Just what if ....

Here's a video of the Shanghai Maglev train. It only travels from the airport to downtown. At 431 km/hour. 273 mph.



Just what if ..

Let's just say that the Texas high speed rail project was brought back to life. And, let's say for sake of argument that said rail triangle was constructed - and, to quell the Negative Nancies that bitch about this rail triangle slaughtering inattentive soccer moms in their Suburbans and kids with learner permits at grade crossings - let's just say that it was constructed on elevated tracks.

Notice in the video that it takes the train fewer than three minutes to get up to full speed. The whole trip is 22 miles - about that from downtown Houston to the Woodlands, and lasts about seven minutes.

Imagine for a minute that you got onboard the train in downtown Houston. If you don't live in downtown houston, you took a connector up from Friendswood, or Pearland, or Katy, or Sugar Land. You walked over to the train, and you hopped onboard.

And sat down.

The train pulls out from the station, and you're sitting there with your laptop, or your latte from Fivebucks. While the train picks up speed, you notice that traffic on I-45 north isn't jammed up like it always is .. well, not quite so badly.

And, seven minutes later, the train slows down and stops in the Woodlands. A few people get off, and a few more get on. The train pulls out.

Let's say that this is at 7:30 in the morning, and you have a meeting in Dallas at 9:30. You left the house at 6:30, and took the car from your home in Royal Oaks to the Hillcroft Transit Center, which took you about 20 minutes on the Westpark Tollroad, and about 17 minutes if you took the light rail from Kirkwood to the HTC. The light rail from HTC to the downtown station takes another 15 minutes. Plenty of time to grab a latte from Fivebucks, which has a concession in the terminal.

And, from the Woodlands, we have 211 miles to go to downtown Dallas.

Four minutes up to speed, and you've passed through about 15 miles - 71 minutes later, you're pulling into the Dallas downtown rail station.

The taxi stand is only some 400 steps from the train platform, so you hoof it out to the cab line, and grab a cab to the building on Central in which your meeting is being held. 25 minutes in the cab, and you're walking out on the dot to take your meeting.

After your meeting, you grab a bite, and cab it back to the station for the 2:10 train back home.

At 3:30 you're in downtown Houston. You walk to another platform, get on the rail back to your office in Greenway Plaza, and at 3:45, you're walking into the lobby at 11 Greenway, heading for the elevator.

Compare this to how we do it now.

Southwest, come the end of August, will have 30 flights a day between Houston and Dallas/Love. Everyone's convinced that Houston Hobby is the best airport in the city (except for those who fly a lot) and so, we'll start out leaving the house.

Your meeting is at 9:30, and from Dallas Love to Central and, say, Throckmorton, that's going to take twenty minutes by cab. So, you have to arrive before 9:10. You need to leave a little time on the arrival end to wait for all of the people in front of you who were in boarding group "A" to unload their bags, skis, laptop cases and baby seats and de-plane. So, you need to be in Dallas by 8:55ish.

Scheduled block to block times from Hobby to Love are 55 minutes, so you need to be on the 8:00 a.m. flight.

It's a weekday, so you'll need to be at the airport at least by 7:15 to clear security. You printed your boarding passes online, so you don't have to check in anywhere, just get there and stand on queue with everyone else in the "B" boarding group. This is really cutting it close though, 45 minutes, so you plan on being at Hobby at 7:00 a.m. for the 8:00 a.m. departure.

Now, from Royal Oaks, we're going to assume that the rail is available (apples to apples and all) so you can either take your car (Westpark tollroad to US 59 to I45 south to the airport exits - give it 45 minutes if you're REALLY confident) or take the rail into town (37 minutes) and then out to Hobby on the rail line - another 20.

So, you're leaving your house at 6:00.

This is assuming everything works as it should. If it's thunderstormy - you're late in Dallas. If there's ice - you're late in Dallas. If it's raining and you took the car - you're missing your flight and you're late in Dallas.

But, everything goes as it should. So, you're saving a good thirty minutes on trip time up to Dallas this way. Time at home. Sleeping in.

While you're on the train, you're laptopping it. The ride is as smooth as sitting at your desk. Thundershowers? It provides visual interest through the windows.

Now, let's look at the return. Remember, on the high speed rail, we're back at the office at 3:45.

So, we leave lunch at 1:30. Our meeting mate in Dallas gives us a ride over to Love. We get there at about 1:50, so we can catch the next flight out at .. probably 2:30, giving us a little time to clear security. We push back, wheels up and we're at Hobby at 3:30.

Are you seeing where we're going here?

3:30, you stand up with all the other lemmings, and wait to de-plane. You head out to the light rail, back downtown and it's now 4:10. Change trains, and you're at the office 4:30ish.

