Marco Chitti

Arab works so well with this! We did multiple presentation in this double arab + english column format when I was working in the West Bank. It really produces visually beautiful documents.

We need this meme, but for negotiating with the US.

Never accept tea from Putin, nor a negotiation with the US. They are both poisonous.

For a US city, you don't even have that many! Even though a European city of a similar size probably has half, a third or even less.

I don't know what to call this...a map, a hierarchy, something else? Either way, putting some thoughts on transit signal priority together. I think this covers all the strategies used in Madison, but there are likely more.

Transit Costs Data – 2026 Update What the data is telling us Most recent update: 02/28/2026 Here we present some visualizations of our data. The data covers only a portion of rail projects in each city/country and, in many instances...

My colleague @eensari.bsky.social has updated Transit Cost Project data, including my additions for Japan and the UK.
transitcosts.com/new-data/

I've been rewatching Andror lately and I've reached the point when the Empire is "acquiring the territories and ressources" of Ghorman.

Or at least that's what the New Coruscant Times is probably writing...

I agree. FSSF is great if you have a range of prevalently suburban/regional/fast regional/mid-range intercity traffic. But higher speed, higher frequency long-distance trains are better on their own and freight is a wild card.

That's an interesting point because many rail enthusiasts in Italy I talked to would point the FS/RFI approach of building Slow and Fast tracks as de facto separate lines as backward and wasteful compared to an S-F-F-S 4-track configuration.

Substantial nationalization of half of the railways. And done in an emergency after a major bankruptcy, not as a strategic choice as far as I understand it.

I honestly wouldn't take Berlin, a city that lost most of its major stations to WWII and then was divided between two hostile countries for half a century preventing any major modernization as a "paradigmatic" example of railway stations evolution to compare against.

French just before it, in 1937. But France's regime prior to nationalization was similar to the Italian 1885-1905: the private railways owned the trains and operated on a regime of concession on publicly-owned fixed infrastructure.

Accidentally, these generous station precincts are why Brescia could add 3 new platforms to host HS trains a few years ago (and 2 more tracks into the station from the West) by leveraging the unused service tracks, with a pricetag in the few tens of millions.

I think we have a growing consensus that @alonlevy.bsky.social 's thesis that the beginning of the North American rail passenger's sector falling behind international peers is not a post WWII thing but rather an interwar thing. And not nationalizing the railways is the main reason.

Well, it was when it was built for the needs of the time.

Today it's famously an underbuilt station after the failed projects of the 1990s and early 2000s and the AV station shoehorned into it without much reflection.

I think that the NE corridor is the single piece of North American railway infrastructure that shows the same level of "third generation" of railway modernization you see in Europe at the same time.

I think a lot of this recurring deception is that we still misunderstand what the EU is right now. We expect it to behave like the sovereign country it is not.

And it's not like fully sovereign countries are behaving differently. Canada's all bark no bites PM is fully endorsing US actions, so...

Most major Italian stations have platforms in the 350-450 m range, at least some of them. Very generous design from an era where train dwelling time was still long and many of these stations had some terminating trains (unlike the ones you cited)

I don't have a definitive answer, but it would be interesting to compare the evolution of stations design between a few countries. Because for example Italy completely missed the high-platform turn, but did grade-separation of ped access to platforms more extensively

I would not be surprised if this results in some additional rules (not CBTC, though) like coming to a stop before every switch. Some 15 years ago, there was an accident with one tram running into another at a stop, and since two trams can queue up at stops and intersections, which causes delays

Quite the shocking video of Milan's tram accident. It was going too fast and derailed over a switch.

I think this is a good point. The Italian examples happened at the same time electrification became the official policy, and that made for more streamlines facilities

Probably. Having a single ownership, especially a public one, makes things much easier.

But I think another interesting point is that the 1920s and 1930s Italian examples were, in many ways, more modern than peer projects in the US and Canada: wider platforms, more rational circulation, etc.

I can't stress enough how forward-looking and decisive the very generous modernization of most Italian train stations during the 1910s-1950s has been. There is so much capacity!

And not only Milano Centrale dwarfs Union Station, but also the more modern "secondary stations" such as Porta Garibaldi (1960s) and Rogoredo (1990s) have more, longer and wider platforms

When one puts Toronto's Union Station side-by-side with stations of Italian mid-sized cities, one realizes how space-constrained the tracks side of the station is. And how narrow the platforms are (leaving aside the outdated platform-track-service platform configuration)

Indeed. Somehow we hold fixed-guideway transit to much higher safety standards

That's the probable outcome, especially if it's a derailment due to high speed. More new slow zones on the way for ATM, which loves them as much as the TTC.

Or maybe less. Someone was killed, and it was outside of the tram.

Pretty bad tram accident in Milan today. One of the new translink stadler trams derailed and crashed into a building. The causes are still unknown.

www.google.com/amp/s/www.ra...

When the American Liberal establishment will be able to verbalize the "are we the baddies now?" epiphany is going to be quite the spectacle, even if probably is going to be too little and too late, if it ever happens.