban air travel blah blah blah. Wtf. No. I’m still out there shopping for plane tickets for trips later this year. Come on. What I am trying to do is to visualize what kinds of adjustments we should be making now or soon so that we bend the curve on what trips happen and in what kind of vehicles.

I’m paying attention now to Amtrak’s RFIs for next-gen long-distance trains. They are focused pretty closely on accessibility, which is very important. I’m happy that money has been allocated to this very important project. But while Amtrak offers wifi on some trains, and is planning to upgrade at least Acela / NEC to 5G, it isn’t upgraded yet. It is an indication of just how awful airports are that Acela was able to persistently divert so many people from air shuttles to the train, even with absolutely erratic wifi.

All that was pretty focused on passenger travel. However, stuff has to move around, too. R. tells me that there are plans to get an icebreaker into the Great Lakes, so that containers can be shipped into the the lakes instead of transferring containers to rails. This is a big deal for a lot of reasons (reduction in fuel use, reduction in cost, and if you bring containers _in_ then you have a chance to ship stuff _out_ cheap, which should be _really really good_ in terms of encouraging the return of manufacturing to the middle of the country), among those reasons is that it might free up rail capacity for moving humans around.

I’m trying to figure out currently how air cargo works. If you look at dedicated flights, it _looks_ like there is a lot more passenger air travel than cargo. But if you look at the fraction of a passenger flight that is cargo, you get a very different picture. Again, you have to ask how that cargo would move if it did not go on a plane. Would it move at all? Would it move on a train, a truck? Would it instead be made somewhere else, closer to where it is wanted? One of the biggest impacts of the grounding in 2001 of all flights was that it stopped checks moving around. We passed legislation enabling the full electronic processing of checks in subsequent years and now we don’t fly checks around; they were once a huge fraction of air cargo. What else are we shipping in planes that we would be utterly flabbergasted at the idea of moving at all, physically, in decades to come?

I slept in.

I walked with M.

I have been addressing holiday cards. I am through “J”, and am optimistic I will finish tonight. Woot!

https://www.washingtonpost.com/travel/2023/12/13/gate-lice-plane-boarding-line/

The travel article is a discussion of people who line up near the gate before their group is called. Apparently, people working at the gate refer to them as “gate lice”. I don’t know if that is true or not — I only just read this article. Also, “full” is in quotes with respect to overhead bins and people having to gate check bags only to learn that there is space in the overhead bins when they board.

So much to unpack here!

I tried RyanAir over the summer, and won’t do that again because Aer Lingus isn’t that much more expensive and their policies are friendlier. I discovered after buying the tickets that I wouldn’t be able to rent a car at that time at that airport and wound up having to fly into a different airport and thus buy different tickets. Oh well! However, I will note that everyone on RyanAir was incredibly well-behaved in line even tho there was a long wait for a variety of reasons, and everyone’s bags were compliant etc. There is some well-established social science research on how unstable social hierarchies are the most stressful and violent. The nature of most airlines and the changes over the last decade-ish have created unstable social hierarchies at boarding. It’s not like things were great before — don’t get me wrong! But there’s all kinds of confusion and uncertainty and variable expectations and so forth. Mathematicians keep promising clever new ways to board that will “fix” the boarding problems, which of course fail because mathematicians keep getting confused about the existence of family groups with members who require assistance and thus cannot board individually but do not necessarily think of themselves as belonging in the “disabled or otherwise needing extra time to board” category. For that matter, if we taught everyone who should be using the “otherwise needing extra time to board” category to use that group, everyone else on the flight would decide “well if they can why can’t I”.

I do think it is interesting that people keep bringing up the whole Just Let Us Check a Bag Dammit or whatever in the comments because you know, you still can if you pay. And often the most expensive tickets (first or business, extra room, etc.) are among the last left to buy on a full flight, which suggests that a component of what is going on is straightforward fighting over that last penny/resources/wtf.

Still, calling your paying customers “lice” feels like a bad sign.

ETA: Having everyone check bags obviously won’t fix the problems either, especially given 2022 checked baggage woes.

So, I have a lot of questions! We arrived _in_ Terminal C an hour before our plane was due to leave, but by the time we printed our bag tags — not that many minutes later — it was already marked “late” and the bag drop was hundreds of people long. We’d arrived at the airport an hour and a half before our plane was due to leave. That all makes this particularly difficult reading:

https://thepointsguy.com/news/orlando-new-terminal-luggage-system/

I wanted to know, well, given that you have to turn your rental car in over at A or B terminal, can you _also_ turn your bags in at A or B and have them schlepped over to C, so you don’t have to walk those fuckers — and get them on and off the tram — in your journey over to C. I don’t have an answer to that question, however, it’s not looking like a yes, for sure.

