Rob Fisher

I went to the Farnborough air show last weekend and took this video of the A380 taking off, flying around a bit, and landing.  The pilot made it climb and turn much quicker than I think it would on a normal passenger flight.  It was very big and very impressive.  Apologies for the shaky camera.

A380 at Farnborough from Rob Fisher on Vimeo.

Patrick Crozier

I’ve been listening to this podcast in which Russ Roberts of Café Hayek talks to Mike Munger about mass transit in Santiago, Chile.  It seems that they had a perfectly good¹ private system which got nationalised.  Result: huge losses, longer commutes, higher car use, oh, and the odd riot.

But do they want to go back to the old system, you know the one that worked?  Hell no.

As Munger observes:

A public mass transportation system is the fiction that each of us can ride at the expense of all of us.

By the way, in case you think the guy is making it all up here is a report from the International Herald Tribune and here is what a Santiagan commenter had to say:

I am from Santiago, and it is very hard to understate the mess caused by the change in the public transportation system.

Santiago is a city where most of its population use public transportation (including myself) and the significant decrease in its quality caused inmense suffering. People who were used to wait for 10 minutes or less for a bus that would take them accross town in 45 minutes need to wait for over 30 minutes now, having to switch buses (sometimes more than once and at stops that could be several blocks away) and doubling or tripling their travel time. This causes havoc with family and “down” time.

Many areas of the city are not not served (or underserved) by the new buses and the ministry of transport has had to draw new routes with astonishing frequency.

And a system that was self-financed and produced profits for the operators, has caused the government to give huge subsidies and cause losses to the new bus companies. This is a terrible loss of wealth, in financial terms and withr espect to the time lost by passengers, in a country that already had a pretty good system.

This is all due to planners belief that thier intelligence was better than the wisdom of hundreds of bus companies.

At least, this has discredited central planning in Chile for the foreseeable time.

Notes
1.  Well, there was a slight problem with buses racing one another and mowing down pedestrians.

Rob Fisher

The Reg has an article on Ruth Kelly’s plans for motorways.  I like the idea of toll lanes.  I don’t like the idea of more M40-style speed management, mainly because it makes driving more tedious than traffic jams do.  I’m really not sure how concerned I should be about electronic tagging of vehicles.

Rob Fisher

Some Swindon councillors want to stop funding speed cameras.  Conservative councillor Peter Greenhalgh thinks they’re just to raise revenue.  This revenue goes to the treasury.  The council contributes £400,000 per year to pay for the cameras.  Greenhalgh thinks that’s not the best way to spend the road safety budget.

The Labour MP for Swindon says that all this is “playing politics with lives”, after all, the Swindon Safety Camera Partnership’s statistics show that accidents at camera sites is falling.  Not everyone agrees.  The obvious question is, what about accident rates at non-camera sites?  Even if cameras do improve safety, there is a certain level of risk people find acceptable.  We could reduce road deaths to zero quite easily but it would be too inconvenient.

It will be interesting to see if this move succeeds and more councils follow suit.  Either way, it is certainly annoying anti-car types.

Rob Fisher

The new motorcycle test starts on 29th September.  It’s a result of EU regulations.  Many test centres will close because parts of the test need to be done in a special off-road area.  This is mainly because the emergency stop now has to be done at 50km/h.  That’s thirty-two miles per hour.  Oh dear.

The DSA was on the radio quoting scary statistics and saying that the new test will make riding safer.  I am not convinced that a 2mph faster emergency stop and riding around some cones makes it safer.  I think motorcycle safety is largely about attitude.  Reading chapter 1 of Roadcraft, which is all about mental attitude, would do considerably more to improve safety.

An even better idea would be to let insurance companies administer tests.  They have to pay the costs of accidents, so they have the best incentive to stop them.  A range of tests could be offered, each yielding a different insurance premium.

Rob Fisher

Drivers of fuel tankers start a four day strike today.  Motorists are being warned not to “panic buy”.  Panic buying is perfectly rational behaviour:  a given individual is more likely to get fuel if they join in than if they abstain.

This strike is about pay rather than tax and only affects Shell.  Will people understand this or will they stock up on fuel regardless?

Rob Fisher

A new low-cost airline charges by weight—including passenger and luggage.

Well, not really.  But it seems like quite a good idea.  I always get charged for an extra kilo or two of baggage when I fly on Ryanair—it’s just impossible to pack everything in 18kg.  Why should people get to carry extra fat for free?

