Bluebird of happiness

I totally agree. Cellists regularly book an extra seat for their cello, and when this weird security thing happened they were forced to part with their instruments and forfeit the $$ spent on the seat. Some people took 14 hr trian rides in lieu of a 1-2 hr flight in order to avoid ruining their instruments.

Also, for the record, trumpet carrying cases are totally smaller than the rolling bags they allow as carryons! So...WTF?!

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Yeah, my mom did this when she bought her cello (made near Boston, but she lives in WV). I've wondered ever since the new security stuff what she could do these days -- it's not like "Cello [mom's last name]" has a passport.

Of course, any halfway reasonable, sane person could open the case, observe the cello, and be cool with that. But I've already made one untrue assumption in that sentence.

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"Of course, any halfway reasonable, sane person could open the case, observe the cello, and be cool with that."

Yeah, I don't know WHY they can't make this exception for musical instruments only.

"But I've already made one untrue assumption in that sentence."

Oh yeah, that's why. :(

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knell.livejournal.com

Oops, posted a comment rather than a new entry. My bad!

(Although I personally think that breaking jazz trumpeters' arms isn't enough. You need to confiscate their mouthpieces to be sure.)

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harleybitch.livejournal.com

oh and *of course* his arm got broken because he struggled not because whoever did that did it wrong.

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Just in general, the air travel business is the strangest business in the world. It seems like so many people are unsatisfied with it, the airlines are constantly going bankrupt. It seems like it can't go on forever like this. Either the system needs to change or some alternative methods of travel need to be intvented. I looked into taking trains a few times and the travel time was always at least twice as long while the price was maybe 10% cheaper than flying.

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feuervogel

The reason going by train takes so long is because we don't have the infrastructure for train travel. If I wanted to take a train from here (Raleigh/Durham) to, say NYC, I get to go a very convoluted route that involves a 6-10-hour layover in DC.

While, if I wanted to take the train from Munich to Berlin, a comparable distance, I could get there in 6 hours on the high-speed train, longer if I took the medium-speed train, and a stupid length of time if I took only regional trains.

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That's too bad. Maybe some gov money towards this would be a good idea. I could see a decent train system being set up on the east and west coasts as well as the upper-midwest. Might be in everyone's interests to have another viable travel option for long trips. I know that they had a DC through NY high speed train at some point, but I heard it wasn't doing very well.

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"Some" government money?
Amtrak only exists because of massive subsidies. The company is a pathetic disaster. No leg is capable of turning a profit except for the Northeast corridor (DC <-> Boston).
Not that I don't enjoy trains. I'm just sayin'.

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feuervogel

How many billions of dollars of government bailouts have the airlines gotten in the last 5 years? Just sayin'.

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leora.livejournal.com

And how much government funding goes to build rodes to encourage car travel, often to the point of requiring cars in areas to get around, which has numerous harmful effects on people and society?

Personally, I find this inexcusable. It was his property, and they should never, ever have tried to confiscate it.

They had the right to say: If you do not give us your instrument, then you may not board our plane. They had the right to bar him from entering the plane. Had he tried to force his way onto the plane, they had the right to use physical force. But from the description, he was trying to regain his instrument, and only trying to regain his instrument, which he had every right to do.

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"And how much government funding goes to build rodes to encourage car travel, often to the point of requiring cars in areas to get around, which has numerous harmful effects on people and society?"

Ugh, I know, this is so bad. I have a friend who goes to grad school in Tampa and lives only about a mile from school. She would like to walk every day, but there are no sidewalks and really big, crazy roads, so she drives...which sometimes takes her 20 minutes because of traffic! (so walking would have been exercise, less polluting, and faster, but they have zero infrastructure for it!)

"They had the right to say: If you do not give us your instrument, then you may not board our plane. They had the right to bar him from entering the plane. Had he tried to force his way onto the plane, they had the right to use physical force. But from the description, he was trying to regain his instrument, and only trying to regain his instrument, which he had every right to do."

I also totally agree. Granted, I'm sure he wanted his instrument AND to board the plane and that's what he was first arguing about, but I think after a while he just wanted the instrument back and that's when they broke his arm!

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leora.livejournal.com

I'm familiar with that sort of design. Back when I could still ride a bicyclce, I wanted to bike places, like the bookstore and grocery store. They were across the street and maybe 2 blocks down. But I couldn't do it, because biking on the ultra-fast mega-roads was too dangerous. I did walk sometimes, which was very difficult, because we had to cut across the little clover-leaf of busy roads, but it could be done. Walking generally meant walking along non-maintained grassy areas, sometimes climbing down the small bit of hill to walk along the parking area for the strips of stores. It was really depressing.

