141–150 of 155 posts
Interesting that some of the stickers contain significant white elements. Is the material used less likely to mark? Actually, I'm not sure that these are stickers. Maybe it's paint. If it's a sticker it'd be very difficult to apply this perfectly...
(Search "vinyl train wrap".)
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The design and planning process for UK infrastructure is already notoriously expensive and we already do significantly more "planning" than we used to do 100 years ago (when we were actually capable of rapidly building high quality infrastructure). I would expect there to already be consultants doing similar to what you've suggested however the work is complex and many will be quite cut-off from the build process or…
Sounds like many of these issues could be described with better knowledge sharing and more tightly coupled processes between planning/building/maintenence. It sounds quite fatalistic what you've said, that we've basically reached maximum planning saturation so we can only pay the costs afterwards when things go wrong. But surely questioning these assumptions is good for our civic involvement and for the lines.
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This is a negative outcome of the Town and Country Planning Act. We've mandated by law that all planning is done upfront and due to the possibility of construction fraud provide detailed designs to building contractors that disallow them from substituting any materials or design choices without it being explicitly requested by the employer. In theory, there can be conversation between individual subcontractors and th…
If it's your project, you can order the builders to reconfigure the ventilation ducts pretty much however you like. Building control require that an architect sign off on things like the size of the beam holding the roof up. If you change that, the architect will have to sign off on the building as constructed before building control will approve it. Planning permission is given on the basis of external appearance, s…
I'm talking with some level of experience here. I did a residential project that was obviously much smaller than this but still very expensive (£100+k). Even for this architects recommended a detailed design and a contract that enforced this.
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How much energy is "wasted" to print all those paper posters, ship them to all stations, have people periodically replace them, discard the old ones etc?
Probably a lot less than it costs to build, ship, and actively power the displays. It's easy to estimate: if the displays + lifetime power costs more than all the posters, then chances are they use a lot more power. The cost of electricity isn't one of those externalities a business can hoist on society - it has to pay for each kilowatt-hour and that cost is easily quantifiable.
If they are gaining some sort of monetary incentive from replacing poster displays with LED screens, and your reasoning holds true, then perhaps in the greater scheme of things the LED displays do use less 'power'.
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In a small house you can move outlets. In a large building the space for every wire and pipe is accounted for. Moving the outlet means that the wires to it have to move and in turn that means a plumber later can't come in and put the pipe where it must go. In a house they solve this by having the plumber come in before the electrician (the order is much more complex), but in a large building you need them working at…
Sometimes - but some large buildings have loads of space above suspended ceilings and in cable trays and suchlike. Office buildings know every new tenant might want to move internal walls, rearrange sockets, reconfigure the kitchen and so on, and they're built with that in mind. You're right that making arbitrary ad-hoc changes during construction can be expensive , of course. Especially if it's wrong and has to be t…
It of course isn't illegal to make changes - but it is expensive and thus not something you should do. (though some things are much easier than others to retrofit half way in.
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Rails in particular have improved quite a bit. Modern newest generation slab designs requiring very, very little maintenance and are fast to install. > Innovation generally tries things that look good to politicians who don't understand trains, but in reality people who understood trains 100 years ago had the idea and rejected it as a bad idea - and the reasons they are bad ideas didn't change! I'm all for respecting…
> is idea that modern engineers are idiots and can't think of anything people 100 years That is not what I was trying to say. I'm saying that politicians and managers are unable to think of things that people 100 years didn't think of. While that isn't 100% true, it is very close. Though most of the time engineers today couldn't think of anything they didn't think of 100 years ago. However sometimes advances in other…
Yes, infrastructure has gotten more expensive, and that is particularly true in the Anglosphere. But those problem don't have so much to do with the chosen design, but rather it operation and planning processes.
What actual parts of the design are actually bad?
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Metro is a balm compared to the PenFed illuminated tunnel at Washington Dulles airport. For non locals, this is in a long walkway between access train and terminal, is lit in bright blue moving images, and plays a silly song about interest rates at high volume for the entirety of your time in the tunnel. It has cemented my desire to never do business with PenFed, for sure.
My favorite thing about the DC metro are the micro-targeted ads. Obviously, there's all the defense contractor junk at Pentagon City, but I also remember one at Foggy Bottom that was like "so-and-so is on the payroll of ISIS and the State Department should BAN them."
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Other people would pay good money to watch. Hey, this is sounding like a sustainable business model with real potential!
We should somehow cram AI in it and lure sweet VC money. Maybe a counter overlay on the stream keeping track of how many people got hosed that day, which would increment using computer vision, GPT and a very expensive production pipeline.
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Transport for London's [1] revenue should be £9100 million this year. Revenue from advertising was £130 million last year, so around 1.5%. It would be nicer if they would just end the advertising. [1] London Underground (metro), several within-London urban and suburban rail lines, buses, trams, river ferries, major roads https://tfl.gov.uk/info-for/media/press-releases/2023/march/... https://content.tfl.gov.uk/tfl-ad…
Just increase tax a bit more to make up for it :)
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If the (quite useless) armrests weren't there to prevent the homeless from sleeping on them, people wouldn't be sitting in the exact same spot every time, causing a light smear instead of defined person-like shaped on the wall.
This isn't the United States, other countries don't tolerate vagrants sleeping on public transit.