My faith in humanity has gone way up today. Returing to San Francisco from Oakland this morning, I tried out the "Casual Carpool" - an extraordinary FREE ride to San Francisco. Basically, there are certain street corners in Oakland where you simply show up around 7-8 in the morning and you find a line of cars casually lined up like taxis at the airport. You simply walk up to the front of the line and hop in someone's car, and off you go!

Why in the world would complete strangers do this? Because if you have three people in a car you get to use the HOV lane and NOT pay any bridge toll! It's a fantastic win-win situation - the driver gets there faster without paying a toll, and you get a free ride! Society benefits as well because it's a traffic reducer. Totally fantastic. There is even a website with maps to the designated corners: Check it out.

Normally, buying in bulk saves you money when you calculate the cost per item. That's what makes Costco so successful. This is also the case with many transportation systems where you can buy a dozen tickets at once for a lower per-ticket rate. Anyway, I have found a bizarre exception to the rule:

Heathrow Express "carnets" of tickets actually cost more per ticket than buying them individually. See for yourself here. Return tickets purchased online cost £11.25 apiece. If you buy the allegedly convenient carnet of 12 tickets they cost £11.91 each.

The only advantage is that you don't have to specify your date of travel. Obviously the idea is to sell the carnets to business people who go on lots of spontaneous trips that don't give them enough time to order tickets online. This saves them the £13 walk up fare at the station. So... we're really talking about 2 different economies at once. But I'm still curious how this all works out in terms of profitability, since most business travellers wouldn't blink at the extra walk-up cost, but I'd gladly buy 12 tickets right now if it would actually save me money!

Ed Note:

The Gatwick Express also sells carnets, but they are in fact a better deal than if purchased individually: £9 each instead of £10.75. Go figure.

Furthering the discussion of geographic tags on websites, someone has now created a London weblog tube map. It's a list of personal web sites based on the owners' proximity to a particular tube station.

If you like subway maps, diagrams, and those route maps in the back of airline magazines, searching for "Route Map" on Google's image search is dangerously distracting. Everything from Airlines to High School X-Country Courses pop up.

I was going to take a cab home, late last night, but there was a #21 bus coming along. I got on with one other guy. Something broke and it started making a horrendous dragging noise. I told the driver and he wasn't interested. Eventually, he asked how far I was going. He figured we could make it to Fillmore. He went and checked the tires. All intact. I offered to take a closer look and rode a few blocks with my head out the window while this rasta dude with headphones encouraged me. I couldn't really see much, but it sounded like we were dragging a large object. He decided to take the bus to the "yard". It happened to be on the way to my house. After he dropped me off, I saw a trail of sparks following the bus. Oh well. A fun ride!

Phenomenal accomplishment this week! The classic London Tube Map, wonderful though it may be, is tragically flawed geographically. In fact, it's very hard to correlate places on it with their actual locations in London. So... I searched and searched for a tube map, that is drawn in geographic reality. After a long search I was unable to find one. So I made one myself! Here it is:

I created it by piecing together a massive map of london from streetmap.co.uk then drew the lines out connecting the stations. I have the original photoshop file, though it is 50 MEG in size. The map here is a very shrunk-down version without the city streets beneath.

Here's another neat link about the history of the London Tube Map.

Incredible! BART has finally reached San Francisco Airport. Well, not 100%. But it is so reasurring to see 6 years of beaurocratic boondoggles and outragious expenses finally pay off. It won't open officially to passengers until January (apparantly), but finally finally! Too bad I'm leaving before it opens. Oh well, at least when I visit San Francsico next year, I won't have to take a $40 cab ride! Bravo BART.

I'm all for high speed rail. But that's another long conversation. The state of Florida is valiently trying to build high speed service, but they have chosen somewhat 'unorthodox' methods of collecting opinions. It seems that troopers are flagging over people at random on I-4 to conduct surveys on people's opinions regarding High Speed Rail. In a state as car-oriented as FL, you know this is just going to irritate people and push large numbers to an anti-train stance. Maybe that's the point. [article here]

Presenting the first of my many case studies to come:

While Muni spends millions on new buses (which are arguably inferior in many ways to the slightly dirty existing buses), no improvement, other than a cosmetic brush up takes place.

One problem is that Muni simply stops too many times. The 5 Fulton bus line exhibits this classic, and perpetually unresolved if not ignored, problem particularily well.

Let's take a ride from Divisidero to Montgomery st. This ride covers a distance of just over 2 miles. It takes 30 minutes. That's an average speed of just over 4 miles per hour. This is barely faster than walking. Pathetic and unacceptable. Those of us who believe in the potential of public transportation should be insulted. How is anyone going to be convinced to use buses with this kind of performance?

The 5 initially stops every 2 blocks. This is the standard Muni stopping rate, and though I'd rather see every 3 blocks, I won't even try to debate it here. What happens after Fillmore street is the real problem. Between Webster and Laguna (That's one block), the bus stops THREE times. Granted it's a long block, but your heard me right: THREE times. The latter 2 stops are so close together, two average people could stand at the two stops and easily play catch with a football. Next time you're inbound on the 5, see it for yourself. Three times. On the next block, the 5 stops twice, and then it stops twice again at city hall. Twice for one building...yeah, it's a big building, but people who work there can walk an extra 100 feet, and furthermore, the second stop is a "light loser" stop which is when the bus stops before a light, and almost inevitably spends an entire cycle of green-red-green waithing there...far longer than it would otherwise wait.

After one more stop, the bus crawls onto market st. Which as we all know, is always a crawl, but shall be the subject of another case study to come.

By eliminating most of these unnesesary stops, the 5 would cover that section of its route about 10 minutes faster in my estimation. By shaving little bits like this here and there, we'll wind up with a faster and more efficient muni. Oh...gee, did I mention this costs nothing? Wait, sorry Muni, you now owe me $50,000 in consulting fees. Get it together!!!