I am strongly against areas that require cars to get places. It's bad for the environment. It's bad for health. It's bad for children, because it forces them to be overly dependent on their parents or other adults. It's bad for anyone who is borderline able to drive, because it encourages them to drive when it'd be safer for themselves and others not to, it's bad for people who are outright not safe to drive, since often you will get your license suspended for things like drunk driving, but they will still let you drive to and from work, because it's recognized that not letting people do that is crippling to them in many places, it's bad for the disabled who simply cannot drive.

My partner grew up in Germany; he came to the US when he was 14. It was a hard transition after many years of being able to get places on his own to suddenly not being able to travel. I really don't like the US system in many places. :/ And then they say it isn't worth improving public transit, because so few people use it. But that's an obvious feedback loop.

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And then they say it isn't worth improving public transit, because so few people use it. But that's an obvious feedback loop.

Totally true. One thing that is different between the US and Europe, though, is geography in general. The US is just bigger and more spread out. Unfortunately, for some cities to be properly reformed in terms of public transit, the whole city would have to be redesigned to be compact rather than sprawling. I guess you can put public transport in places like Phoenix, but you can see why that's harder to do than in New York City.

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leora.livejournal.com

Yeah, but that's because of a feedback loop the US has had with cars for ages. Cities are designed around the assumption of cars. And we don't put in bike lanes or design for public transit. Sure, it'd be hard and not as good, but you have to start moving toward it... then over time, it'll become easier and easier, cheaper and cheaper. But the more we say, well, it's sprawly, we need cars... well, everyone has a car, so let's make it sprawly... the harder it gets to change. You have to start somewhere.

And part of the reason it developed this way was because of decisions of the US government to promote car use by putting so much energy into roads for private cars rather than into other options.

Yes, I know, it's hellish digging out of a hole like this, and we can't necessarily afford to just up and fix the whole thing. But we can work toward it. Where I lived was a developing area. Sections of it were still just wildernessy... not extreme wilderness, but plants and weeds and wild rabbits and such. They were creating a new place to live, and they were doing it all wrong.

Of course, I seem to be preaching to the choir.

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Of course, I seem to be preaching to the choir.

yes, you are. (I was about to be all, "I AGREE" then I saw this sentence.)

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rshruti.livejournal.com

Same goes for trains: if they put more money into passenger rail tracks and less money into interstate highways we'd probably have a much different landscape wrt rail travel.

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I disagree that bike lanes are necessarily a good thing, but I won't go into that rant unless someone is interested. (For any onlookers who don't know the context here, I've been a bike commuter for 5 years now, whereas I've owned a car for a year and a half. I put more miles on the bike than on the car last year by a large margin. So you know where my sympathies lie.)

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kirin

Now I'm all curious. Do you have this rant written up in another entry that could be linked or anything?

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Nah, but I can rewrite it at the drop of a hat :).

OK. So bike lanes are typically advocated because people feel that they will encourage bike use by making people feel safer. The chief problem with this theory is that bike lanes do not make people be safer; in fact, poorly designed bike lanes make people less safe. They accomplish this in a variety of ways: by being too narrow; by being striped directly in the "kill zone" adjacent to parked cars and not providing enough width to escape opening doors (this tactic is very popular!), by being striped stupidly at intersections (eg funneling bikes to the right of right-turning cars). In short, bike lanes are often designed by people who don't understand the needs of cyclists, and their cluelessness shows. Additionally, if bike lanes succeed in their generally-stated purpose of encouraging people to bike, they have succeeded in putting inexperienced cyclists, who would not otherwise feel confident on the roads, onto often dangerous infrastructure, which actually makes things worse and is, one could argue, recklessly irresponsible.

There are also philosophical objections to bike lanes. To wit: bikes are vehicles, subject to nearly the same rights and responsibilities as the other vehicles on the road; in particular, bikes have the right to the full road surface under basically the same stipulations as anybody else. Bike lanes suggest that bikes do *not* have the same rights, but belong in their little bike ghetto. This is a problem when the little bike ghetto doesn't go where you're going -- for example, bike lanes absolutely never make left turns across intersections, but sometimes cyclists do! It also encourages road rage on the part of drivers who see cyclists outside of specially marked bike infrastructure and mistakenly believe they don't have the right to be there.

