city of Christiansfeld, Denmark

For instance, the city of Christiansfeld, Denmark used “ambiguity and urban legibility” in street design to reduce high death rates on the town’s central traffic intersection. Instead of erecting warning signs, road markings, and traffic signals, Bjarne Winterberg and the engineering firm Ramboll removed traffic signals and road markings. No mode of transport was given priority and pedestrians, buses, cars, and trucks used eye contact to negotiate the junction.

Surface treatment, lightning columns, and junction corners were squared up. The purpose was to make the intersection resemble the centre of the town or to create a public realm. Expectedly, the number of killed or seriously injured (KSI) during the last three years was reduced to zero, moreover, traffic backups were reduced. Compared to junctions having traffic signals, ambiguous junctions prevent accidents, reduce delays, and are cheaper to construct and maintain.

Shared space is another woonerf principle that is applied to transform busy traffic intersections. In Friesland market town of Oosterwolde, different types of traffic intermingle giving an impression of chaos and disorder, in fact, traffic negotiates the junction using eye contact and care for other types of transport. No state regulation or control is visible and traffic movement depends on informal convention and legibility.

FedEx May Cancel Jet Orders

The Journal reported that a FedEx spokesman said the company may cancel plans to purchase the planes, valued at nearly $8 billion, if Congress passes a bill that would remove certain employees at FedEx from the jurisdiction of the federal Railway Labor Act of 1926, the law that today also governs labor organizations at airlines.

Congress is currently debating a bill that would move FedEx to the jurisdiction of the National Labor Relations Board, an organization that generally covers trucking companies.

FedEx was formed as an airline and thus is able to enjoy the benefits of the RLA, which has provisions that complicate union organizing.  This is seen as a key advantage over rival UPS (UPS 47.24) which was formed as a trucking company and is governed by the National Labor Relations Act, which allows for easier union organization.

Opportunities for Anticompetitive Behavior in Postal Services

In the United States, the delivery monopoly is over letter mail. The Private Express Statutes prohibit the private carriage of "letters or packets," and the Postal Service defines a letter as "a message directed to a specific person or address and recorded in or on a tangible object." The courts have accepted the Postal Service's broad test for a letter as, "the presence or absence of an address."

The USPS's definition of a letter, adopted by the Postal Service in 1974, differs from earlier definitions and is much more expansive. Indeed, the Post Office and then the Postal Service has consistently expanded the scope of its monopoly over a 200-year period. Such an expansive definition leads naturally to monopolization of materials not intuitively considered letters, such as bills and advertising matter, which constitute a substantial and increasing proportion of the mail stream. According to the Postal Service's definition, an addressed grocery store advertisement is a letter.

A substantial portion of USPS revenue comes from monopolized activities. In 2002, 57 percent of the Postal Service's revenues were from monopolized first-class mail, while almost 25 percent were from partially monopolized Standard Mail A (formerly third-class mail).

The monopoly is well enforced. The USPS can conduct searches and seizures if it suspects citizens of contravening its monopoly. For example, in 1993, armed postal inspectors entered the headquarters of Equifax Inc. in Atlanta. The postal inspectors demanded to know if all the mail sent by Equifax through Federal Express was indeed "extremely urgent," as mandated by the Postal Service's criteria for suspension of the Private Express Statutes. Equifax paid the Postal Service a fine of $30,000. The Postal Service reportedly collected $521,000 for similar fines from twenty-one mailers between 1991 and 1994.

AEI - Short Publications - Opportunities for Anticompetitive Behavior in Postal Services


http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/12/09/1935223

Google Transit NJ NYC

Google transit - NYC, NJ. Lovely!

How Electric Cars Could Save the Grid

Their idea is simple: electric cars have to plug into the power grid anyway to get their batteries recharged. Why not use those batteries collectively as electricity "sponges" to soak up and wring out the excess power from utility companies that fluctuates notoriously on any given day?

