London (1927) in color
London (1927) in color
More from London Screen Archive
November 11, 2009
September 18, 2009
Mayor orders Thames back on map
From BBC Mayor orders Thames back on map
The most recent TfL Tube map had deleted the Thames to simplify presentation.
August 27, 2009
London Bus iPhone and iPod Touch Application
I wish I had this when living in London: London Bus iPhone and iPod Touch Application London Transport with augmented reality.
August 26, 2009
New UK high-speed rail plan unveiled
From the BBC New UK high-speed rail plan unveiled
The line would serve Birmingham and Manchester, getting passengers from Glasgow to London in just two hours and 16 minutes, the rail firm said. It rejected several alternative routes, including the east of England.
Judging from the map (linked below), the architecture of the line is clearly to feed London, all of the ancillary cities are as if on a tree with the xylem and phloem oriented to London, it would not be terribly good for say Manchester to Edinburgh or Manchester to Birmingham.
"The firm said that the line would account for 43.7 million journeys per year by 2030, which would result in 3.8 million fewer vehicle journeys and fewer carbon dioxide emissions.".In other words, more 90% of the trips are switching from rail or air to HSR. Providing better rail service to existing rail passengers is a good thing, but CO2 is hardly a rationale (as more CO2 has to be used going faster than going slower if the electricity is from the same place ... diesel to electric conversion is a separate matter).
Finally, the cost is esimated at $55B for 1500 miles of rail (presumably including triple or quadruple tracking in some sections. Planning will take 5 more years. It is hoped by the promoters the first section (London to Birmingham) will open in 2020. Speeds will max at 200 mph.
Birmingham: 45mins, down from 1h 22mins
Liverpool: 1hr 23mins, down from 2hrs 8mins
Manchester: 1hr 6mins, down from 2hrs 7mins
Edinburgh: 2hrs 9mins, down from 4hrs 23mins
Glasgow: 2hrs 16mins, down from 4hrs 10 mins
Also see: London to Glasgow in five minutes, a video showing the West Coast Main Line (which this proposal seems to duplicate) and was recently modernized for 9 billion pounds.
July 10, 2009
Nearest Tube
This looks like the coolest iPhone app yet: Nearest Tube, an augmented reality application to find London Underground stations. by acrossair. I have not yet played with it.
Update: from Venture BeatAugmented reality subway app comes to NY, SF
June 4, 2009
"A car for every worker"
Herbert Hoover is attributed telling Americans if he were elected in 1928 there would be "A chicken in every pot and a car in every garage". (though it has only been traced to a printed advert for the Republican Party in 1928, and not directly to Hoover's lips) (Republican Party Campaign Ad. New York World, 30 October 1928).
"A chicken in every pot" sans car and garage is attributed to Henry IV of France who is said to have said each of his peasants should enjoy "a chicken in his pot every Sunday." (or "la poule au pot") (Ref Answers.com)
When I was in the UK in 2007 I saw on the telly a post-World War II British politician, apparently Ernest Bevin, promise 'a car for every worker' (I am not sure of the exact quote, a free chicken to anyone who can find a better citation), which I found with help* in this cartoon illustrating unredeemed promises
source: "http://delwedd.llgc.org.uk/delweddau/ilw/ilw01092.gif"
This slogan was later adopted by Shimon Peres while running for office in Israel in 1965.
*Acknowledgment: Thanks to Derek Halden and Erel Avineri for research on this post.
February 5, 2009
London's Transport recovers after wrong amount of snow
From Going Underground Blog , I am truly sorry I missed seeing London get a real amount of snow.
After yesterday's "Arctic" conditions, with London's worst snowfall in 18 years, looks like we will have an easier journey into work this morning. Most of the London Underground seems to be working and at time of writing (7.20am) only the Circle Line is completely suspended due to a broken down train. There are part suspensions on the District, Bakerloo & Hammersmith & City Lines, so check the Tube's website before you leave home.
Here's the view from my study today, with the District Line coming in from Richmond, so err... luckily, I'll be able to get into town.
Most of the main roads have been cleared of snow, so most of London's buses are back on the road. However TfL said "Five routes are currently suspended linked to the volume of gritting taking place on local roads and there may be reduced services on some other routes."