You've saved one hour and twenty-five minutes today. The frustration level is also much lower.

What could you do with an extra hour and twenty-five minutes, not to mention being able to work the entire ride up and back, because you don't have to stow your laptop for takeoff/landing?

How many cars would it take off the roads?

What stands in the way? Well, several things. Firstly, Texas is all about private enterprise, and private enterprise is all about getting the money for free from the government. Secondly, unless the real estate developers here can figure out a way to make money on it, it's unlikely to gain much lobbying support.

Then, there's Southwest Airlines, who will definitely lobby against having their Texas Triangle business taken away from them. Why?

Southwest has 30 flights a day each way between Houston and Dallas. That's 8160 seats a day, and they're usually full. Their financial gross from that one city pair operation is approximately $563,000 a DAY. $180,172,800 a year, if you only look at weekdays.

That's money that's worth fighting for.

Think of the major cities separated by a few hundred miles which could be successfully paired with high speed rail.

London car .. how to fight illegal parking?

Who knew Abba could explain Iraq?

I've reached that milestone

I guess it's the final nail in the notion that I'm young and indestructible. The doctor today put me on blood pressure medication.

Not that I'm hypertensive, exactly, just sort of. My BP usually runs about 130/90. My heart rate is also a little high at 85.

Hm.

My letter to NPR

A few days ago, we had a storm related power outage, and my trusty clock radio needed to be reset. I had failed to get all the settings down, and I forgot to reset the morning alarm to KUHF, my local Public Radio station.

The last three mornings, I've been waking up to a shrill, mechanical "beep, beep, beep."

This morning, I awoke and I realized I was in a better mood on arising than I have been in many months.

Of course, I had to reflect on this a moment.

I am now free of listening to endless, pointless "news" about Iraq. That's what has elevated my mood. I no longer have to listen to car bombings, the pointless deaths of our soldiers, the posturing of our administration and the "loyal opposition" who offer no opposition at all to this illegal, senseless, horrific nightmare.

And since I live in a state in which there is no point to calling one of my fright wing Congressmen, I am free of the frustration of being able to do nothing about it at all.

I also realized that I've chosen to ride public transit four days a week, and my afternoons no longer lend themselves to listening to "All Things Considered" as I sit in bumper to bumper traffic.

Ditto with the input restrictions on listening to the same pointless recitation about Iraq.

And my mood is greatly improved.

So, I have now officially given up my mornings with "Morning Edition," and my evening drive times with "All Things Considered." Until it's over.

Ignorance is indeed bliss.

Wasn't I just saying this?

From the thecarlounge.net, which is a great little news source - snarky and fun, and loaded with up to the minute information.

Brian's friend Wes is the author - he's awesome. In fact, I want all of you to go and start reading thecarlounge.net so that he keeps publishing it. I'll wait.

The 1970 booklet from China entitled China Tames Her Rivers is full of eye-poppingly extreme Communist propaganda, but every word of it was meant seriously, including these: "There were early attempts by traitors to hoodwink the people with such decadent Western notions as "put technique first" and "place specialists in charge of engineering." These traitors were swiftly dealt with."

Mao had a deep-seated loathing for engineers and other intellectuals, and so did everything he could to minimise their contribution to Chinese society. In the so-called Great Leap Forward, intellectuals were rounded up and shot, and Mao (who didn't know a thing about metallurgy) ordered farmers to quit farming and instead build small coal smelters on their land, melt down their farming implements and turn them into raw steel. He thought this would act as a springboard for China to have a sudden industrial revolution. What actually happened was a sudden lack of food because nobody was farming, a sudden lack of farm implements because they'd all been melted down, and a sudden glut of utterly useless metal goo that couldn't even remotely be called steel. Vast numbers of people starved to death.

So, culturally, China not only has no history of valuing Western "quality" and design as we know them, but they actually have a strong history of violently devaluing them. They will emerge from this, but it's going to take a very long time. Unfortunately, Western MBAs don't want to wait, and the collateral damage includes mislabeled glycol being sold as glycerin, melamine being stuffed into dog food, and this: The Detroit News is reporting that federal safety officials have ordered over 450,000 tires made by Hangzhou Zhongce Rubber Co. recalled because corner-cutting during assembly can lead to complete and catastrophic tread separation. The tires were sold for light trucks under the brand names Westlake, Compass, Telluride and YKS in a variety of 15 and 16-inch sizes. The recall affects all tires sold because the manufacturer "failed to provide information that would allow [the US distributor] to determine exactly how many tires, and which batches, have the problem."

Here's the news article from the Detroit News. The website (thecarlounge.net, remember?) has a cool picture of what this tread/corner separation looks like.

Monday, Monday .. donde esta la autobus?