One possible strategy on our next trip is to have R. drop 3 of us with all of the bags off at Terminal C, then drive back to A/B to return the rental car.

Which is insane.

Dealing with this new terminal is making me _really_ tempted to sell out of DVC and just not ever go back, but that’s not actually an option, as long as FIL and MIL are alive. We _still_ have to travel to Florida, and while we could fly into Tampa or Sarasota to visit FIL, MCO is still the logical airport for visiting MIL.

ETA:

https://www.clickorlando.com/news/local/2022/11/22/flying-through-mcos-new-terminal-c-be-prepared-to-walk-for-a-rental-car/

Supposedly, we could have dropped the rental car off at Terminal C. *sigh* I don’t know if it is true, and I sure didn’t know that might be a possibility yesterday. That would have made a huge difference.

This is from National Car Rental (who we usually use): “For terminal C, our counter is located on level 6 across from Starbucks. Upon arrival to the airport, please proceed to the National counter to obtain your rental agreement. All renting customers at C terminal shall take the rental shuttle to B terminal to retrieve their rental car. Returns are accepted in C terminal garage.” I wish I’d noticed that. We did try to pick up a car in C, but we already had a reservation and the go straight to the car option, so we had to go to B for pickup regardless. I am feeling more optimism that our next trip will be less painful.

https://www.clickorlando.com/news/local/2022/12/19/rental-cars-still-in-short-supply-at-orlando-airport-terminal-as-holiday-travel-season-looms/

This confirms that when designed and built, terminal C wasn’t going to have _any_ rental car pickup and drop off (which, you know, why would JetBlue take gates there). Supposedly, Sixt has both pickup and drop off at Terminal C, but when I look at the Sixt website, they say go to A-side to pick up, which does not involve Terminal C!

I no longer feel like _such_ an idiot for how this went down. Altho I really do want to get it figured out now. I suppose one strategy is to call the week before we go next, figure out whether or not there is pickup in Terminal C, and then when we pick up the car (wherever we pick it up) get some definitive answer from National Car Rental staff on site whether we can return to Terminal C or not and, if so, where to go to drop it off. Because I’m unconvinced there is signage to figure that out currently.

https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2022-12-16/southern-california-ports-vital-jobs-and-economy-fight-east-coast-rivals

May be paywalled.

This is really nice reporting by Staff Writer Ronald D. White. Earlier in the year / late last year, LA ports were constantly in the news: delays in goods reaching shelves for the holiday season that stretched well into the new year, snarls of ship traffic, truck traffic, etc. Even as it was getting better, there was a lot of fear around whether the end of key contracts at the port would lead to a major strike and further backups. It was hard for shippers to know what to do, but ports on the East Coast — especially Savannah, but NY/NJ, Boston and elsewhere as well — had been trying to lure ships to their ports for years and they finally got some takers.

This survey of the LA logistics landscape touches on all of these points and many more. The port continues on without a contract, but East Coast ports will have a contract coming up in the New Year. During the pandemic, lots of people upgraded their domestic environment, but they aren’t buying furniture any more (and while not mentioned, high interest rates have slowed household formation, another major driver of furniture acquisition), leading to the demise of at least one LA area furniture company. A nice quote from Mario Gonzalez, erstwhile executive, helping former employees find new jobs. Also perspective from a trucker sitting in his truck waiting for a load for a company that abruptly laid him off as it closed up shop completely.

BNSF’s “Barstow International Gateway” is also mentioned — it’s interesting to see that rail is slogging away trying to improve connectivity between ports and the rest of the country.

Booms and busts are both noteworthy, and worth taking the time to understand and think about. While the “bust of the moment” is the implosion of all things crypto (but especially FTX), the rearranging of our logistics landscape from one that is almost entirely focused on Asia-SoCal plus rail and truck, to one that is distributed a bit more around the country and perhaps one day around the world, is important.