Upgrade: Travel Better.

Rob Fisher

Via Slashdot comes the story that the TSA (the people in charge of security in American airports) will refuse to let you on the plane if you refuse to show your ID.

But ID is not a requirement for travel:  if you say you lost or forgot your ID, they’ll let you on the plane, subject to extra searches.  Chris Soghoian writes:

The change of rules seems to be a pretty obvious case of security theater. Real terrorists do not refuse to show ID. They claim to have lost their ID, or they use a fake.

To me this doesn’t seem like security theatre at all.  It’s simply that officials don’t like those who refuse to respect their authority.  They respond by behaving like bullies.  It’s no different to me being told off for holding a camcorder at a security checkpoint, or some bloke being told to change his T-shirt.

Brian Micklethwait

I spent the night before election day and the night of election day watching Boris Johnson get elected Mayor of London.  And I think it must have been in the rather testy TV interview he did for the BBC, after his official acceptance speech, that he said he favours moving Heathrow to the Thames Estuary.  I do as well, if only because it will make for such great aerial photos while it is being built, to say nothing of when it is finished.

I have mentioned this notion here before, although the only serious commenter on that thought the scheme nonsensical.  What I didn’t mention was that Boris is in favour of it.  So it may not go away just yet. 

Whether Kit Malthouse, the writer of the piece I originally linked to, is anything directly to do with Boris I do not know.  Ah.  At the bottom of that piece it says that “Kit Malthouse is a businessman and former Tory councillor and is standing for the London Assembly in 2008”, so I’m guessing: yes.  And I’m guessing he got in, if only because the Tories in general did so well.

Vote Conservative for better ways to waste public money!

Patrick Crozier

Tim Blair has a post up about fuel efficiency.  Seems that it is about the same now as it was forty years ago.  Blair points out that modern cars are quite different, they have all sorts of systems eg air conditioning that use engine power to run them.  They also have far better acceleration.

The funny thing is that I am pretty sure that this phenomenon of efficiency not changing much can be traced back much further.  I seem to remember coming across an article in Autocar from about 1910.  The MPG figures given were remarkably similar to those of today.

Ah, here are some figures for the 1908 Model T and yes, it’s the same.

Of course, the big thing being missed here is engine efficiency as opposed to overall car efficiency.  I suspect engines have made huge gains over the years.

The point is that consumers when given a choice between saving money and greater safety or comfort will choose safety and comfort.

Update

Actually, it would appear that those Ford figures might be a bit dodgy.  But the article confirms (talking about the Lupo) that for consumers fuel economy is far from the only thing.

Patrick Crozier

This is a complete rewrite of version 1 which didn’t really cut the mustard.  Ah well.

It rather looks like BAA, Britain’s largest airports operator and owner of Heathrow, Glasgow and Stanstead, will be forcibly broken up.  It doesn’t seem to have a lot of friends right now¹ and the regulator is starting to beat his “this is a monopoly” drum².

I can’t say I am exactly thrilled at the prospect.  For two reasons.  First of all, there’s a rather nasty whiff of nationalism here.  I can’t help but notice that things were awfully quiet until a bunch of foreigners bought up BAA.  Secondly, forcibly breaking things up involves, well, force and I am against force³.

I am, of course, all in favour of things being voluntarily broken up, if that is what owners want to do.  Indeed, that is precisely what BAA itself did in the case of Prestwick a few years ago.  They reckoned they couldn’t make a go of it, sold it off to some people who thought they could and, hey Prestwick! (so to speak) within a few years the airport was booming⁴.

The fact that BAA’s owners (and, for that matter, its owners before that) don’t think the same experiment should be tried with its London airports tends to suggest that they think the airports will make more money if owned by just the one operator.  This argument cuts a lot of ice with me because I think profits are a good thing⁵.

However, it’s impossible to avoid the complaints.  Personally, I rather like airports, Heathrow included.  But lots of people don’t.  Terminal 5’s teething difficulties⁶ aside people complain about the queues, the lost luggage and the general state of repair of the buildings.  Airlines have their own range of complaints but I have never been quite able to pin down just what they are.

But let’s assume for argument that BAA is not doing as good as job as it could or is reasonable to expect.  Why’s that?  Because free market theory tends to run along the lines: “Well, if companies attempt to abuse their monopoly position all that will happen is that competitors will enter the market.” And there are examples of this⁷.  So, if BAA really is doing a crap job it is either because the theory is wrong or something else is going on.

