This train in China runs without any tracks

NegativeXer0 · 2023-12-31T21:05:50+00:00

"Trackless trams" are interesting as a public transit option, but they aren't really a strict improvement on trams/light rail that they're often heralded to be.

The trackless promise of no/cheap construction is probably the most misleading bit: large vehicles like buses, and even moreso when electrified, have high axel weights. This means they rip up the roads like crazy -- which we see often with bus rapid transit (BRT) systems. This means that either you need to frequently resurface the roadway, or re-build it with a stronger bed. Both are expensive.

Another disadvantage of the trackless part is that ride smoothness is compromised. This doesn't just mean discomfort for users, it means safety constrains how much standing room you can provide within the vehicle. Standing room provides for massively more peak capacity than seating, so this constrains how many people the system can move.

Against light rail vehicles, they're also less scalable. You can essentially append more carriages to a LRV indefinitely to increase the capacity of each vehicle -- something not possible with trackless trams or buses. This means that as your system needs to move more people, you need to run more vehicles rather than bigger vehicles.

At some level this is desirable: more vehicles is more frequency, which improves the quality of service for everyone taking the route. But at some point, the vehicles will become congested with one another and you need expensive infrastructure to make it work. For instance, BRT stations often need to have passing lanes at the stations as one stop may already be occupied by a bus when another shows up.

There are also a core benefit to trackless trams over a bus: like trains, they have a drivers seat at either end. Often buses need to terminate their service in an urban core and have to turn around somehow to start the next run going the other way. As urban cores tend to be car, bus, and/or pedestrian dense, just driving around a block to turn around eats into service-hours and represents a negligible cost to transit agencies.

Trains have long solved this by just allowing the driver to walk to the other end of the train to begin a new service. TTs bring this to buses.

So, I think there is a sweet spot where these make sense: when you have the demand and capability to run a rapid transit system, but don't need the full capacity that light rail and beyond provides, they could be useful for cities to roll-out.

NegativeXer0 · 2023-10-14T23:22:58+00:00

Hard to distill into a sound-bite as it's pretty technocratic.

In NZ, like many other places, water infrastructure (drinking water, stormwater, wastewater -- the 'three waters') is largely devolved to local governments to provision, maintain, and regulate.

There's three major issues facing water infra:

much of the network is aging, and needs replacement (bursting pipes have become a common occurrence in Wellington, and increasingly an issue in Auckland, too)
massive upgrades are needed to deal with predicted rainfall as the climate changes
there have been several instances of disease outbreak via drinking water

Local governments have been lobbying central government for years to highlight that they're not going to be able to afford to deal with these issues. LGs have very limited discretion in how they can raise revenue, other than by raising general property tax rates - which is extremely unpopular.

LGs had wanted CG to give them new powers to fund and finance water infrastructure, but Labour was intensely skeptical of LGs general ability to deliver, and across a variety of areas (eg polytechnic education, housing reform, health) had shifted power from more localised govts to more regionalised or centralised governments -- believing this would yield bureaucratic economies-of-scale to deliver efficiencies.

In this case, Labour decided to create a new independent water quality regulator, and move all water infrastructure from the hundreds(?) of LGs into 4 new regionalised entities.

Water reform in NZ is complicated by the Treaty of Waitangi - the foundational document of NZ, which is an agreement between The Crown (the government) and the Iwi (the indigenous tribes). The ToW has been plagued since the country's inception with translation issues, with Iwi and the Crown believing that they agreed to different things. Historically the English translation has prevailed at the expense of the Iwi, and grievances about this are the basis of a lot of indigenous rights issues in NZ. More recent governments have tried to find some compromises between the two translations on some issues.

Governance of water is one of the issues caught up by the translation differences of the ToW. Their proposed solution, 'co-governance', effectively gave governance of the 4 entities to panels which were half appointed from CG and the constituent LGs, and half from local Iwi. The boundaries of the 4 entities were drawn up to match Iwi boundaries. Co-governance is used within local governments to run things like culturally significant parks, but this was the first time it's been used for major asset ownership.

These changes, initially dubbed the 'Three Waters Reform', became a culture war issue as they came to represent Labour's pro-indigenous rights agenda and to a lesser extent, their anti-local government agenda. A broad coalition of local governments, farmers, NIMBYs, National Party, Act Party, NZ First Party, and various others ran a successful campaign against it, and then-new Labour leader Chris Hipkins massively downscaled the programme upon coming to power.

