Recently, my laptop computer developed a fault. My laptop is my only computer, and it was thus very annoying to be without it for several weeks. Partly as a consequence, I am in the process of building myself a desktop computer out of various bits and pieces. The first step is just to get the thing to work in some form - I may upgrade some of the pieces to something nicer later. One thing that I needed was a screen. Lots of people have old screens lying around, and Brian Micklethwait wanted to get rid of his because it was taking up space in his flat.

So I just had to get it home. As I don't have a car, it had to be by public transport. The screen was an old model and heavy, and I did not want to have to carry it far. This led me to a different set of requirements when figuring how to get home to those that normally apply. In normal circumstances I would either walk to Victoria station, and catch a train to Selhurst just north of Croydon, which is where I live. Or I would walk to Vauxhall across the river, catch a train to Clapham Junction, and then catch the train from Victoria on its way through. (As Vauxhall is in Zone 2, going this way also works out cheaper).

However, both of these routes were clearly out in this instance. The screen was too heavy to carry to either of the railway stations. However, I could catch a bus in Vauxhall Bridge road to either Victoria or Vauxhall. However, there were disadvantages to both. To get to Victoria, I would have to cross a busy road, and walk a distance down the street to the nearest bus stop, get off a bus at a location not terribly close to Victoria Station, find the right platform, walk a substantial distance through a crowded station, go through ticket barriers, and get on the train. If I chose instead to get on a bus to Vauxhall, I would have to get off at a bus stop not especially close to the station, cross a complicated road intersection, and find the right train. I probably would have done this, except for the fact that I would have to change trains at Clapham Junction, which would mean carting the screen a fair distance including up and down stairs through another crowded station.

So what did I do? Well, I looked carefully at the bus map, and noticed that the bus to Vauxhall continued a substantial distance into south London. In particular it happened to stop right next to East Dulwich station. As it happens, not all trains to Selhurst start at Victoria: there is a less frequent service that starts at London Bridge and goes via East Dulwich and Tulse Hill. So as it happened, it was possible to get a bus to East Dulwich wich stopped right outside the station (although I still had to cross a road), where I could change to a train at a not very busy station with no ticket barriers and a relatively short walk. And this I did.

In this case, most of the usual considerations for choosing a route did not apply. I was not concerned with finding the route with the minimum time or the shortest route. (To say that the route I took was non-direct is an understatement). What I was concerned with was minimising the total walking distance, minimising the number of times I had to change from one vehicle or mode of transport to another, and avoiding having to walk in large crowds. Frequency was not very important to me, and journey time even less so. And this led me to make a completely different decision to the one I normally would.

Of course, Jeremy Clarkson would say that it would have been a great deal easier and faster if I had a car. And in this instance he would certainly have been right.

In a comment to Jackie’s post on satellite navigation Mark Holland manages to mention last night’s Top Gear in which Jeremy Clarkson challenged his co-presenters to a race from the Top Gear HQ in Cranleigh to Monte Carlo. Clarkson drove, his colleagues took the train. Why exactly, they didn’t pop down to Heathrow like everyone else is a mystery but that was the challenge. And Clarkson won.

That’s a bit of a shocker. I know there are all sorts of things that slow down train journeys. You have to get to the station. You have to buy your ticket. They have to slow for bends, dodgy track etc. They have to stop. I presume that his colleagues had to transfer in Paris but, you never know, maybe they didn’t. And I am sure that Clarkson took a “French” view of speed limits.

But even so I am surprised. The top speed of a TGV is 186mph. Average I would guess is about 140mph. My guess is that Clarkson (even he has to be mindful of his licence) was rarely driving at above 110mph. One wonders what he might have done if he’d really been allowed to rip.

So what happened? I wonder if SNCF frequency was the culprit.

A couple of years ago, I drove to the South of France with my friends. We borrowed my friend's father's BMW estate, so that we could bring back as many crates of wine as possible. But after the first twelve hours of driving and map reading, at least one of us (that would be me) was thinking that the wine may not have made such an ordeal worthwhile.

One of those friends, soon after we returned from France, bought a Mercedes CLK with satellite navigation, and has since purchased a Mini Cooper (for himself) and a BMW (for his wife-type-partner), all with sat nav. The idea is that we'll be able to take one or more of these cars to France with us and fill them with booze, without the hassle of maps and the spats they can cause. An expensive solution to a minor problem, perhaps, but one I approve of wholeheartedly. After using satellite navigation to find several potentially troublesome addresses, I have become a major fan of the technology, and would not dream of driving a car without it.