The Congestion Charge, which Mayor Boris Johnson lifted yesterday, is back to normal operation today. You'll be pleased to hear that the wrong type of snow wasn't blamed for our transport system not coping. Yesterday The Mayor said:
"There's no doubt about it, this is the right kind of snow, it's just the wrong kind of quantities.
"My message to the heavens is: 'You've put on a fantastic display of snow power but that is probably quite enough'."
I like how in yesterday's interview above Boris manages some clever avoidance. Johnson says "We've actually been quite successful with the Tube network". The interviewer responds rather quickly with "If this was successful I'd like to see what unsuccessful was like".
June 26, 2008
A game to frustrate you:
A game to frustrate you: Can you name the London Underground Tube Stations (Zone 1)? - sporcle
April 6, 2008
Transport Manifestos
The London Mayor's race is "hotting up" (not heating up, as in American English). Each of the candidates, current mayor Ken Livingston (labour) and Boris Johnson (conservative) have issued "transport manifestos".
While Ken Livingstone may now be somewhat well-known to Americans interested in congestion pricing, Boris Johnson is himself a celebrity of sorts in the UK, a British version of a young William F. Buckley perhaps? He manages to attract publicity for whatever he does.
An article on Ken Livingstone's campaign and manifesto are linked to from here:
London: Mayor & More: Livingstone's Transport Policy Launch
Boris Johnson's Manifesto can be found here:
Transport : Back Boris for Mayor of London
One of the major issues is "Bendy Buses" (Articulated Buses), which have in recent years been introduced to London's streets, and are not terribly popular, especially with cyclists.
Johnson has also called for reconsideration of the western extension of the congestion charging region implement in 2007.
July 6, 2007
Goofballs and Trainwrecks: This week in London Transport
I come home to London from WCTR to car bombs and people driving into airports (shall we now inspect all cars driving into airports ... and then the security line becomes the target, secure areas always have insecure areas outside boundaries and entrances).
Fortunately, this particular cell were not a particularly competent terrorists, so I will refer to them as goofballs. I have yet to see whether they were competent doctors? One hopes the goofballs healed better than they attempted to inflict harm.
Later in the week, a train derails:
Metronet warned in May over derailment danger. A number of passengers had panic attacks, thinking it was another terrorist attack, coming almost 2 years after 7.7 and days after the Piccadilly smoking car.
The greater harm done by terrorists (even the goofballs) is not the physical damage, but the terror (which gives this -ism its name), and people living in terror. This culture of fear is amplified by news and free flow of information.
The book Paradox of Choice by Barry Schwartz talks about the curse of abundance, we have too many options and by extension too much information. This repudiates the economists argument of "non-satiation", required for well-behaved utility functions.
Of course many bad things happen in the world, but when personal tragedy strikes people I don't know, and will never know, do I really need to know and am I better off if I know?
Cars hurtling on fire toward airport entrances and dud-car bombs might rise to be slightly larger than personal tragedy, but not too much larger. Scarcity makes events like this unusual, and therefore newsworthy, but unlike "dog bites man" wherein the dog was after the man rather than the news-story, getting attention from the news and causing fear is exactly the terrorist aim.
The appropriate response would be to note it, arrest the goofballs, and move-on, rather than obsessing and changing our ways and continuously reminding ourselves of the goofball agenda, and thereby empowering it. Attention is the ransom demanded by terrorists, and we don't pay ransom for fear of encouraging kidnapping, we should not pay attention for fear of encouraging more random acts of terrorism.
April 5, 2007
Socialised Medicine
We recently had a child in England ... a brief summary of the process is below
In England there is no prenatal care, there is antenatal care (which I thought when I first heard it that they were against babies). And you only see the doctor once in the process, the rest is handled by midwives. Socialised medicine is strange in what they do for you.
For instance, patients keep their own records, there doesn't appear to be a copy at the doctor's office (though this cannot really be the case it is much too absurd for a bureaucracy not to keep data), much less a digital version (and their project for that, the world's largest civilian IT program seems to be having difficulties and ... more difficulties (and its leader has come under some amusing scrutiny (his mom notes he failed computers in college) though they are still trying).