My guess is that it is more or less impossible to enter the market.  Try getting planning permission for a new airport in the South East.  With the current planning laws you can forget it⁸.  Well, you can but BAA might just be able to what with all its experience and contacts.  And buying up enough contiguous land might also pose difficulties⁹ even if I think they can be overcome. 

But maybe it’s not.  Maybe, it would indeed be impossible to build another airport in South East England.  But then the appropriate level of competition is not airports but regions.  Maybe a better airport somewhere else would draw in the investment and the people to compete with London (and in the process take BAA down a peg or two).  Of course, to do this developers would need to be able to build the buildings and infrastructure needed which again is impossible under current conditions.  But this just re-iterates the point: as far as we know it is government force that is causing the problem.

Just as an aside one argument that gets dragged up in this debate is the one about how BAA was privatised in the first place.  The argument goes that all our woes are down to the fact that it was privatised in one go.  If only the airports had been sold off one by one… Maybe, maybe, but if it had there would have been nothing (in a free market) to stop one of those airports gobbling up all the others and creating what we see today.  The point is that markets are discovery mechanisms.  Amongst the things they discover is how many companies should exist in a given market.  My guess is that BAA is the size it is because that is the optimum size in the prevailing conditions.  If it wasn’t it would have been broken up by now.

Notes

1.  Hey, even the libertarians at Samizdata don’t have much time for it.  Or, even Jeff Randall at the Telegraph.

2.  See Gatwick and Stansted are targets as BAA break-up looms, Telegraph, 23 April 2008

3.  See What I believe, InstaPatrick.

4.  See David Farrar’s article, Freedom and Whisky, 29 May 2003.

5.  See Profits in a Market Economy, Art Carden, Ludwig von Mises Institute, 18 January 2008, in which the author makes the point that profits are good and losses bad.

6.  At least, I hope they’re teething.

7.  See Against competition regulation, InstaPatrick.  Another short one

8.  Another reason to be against planning.  For some more, see Against Planning, InstaPatrick.

9.  I am, of course, against compulsory purchase.  See Against compulsory purchase, InstaPatrick.

Patrick Crozier

Earlier this week I heard (or did I read, or both?) that some commission or other (the Monopolies commission, perhaps?) had written a report saying that Britain’s biggest airport operator, BAA which owns Heathrow, Gatwick and Stanstead should be broken up.  It’s stifling competition or something, apparently.

This has met with almost universal approval¹.  But, I don’t care, I’m still against it².

Notes

1.  See Situation Normal, All F**ked Up by Johnathan Pearce on Samizdata.
2.  See:

Should BAA be broken up? in which I argue that, no, it shouldn’t.

The ASI was wrong in which I argue that monopolies aren’t a problem so long as you have free markets.

Against competition regulation.  This is an InstaPatrick article and is woefully short but it makes many of the same points.

What do you mean by a monopoly? in which I argue that everything has some competition.

Rob Fisher

It’s threatening to go beyond nods and winks.  “One of Stormont’s youngest politicians” has made some proposals:

• Total alcohol ban for newly qualified drivers;
• a curfew that would stop young motorists from driving at night;
• a ban on them carrying teenage passengers.

This is just the usual ill-thought-out posturing that’s difficult to argue against because everyone can agree that one teenage road death is one too many, so any measures to reduce deaths are justified.  It’s not true because if you think about it, some risk is acceptable, or else we wouldn’t drive at all or we’d have universal 5mph speed limits.

And if you think about it, there are some obvious problems with this scheme:  A total alcohol ban doesn’t make any more sense with young drivers than it does with older ones, it just punishes innocent people who have drunk a harmless amount.  What happens when a young motorist is stranded in a remote location past the curfew?  How are young motorists to get experience of night driving?  And the passenger ban has been tried elsewhere.  It just results in more cars on the road with teenage drivers.

But proposals like these are about the politics of beeing seen do be doing something to protect the children.  They don’t have to make any sense.

Rob Fisher

The new UK Libertarian Party has a transport section in their manifesto.  It’s something of a living document and may change over time, but there are some interesting ideas.  This one could be controversial, it’s a bit like what the Australians are trying but perhaps the truckers will be placated by the abolition of income tax:

We will end the indirect subsidy of road freight. This may require retention of a form of distance-based road pricing for HGVs, which in 38-tonne form, do 10,000 times more damage to roads than a 1 tonne car.

