Category: Transportation

England and Scotland, days 1 and 2

May 6, 2023 / / 3 Comments

Day 1 (Tuesday)

  • I arrived at London Heathrow airport at around 11:30 AM. Immigration was quick, using e-gates that only people with passports from select countries can use. The distance between the arrival gate, immigration, and the train station was immense. Much longer than even the new, longer distance at SLC. I took the Heathrow Express to Paddington (paid for via contactless credit card), and then took Underground lines to King’s Cross (again, paid via contactless).
  • At King’s Cross (KGX) I bought a ticket on LNER Azuma service to Edinburgh Waverley, which was leaving in 20 minutes. The train passes through countryside but “calls” at York, Durham, and Berwick-upon-Tweed; nearing Edinburgh the East Coast Main Line hugs the North Sea coast.
  • After arriving at Waverley I walked up the stairs to High Street and then over to my hotel. I dropped things off in the room and headed over to the base of Arthur’s Seat and hiked up to the peak before sunset.
  • Once back down at city level, I walked around the city and then got a pie and pint at Halfway House (which I had seen on the walk up the stairs several hours prior).
An LNER Azuma service train at St Pancras station
The view from halfway up the hill to Arthur’s Seat
Top to bottom, left to right: Rapeseed field in Scotland, Waverley station in Edinburgh, an LNER Azuma service train in St. Pancras station (London), people watching the departure boards at St. Pancras, and the Edinburgh city center as seen from halfway up the hill to Arthur’s Seat.

Day 2 (Wednesday)

  • I checked out of the hotel at 11 AM and walked over the to Left Luggage business at Waverley station to store my big backpack for the day. After that I walked over to the platform where a ScotRail DMU train was waiting to depart for Cowdenbeath. (I bought tickets at a machine.)
  • I alighted (disembarked) the train at North Queensferry and walked down the hill to the riverside to get a better view of the Forth Bridge (the first one, that carries two railway tracks). I also used a public toilet at a little car park here. (I placed all of my Forth Bridge photos below.)
  • The hill back up to North Queensferry station was pretty steep and I hoofed it to make the next train in the return direction so I could get to the other side of the River Forth to Dalmeny. (Trains are only ever 30 minutes on this line.)
  • Once in Dalmeny on the south side of the Firth of Forth (a river estuary) I walked down the hill to the riverside, which is in (South) Queensferry, and over to a pier where I bought a ticket for the day’s final sailing of the 90-minutes-long Maid of the Forth river cruise – I didn’t plan ahead for this, it was something I spotted and the schedule worked. When you’re traveling solo, you don’t have a hotel, and your train leaving the city isn’t for another nine hours you need stuff to do to fill the time – but the river cruise turned out to be a pretty awesome way to spend the time and £17.
  • Back at the dock I walked over to the town of (South) Queensferry. Both towns are named such because former Queen Margaret of Scotland used both points to cross the river. Queensferry has some great urbanism: being set in a hill, there are shops on the flat part at the bottom of the hill, then a large sidewalk above them and entrances to shops and row houses next to this sidewalk – the hill is completely disguised.
  • Next to Queensferry are two road bridges over the River Forth. The old one was found to have structural issues and is used only for taxis, pedestrians, cyclists, and transit. Adjacent to it is the bridges’ maintenance and monitoring facility and a public viewing deck that offers views of all three bridges. There’s another public toilet here, and a kiosk.
  • I walked back over to Dalmeny (the town under the Forth Railway Bridge) and had my dinner early at The Rail Bridge Café. I ate a plate of haggis, neeps, and tatties (haggis is “savoury pudding containing sheep’s pluck (heart, liver, and lungs), minced with onion, oatmeal, suet, spices, and salt, mixed with stock”, and neeps are mashed turnips, and tatties are mashed potatoes). It was delicious and I would like to have it again.
  • After four hours in the towns around the Forth Bridge, it was time to head back to Edinburgh. I boarded ScotRail back to the city and alighted at Edinburgh Gateway, a station to transfer to trams to the airport or city center. I took the tram to the city center and alighted at Princes Street, the main shopping street.
  • From Princes Street I walked to the Leith River and on to Leith and Newhaven. I walked around Leith to a bus route that would take me back to Waverley station.
  • Once at Waverley station I retrieved my left luggage and paid £15 (which is a convenience for not having to spend half an hour to return to the hotel up the hill to get it if I had left it for free and less secure at the hotel).
  • I bought some snacks at M&S Food and ate them in the station waiting room until I found out at which platform the Caledonian Sleeper would be waiting. (I used the National Rail website to find out because its late departure meant it would be a while before it showed up on the overhead departure screens.)
  • I boarded the train, found my room, and immediately started changing into pajamas and brushed my teeth. I was in bed by the time the train departed at 23:40. The sleeper train has a lounge car, but I don’t think the timing of this train allows it to be used conveniently.
  • [overnight train, waking up on Day 3] The train arrived at London’s Euston Station at 6:30 AM, about 37 minutes earlier than the Caledonian Sleeper’s “tips and tricks” webpage indicated. This is also when the attendant brought everyone in my carriage their coffee and breakfast snack.
  • Passengers must disembark by 7:30 AM, and that’s about when I did. I exited the station and walked two blocks to my hotel for the next three nights in London. Continue to day 3…

