I haven't a clue why the UK can't manage to do it, but Japan does at least cover operating expenses with fares. And those fares cost less per mile than their American and Canadian counterparts (dunno about the UK).
They also died because taxes on railroad tickets directly subsidized the highways and airports which replaced them.
A model where the rails are "public" and private operators can use them, similar to how cars and trucks use roads, might work. But both left and right would cry about that (right wouldn't like the public sector taking on the infrastructure costs and left wouldn't like private industry running the services).
Typically broadcast TV has space for "national" and "local" commercials. Probably hard to notice in a major metro area, but in low population areas the low production quality of "local" commercials is a dead giveaway as to when in the break it switches. A commercial for Pepsi is typically in the national section (beginning of the break) and the commercial for your local Ford dealer / personal injury lawyer / county fair / nightly news will be in the local (end) section of the break.
I remember at the University I attended, I could get WPIX (then the NYC WB affiliate) and WSBK (then the Boston UPN affiliate) on their quasi-homegrown cable system, while getting the local affiliates over the antenna. During commercial breaks I would sometimes play around switching back and forth between the inputs to see this effect firsthand.
Same for driving through the US's deserts and mountain ranges. Even the interstates have some danger; they will warn you with things like "last fuel / cell reception for 80 miles".
I agree on relaxing zoning restrictions, but unlike all of the west coast cities the NY metro area spans 3 states within very reasonable commute distance (4 if you include PA which is slightly unreasonable but done by many anyway). Anyone who becomes too strict is giving tax base away to neighbors. The city itself has relaxed a bit, but the suburbs are still clinging to 3 story height restrictions in their "downtown", which of course is the entire walkable area from the train station, which means people need to drive to the station from farther away, leading to giant parking lots that have waiting lists several years long.
It is heavily promoted by automotive lobbying groups to stall the growth of new mass transit on these sites.
In all my years of studying transit vs rail trails, I never even considered that one vector of support for the trails was the automotive industry. I thought it was mainly short-sighted local politicians combined with good ol'fashioned NIMBYism, and maybe cyclists (and in my area, snowmobile-ers), but thinking about it none of those groups have any real amounts of lobbying money.
That is also somewhat supported by what happened with Metro-North's Harlem Line extension - they got funding to re-extend north from Dover Plains, so the railroad went as far north as they could, until they were blocked by an incomplete rail trail which "conveniently" started at the very end of the section of the line that still had rails and only covers random sections totalling 15 miles of the 46 mile discontinued section to Chatham. The trail folk made sure to start and complete the end most likely to get restored to rail use first.
No doubt it's popular, and its far-west location makes it less useful for transit than it would be if it were more towards the center, which is why there wasn't much resistance. The issue with deep tunnels is getting to/from them - long escalators or cramped elevators. The subway stations that can be reached with 2-3 flights of stairs are always better. The only time I've had a pleasant-ish experience with a deep one was Forest Glen DC metro station where they have 6 high speed high capacity elevators to get people from the surface to track level instead of escalators that always break or get clogged up with people standing and not walking.
The Queens route I mentioned though, there is quite plenty of park already (especially Forest Park) and the nearby Woodhaven Blvd has standing room only buses every 2-3 minutes most hours of the day. Operating costs would plummet if instead of buses there were trains. Any sane city would have made the conversion 10 years ago.
In NYC there is an attitude of taking routes that would be good for transit and building parks on them. The high line could have been an surface level extension of the 7 line from its current Hudson Yards terminal to the 14st area of Manhattan (and duck into a tunnel from there). Or, allowed LIRR to run to a Lower Manhattan terminal without much tunneling (relieving pressure in overcrowded Penn Station by providing more places in Manhattan to get off).
There's a similar argument going on in Queens about what to do with the former LIRR Rockaway Beach branch: one side wants a linear park (despite the fact that it runs through Forest Park, which is already pretty big, and through people's back yards who don't want random people walking by all day), another wants to restore it as an an extension of the subway (connecting the Queens Blvd Line to the A train). The route runs through a transit desert in Queens, and in any of the west coast or midwestern cities with budding new rail systems the population centers being connected would be an automatic no-brainer to put transit there.
Yup mine is only slightly newer than the V20. It does everything I want and can forsee - I'll likely have gotten a good 4-5 years out of it before upgrading again.
Consider that Samsung still has the headphone jack in their flagship phone, and the fact that the Android UI manages to be more consistent and usable than iOS (the back button is in the same place!) they may have just shot themselves in the foot.