Politically, bike lanes can be pernicious in several ways. For one thing, they are often advocated by noncyclists or non-serious-cyclists, who substantially outnumber serious cyclists in the political discourse, and are therefore louder. They also can be more persuasive to a non-cyclist audience (ie politicians), since a lot of transportation cyclists' needs are counterintuitive to people who haven't done it before. Obviously (from my perspective, anyway :) the input of people who actually use the roads for transportation is more important and more correct than that of people who don't, but the advocacy of clueless people can be louder and more persuasive than the advocacy of clueful ones, and bike lanes are frequently part of that. Also, even if bike lanes are advocated by people of clue (as they sometimes are), political will can be exhausted by building the bike lanes, when there are often other infrastructure projects that would contribute more to safety and usability (for instance, widening and resurfacing roads, or providing good parking). If bike lanes, even thoughtfully designed ones, get built at the expense of more helpful things, that's bad.

Finally, a discussion of bike lanes isn't complete without mentioning the Europe thing. Often, when people are talking about bike lanes, they are talking about European-style sidepaths, of the kind so popular in the Netherlands. This is the part where my self-restraint thus far gets harder, because European-style sidepaths are an actively ghastly idea. (This is particularly hard if you're having this conversation with someone who's been to Europe, who tends to feel that sidepaths are the be-all and end-all.)

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These paths are an actively terrible idea because, unlike painted bike lanes which can increase accidents if done badly, sidepaths demonstrably increase accidents, even for experienced cyclists, everywhere. The false sense of safety they provide by "separating" bikes from "traffic" (in scare quotes because bikes are traffic) is more than counterbalanced by the way they funnel bikes through intersections. Intersections are the most dangerous place in terms of collision frequency, and sidepaths place cyclists at intersections in places where motorists don't tend to look, and often places with poor sight lines. They also dramatically increase the number of intersections cyclists must navigate (think driveways). In addition, really horribly designed sidepaths have a raised separator between the bikes and the cars. I don't know if you've ever had a crash resulting from catching the front wheel of a bike on a nearly-parallel trajectory against a small (even half-inch) raised line, but if you have (I have twice) you know that this collision is very bad. It rips the bike out from under you, irrevocably destroys your control, and sends you sprawling flat-out perpendicular to your direction of motion on the other side of the barrier, which is to say directly where the cars are in this setup. Sidepaths are bad, bad, bad.

Really, the state of both bicycle transportation theory and empirical studies is far more advanced in America than in Europe; American cycling experts have been alarmed to note that European cycling "experts" at international conferences can't actually justify their practices except with "that's how we've always done it". The German government and German insurers, having funded studies to support sidepaths, were discombobulated to note that these very studies showed they are dangerous. But there are strong cultural and emotional forces pushing people toward sidepaths because they feel safer. The facts that they are actually hazardous and restrict cylists' options as far as travel route is concerned (thereby making them much less useful for, you know, getting places) do not seem to be valid objections to sidepath advocates.

Even if sidepaths were safe (a contention so ludicrous it's hard for me to make even as a hypothetical), European and American cycling patterns are just different and call for different solutions. America is, well, bigger (the fact which underlies so many of our infrastructure differences). Cyclists have more places they might like to go, and are more likely to be going there a lot faster. The bikeway that comfortably carries a wide mix of ages and experiences at 10mph is not the same as the commuter route that carries an adult cyclist at 20mph. They both have their place and I'm glad both of them exist near me, but you can't readily accomodate both of those uses on the same infrastructure. European cyclists are a lot more likely to be slow (in fact, until recently, it was hard to buy performance-oriented bikes in the general market in Europe, and it's still a lot harder there than here). American cyclists are a lot more likely to be using roads for serious distance and matching or approximating the speed of other traffic. Non-cyclists tend to advocate these things that make sense for people toodling about on summer weekends without awareness of what makes sense for people who are actually using the roads to get places. I'm OK with that insofar as it's harmless, but once it starts taking money or willpower away from projects that would help people who actually use the infrastructure I start to twitch, and once it starts actually making me less safe (eg by taking away road width, my most valuable commodity, to make separated facilities) I become wroth indeed.

There now, that was much less ranty than it could have been :).

(Oh, I've left the heck out of any sort of citations here, but all this stuff can be verified with some googling; "bicycle crash statistics", "bicycle accident statistics", "vehicular cycling", "John Allen", "John Forester" (the latter two being prominent American cycling advocates, sometimes a bit too militant but generally correct) and a few hours would cover it.)

