The Transportationist

Russia Plans World's Longest Tunnel, a Link to Alaska

April 18 (Bloomberg) -- Russia plans to build the world's
longest tunnel, a transport and pipeline link under the Bering Strait to Alaska, as part of a $65 billion project to supply the U.S. with oil, natural gas and electricity from Siberia. ... more.

This reminds one of Buckminster Fuller, who long ago advocated linking the world's electrical grids to balance loads (assuming low losses on transmission). Looking at his Dymaxion Map gives a new perspective on how close Alaska and Siberia are.

Posted by David Levinson at 05:12 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The Urban Economics blog has an interesting post by Efrat Blumenfeld-Lieberthal, who I met while visiting Michael Batty's CASA shop at UCL: Topology of urban transportation networks. It was nice to see correlations between economic development and network structure for intercity networks.

Posted by David Levinson at 11:15 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

In the Tofflers' new book "Revolutionary Wealth", the discuss the "Clash of Speeds", saying in an interview

"If you were a cop at the side of the road monitoring the speed of the cars going by, you would clock the car of business,which is always changing rapidly under competitive pressures,at 100miles per hour.But the car of education,which is supposedly preparing our young for the future,is only going 10mph.You cannot have a successful economy with that degree of de-synchronization. "

If education is going 10mph, one might posit surface transportation itself is going 1 mph. The networks we use are perhaps the slowest of institutions to change, the roads we use today are still where we put them a decade, a century, or a millenium (or two) ago. This slow pace of change is a two-way street. If you want to make rapid change, you will be frustrated, but if you want to make lasting change, you will be rewarded.

Posted by David Levinson at 01:19 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

There is a nice summary of our recent empirical work on modeling network growth, the project "If They Come, Will You Build It," written up here:

Article

The final report is here:

Final Report

Posted by David Levinson at 11:59 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)