But these sat nav systems are not without their bugs.

One day last month, I was visiting with someone who has satellite navigation in his BMW. We decided to go for lunch at a restaurant near Colchester, in the village of Great Tey. But we couldn't find Great Tey in the sat nav directory no matter how hard we looked. And then finally, there it was -- under Tey Great. "That's a bit cheeky," the car's owner commented.

A couple of weeks ago, driving around central London in the same car, we were trying to find a certain restaurant. But at almost every turn, the sat nav system directed us to drive the wrong way down one-way streets, or to take avenues that were closed due to road works. The driver explained to me that there were updates to the sat nav software that you could get, but as he'd only had the car a few months, he hadn't yet bothered to do so. That explained that, then.

Fast forward to this week: same car, same car owner, in deepest Fingringhoe. After a couple of drinks in a country pub, we got in the car and entered our desired destination into the sat nav system. The system advised us to make a U-turn.

We were still in the car park.

It also indicated that we were 7.3 miles from our destination. Once we'd pulled out of the car park, it told us that we were 9.6 miles from our destination. Half a mile up the road, it sent us down what appeared to be a mud track for a quarter of a mile, then spit us back out onto the road on which we'd originally been driving.

Somehow, I don't think that my hypothesis -- that the car is possessed, a British Christine -- quite hits the nail on the head. I've looked on Google for information on sat nav bugs, and have come up quite emptyhanded. While I'd love to take this as an indication that the car is evil, I suspect there is more to it than that. Any suggestions gratefully received in the comments.

Company naming seems to go through trends, and we seem to be going through a particularly silly one at the moment, which is to give companies numbers as names. A case in point:

One problem that has occurred since rail franchising is that train companies forced to share London terminal stations with one another have taken to squabbling with one another about who gets access to which platforms and when, and as franchises are re-awarded, policy has been to create knew franchises in such a way that the London terminal stations are used by a single company only. (This essentially recreates the original companies that built the stations in the first place, of course). Very recently, a new franchise has been created to serve Liverpool Street station. After immense thought, and no doubt spending lots of money, the marketroids came up with a name for the new franchise: "One", presumably to imply that there was only one company serving Liverpool Street.

How is this stupid? Let me count the ways. Firstly, using such a common word as a company name is difficult if you want to find the company on the internet. The URL is impossible to guess, and it takes a few attempts before you can even figure out how to find it on Google. (It is here). I haven't tried it, but I suspect the same problem occurs if you attempt to ring up directory enquiries to find a phone number. And there is the problem discussed in the Times yesterday. How do you deal with an announcement like

"The train on platform seven is the 7.20 One service to Norwich".

And what does

"The train on platform six is the 3.47 One service to Cambridge" actually mean?

Unsurprisingly, announcers have quickly reverted to

"The train on platform seven is the 7.20 service to Norwich", which is presumably not what the people who own One really want.

One is not even the first train company in Britain to have run into this problem. The Great Western franchise (the railway famously built by Isambard Brunel) is owned by a company named "First", and the operation is collectively called "First Great Western". This company initially put the words "First Great Western" on the side of all their trains (with the word "First" helpfully in a different font, as that was a corporate logo), and found themselves suffering from the problem that passengers would walk from one end of the train to the other, trying to find a second class carriage. (I have not heard if any people with first class tickets sat down in second class thinking they were in first and were disappointed). This problem was solved in an equivalent way to what the announcers are doing. Many of the carriages were repainted simply with the words "Great Western", and the corporate logo was left off entirely.

Given how much money is spent on corporate branding, it surely isn't too much to ask that people think these things through. But they often don't.

(As another non-transport example of the same thing, mobile phone company "3" last year sponsored two series of cricket matches in Australia. Hence the "3 Test series" between Australia and Zimbabwe that consisted of two matches and the "3 Test series" between Australia and India, that consisted of four matches. At least in this case the corporate name was invented well before it was decided that the company would be sponsoring cricket matches. The "One" people have no such excuse).

Correction: I repeatedly wrote "Great Eastern" when I meant "Great Western" when I first posted this article. Silly me.

“So, how was my driving?”

“Terrible. You were driving too fast, cutting people up, driving too close to the car in front…”

“Oh”

“You never used to be this bad.”

“Yes, I always thought you were a good driver.”

This came as something of a shock especially when it came from my mother and my sister. I (of course) thought my driving was fine. But then, we all think our driving is just fine. Of course we do. You are hardly going to drive in a way you think is dangerous. Or, at least, not normally, you’re not.