I went with LG because not only does it have the headphone jack, it still has removable storage (in addition to wireless charging). Currently sitting with 32+128GB of space. I probably won't need to upgrade again for another 2 years (and likely would still go for an LG, so long as they still have removable storage).
Public water fountains are making a comeback in shopping malls and office buildings. They now come with filters and a digital readout for how many plastic bottles were saved.
I walk away from the vending machine in Japan (gaijin superpowers), but still take advantage of this and will use the bin of a later vending machine (I at least make an effort to find one that sells the same drink) or a convenience store. Japan has another big difference from North America: almost no public trash cans, resulting in recycling being easier than discarding in trash.
Metro-North railroad seems to have stolen this idea from Japan; many suburban stations have a paper/can/trash "recycling center" with 3 bins, a few feet away from one or two vending machines (there's always a beverage one, and often a snack one). [they've also stolen a few other good ideas, like heated on-platform waiting areas/overpasses and frequent off-peak service with zoned expresses so that most people get to skip the majority of stops along the way to Manhattan].
willing to live with lesser audio to get the headphone jack.
The headphone jack is actually better audio. Not just for headphones, even for the brand name speaker system in my car, plugging the headphone jack into "aux in" is noticeably higher quality than bluetooth, like night and day. Only reason I don't do it is because unfortunately some form of digital connection is needed (bt or USB) for the steering wheel buttons to work.
This makes sense. LG for example still has headphone jacks and MicroSD slots in even their latest flagship phones. Possible reason: they don't make accessories (the quasi-official recommended wireless charger was a Samsung last year, not sure if they even have their own yet) and they don't offer cloud storage.
"flaw in the logic" is "they scanned them all as delivered as they entered the truck". Could be a shortage of scanning devices, could be laziness, could be artificially inflating delivery times.
1. People use public restrooms in stores and restaurants to shoot up, others smear feces everywhere, still others vandalize 2. Store owners put "customers only" and use some technological means to enforce (a buzzer, door code printed on receipt, in one place I saw a mall food court guard checking receipts and writing the door code for the day on the back). 3. Homeless have nowhere to "go", so fuck it, they defecate in the streets.
The irony is, cities "less friendly" to druggies and obviously homeless have less of the problems in (1), so (2) doesn't happen, and because the homeless who are there make an effort to "blend in" (wearing clothes, using showers in shelters to avoid smelling like goats, etc) will therefore have no issue with getting a bathroom to use or a place to sit and chill for a day.
That is what happens when progressiveness goes unchecked. It seemed like a good idea at the time, but now is screwing people.
Meanwhile states like TX and NY kept the overtime definition limited to 40 hrs/wk, employers implemented 4x10 as an option greatly improving work-life balance, and now if some yucklehead tries to add an 8 hr/day stipulation they'll get their hand slapped before the bill even makes it to the floor.
Plastic Bottles -> Aluminum Cans and Glass Bottles, paper cartons. Plastic Bags -> Paper Bags, put them inside those reusable canvas bags. That annoying packaging for electronics, etc -> box with cardboard inserts for padding.
Not everything but a lot of consumables can be switched over to non-plastic.
Japan uses SNS apps rather than email nowadays. "Line" is big there, similar to how WeChat is big with China. US phone companies definitely would not want people switching to this en-mass because both have the ability to do voice and video over the network, and unlike Skype do not charge for the privilege. International vs domestic is completely meaningless in this context. Fiefdoms would collapse.
The apps are also superior in that they have built in location send features, making finding the person you're trying to find in a crowd (one of the few times people still call other people nowadays) easy since you can just send a picture of a map with a dot showing your location.
Sure, then farmers can charge the actual cost of the food to sustain their livelihood. The blue states will reverse course in a hurry when the weekly grocery bill increases tenfold...
Forgot about that. I can see where they might grab the passport info [they ask to make a copy], but the driver's license domestically they just look at the picture (I usually don't even need to take it out of the wallet).
I was a Starwood member, and can fill in a few reasons/things: Address: To send the membership card and some legally required mailings, not to mention verify billing address Credit Card Number: Storing this was always optional, and like anywhere you save payments it is a convenience/security tradeoff. DOB: I don't remember ever providing that Drivers License, Passport number: Nope, never provided those either, even for international bookings or bookings involving parking fees.
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I haven't a clue why the UK can't manage to do it, but Japan does at least cover operating expenses with fares. And those fares cost less per mile than their American and Canadian counterparts (dunno about the UK).