Forth Bridge photos

Forth Bridge seen from Maid of the Forth
Maid of the Forth boat
Forth Bridge, seen from where I ate dinner
Forth Bridge, seen from Maid of the Forth (far away)
Forth Bridge, overlooking Queensferry
Scotland flag from the Maid of the Forth boat

Transportation so far

  • Heathrow Express (non-stop service from Heathrow Airport to London Paddington station)
  • Jubilee Line
  • Victoria Line
  • LNER Azuma service on the East Coast Main Line (top speed is said to be 125 MPH)
  • ScotRail (provides intercity and regional services but I took it only to towns 25 minutes away from Edinburgh)
  • Edinburgh Trams
  • Lothian Buses
  • Caledonian Sleeper

A short list of features of the Netherlands that I still try to wrap my head around

January 18, 2023 / / 0 Comments

The Netherlands is the country I’ve visited the most, going there eight times between 2011 and 2022. I’ve obsessively visited 31 cities, the Hoge Veluwe national park, and plenty of other places outside cities.

Here are three land use and infrastructure characteristics that continue to fascinate me.

Transportation systems, obviously

Learning about how the Dutch created the safest network of streets for cycling is what started my near-obsession 15 years ago.

Then I went there in 2011 and I got to experience it for myself (photos from that trip).

I think the quality, capacity, likability, and integration of their transportation systems can be summarized best, for Americans who haven’t been there, by learning the results of a Waze survey: People who primarily drive in the Netherlands are more satisfied with the driving in their country than people in other countries are with driving in theirs.

In other words…if you like driving, then you should also care about what the Netherlands because they happened to also create the most driver-friendly transportation system.

Creating land & living with flooded land

As a novice, it’s probably easier to notice and understand how the Dutch create, move, and live with flooded land from above. There have been moments while I was cycling in the country where I’ve ridden past “polders” and former lakes and seas only to realize it later that I had biked through a massively transformed area that appeared entirely natural.

When I lived in Rotterdam for three months in 2016 I tried to visit as many places across the country as I could. I especially wanted to visit Flevopolder, the larger part of the Flevoland province, built from of the sea in 1986 where 317,000 people live.

I visited both major cities on the Flevopolder in the same day, Almere and Lelystad, the capital. I cycled from Almere (photos) to the seafront of Markermeer, and…get this…had to ride uphill because the land is below sea level.

Reaching the edge of Flevopolder, where it borders the sea called Markermeer
Cycling uphill to meet the sea north of the city of Almere, in the Flevoland province of the Netherlands.

Most Dutchies live below sea level, and the country has massive land and metal engineering works to keep the water in check.

The Dutch, especially in and around Rotterdam, come up with new ways to deal with water and export this knowledge abroad.

While the existing and planned measures should be sufficient until at least 2070, too much uncertainty over the progress of climate change remains afterwards to assess whether the city will truly stay liveable.

Some assessments suggest that if the sea rises by 5m – an estimate in sight within a century, considering the unpredictability of the rate that Greenland and Antarctica’s glacier will melt – Rotterdam will have no other choice but to relocate.