Utility companies would benefit because they'd have a place to store energy; car owners would receive a fee to participate; and car manufacturers would have an attractive selling-point by which to promote their vehicles.

And it doesn't take much to get started.

"If you can collect 300 cars, that fleet is sufficient for a utility operator to run a V2G operation," said team member Ajay Prasad, professor of mechanical engineering at the University of Delaware in Newark.

Car owners drive, on average, about one to two hours per day. So statistically, a large percentage of the total population of cars is sitting idle at any given time.

At the same time, electric grid operators play a balancing game of generating electricity that will meet customer demand. On top of that, they must pay to keep a generator fired up that will serve as a back up in the event of a catastrophic failure on the grid. Until the failure, that energy is wasted.

But if all of those parked cars were electric and plugged into the grid, the utility operator could automatically draw on the batteries exactly as needed, meeting demand. And instead of paying a power plant to generate energy that would be wasted anyway, they would pay a fee to the electric car owner for making the battery available.

This sounds fine and dandy, except it won't work in India. Well, it won't be needed in India until far into the future. I guess our current needs far exceed what the grid can pump.

An opportunity for Zipcar?

A Plan to Improve Campus Mobility

Lets say we have a few slots reserved for zip car at every building on campus. In college towns, we can have zipcars at dorms, walmart, etc.

Whereismybus.com and nextbus.com

NextBus uses Global Positioning System (GPS) tracking satellites to provide vehicle arrival information and real-time maps— not just bus schedules — to passengers and managers of public transit, shuttles, and trains.


http://www.whereismybus.com/

The Future of the Interstate Highway System

Although the Interstate at 47,000 miles represents only 1 percent of total system mileage, it carries 24 percent of all traffic and 41 percent of combination-vehicle truck traffic. It is a strategic system of arterials which performs well. But it has meant far more to our economy and way of life than its designers could have imagined.

The Interstate Highway System was a technological breakthrough which increased productivity and transformed the country in ways not anticipated. A safer, 65 mile-per-hour system was overlaid onto a less safe, less well-maintained 20 to 40 miles per hour system which previously existed in urban and rural areas. National, multi-state, regional, and local economies were all empowered to reorganize to take advantage of new capabilities. The quantum change it brought about has been compared with the railroads of the 19th Century which also more than doubled speeds and capacities of connections between places, and the jet aviation system of the 20th Century which tied together the nation and the world for business and leisure travel.

Regions that were not part of the nation’s economy became integrated through new opportunities to have longer distance links to goods movement and for personal travel. Look what has happened to the south and west over the past 50 years. Urban areas were able to expand and grow, enabling more agglomerations of industries and skills with much larger urban boundaries. Metropolitan areas now generate over 80 percent of jobs, growth, and development.

The Interstate Highway System has made significant contributions to U.S. productivity growth. During the 1950s, the contribution of highway network investments to annual productivity growth was 31 percent. It averaged 25 percent in the 1960s, and by the 1980s the net social rate of return on highway capital was 10 percent, about equal to rates of return on private capital.

The Interstate System enabled the U.S. economy in the last half of the 20th century to develop within a much larger envelope of potential size and productivity. However, as the capacity and the performance of the current Interstate Highway System are used up, this will reduce the Interstate’s ability to support the increased productivity the United States will need to compete in the global economy.

Greater supply chain productivity and lower logistics costs have been critical to U.S. economic growth. From 1980 to 2003, the cost of transportation was cut in half because of infrastructure improvements making U.S. goods globally competitive.

Magic in the Metro

With 8 million people passing through each day, Moscow's metro system is the busiest in the world. It's also one of most of the beautiful.

Built during Stalin's rule, the stations are known as "the people's palaces" for their elegant design and lavish use of marble, mosaics, sculptures, and even chandeliers. The intricate mosaics lining Kievskaya station, the stained-glass panels at the Novoslobodskaya stop, and the gold-trimmed white porcelain caverns at Prospekt Mira are more museum than metro.