They also died because taxes on railroad tickets directly subsidized the highways and airports which replaced them.
A model where the rails are "public" and private operators can use them, similar to how cars and trucks use roads, might work. But both left and right would cry about that (right wouldn't like the public sector taking on the infrastructure costs and left wouldn't like private industry running the services).
Typically broadcast TV has space for "national" and "local" commercials. Probably hard to notice in a major metro area, but in low population areas the low production quality of "local" commercials is a dead giveaway as to when in the break it switches. A commercial for Pepsi is typically in the national section (beginning of the break) and the commercial for your local Ford dealer / personal injury lawyer / county fair / nightly news will be in the local (end) section of the break.
I remember at the University I attended, I could get WPIX (then the NYC WB affiliate) and WSBK (then the Boston UPN affiliate) on their quasi-homegrown cable system, while getting the local affiliates over the antenna. During commercial breaks I would sometimes play around switching back and forth between the inputs to see this effect firsthand.
Correct, that is not how capitalism is supposed to work. Regulatory capture is what happens when the government inserts itself into capitalism.
Same for driving through the US's deserts and mountain ranges. Even the interstates have some danger; they will warn you with things like "last fuel / cell reception for 80 miles".
I agree on relaxing zoning restrictions, but unlike all of the west coast cities the NY metro area spans 3 states within very reasonable commute distance (4 if you include PA which is slightly unreasonable but done by many anyway). Anyone who becomes too strict is giving tax base away to neighbors. The city itself has relaxed a bit, but the suburbs are still clinging to 3 story height restrictions in their "downtown", which of course is the entire walkable area from the train station, which means people need to drive to the station from farther away, leading to giant parking lots that have waiting lists several years long.
It is heavily promoted by automotive lobbying groups to stall the growth of new mass transit on these sites.
In all my years of studying transit vs rail trails, I never even considered that one vector of support for the trails was the automotive industry. I thought it was mainly short-sighted local politicians combined with good ol'fashioned NIMBYism, and maybe cyclists (and in my area, snowmobile-ers), but thinking about it none of those groups have any real amounts of lobbying money.
That is also somewhat supported by what happened with Metro-North's Harlem Line extension - they got funding to re-extend north from Dover Plains, so the railroad went as far north as they could, until they were blocked by an incomplete rail trail which "conveniently" started at the very end of the section of the line that still had rails and only covers random sections totalling 15 miles of the 46 mile discontinued section to Chatham. The trail folk made sure to start and complete the end most likely to get restored to rail use first.
No doubt it's popular, and its far-west location makes it less useful for transit than it would be if it were more towards the center, which is why there wasn't much resistance.
The issue with deep tunnels is getting to/from them - long escalators or cramped elevators. The subway stations that can be reached with 2-3 flights of stairs are always better. The only time I've had a pleasant-ish experience with a deep one was Forest Glen DC metro station where they have 6 high speed high capacity elevators to get people from the surface to track level instead of escalators that always break or get clogged up with people standing and not walking.
The Queens route I mentioned though, there is quite plenty of park already (especially Forest Park) and the nearby Woodhaven Blvd has standing room only buses every 2-3 minutes most hours of the day. Operating costs would plummet if instead of buses there were trains. Any sane city would have made the conversion 10 years ago.
Let me Wikipedia that for you: Linear Park.
In NYC there is an attitude of taking routes that would be good for transit and building parks on them. The high line could have been an surface level extension of the 7 line from its current Hudson Yards terminal to the 14st area of Manhattan (and duck into a tunnel from there). Or, allowed LIRR to run to a Lower Manhattan terminal without much tunneling (relieving pressure in overcrowded Penn Station by providing more places in Manhattan to get off).
There's a similar argument going on in Queens about what to do with the former LIRR Rockaway Beach branch: one side wants a linear park (despite the fact that it runs through Forest Park, which is already pretty big, and through people's back yards who don't want random people walking by all day), another wants to restore it as an an extension of the subway (connecting the Queens Blvd Line to the A train). The route runs through a transit desert in Queens, and in any of the west coast or midwestern cities with budding new rail systems the population centers being connected would be an automatic no-brainer to put transit there.
Yup mine is only slightly newer than the V20. It does everything I want and can forsee - I'll likely have gotten a good 4-5 years out of it before upgrading again.
Consider that Samsung still has the headphone jack in their flagship phone, and the fact that the Android UI manages to be more consistent and usable than iOS (the back button is in the same place!) they may have just shot themselves in the foot.