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kirin

Hey, thanks. mostly commenting just to let you know I finally had time to read all this and appreciate the answers.

Random observations from someone with but a tiny fraction of your biking experience: I agree that short raised barriers sound like about the worst idea possible. I was in Germany a few years ago and do remember seeing the "side paths" thing in force in some of the larger cities we went to. It didn't really occur to me at the time, but having read your comments the drawbacks do seem pretty plausible (and i'll take your word on the statistics that back them up). Some of the smaller cities, though, had actual bike lanes instead that looked fairly useful and well-designed. But I didn't actually have any chance to use them.

Closer to home, there's a town just a bit south of me that has quite a few independent bike paths, that seem to manage to go a lot of useful places without following the roads at all. Obviously that's going to restrict destinations somewhat, but it's nice if they match your plans. And they double as walking paths / greenways, so at least what infrastructure money they take has multiple decent effects. But alas, they're too far away for me to use much.

Which brings me to the reason I'm apt to think wistfully of bike paths: in my current location, I can hardly get *anywhere* without going at least a little ways on a narrow, 2-lane, 55MPH road. I pretty quickly bought a rear-view mirror and blinking lights to help me maintain the illusion that I'm not going to die when biking on it, but it's still almost certainly the most dangerous thing I do on a semi-regular basis. I pine for pretty much any marginally better option.

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I do like nice bikeways; I just don't think of them as addressing the same needs as transportation. Recreation, transportation, both perfectly fine uses of a bicycle, but they demand different infrastructure. And I'm fine with recreational infrastructure under two conditions: (1) that it doesn't hamper transportation, and (2) that the people designing transportation infrastructure be transportation-oriented cyclists, not ones with only recreational experience and instincts. But one of the premier bike paths in the nation (or so I'm led to believe) is quite close to our current apartment, and it was a nice place to learn, and it's still a nice place to bike when not totally overrun by clueless users, and a nice place to walk.

Narrow roads suck, particularly with fast cars. ("Width" is my sine qua non of bike infrastructure. Give me width and half-decent paving and I'll make anything work.) Is it also windy? Because that would be really awful :/. Are you sure there is no better route? When I was using a terrible route and didn't think I had an alternative, my local bike shop was able to help me come up with something better...

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feuervogel

Getting out of our neighborhood essentially requires biking on Hwy 86 (the aforementioned narrow 55-mph rd) or on Old 86, which is a narrow 45-mph road. And since Ben has a remarkable aversion to repetition, he won't ride through the neighborhood. (He's doing this for fun/exercise, as opposed to actively getting anywhere. We're 10-15 windy, hilly miles from most places we'd want to go.)

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I've always heard train people complaining about the subsidies. Maybe it's in comparison to air travel.
The northeast corridor is definitly the best place in the US to have a train, and it might be the only area with the density to make it profitable. There used to be a Minn-Wisc-Chicago train that went through here. I think it ended in the late 70s.

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There's talk of building another rail system to serve that corridor. It won't happen while we're here, of course. You can read about it here (http://www.dot.state.mn.us/passengerrail/onepagers/midwest.html).

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Actually, here's a much better link (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midwest_Regional_Rail_Initiative). Less official, but more informative.

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Wikipedia to the rescue! Thanks a lot, now I'm going to spend all morning looking up random transportation stuff. :P

Did you know that a Boeing 757 can reach crusing speeds of 540mph?

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I did not know that, in fact!
I would have guessed faster. I think I was misremembering the speed of my transatlantic voyages, switching km for miles... oops ;)

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Hee hee, you saved me the trouble.

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cynic51.livejournal.com

I don't know if it is profitable, but there is a very popular and heavily traveled fast rail link that goes from DC to Boston, with major stops in Baltimore, Philly and NYC. Many business travelers use it on the east coast.

I would note that part of the reason that Amtrak does badly is because their scheduling is crap. I have been told, but do not have evidence to support it, that their scheduling is partially mandated by their funding. Which is presumable Cleveland has one train that leaves at 1am.

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tla

A whole lot of musicians lost lots of money from this restriction. It's not only insanely risky to put their instruments in the hold; it is forbidden by their insurance. So sometimes they just couldn't reasonably go to gigs that they had booked.

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vfoxy.livejournal.com

I know, every time I try traveling with my organ they make me buy out an entire airplane! It's totally unfair. :)

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