ETA:

Barstow, of course, we all know from the song route 66, but its location on 15 well back from 5 is striking. The Marine Corps has a logistics base in Barstow. There are already BNSF rail yards there. I haven’t been to Barstow in over 20 years, and it was pretty small then and doesn’t look that much bigger now. Freight has moved through there for a very long time, tho. The current yard is about 600 acres, second largest west of the Rockies, with the largest being in Roseville near Sacramento, which is 900ish. BNSF is advertising the gateway as increasing to 4500, which is astonishing, when you compare to what seems to be the current largest in the US in Nebraska, Bailey Yard which is under 300 acres.

Railway Age had a piece on it back in October when BNSF announced this, and included some extensive commentary. The only commentary included that makes any sense to me is Larry Gross’ — the idea that you could or would _want_ to plot a large intermodal facility down in the middle of the Central Valley kinda boggles the mind honestly. But Gross’ network analysis is interesting.

Anyway, comparing the size of the proposed gateway to existing classification yards very much misses the point — this isn’t really a classification yard at all. It includes that — albeit at a larger granularity — along with a lot of other things as well. The _most_ striking difference in the commentary on the Railway Age article is that Gross’ ably captures the system implications of this location in terms of reducing overall drayage.

ETAYA:

If you were wondering, hey, is that a good or bad place from an earthquake perspective, so was I!

https://scedc.caltech.edu/earthquake/mojave.html

“Fortunately, the risk of casualties and damage posed by rupture along faults in the Mojave Block is mitigated by the fact that it is a sparsely developed area.”

Not an awesome sentence, but *shrug*. It’s California, after all.

As the spring of 2020 was defined by lockdowns, the spring of 2021 is defined by a conspicuous avoidance of commemorating the one year mark. No one likes to think about how long we’ve been dealing with this, and a Golden-Glass Evergreen container ship named the Ever Given, stuck sideways in the Suez Canal has provided us with something else to talk about, think about and meme about.

It has also gotten people to put Marc Levinson, author of _The Box_ and, more recently, _Outside the Box_ on television to talk about the complex global supply chain and container shipping. In turn, that has caused me to read _Outside the Box_. I’m not done; it’s good; you probably won’t read it and that’s fine too.

For most people, The Stuck Boat is a simple thing, a respite from complexity and stress and anxiety. For me, it is a fascinating opportunity to finally get some really detailed information about parts of our reality that most people ignore All the Fucking Time. Secondarily, it is mildly concerning, simply because so many people are happy to find entertainment in The Stuck Boat, rather than actually think this through and maybe fix the problems that led to The Stock Boat. There are a few apocalyptic types — Civilization Is More Fragile Than We Thought articles a year into the pandemic prompted by a Stuck Boat seem a little off even for apocalyptic types, but they are very much a One Note Crew, everything is like the Roman Republic / Empire Collapse of some other Civilization. For them, everything is too complex, and that’s probably a valid observation but also fails to give any meaningful insight into any particular problem. They are hoping to be a Stuck Clock, and here they are stuck with a Stuck Boat.

One of my SILs has a phrase that really stuck in my mind: “Too Big to Sail”. Indeed, the thought process that went into the design of the Golden Class (and related classes like the Algeciras class) is a straightforward exercise in increasing efficiency. The end result, as she noted, is something that ran up against a risk that was manageable at a smaller scale, but not at the larger scale. Banks which are only kinda big can be bailed out; make a big enough bank, and you can’t any more. They are systemically dangerous; they are too big to fail.

And so, articles which note that huge boats are still being built are not wrong, but it is worth noting that even before this event, there had been some backing away from the 20XXX TEU boats, back down to 15XXX TEU give or take. Will this be enough of a reduction? Hard to say. We need the after-event analysis, to understand whether what went wrong with Ever Given is fixable with changes in how the canal is run, the shape of the canal, the management of the canal, the loading of the boat, or something else. I suspect, given what’s been going on worldwide with trade, that a factor with Ever Given will turn out to be it was loaded heavier than anything else that has ever gone through the canal with that kind of wind. It’ll likely be fixed with some combination of Gotta Wait Till the Wind Dies Down and/or Hey, Run It A Little Lighter. Either one will contribute to even less efficiency with 20XXX+ TEU class vessels, and discourage people from building them and perhaps encourage them to scrap them.

The insurance angle is an interesting one; I don’t really understand what’s going on there. No one uninvolved in doing boats insures them ... for very long (they run out of money!), so when the collective has to pay out for what happened here, that will be another form of pressure to adjust the risk / reward tradeoff.