Took the bus this morning. Apparently, white people don't ride the bus when it's raining. Personally, not having to get all jacked up about people doing stupid stuff when the road's wet is just dandy with me. I only waited outside for about four minutes before said bus rolled up, and so I'm just damp.

And, I'm just all read up and out. In a moment, I'm going to close most of the web browsers that I use all day long and focus on the tasks that I have on my pop-up task list.

After I pay some bills.

If you're wondering how we know that someone else is gay, read this.

Okay, so blah blah blah blah .. I hate sunty behavior. That's French, with the cedilla. Enough on that subject.

Bram was chasing asian boys until about 0500, and when he got up and out, it was nearly 11:00. He was freaked out to find my car in the garage. "Did you take the bus?"

Yepper.

So, things are happening here. Five new loan applications today alone, it seems.

More on the "to do" list.

What's up with all you that have blogs

and write in them about once every twenty days? Or every year?

If you started a blog and you aren't interested in maintaining it, just close the damned thing down. Find that link that says "delete this blog" and nuke the thing.

That will prevent me from having to go, hopefully, to see whether MAYBE you wrote in your blog.

Just uninstalled a whole bunch of software on the laptop that were duplicates, useless or cheesy - the lappy is now very zippy as compared to before. That's awesome!

Here's a great blog post on the state of the "liberal" media and people's general unconsciousness about what the government is up to:

Qui Tacet Consentit Hotlist
by Devilstower
Sun Jun 24, 2007 at 04:52:46 PM CDT

The Sunday paper arrived by my mailbox carrying its usual heft of ads, sports, and television schedules. Above the headlines on the front page was the story of a man who killed his wife and kids, and was foolish enough to not only do so on the basis of the plot from a popular TV crime show that aired the previous week, but to base his murder scheme on a plotline in which the murderer was caught. The rest of the front page was taken up with a story of religion in baseball, the difficulties of a local museum, and a study on mass transit. Nothing too unusual.

In the meantime, we have a Vice-President who has declared his independence from law and regulation, and a President who, far from reigning in in this ridiculous Constitutional overreach, has decided to play me too, even in reference to regulations that explicitly address the office of the president and vice president.

Cheney is not subject to the executive order, she said, "because the president gets to decide whether or not he should be treated separately, and he's decided that he should."

In the ultimate evolution of Nixonian dogma, they are quite blatantly asserting that the rule of law may be ignored, and that the president and vice-president obey only at their own discretion.

Did you know that members of the St. Louis Cardinals often stay after the game to talk to fans about faith? Or that Paris has agreed to have an interview with Larry King? Or that Conservapedia states that the Pleistocene is a "theoretical" period of time? All those stories made the "A" section of my Sunday paper.

There have been some voices raised that the we are nearing a constitutional crisis. That's not true. We are in a constitutional crisis. And to lose this fight, we don't have to land in jail. We don't have to see troops on the street or get a midnight knock on the door.

People are still speculating over the meaning of the Soprano's finale. A rare monkey was born at the Tokyo Zoo. Colin Powell is coming to town to give a motivational speech.

We have only to worry about the events of everyday life. We have only to flip on the tube. We have only to be silent. Qui Tacet Consentit -- silence implies consent.

Toward the page of section A, there's a story on more soldiers losing their lives in Iraq. That's sad, but look there's a bit on how Peru has lowered the age of consent to 14, and a human interest piece on the struggles of Muslim detective in France.

Every paper that is not running this story on the front page, every day, is providing a blessing to the administration's actions. Every television station that wastes a minute on celebrity gossip, is complicit in the destruction of democracy. And every one of us not actively protesting these actions is passively supporting them.

There's a review of the newest model from Saturn in the auto section, the business section mentions that gas is below $3 nationally, and just look at those ads! Some department stores are already discounting summer merchandise

Meteor Blades has already given you a terrific insider's history of the protest movement during the Vietnam era, and told you about Iraq Moratorium Day, the series of protests that are planned to start in September. I plan to participate, and I hope you will, as well.

There's a long section in News Watch about how we may have no choices but New Yorkers in the election. The Midwesterners interviewed for the story don't seem too thrilled about it. And hey, the city museum had a two-headed hermaphroditic albino snake. How cool is that? Oh, but it died.

But don't wait for September. If you already belong to a local group, keep participating, if you don't, then join. And even if you're not out involved in a formal protest, conduct a constant, personal protest. It can be at your school, at your church, or at the copy machine, but whenever opportunity allows, make it clear that you do not consent. Make it clear that this is not okay with you. It's not ordinary. It's not something that "all politicians do." It's not business as usual. Do not be silent.

Where's that movie schedule? I think we could still catch a flick this afternoon.