And then, there is the problem that as passengers most of us are more on edge than we are as drivers. It’s all to do with being in control, I guess.

And it was France. And we all know how they drive.

But that’s not the point. Good manners requires considering the feelings of others. And when driving considering the feelings of others means driving in a way they are comfortable with. And if that means driving in a way you regard as ludicrously slow then so be it. Even in France.

There is another point, I suppose. Passengers are very reluctant to criticise drivers. There is always a fear that you are going to wreck a relationship. Which, of course, means that vital information is not going to be communicated. The answer: perhaps before we even get into a car, we should initiate a discussion:

“Is your driving going to alarm me?”

Or perhaps:

“If you find my driving alarming please tell me and I will do my best to moderate it.”

For my trip to Alsace I could have chosen rail. Waterloo to Paris; Paris to Strasbourg; Strasbourg to Colmar. Booking it would have been a pain and it would have worked out more expensive than flying but it could have been done.

But…my pregnant sister was coming along.

This changed everything. After that fact became known there was no mucking about. So, it was a plane to Basle and hire car from thereon.

The thing is that although that was the decision I made and although it seemed obvious, I am still not quite sure why that was the one I made. I think it was because it meant that my sister would spent the least possible time trapped. On a plane you are trapped. It’s a rotten place to feel ill. No, I wasn’t expecting my sister to feel ill (she’s at a stage of pregnancy where you don’t tend to) but it was more that she might. But although you are trapped on a plane the entrapment doesn’t last unlike a five-hour train journey.

The hire car also gave us one significant advantage once we got to Colmar: flexibility. We could change our plans, go sightseeing and we wouldn’t need to call cabs. Very useful.

In the end, hiring the car worked out pretty expensive but looking back and even armed with the knowledge that French train travel is dirt cheap I don’t think I would have changed things. Paying to remove some of the hassles of travel was, in this case, very much worth it.

This New York Times article today, which Patrick has NOT yet linked to (unlike the previous NYT bit I linked to today from here without mentioning his link from here – very embarrassing) says something very Transport Blog relevant, in among a lot of other stuff:

SCHENECTADY, N.Y. – In a onetime printing plant on the edge of this tattered manufacturing city, a small company named Superpower churns out sample after sample of what looks like shiny metal tape.

The tape has five layers. The middle one, a ceramic film one-tenth as thick as a human hair, exhibits one of nature's most tantalizing tricks. At very low temperatures, the ceramic abruptly loses all resistance to electrical current.

Superconductivity! It's now coming on by leaps and bounds:

Success could spring superconductivity from the modest niches that it has occupied in fields like medical diagnostics and give it wide commercial applications. In addition to cutting costs and raising reliability in generating and distributing electricity, superconductive wire could replace copper wire in motors to save space and cut energy costs in factories and on ships. …

And here comes the Transport Blog relevant bit:

… Railroads might finally embrace maglev technology, which allows high-speed trains to ride magnetic fields above superconductive rails.

So how is this being achieved?

The alloys used in medical imaging superconduct only at supercold temperatures, about 450 degrees below zero Fahrenheit. To reach that point, they have to be cooled by liquid helium, which is expensive to make and manage.

By contrast, ceramic superconductors work at temperatures above minus 321 Fahrenheit, allowing them to be cooled by liquid nitrogen, an inexpensive industrial refrigerant. For that reason, they are called high-temperature superconductors, though they are still far from the dream of a room-temperature superconductor.

Scientists eh? Above minus 321 Fahrenheit is a "high temperature".

It sounds vaguely like a new kind of railway line that will automatically cover itself, with no help at all from the weather, with the wrong kind of snow.

Via this posting, which I got to from … can't remember … oh yes, from this, I found my way to this New York Times story, about a brand new "Maglev" in Shanghai:

Their digital cameras were flashing furiously now, and passengers began calling friends on their cellphones, eager to share the thrill. With a glance out of the big bay windows came an impression of art to accompany the technological awe. Mondrian and Dali came to mind as the farmers' plots were reduced to streaking geometrical abstractions, and time seemed to bend, with the thick traffic on the parallel highway down below zooming in reverse.

For a brief instant, the car's friendly display read 432 kilometers per hour (268 m.p.h.), the train's peak speed, and just then a passenger cried out: "Slow down, this is way too fast. Whoa, where are the brakes?" Faster-than-a-bullet-train technology is a marvel to be sure, the man's cry seemed to say, but in an eight-minute train ride to the airport there is no time to read, or scarcely even time to think.