“Rotterdam: A bastion against rising sea, for now”
By Zuza Nazaruk

The country may rely on electricity to survive more than most: it’s needed to keep the pumps working, to keep the water in the sea instead of in and over the land.

How productive their agriculture industry is

By land area, the Netherlands is a very small country; it would be the tenth smallest state in the United States. By population, it would be the fifth largest state (17.6 million, greater than Pennsylvania’s 13 million).

Given that, how is it that the Netherlands is the world’s second largest exporter of agricultural products by value, after the United States?

Simple answer: High-quality, high-value, high-demand foodstuffs; space-efficient farming practices, including a significant amount of food grown vertically and in greenhouses. And, I don’t remember if this was in the article, very good transport connections to trading partners through seaports, canals, railways, and motorways.

I was surprised to see that both brands of canned cold brew coffee sold at the convenience store in my apartment building are produced in the Netherlands.

Photo of a Red Line train heading north on original tracks, but in the foreground there are new tracks under construction. Below the new trucks is a construction site; some construction equipment and workers can be spotted.

Deferring a trip to another time is a part of “trip chaining”

December 16, 2022 / / 0 Comments

A “trip” is the transportation planner’s name for the action of leaving home (H) to go somewhere else, and also going from that somewhere else (SE) to another somewhere else, and from the last somewhere else back to home.

Another way to write that would be to compare a “chained” trip (H-SE-SE-H) to two separate trips (H-SE-H + H-SE-H; also called “unchained” trips).

Trip chaining is a common pattern practiced by many people who usually use bicycles or transit for their trips so as to reduce effort and monetary cost, respectively. (I think there is also something to be said that trip chaining is also a natural way to “use time wisely”, but there are ways to use time wisely on long trips via transit.)

Effort in the context of the trips I tend to make can have many meanings: it can be the physical work put into riding a bicycle, but it’s also the time and energy to get ready to leave the house for several hours, the friction of moving my bike out of a building’s bike room and wondering if someone else will park there bike in “my” space when I’m gone, as well as the stress that comes with bicycling in Chicago.

Today I did a big trip chain…

  1. I walked to the Harrison Red Line station to ride the ‘L’ to Fullerton, after which I walked over to Wrightwood 659 to see two art exhibits.
  2. Then I walked back to Fullerton to take the Brown Line ‘L’ to Lincoln Square to pick up a new homemade CO2 sensor.
  3. After that meeting I took the ‘L’ to Clark/Division so I could shop at Aldi (a block walk in each direction).
  4. Finally I took the ‘L’ a fourth time back to Harrison.

Trip #2 was a deferred trip. The sensor was ready for me to pick up two weeks ago but it was unnecessary to make a trip just to go get it. I had no other errands to run in the Lincoln Square area, and no compelling reason to invent other trips between home and Lincoln Square (although I guess I could always stop at Aldi to restock certain groceries I prefer to buy there).

Trip #2 was a necessary but time insensitive trip.

A week ago, however, I scheduled to visit the galleries at Wrightwood 659. Because I would already be halfway to Lincoln Square I then scheduled the pick up.

Trip #3 was a spontaneous trip. Since I had such a long distance to go from Lincoln Square back to the Harrison station I figured that I might try to do some other things along the way…would I need to pick up beer at Off Color Brewing’s Mousetrap, should I stop at a Whole Foods (there are two along the Red Line, although there used to be a third one, next to the Fullerton station), or something else?

Welp, there’s an Aldi store one block away from the Clark/Division Red Line station. Perfect! My chained trip became even more efficient!

Chicago Crash Browser updates with stats, filters, and news article links

August 9, 2022 / / 0 Comments

Today I’m adding a bunch of new features to the Chicago Crash Browser, which lives on Chicago Cityscape.

But first…special access is no longer required. Anyone can create a free Cityscape account and access the map. However, only those with special access or a Cityscape Real Estate Pro account will be able to download the data.