The fact that it is a centralized 10 year program already shows why it is doomed to fail, and that no lessons from the failure of transportation mega-projects and ITS or the success of the internet have been learned.
However, there are several home visits by the midwives, I suppose so the nanny state can check you out at home. They don't do ultrasounds either except when something appears to be a problem, those you must acquire privately. And for your blood work they give you Lucozade) rather than a special sugar drink (which I am sure is cheaper). Given the lack of doctors, lack of ultrasounds, lack of drugs, lack of malpractice insurance and lawsuits, lack of billing, kicking you out of the hospital in one day etc., it should be cheaper, one wonders why National Health Service are running a deficit.
The "A team" of doctors is at the hospitals (My wife actually only saw one doctor prior to the day of birth, and that was only to do the birthing plan, and he didn't even lay hands on). The procedure was only delayed 4 hours, not too bad on the whole. The nursing staff/midwives is largely immigrant, though I guess the US is moving that way as well. The midwives also seem to have less training than US midwives. The doctors seemed quite good (more competent than their US counterparts).
One doesn't get a private room. There is a ward with about 6 mothers, though there are privacy curtains. This seems to be more for the convenience of the nurses/midwives monitoring everything than to actually save money, the amount of space difference is minimal, and the hospital (Chelsea and Westminster) has plenty of enclosed open space. I don't know its utilization, it seemed higher than Fairview-Riverside.
Post-natal care involves 3 home visits by midwives, basically to collect data, again they don't lay hands on or even look closely at the baby unless asked to. They do weigh it once or twice. There is also a health visitor who comes by.
The at-home visits are nice in principle especially for late in pregnancy and just after child-birth when mobility might be constrained. In practice, there didn't seem to be too much point, the medical system just asking the same questions over and over again without actually treating anything. You get a team of midwives, so you may never see the same midwife twice.
The child-birth was much smoother this time, probably because a planned c-section is much preferrred to an emergency c-section. The lack of billing (or especially the infuriatingly time-wasting and tree-killing "this is not a bill" statements) is fantastic.
March 3, 2007
The Co-Evolution of London's Land Use and Transport
updated August 25, 2009:
For those of you who doubt I am doing work over in London, I have completed two other papers (in addition to "Too Expensive to Meter" based on my research over here):
- Levinson, David (2008) The Orderliness Hypothesis: Does Population Density Explain the Sequence of Rail Station Opening in London? Journal of Transport History 29(1) March 2008 pp.98-114.[download]
- Levinson, David (2008) Density and Dispersion: The Co-Development of Land use and Rail in London. Journal of Economic Geography 8(1) 55-57.
JEG: [doi]
Network growth is a complex phenomenon. Some have suggested that it occurs in an orderly or rational way, based on the size of the places that are connected. David Levinson examines the order in which stations were added to the London surface rail and Underground rail networks in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, testing the extent to which order correlates with population density. While population density is an important factor in explaining order, he shows that other factors were at work. The network itself helps to reshape land uses, and a network that may have been well ordered at one time may drift away from order as activities relocate.
This article examines the changes that occurred in the rail network and density of population in London during the 19th and 20th centuries. It aims to disentangle the 'chicken and egg' problem of which came first, network or land development, through a set of statistical analyses clearly distinguishing events by order. Using panel data representing the 33 boroughs of London over each decade from 1871 to 2001, the research finds that there is a positive feedback effect between population density and network density. Additional rail stations (either Underground or surface) are positive factors leading to subsequent increases in population in the suburbs of London, while additional population density is a factor in subsequently deploying more rail. These effects differ in central London, where the additional accessibility produced by rail led to commercial development and concomitant depopulation. There are also differences in the effects associated with surface rail stations and Underground stations, as the Underground was able to get into central London in a way that surface rail could not. However, the two networks were weak (and statistically insignificant) substitutes for each other in the suburbs, while the density of surface rail stations was a complement to the Underground in the center, though not vice versa.
Perhaps more interesting for the non-academic, we (Ahmed El-Geneidy, Feng Xie, and myself of the Nexus group) have put together three quicktime movies
- 1.The co-evolution of London population density and surface (National) rail
- 2.The co-evolution of London population density and the Underground
- 3.The co-evolution of London population density and surface (National) rail and the Underground
These can be accessed from here.