And this could be one reason the Shanghai maglev has yet to catch on since the eight-minute service was begun in January. On an average day there are reportedly only 4,000 riders, less than one-sixth of capacity.

Personally, I love riding on trains that are nearly empty, just as my favourite pubs are the ones that no one else likes and where I can get a bit of peace and quiet. For someone like me pleasure tends to be transient. My favourite trains fill up or are discontinued. My favourite pubs go out of business and get turned into yuppie hutches.

This maglev will soon fill up, presumably. Economically, it may scrape along making an "operating profit", but its true costs will never be repaid. Why do people build such things? Partly because they tend to look so pretty.

But, question: will Shanghai as a whole benefit from this service? Will it, in that wider positive externalities sense, be profitable? And do they plan to extend it out into the wide open spaces of China?

One thing is for sure. Shanghai is one great place, and getting greater all the time.

By which I mean that railways are at their most profitable (or least unprofitable) when they operate in densely-populated areas with large populations. This matters to me because I believe that profit is a very good indicator of whether something should be done or not.

Empirically, this seems to hold out. Profitable railways can be found in Japan’s cities and suburbs. In Britain, in London, there are some commuter TOCs which don’t need any subsidy at all and most of them need (or, at least, until recently needed) very little. Most of the subsidy (insofar as it can be apportioned) ends up supporting services outside London. In the past, private companies have found it (just about) profitable to build underground railways in both London and New York.

Although states do not operate on a strict profit and loss basis, ultimately, how much an infrastructure project stands to lose will play a factor in whether it gets built or not. States seem to have found that it is only worth building (or running) subways in densely-populated parts of the world. Thus they’ve built them in Tokyo, Paris and Moscow, but not Birmingham or Edinburgh.

Why, this should be, I am not quite sure. I guess it has something to do with marginal costs in that the marginal cost of one extra rail passenger is, in fact, very low (no need for extra drivers, station staff or signallers), while the marginal cost of an extra road passenger is much higher. And, at some point, the average cost of a rail passenger becomes less than that of a road passenger.

Los Angeles (I was surprised to discover) does have a metro. But at 270,000 passengers a day it’s pretty insignificant in comparison to Tokyo’s 5m, Moscow’s 9m or even London’s 2.5m.

The real surprise is that in terms of total population and population density (the things I think are the biggest single determiners of whether a railway is viable or not) Los Angeles is remarkably similar to both New York and London.

All down to the evil machinations of General Motors? [In the 1940s (?) GM bought up LA’s trams, ripped up the tracks and replaced them with buses.] Personally, I don’t much buy this argument. If a Los Angeles metro or tram system had been such a good idea someone would simply have relaid the tracks.

No, I think something else is going on here. Two possibilities: one, that subways are, in fact, a really bad idea and London and New York are simply victims of their own history; two, something else is going on. Are LA’s roads significantly wider than in other places, perhaps?

In the economic sphere, I mean. Obviously, buying your mother a box of chocolates is a pretty unprofitable thing to do (in strict monetary terms, that is) but (for most of us) it is still worth doing.

The problem is…I’m not sure why (profit is such a good indicator, that is). I think it is wrapped up with the whole idea about why markets work but I can't quite work out why. So, if there are any free marketeers out there who could tell me I would very much appreciate it.

When I read Gordon and Richardson’s piece about urban expansion (aka sprawl) I was doubtful about their claim that Los Angeles is more densely-populated than New York. According to these figures (from Wendell Cox’s outfit) I was right to be. Having said that the differences are not great and it does strike me that a lot depends on how you define a city’s limits and whether you include things like industrial areas and parkland.

At their most basic level free markets depend on trade, voluntary exchange, swapping, call it what you will. But think about what goes on in some of the swaps in your life. When I go to work essentially what I am saying is that the money is more valuable than my labour, or, at least, that I guess that that will be the case. At the same time my employer is saying that (to him) my labour is more valuable than the money he is about to give me.

In other words we both win.

And that is why free markets work.

Introducing the Hampton Luxury Liner:

Walnut trim, eh? Looks like I'm going to have to eat some of my words.

Mind you, $37 for a single trip - Long Islanders must be loaded.

I don’t like the use of the term. The linguists out there will know the proper technical term for this but “sprawl” is a word which has two bits to it: a descriptive bit and a judgement bit. It describes urban expansion. Its judgement is that this is a bad thing.

Right here and now I don’t particularly wish to pronounce on whether urban expansion is a good thing or a bad thing, just to say that it is a legitimate matter for debate. And as such one should not seek to prejudice that debate by using a judgmental term like “sprawl”.