Five new features include:

  • Statistics that update weekly to summarize what happened in the past week: the number of crashes, the number of people killed in crashes, and the number of people with the two worst tiers of injuries. The statistics are viewable to everyone, including those without access to the crash browser.
screenshot of the new weekly statistics
The statistics will update every Sunday. The numbers may change throughout the week as Chicago police officers upload crash reports.
  • For data users, the crash record ID is viewable. The crash record ID links details about the same crash across the Chicago data portal’s three tables: Crashes, Vehicles, and People. My Chicago Crash Browser is currently only using the Crashes table. Click on the “More details” arrow in the first table column.
screenshot of the data table showing the crash record ID revealed.
The crash record ID is hidden by default but can be exposed. Use this ID to locate details in the data portal’s Vehicles and People tables.
  • Filter crashes by location. There are currently two location filters: (1) on a “Pedestrian Street” (a zoning designation to, over time, reduce the prevalence of car-oriented land uses and improve building design to make them more appealing to walk next to); (2) within one block of a CTA or Metra station, important places where people commonly walk to. Select a filter’s radio button and then click “Apply filters”.
  • Filter crashes by availability of a news article or a note. I intend to attach news articles to every crash where a pedestrian or bicyclist was killed (the majority of these will be to Streetsblog Chicago articles, where I am still “editor at large”. Notes will include explanations about data changes [1] (the “map editor” mentioned in some of the notes is me) and victims’ names.
screenshot of the two types of filters

After choosing a filter’s radio button click “Apply filters” and the map and data table will update.
  • Filter by hit and run status. If the officer filling out the crash report marked it as a hit and run crash, you can filter by choosing “Yes” in the options list. “No” is another option, as is “not recorded”, which means the officer didn’t select yes or no.
  • Search by address. Use the search bar inside the map view to center the map and show crashes that occurred within one block (660 feet) of that point. The default is one block and users can increase that amount using the dropdown menu in the filter.
screenshot of the map after the search by address function has been used
Use the search bar within the map view to show crashes near a specific address in Chicago.

Footnotes

[1] The most common data change as of this writing is when a crash’s “most severe injury” is upgraded from non-fatal to fatal, but the crash report in the city’s data portal does not receive that update. This data pipeline/publishing issue is described in the browser’s “Crash data notes” section.

The “map editor” (me) will change a crash’s “most severe injury” to fatal to ensure it appears when someone filters for fatal crashes. This change to the data will be noted.

I tried to see the Vatican City train station

June 17, 2022 / / 0 Comments

Vatican City has a train station but you cannot see it. You can, however, see the large gates within the papal state’s wall that enclose the train station and separate it from the main railway network in Italy. 

Beyond the gates is the Vatican City railway station
Beyond the gates is the Vatican City railway station

The Citta Vaticano railway station is on a branch on the Roma-Capranica-Viterbo mainline and nominally connected to the Roma San Pietro train station which serves Trenitalia regional trains, including the numbered Lazio region commuter lines. 

Railway branch to Vatican City

There is one way to visit the train station and that’s to take a Vatican City-sponsored day trip from the station to the Pontifical Villages about 15 miles southeast of Rome. In 2022, the trips are offered on Saturdays through October 29 and cost about €43. 

A proposal intended for visitors interested in taking part in a tour of the Vatican City and the Gardens of the Pontifical Villas of Castel Gandolfo.

Every Saturday, a modern and comfortable electric train connects the historic Vatican City railway station with the Pontifical Villas for a Full Day visit that, starting with the wonders of the Vatican Museums and continuing through the Vatican Gardens, will lead the visitor to discover the Gardens of the Pontifical Villas.

Pope Francis opened the villas and Castel Gandolfo in 2015. Watch an AFP video in English or in French about the news.

Watch this video from The Round the World Guys – skip to 5:58 – for a view of the station and their ride to the villas. (I thought The Tim Traveller also made a video about the Vatican City railway station but I cannot find it on his YouTube channel.)

When I was in Rome this month – part of a longer trip to Rome, Florence, Lyon, Strasbourg, the Netherlands, and Germany – I wanted to see what I could see, so I walked south and west around the wall towards the San Pietro station. A street follows the southern wall; walk along this and you’ll come to an entry to a railroad viaduct. At this point, it’s at ground level, but to the left (south) the ground quickly slopes down several stories. The viaduct holds the branch from the main line and you can walk across it to San Pietro station. 

If that’s too difficult to follow, go to the San Pietro station, go up to binario (platform) 1, and walk towards the large St. Peter’s Basilica you see to the right.

Railway to Vatican City