tingilinde

take the train

France may ban air travel on routes that trains can cover in 150 minutes. It only impacts a few routes and France has a robust passenger rail network, but it's a start.

 

beyond build it and they will come

Finding the right topology for cycling networks - they have to be useful.

 

 

 

just the thing for muddy roads

When Vickers hacked a Wolseley car in 1926...

 

the inflatable airplane

gcaptain on the suez canal salvage job

a bad day for a canal pilot

A very bad day in the Suez Canal as a ship gets wedged blocking traffic.

 

 

towards working transit

Buses are almost always seen as a necessary component for regions with over 100,000 people.  Farhad Manjoo is taken with London's approach. 

 

getting ready for large scale ev adoption

It's a large undertaking and not exactly straightforward.  The type of government we have over the next decade will probably have a big impact.

 

salt monopolies

Road salt could get expensive.

snip

...

Every year, over 1300 people die in car accidents due to snowy, slushy, or icy pavement, with another 117,000 injured. Snowy weather is also a huge waste of time and money, costing roughly $500M a day, and 544 million vehicle-hours a year of delay. Road salt doesn’t eliminate this problem entirely, but it comes close, reducing collisions by up to 88% and injuries by 85%. Studies show that deicing salt pays for itself within the first 25 minutes after it is spread. Roughly 40% of domestic salt, produced largely from mining, is used not for food or chemicals, but for deicing. It’s a major expense for cities and states, and commercial customers like shopping malls. And because weather leads to demand spikes, and America tends to operate in just-in-time style inventory models instead of managing risk by storing surpluses of critical commodities, there are often shortages of road salt precisely when everyone needs it most.

And that’s why I paid attention when ex-convict and junk bond king Michael Milken’s alleged private equity firm, Stone Canyon, bought two major salt producers over the last year. Early in 2020, Stone Canyon acquired Kissner, a producer of deicing salt, private label consumer salt, and salt-related chemicals. Then, nine months later, Stone Canyon bought Morton’s Salt, the largest producer in the world, for $3.2 billion, and it is now awaiting antitrust approval. Kissner is itself a roll-up of the salt industry, having bought Central Salt and Lion Salt and turned itself from a small Ontario-based regional distributor of ice melt into one of the giants of the industry. So Stone Canyon is overseeing a roll-up of roll-ups.

...

 

 

shipping delays

Deviations from the normal of a massive system have created international shipping issues.