Zurich's Hauptbahnhof - A great example of a main train station (from my flickr photos).
I just finished reading Tony Judt's fascinating article What Is Living and What Is Dead In Social Democracy? from the New York Review of Books (December 19, 2009).
The article is especially interesting to me because is uses transportation, particularly privatization of transport services, as an example to explain the need for considering social benefits rather than very strict adherence to market-based economic considerations. Judt's example of private shops in a public railway station is excellent.
I read about the article in the equally interesting opinion article The Public Works by Nancy Levinson in Places. The article outlines how some of Judt's ideas could be thought about by designers (architects, engineers, and planners).
In October I blogged about the California High Speed Rail seminar organized by UC Berkeley's Institute of Transportation Studies. The seminar was videotaped and the tapes are available from the ITS News Bits website.
What an interesting post by Seth Godin on dynamic pricing yesterday, here's the final line:
Technology puts a lot more pressure on your imagination and creativity, even in pricing.
I have been working with Nadia Naik from Californians Advocating Responsible Rail Design on ways to use Web 2.0 techniques to improve the California high speed rail system planning and design by increasing the ability for citizens to collaborate in the planning process.
We just wrote a draft paper called: Peer-to-plan CSS 2.0: A Web 2.0 application to facilitate public collaboration in the project planning and design process. It builds on the work described in my Transportation Research Paper: Web 2.0 Applications for Improving Public Participation in Transport Planning - described in a previous post. As it is a rough concept, I would be interested in your comments and ideas.
TGV at Zurich Hauptbahnhof - October 2009 - from my flickr photos.
As I mentioned in a previous post, I just finished revising my TRB paper on Web 2.0 applications for improving public participation in the transportation planning process (download here: web2transport). Yesterday I was talking to someone about some of the ideas in the paper and I remembered a story I wrote in 2005 as part of a proposal for completing the Regional Rail Plan for the San Francisco Bay Area.
The story was a speech given by one of the participants in the Regional Rail Plan planning process given 25-years after completion of the California High Speed rail system. I just re-read the story and I was surprised about how good it is and how relevant so many of the points it raises are today. So, here's the link to a pdf file. As they say, sit back, relax and enjoy the trip!
San Francisco Bay Area Regional Rail Plan - A vision (2005)
(By the way, although people I talked with on the inside said that this story was an important reason for selecting the consultant team, the consultants never asked me to help with the project and I'm not sure what ever happened to the plan itself.)
I just posted the latest version of my US Transportation Research Board paper: Web 2.0 Applications for Improving Public Participation in Transport Planning on my website. I would love to get comments on the paper, so add one below or e-mail me directly.
I will be making a presentation on the paper at SPUR in San Francisco on January 7, 2010 and at the TRB Annual Meeting in Washington on Monday January 11. See my website for more details.