I went with LG because not only does it have the headphone jack, it still has removable storage (in addition to wireless charging). Currently sitting with 32+128GB of space. I probably won't need to upgrade again for another 2 years (and likely would still go for an LG, so long as they still have removable storage).
Public water fountains are making a comeback in shopping malls and office buildings. They now come with filters and a digital readout for how many plastic bottles were saved.
I walk away from the vending machine in Japan (gaijin superpowers), but still take advantage of this and will use the bin of a later vending machine (I at least make an effort to find one that sells the same drink) or a convenience store. Japan has another big difference from North America: almost no public trash cans, resulting in recycling being easier than discarding in trash.
Metro-North railroad seems to have stolen this idea from Japan; many suburban stations have a paper/can/trash "recycling center" with 3 bins, a few feet away from one or two vending machines (there's always a beverage one, and often a snack one). [they've also stolen a few other good ideas, like heated on-platform waiting areas/overpasses and frequent off-peak service with zoned expresses so that most people get to skip the majority of stops along the way to Manhattan].
willing to live with lesser audio to get the headphone jack.
The headphone jack is actually better audio. Not just for headphones, even for the brand name speaker system in my car, plugging the headphone jack into "aux in" is noticeably higher quality than bluetooth, like night and day. Only reason I don't do it is because unfortunately some form of digital connection is needed (bt or USB) for the steering wheel buttons to work.
This makes sense. LG for example still has headphone jacks and MicroSD slots in even their latest flagship phones. Possible reason: they don't make accessories (the quasi-official recommended wireless charger was a Samsung last year, not sure if they even have their own yet) and they don't offer cloud storage.
"flaw in the logic" is "they scanned them all as delivered as they entered the truck". Could be a shortage of scanning devices, could be laziness, could be artificially inflating delivery times.
1. People use public restrooms in stores and restaurants to shoot up, others smear feces everywhere, still others vandalize
2. Store owners put "customers only" and use some technological means to enforce (a buzzer, door code printed on receipt, in one place I saw a mall food court guard checking receipts and writing the door code for the day on the back).
3. Homeless have nowhere to "go", so fuck it, they defecate in the streets.
The irony is, cities "less friendly" to druggies and obviously homeless have less of the problems in (1), so (2) doesn't happen, and because the homeless who are there make an effort to "blend in" (wearing clothes, using showers in shelters to avoid smelling like goats, etc) will therefore have no issue with getting a bathroom to use or a place to sit and chill for a day.
That is what happens when progressiveness goes unchecked. It seemed like a good idea at the time, but now is screwing people.
Meanwhile states like TX and NY kept the overtime definition limited to 40 hrs/wk, employers implemented 4x10 as an option greatly improving work-life balance, and now if some yucklehead tries to add an 8 hr/day stipulation they'll get their hand slapped before the bill even makes it to the floor.
Plastic Bottles -> Aluminum Cans and Glass Bottles, paper cartons.
Plastic Bags -> Paper Bags, put them inside those reusable canvas bags.
That annoying packaging for electronics, etc -> box with cardboard inserts for padding.
Not everything but a lot of consumables can be switched over to non-plastic.
Japan uses SNS apps rather than email nowadays. "Line" is big there, similar to how WeChat is big with China. US phone companies definitely would not want people switching to this en-mass because both have the ability to do voice and video over the network, and unlike Skype do not charge for the privilege. International vs domestic is completely meaningless in this context. Fiefdoms would collapse.
The apps are also superior in that they have built in location send features, making finding the person you're trying to find in a crowd (one of the few times people still call other people nowadays) easy since you can just send a picture of a map with a dot showing your location.
Sure, then farmers can charge the actual cost of the food to sustain their livelihood. The blue states will reverse course in a hurry when the weekly grocery bill increases tenfold...
Forgot about that. I can see where they might grab the passport info [they ask to make a copy], but the driver's license domestically they just look at the picture (I usually don't even need to take it out of the wallet).
Ordering kiosks [ideally that accept cash] solve that. People preparing food never handle the cash - win.
I was a Starwood member, and can fill in a few reasons/things:
Address: To send the membership card and some legally required mailings, not to mention verify billing address
Credit Card Number: Storing this was always optional, and like anywhere you save payments it is a convenience/security tradeoff.
DOB: I don't remember ever providing that
Drivers License, Passport number: Nope, never provided those either, even for international bookings or bookings involving parking fees.