yakalskovich

If you're dreaming, I'm having the same one...... should we pinch each other?

Let's pinch each other and see if Obama is still there, or if we wake up and are back in the Bush era...

Urgh, if the option is to wake up in the Bush ere? I'll stick to dreaming thanks! So far I'm liking the no nonsense businesslike approach of President Obama. Particularly since Slum-Brown's visit wasn't all fancy-schmancy entertainments! Wish we could get that idea into our politicians heads, and some of the B(please substitute letter of choice)ankers in the UK....

Yep -- I'd vote for somebody like that as well. It is just a continued pleasure to see the man working. Just look at this picture:

see more Political Pictures

Without the PunditKitchen caption, of course...

Well, the Bush era is the alternative we know. I don't want to imagine a McCain-Palin administration. I prefer to leave the nastier parts of my imagination for plotting in Morningstar Manor or Milliways.-

Yes, and there has been plotting just recently at the Manor... some of which has now started!! Might need to involve my two favourite spookies at some point if you're up for that?

Oh that would be lovely, especially here in Vegas. They had a huge one in LA many, many years ago, but the automobile companies bought it out and shut it down (sometime in the 50's I think). There're still massive subway tunnels under LA that are just bricked over.

Sad.

Oh yes, I heard about that story about some car company conspiracy buying out and closing down public transport in several US cities in the 50s and 60s, but I simply pegged that as a conspiracy theory...

I just looked up Ann Arbor on Wikipedia because

ceitfianna is looking into opportunities there, and read that Ann Arbor and Ypsilanti have a bad gentrification problem while Detroit and Flint, places they are sort of mashed up against, are notoriously turning into ghost towns as the industriy the cities was based on collapses. What these places need is an S-Bahn as we have in similar areas in Germany, and the pressure of gentrification would spread more evenly, and the disadvantaged areas of that conurbation could be resettled more easily by people for whom the 'good' areas are becoming too expensive while they can still work or study there, and take advantage of the culture. That works very well for the Ruhr area of Germany, a large conurbation of which parts are made up from abandoned heavy industry as well. S-Bahns make longer commutes inside such a conurbation possible; people are much rather willing to sit for an hour in the S-Bahn and read, changing trains at some central point, than to drive for the same time (or considerably more, in times of traffic jams).

But what with the car companies leaning towards conspiracies, introducing an S-Bahn to the larger Detroit area might be a tad cheeky...

Welcome to my professional life.

That was very well said. If we had work, I'd hire you :)

Oooh, thank you! **blushes**

Still, where do we drop that idea off so the right people hear about it? After all, the system exists and works well. The rights sort of people just need to take a look at the VRR* and implement that there. It's not that anybody needs to reinvent the wheel or anything. "Yo, look at that!" at the right point should be enough.-

* The Nazgul, who hails from the Ruhr area, says that VRR secretly means 'Verein raffgieriger Raubritter' but that's only because people, spoiled by having all that as a matter of course, start to grumble at pricing.

It really is common sense, but people are crazy.

Here is a link to the now-officially-adopted transit system map that I've been partially involved in planning for:

http://www.livablecommunitiescoalition.org/uploads/100012_bodycontentfiles/100703.pdf

The thick blue and orange lines exist today. I was involved in envisioning and am now doing detailed design for the green loop around Downtown, which will be S-Bahn technology. The green tram running east west from Bankhead to Ponce Springs is also my idea :)

Wow!!! You are getting Atlanta an S-Bahn. And trams! New trams! That is bloody brilliant!!

Is that project getting stimulus package funding, or is it funded already?

The loop thing is a London type of idea; Munich or Rhein-Main area S-Bahns all orient towards the centre, and the VRR is polycentric anyway. The Detroit/Flint/Ann Arbor area would need a polycentric layout as well, I guess.-

The BeltLine is 70% funded. It's going to take a while to finish the detailed planning though. I think that the only one that is "shovel ready," as they say, is the Peachtree Streetcar (tram).

There's an inaccurate short movie on it here (it has the wrong transit vehicle):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YvngF4qUSgg&feature=related

The BeltLine can be found here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gGb_P5NCgE0

My own report is below. I wrote, managed, and drew up the SA 2 plan (please note that the version on-line is the draft - I've since fixed the typos). You can see many pictures of Germany in the Final Draft Report Main Body :)

http://www.beltline.org/ResourceLibrary/Planning/tabid/1824/Default.aspx

Ahhh! What I didn't realise is that the Beltline had existed before and has to be woken up and patched, rather than being hewn through rail-unfriendly suburban neighbourhoods and abandoned industrial land.

I wish there was a public transport system out this way! There is one in the area I go to college, but they don't run on Sundays :( Public transport would reduce the parking issue at school, and by far, ease up my knuckled driving in the winter!

Leave a message on recovery.gov and tell them you want one? Who knows: - they might read it!

Wow!

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