Martha Lauren

Will I be the first to suggest the carbon offsets worked exactly as planned: they delayed real action for another 25 years

The pricing software/ blackrock obsession is so funny to me because it basically posits that there was no housing crisis before, like, 2018.

One-third of Angelenos do not drive Walking back the "car-free" games promise is unconscionable in a city where the people who don't drive are also the most vulnerable users of our streets

Reflections on last week's #WeekWithoutDriving in a city that still refuses to acknowledge the existence of its nondrivers — which a comprehensive new report claims make up one-third of LA's population

Some of these interchanges on the RATP are ridiculous

feels like we're living through some kind of cultural gas leak

Me: I'd like to go to Avignon please :)
SNCF: *lights Gitane* Why must you make zis my problem? Can you not take ze bus?

I love how the SNCF journey planner is like 'have you considered not taking the train?'

Remember this genius innovation?

You forget Marco, this isn't for the sort of people who ride the bus, it's for the sort of people to drive. A sort of remote parking lot for downtown Toronto.

One cannot expect them to wait in an open shelter any more than one could expect a nobleman to subsist on the serfs' coarse potage!

A station that gets 6 trains per direction per day should look like Exo's stations, not like that, honestly. There are hundreds of bus stops that serve more people that need investment in fixed infrastructure more than this. Just build a platform and add 3 bus shelters.

Still, annoying I even gotta fly because Italy sucks for European rail staff discounts and trains in the Mezzogiorno are s l o w

My STN-CTA flight had held steady so I booked yesterday, today it jumped £9. My CTA-LTN flight had just gone up €25 so I waited, today there was one (1) place at the previous price.

AirHint 0, my feminine aviation intuition 2 💅

Is there anything in the world more satisfying than gaming air fare fluctuations successfully?

Don't count your blessings before they've hatched

The YIMBY movement will not rest until every town has its own Tour Montparnasse

Pistachios

Not to mention that the Federal Republic of Germany is a member state of the European Union, a federation of sorts.

So the UK is a country containing four countries, though some Cornish people will tell you that it's really five countries, and some Irish people will tell you it's three countries while the fourth is really the occupied territory of another country?

The fun part is that if you pick a definition based on national identity, statehood or sovereignty, you're still going round in circles because those are vague and complicated concepts too!

Threads discovering that 'country' is an imprecise term with no specific definition

Bud Abbott invites Lou Costello over for Ethiopian food

Costello: What's for dinner?
[hilarious misunderstandings ensue]

One of my favorite bits was when we just got nationalised and for a while I was like 'welcome on board this SNCB train to Shepperton' or 'this is your Grote Britse Spoorwegen service to Woking' or 'thanks for traveling with Brit Államvasutak'

So what precisely do the right want to do about the white working classes? Certainly not go to university, as they want numbers down. Nor to have a unionised manufacturing job, as they don't want unions.

No, they just want pawns as part of their culture wars. They don't give a toss.

The gated modes only part is... odd

(me taking the train home following a few pints after work) ah, so the PTI hazard observer becomes the PTI hazard

King County Metro states 55% of fare revenue comes from ORCA Business Passport (employers paying per head for their employees to have annual transit passes).

Does that mean that uptake is exceptionally high, or that fare evasion is the norm for everyone else?

Anyway, I'm biased towards the continued existence of my job. But I would observe that when you have the complexities and stresses of fast main line driving, loading all safety critical responsibilities onto the driver becomes a false economy, accounting for burnout and operational incidents.

Without conductors it's harder to recruit drivers off the street, get them through training and not end up redeploying them to the ticket office at full salary after they have too many incidents. You're just moving the bottleneck.

I stand corrected. Also I think the hyper-austerity of driver only operated regional trains is bad actually

As Robert Moses once said, you need to put everyone’s homes on one side of the Intercoastal and FECR and all the Targets and Publixes on the other