My biggest lesson from this whole exercise was basically the shock I experienced when I found the calculator online for Suez canal crossing fees. They are _much_ _much_ lower than I would have imagined. That might change, and if they do not yet require bonding for very large vessels to cross, they might in the future. I’m not sure what the correct modification for “Picking up pennies in front of a bulldozer” might be, but I have been forcibly reminded of it here.

ETA:

A really nice description of some of the fluid effects that really big boats in canals experience. I think we’ll see really big boats not allowed into very narrow places during periods in which high winds are a risk. This will discourage making the boats quite that big. Which is already happening in other ways.

https://massivesci.com/articles/ever-given-suez-canal-physics-width/

I’ve been trying to figure out what to post about this, and I had something really long and elaborate which I doubt I will ever post. The Seattle Times has now posted two really good, in-depth pieces on what is happening, with enough back story to be interesting.

This is from last weekend: https://www.seattletimes.com/business/boeing-aerospace/failed-certification-faa-missed-safety-issues-in-the-737-max-system-implicated-in-the-lion-air-crash/

And this is from today / yesterday: https://www.seattletimes.com/business/boeing-aerospace/air-canada-pulls-737-max-from-schedule-until-at-least-july/

Non-detailed information from a FOAF suggests that safety culture at Boeing has been deeply eroded by management; it is unclear how far down the management chain that goes. The workers and engineeers still care deeply and are highly committed to a high level of safety. The top level clearly does not even see the existential threat that eroding safety culture poses to the company. This is something I was poking at the other day while looking at Boeing’s Board. I don’t think a major maker of aircraft for commercial airlines should have a lot of telecom (AT&T, Nortel), medical (Amgen, Medtronic) and insurance executives on the board. They are not going to come at this problem with the right perspective.

Also, having some rando who is working for the Russians to undo the Magnitsky Act seems ... strange. I mean, WTF, Boeing?

My personal _feeling_ — I don’t know enough to be able to present this as any kind of detailed thesis and support it — is that Boeing is engaging in a pattern of corporate behavior that, if it were not coming from a major maker of commercial airline aircraft, we would instantly recognize. They are diverting attention, blaming other people (pilots) for their own choices (misrepresent relentlessly to ensure we don’t train pilots or even tell them about what they have just signed up to fly) and then focusing NOT on fixing the problem, but on convincing people that either there is no problem OR it is already fixed without waiting for the final, objective analysis of the scope of the problem. This is a coverup. It remains to seen what is underneath. I _feel_ very confident that Boeing’s share price will ultimately reflect the contents of this paragraph, and that Boeing may well have a Brand New Board a few years from now as it, say, settles all of the various prosecutions and lawsuits and exits receivership.

If you are poking around at my social media presence and think you have identified someone that I know who works or used to work at Boeing, I haven’t actually talked to any of those people lately. At all, much less about this.

There is some good news today. Elaine Chao has apparently involved the inspector general for USDOT in an audit process for the certification of the Maxes. That is _fantastic_ news. The IG in question seems to have been there since 2006 and is thus originally a W. appointee (like Chao once was herself, when she was at Labor). However, for all the many complaints I have had about W., and for all that his administration significantly weakened / undermined / dismantled the aircraft certification process, there is, in general, a lot of reasons to trust Inspectors General. They are nerdy, boring, and rarely beholden to the people who appointed them, because they tend to stay in their jobs for a ludicrously long time. I’m glad that investigation has started. (ETA: FBI is in on this as well and a grand jury has been started.)

The other piece of good news is that the rubber stamping of FAA certifications has probably just screeched to a halt. Over the many decades that commercial airline travel got safer and safer and safer, to the point where most people’s primary complaint about commercial airline travel is having to listen to crying babies (what a different world from the mid 20th century, when spouses strategized whether to fly together and die together or separately so that someone would remain to raise the children!), it became clear that the regulatory apparatus wasn’t actually finding any more problems. That was what made it possible for W. to move the FAA in the direction of document review and rubber stamp, and that was what made it possible for the Europeans to certify Airbus and have FAA rubber stamp and FAA to certify Boeing and have the Europeans rubber stamp. And then the rest of the world tagged along. We will tit-for-tat, of course, because that is the nature of relationships (reciprocity is All!), which currently is surely unnecessary (the Airbus board is not weird the way the Boeing board is weird, and there is no indication of erosion of safety culture there), but which might eventually have become a problem.

