The country has ambitions for 310 mph bullet trains by 2025.
The trains planned for 2025 will reduce the travel time between Tokyo and Nagoya to 40 minutes from about 90 minutes. At that speed, commuters could go from L.A. to the Bay Area in just over an hour.
But can low-income Japanese afford to travel this way? Can the middle-class?
Traffic engineers in Korea have challenged convention by reducing the traffic capacity along a section of Seoul’s road network in order to increase the efficiency of the system as a whole. Somehow it worked. Researchers from the Sante Fe Institute recently concluded that a large number of network options countervails a large network capacity.
The “price of anarchy” is a measure of the inefficiency caused by selfish drivers. Analyzing a commute from Harvard Square to Boston Common, the researchers found that the price can be high—selfish drivers typically waste 30 percent more time than they would under “socially optimal” conditions.
The solution hinges on Braess’s paradox, Gastner says. “Because selfish drivers optimize a wrong function, they can be led to a better solution if you remove some of the network links,” he explains. Why? In part because closing roads makes it more difficult for individual drivers to choose the best (and most selfish) route. In the Boston example, Gastner’s team found that six possible road closures, including parts of Charles and Main streets, would reduce the delay under the selfish-driving scenario. (The street closures would not slow drivers if they were behaving unselfishly.)
It reminded me of something Brian Eno said in a recent interview about his role as a producer:
“But what I do can work for any artist. In modern recording one of the biggest problems is that you’re in a world of endless possibilities. So I try to close down possibilities early on. I limit choices. I confine people to a small area of manoeuvre. There’s a reason that guitar players invariably produce more interesting music than synthesizer players: you can go through the options on a guitar in about a minute, after that you have to start making aesthetic and stylistic decisions. This computer can contain a thousand synths, each with a thousand sounds. I try to provide constraints for people.”
Related: See bookmarks tagged counterintuitive by myself and others on delicious.
The Bandvagn 206 is an amphibious troop-transport vehicle originally designed for the Swedish military. Blackbeltjones saved this bookmark to his handsomelookinmachines tag.
This photo was taken by Flickr-user Steffe at the open house for a biofuel power plant in Jordbrom a suburb of Stockholm.
A recent report comparing six alternatives for crossing the Thames found cable cars the most sustainable option.
Cable cars are increasingly used for mass transit in world cities and across rivers because they need little space, have virtually no waiting time, can run at over 20mph, and have very low emissions. They are already used in New York, Istanbul, Vancouver, Madrid, Caracas and Hamburg, and other cities are planning systems. A cable car has crossed the Rhine in Cologne since 1957.
Conan O’Brien rode on the Rhine cable car during his 1997 visit to Cologne (fast forward to about 1:21).
Urban tree locations come courtesy of Friends of the Urban Forest, one day’s worth of taxi cab locations from Yellow Cab (via Cabspotting), and a week’s worth of reported crime incidents from Crime Reports.
Originally uploaded by shawnbot
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Every weekday, I use this space to share the best links from a select group of 21 people in my network on delicious.com. The membership of this select group (listed in the right-hand column above) is subject to change. That's where you come in.
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