Friday Reads – 19 January 2024

A ride on Glasgow’s new Subway trains (BusAndTrainUser)

Car sales: we’ve hit a grim milestone not seen since 1981 (Slate)

How Montreal’s New Rapid Transit Line Saved Millions Per Mile (Bloomberg)

Japan to postpone plan to extend Hokkaido Shinkansen Line by 2031 (The Japan Times)

The five-minute city is a new bottom-up model taking over Paris (Domus)

BART’s new train fleet is saving hundreds of millions w/ in-house engineering (Trains)

E-scooter companies are going bankrupt. That should alarm you even if you hate them (Fast Company)

The Shipping Forecast – 100 years on air: Podcast (BBC)

2 comments

  1. David Zipper makes a pleading case for e-Scooters, but fails to recognise many of the issues, or offer any solutions other than “build fully segregated bike lanes”.

    Fundamentally, I can’t see what problem eScooters are there to solve that a bike or an eBike can’t do equally as well or better. Moreover, in densely populated areas where road space and parking space are both at a premium, getting people onto a frequent, comfortable bus service is a far better outcome. Better for safety, better for the environment, better for accessibility and better value for public money.

  2. Re. US vehicle bloat, for a recent visit my son had borrowed a VW monstrosity of a full-cab pickup (Amarok ?), noticeably larger than a similar one he’d arrived in once before and filled with all sorts of hitech goodies. When I suggested, reasonably enough, that there was no need for such a vehicle apart from someone one requiring its specific features, e.g. a gang of 4+ taking a lot of equipment on-site (and even then the luxurious in-cab plushness etc wasn’t suitable for such a utilitarian purpose) but most would be bought by urban warriors, his comment was that in the USA it would be considered compact.

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