I continue, however, to be concerned about the Houston cargo plane crash. It, too, was a nose down related crash, and honestly, those are weird. If there is an engine failure, that can happen. And tragically, pilot suicide can manifest that way. Otherwise, nose dive related crashes are uncommon, even in the world of rare birds that is airplane crashes. I know basically nothing about how planes work, but I _do_ know how software fails, and I spent a lot of my formative years on comp.risks. I have to wonder if perhaps we have got hold of only one major failed component here, and we are about to get some really bad news about an autopilot software update that might turn out to affect a lot more planes than just the Maxes. In all likelihood, however, this particular bit of paranoia will shortly prove unjustified when NTSB releases its final report on that crash.

ETA:

Oh, I forgot to add. Check this out from politico:

https://www.politico.com/amp/story/2019/03/12/pilots-boeing-737-1266090

This asserts that US pilots in US airspace reported related problems with Maxes.

And yet, a couple days later, this:

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2019/03/15/737-max-8-software-scrutinized-after-2-fatal-crashes-training-regulation-boeing/3166679002/

Really, Elwell? I mean, I know people were wandering around saying, oh, look there’s an airline industry lobbyist running the FAA, what could possibly go wrong? But that’s a bit ... crass, to claim, nothing in the data, nothing to see here, move along. When there is already reporting to the contrary. If you know of anyone who has tried to reconcile these two bits of reporting, I’d love to see it.

ETAYA: There are aspects to this story as it develops that make me wonder _why_ people are not more freaked out about this than they are currently acting. However, I — unlike others — remember how Gov. Grey (Gray?) [ETA: Davis] was punished for pointing out what Enron was up to before it became widely understood (much less Skilling — recently released! — and others went to prison). No One wants to be the kid saying, Boeing is nekkid.

ETA blah blah:

https://www.seattletimes.com/nation-world/extra-pilot-saved-doomed-lion-air-jetliner-on-next-to-last-flight/

Another pilot on the plane told them how to turn “it” off. There continues to be a lot of confusion in the reporting in terms of whether or not information about how to disable various components of this system (the MCAS, the “motor” mentioned in this article) is available in the documentation or not (I’m sure _which_ documentation will turn out to be a component of answering this question) and what exactly is or is not covered in training.

This also goes to show how badly safety culture in commercial airlines has eroded (or, conceivably, has not adequately developed in some jurisdictions).

Subtitled The Dreams, Schemes and Showdowns That Built America’s Cruise-Ship Empires

I went on a cruise! I was careful not to read a lot ahead of time, because I was afraid I’d chicken out. But you know, I could have read this one ahead of time. It is gossipy, well-sourced, and a fast read.

After WW2, the passenger liners that had once been the main way to cross an ocean, were replaced by jet travel. Boats were cheap. Ship yards were desperate for business. And during the leadup to WW2, the US had flagged vessels in other countries as part of Lend-Lease, so there were court decisions in the US that the US didn’t have jurisdiction over vessels flagged in those other countries. The combination led a variety of enterprising people to collect some boats, have them redone to provide more on-board entertainment, and run them out of Miami to various Caribbean ports as a vacation destination. They didn’t have to pay their labor — collected from around the world — US minimum wages. They were largely free of a lot of regulation, and, more importantly, because they were flagged out of the US, they could dodge a lot of taxes as well. The fees to the countries they registered at were pretty minimal.

Garin covers the initial forays into this business, and the collapse of the combination of Arison / NCL, then spends a lot of the book on the sparring between Carnival and Royal Caribbean. This is sort of a pity, because it’s not like NCL is entirely out of the picture, and they have continued to innovate (they even run a Hawaiian cruise ship, the only cruise ship flagged in the US in the post-war years, which thus gets to completely own cruising the Hawaiian Islands, because only US flagged ships can travel from a US port to a US port).

Other chapters touch upon how crime has been handled on board and some scandals in that area, pollution (both garbage dumping and oil / chemical / hazardous waste dumping), illness on board and the problems of freely serving alcohol and people winding up overboard.

The book was published in 2005. Thus, Disney Cruise Lines only appears in its earlier incarnation, lending its name to Premier’s Big Red Boat. While the newer incarnation of DCL as its own line did exist at the time of writing, it was such a small operator, and had not yet started winning tons of awards, that it is unsurprising Garin left it out.