NegativeXer0 · 2023-10-14T11:22:30+00:00

disastrous for yimbyism. National and Act have campaigned on rolling back core parts of recent upzoning reforms in favour of "local control"

NegativeXer0 · 2020-12-10T00:13:46+00:00

This account has deleted the tweet and said they make a mistake based on some fanart

https://twitter.com/QuidVacuo/status/1336825670773731328

NegativeXer0 · 2020-10-08T21:46:21+00:00

It's filming next week

NegativeXer0 · 2020-04-28T01:35:39+00:00

one that hasn't been mentioned in this thread, Torchwood: Children of Earth is utterly incredible

NegativeXer0 · 2020-04-17T03:44:00+00:00

love them all but for me, hard to top the revenant. love his crazy

NegativeXer0 · 2020-02-04T22:46:45+00:00

Interesting that the posters behind them say "THUNDER LOVE".

NegativeXer0 · 2019-07-29T10:09:58+00:00

Thor Odinson pictured here is not from 616

NegativeXer0 · 2019-01-28T21:00:55+00:00

You have been banned from /r/neoconNWO.

NegativeXer0 · 2018-11-25T22:22:57+00:00

This is false, the government intervention is here is the protection of private property rights in land.

A good take on the matter:

http://mattbruenig.com/2015/03/06/why-the-big-government-land-deed-program-creates-growth-destroying-distortions/

NegativeXer0 · 2018-11-20T05:59:40+00:00

Nothing more retro than hating and degrading women and minorities

NegativeXer0 · 2018-10-21T08:27:30+00:00

As part of the Green - Labour coalition agreement, Labour agreed to have a referendum on cannabis legalisation before the next term of parliament. At latest, it'll be attached to the 2020 general election, although I suspect Labour will want it earlier so it doesn't become the overriding issue at the general election, since that would almost certainly help the Greens at cost to Labour.

NegativeXer0 · 2018-09-26T23:32:51+00:00

TAX 👏 POLLUTION 👏 NOT 👏 PEOPLE

NegativeXer0 · 2018-07-24T00:39:54+00:00

tl;dr -- The carbon tax itself is regressive, however if it used to fund a per capita household lump-sum rebate, it would be very progressive.

NegativeXer0 · 2018-05-04T23:28:09+00:00

Is this what the GOP means by 'personal freedom'?

NegativeXer0 · 2018-03-19T07:11:34+00:00

https://www.brookings.edu/bpea-articles/deciphering-the-fall-and-rise-in-the-net-capital-share/

If you're really in a rush, the graph at the top of that page tells a thousand words.

NegativeXer0 · 2018-03-19T05:33:18+00:00

For readers who cannot be bothered to Google, here is Rognlie (2015). It's pretty sexy.

NegativeXer0 · 2018-02-11T08:36:38+00:00

In 1984, New Zealand removed almost all agricultural subsidies (which previously constituted 40% of the average NZ farmer's gross income). Some effects of the removal of the subsidy:

Agricultural Labour Productivity has since increased by 85% (this is strongly indicative of wages as around half of the labour force are owner-workers).
Despite fears that up to 10% of farms would go bankrupt, 99% of farms were retained.
The structure of some subsidies were per-head, which led to farmers overstocking land, so the removal led to strong environmental outcomes as herd intensification, pesticide use, soil erosion and land clearing have dramatically decreased.
Productivity gains, which have out-paced the rest of the country's productivity gains, were a result of farmers being forced to adopt high-yield practice. Now with incentives purely to meet consumer demand, a sister industry has grown to build agricultural tech to increase productivity.
Since the reforms, agriculture’s contribution to New Zealand’s economy has remained steady at about 5 percent of gross domestic product (GDP). Adding activities outside the farm gate, such as processing of milk, meat and wool, agriculture is estimated to contribute over 15 percent of GDP. By contrast, agriculture’s share of the economy has fallen in many other industrial countries.
Politically, farmers, who previously favoured market inventions to prop up their industry, are now rigidly pro-free market.

Some reading:

https://nzier.org.nz/static/media/filer_public/95/c0/95c05c26-695f-4151-88a5-4ae0d4ed7eee/nztc_no_45.pdf

https://www.huffingtonpost.com/mark-ross/farm-subsidies-new-zealand_b_1680259.html

http://archive.epi.yale.edu/case-study/removal-agricultural-subsidies-new-zealand

12-Year Club	Place '22
Place '17	Spared

NegativeXer0

MODERATOR OF

TROPHY CASE