Garin spends a chapter discussing port fees and the politics of Caribbean nations. This is a pretty good chapter, albeit brief, and Garin does point interested readers at another good (with a revised edition, but not available on kindle, and also fairly old at this point) book on the topic of the politics of United Statesians vacationing in the Caribbean (_Last Resorts_, haven’t read it, may do so, but will first look for something a bit more current). Unfortunately, while Garin does spend a fair amount of time depicting the back and forth of port fees, and the struggles of island nations to balance their increasingly desperate need for tourist dollars against the costs associated with those tourists, Garin absolutely misses an opportunity to show how the two majors (Carnival and Royal Caribbean) are screwing themselves over by pushing port fees so incredibly low.

When we stopped in Nassau, we heard complaints from crew about how long it was taking for the new port to be finished — I think we probably asked what that building was over there. Along with those complaints was a passing remark about the port fee being paid by Disney. R. and I looked at the port building, thought about the port fee, did a little math based on the calendar, and concluded that that port building was going to take a whole lot longer to finish, _because_ port fees were too low. Now, I’m sure someone could produce a (pretty creepy, colonialist) argument about how if you give them more money, it’ll just be wasted and won’t produce a port building any quicker anyway. But the scale of the fees Nassau is collecting is not commensurate with finishing that building any time soon. *shrug*

The specific opportunity Garin missed is when they were about to evade yet another very small rise in port fees earmarked for a waste management system, and the World Bank basically said, hey, knock it off, the governments of the islands _must_ collect this fee, the big loan we are making the islands to building the system is contingent on the fee, and your customers are why this thing has to be built anyway. The majors backed down. That right there is as compelling a proof as anyone could need that the majors are harming themselves by forcing port fees so low (allowing, of course, for the risk that higher port fees might be siphoned off and thus not produce real benefits either).

It’s a minor point; I have belabored it.

Overall, it’s an interesting story of an industrial sector that, through a combination of clever avoidance of many of the ordinary costs of doing business with United Statesians (taxes, regulation), a global supply chain (labor from around the world) and careful management of image and risks (The Love Boat, working with the CDC to reduce shipboard illness) grew very rapidly in the postwar period, first proliferating and then consolidating.

I would really love to read a newer book / updated edition that covered things like NCL’s Pride of America, the rise of DCL and family cruising, and increasing conflict as adults start looking for adult-only experiences and have more and more trouble finding it. It is super clear that the demographic of who is cruising evolved over the course of the time covered by Garin, but it has also changed a lot since that book. It is probably too soon to cover the change to LNG fuel.

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Nella Acceber

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Page Summary

Sheets are in the wash on Wednesday and linkage about e-flying
Still More About Tap to Ride
Warning: A Few More Remarks About Transit Payment Systems
Friday: weirdly busy day
Belated post about amtrak capacity limitations
Belatedly Learning about Dreamstar Lines
OK _THIS_ one does involve train stations and rental cars and parking
More about trains, altho nothing about rental cars and train stations
National Transit Map and the General Transit Feed Specification Standard
Papers, we have papers (warning: this is still about train stations and rental cars or lack thereof)
Warning: Still More Whining About Train Station Connectivity
Ah, the quality of reddit conversation vs specialized forums
Friday: phone call, walk
Probably a whole lot of words about transportation
Thursday: addressing holiday cards and a wild headline at WaPo
Questions about baggage, MCO and Terminal C
Logistics article in LA Times
The Stuck Boat
What the heck is going on over at Boeing, anyway?
_Devils on the Deep Blue Sea_, Kristoffer A. Garin

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Entries tagged with transportation

Sheets are in the wash on Wednesday and linkage about e-flying

Still More About Tap to Ride

Warning: A Few More Remarks About Transit Payment Systems

Friday: weirdly busy day

Belated post about amtrak capacity limitations

Belatedly Learning about Dreamstar Lines

OK _THIS_ one does involve train stations and rental cars and parking

More about trains, altho nothing about rental cars and train stations

National Transit Map and the General Transit Feed Specification Standard

Papers, we have papers (warning: this is still about train stations and rental cars or lack thereof)

Warning: Still More Whining About Train Station Connectivity

Ah, the quality of reddit conversation vs specialized forums

Friday: phone call, walk

Probably a whole lot of words about transportation

Thursday: addressing holiday cards and a wild headline at WaPo

Questions about baggage, MCO and Terminal C

Logistics article in LA Times

The Stuck Boat

What the heck is going on over at Boeing, anyway?

_Devils on the Deep Blue Sea_, Kristoffer A. Garin