I like this bit best:

Motorists and riders should have the right to make their own choices on their use of safety equipment; insurance companies should have the right to charge additional premiums (or decline cover) to those who do.

These parts sound like a good opportunity to properly privatise rail, although I don’t fully understand the current situation (does anybody?)

Disband the cartel of the rolling stock leasing arrangements.  Resolve geographic monopoly that is the rail tendering mechanism.

Patrick Crozier

By now, most readers will be perfectly well aware of the problems at Heathrow’s new Terminal 5 which have led to cancelled flights and passengers being separated from their luggage.  Readers will also be perfectly familiar with the media’s calm, measured and sober reporting of the issues involved.

Glancing at the background it appears that what’s happened is that a number of small problems combined to make one big one.  The good news is that most of these are “soft” issues - to do with staffing and training and therefore reasonably easy to sort out - rather than “hard” issues - to do with the infrastructure and computer systems - which would take ages.

Terminal 5 was a massive project brought in on time and on budget.  This says some pretty good things about the people involved. 

I suspect Terminal 5 will be working pretty well pretty soon.

Rob Fisher

At Richmond station there are no automated machines for topping up Oyster pre-pay, so one has to queue behind people making unfathomably lengthy and complicated transactions.  Said I to the ticket clerk, “are there any plans to install Oyster machines?”

“That’s up to the London Underground People,” said he.  “They would have to pay for those machines.  We are South West Trains; it is nothing to do with us.”

Protested I, “But I am a Southwest Trains customer.  Care you not for my convenience and the marginal benefits of such that might encourage others like me to favour your interchange over other routes?  Could not some agreement be made to the satisfaction of all?”

Alas, it was nothing to do with him.  He was a mere employee of South West Trains.

Rob Fisher

Grocery prices in Australia are to climb.

Australia’s transport ministers decided at a meeting in Canberra yesterday to introduce a system of “full cost recovery” on heavy vehicles to help pay for road repair and construction costs.

Registration fees for 69 per cent of heavy vehicles will rise between 1 and 10 per cent.

[...]

Australian Consumer Association spokesman Christopher Zinn said families should expect more grocery price increases as the transport industry’s prices rose.

Or to put it another way, groceries will now be subsidised a bit less than they were before.

Brian Micklethwait

You can now connect your idiot toy to the internet in a South Wales bus.  There’s a great picture there at Idiot Toys of the back of the bus which explains everything, and it includes a link to this website, where you can learn more.  Good news for me.  If I’m in South Wales.  In a bus.

Patrick Crozier

As promised, Open Skies Part II, in which Michael and I talk more about slots, the likely effects of open skies and the rise of Emirates.

I should also point readers in the direction of this rather good essay on the subject by Michael from a few years ago.

Patrick Crozier

FGW train at Paddington

One of my recent themes here has been that the TOCs¹ are beginning to sort themselves out.  Trains are cleaner, brighter, safer, more reliable, easier to use etc.  This has certainly been my experience.  And the other day this was confirmed by South West Trains’s latest results which indicated that they are having success in growing their market.  The only fly in the ointment seems to be Network Rail2 which (to no great surprise amongst libertarians) is gaining a reputation for being as arrogant as it is wasteful.

And then came this:

The country’s worst-performing rail company has been warned it could lose its franchise unless services improve over the next 12 months.

In a move unprecedented since privatisation, First Great Western has been told it faces being stripped of its licence unless standards are raised.

Personally, I get a feeling of yet another last chance.  I can imagine why.  You can’t exactly re-let the franchise immediately.  It took 18 months in the case of SouthEastern (yes, such a move is not “unprecedented") which means if the government strips Great Western of the franchise it is going to the government that gets the blame every time a train is late.  From a minister’s point of view best to procrastinate in the hope that he gets moved before he really, really has to do anything.

Whether First Great Western really is as bad as everyone says it is, I really don’t know.  In my experience it seems just fine but I know at least one commuter who bought himself a car rather than rely on their service.  And The Truth About First Great Western has gone awfully quiet recently.

Notes

1. See the Wikipedia page for a description.
2. See Wikipedia page on Network Rail.

Patrick Crozier

Uh oh!

I’d managed to press stop.  It was an accident but that was it.  Ten minutes of quality podcasting consigned to oblivion.  I suppose I should look on the bright side.  We had at least got half an hour recorded.  And I had got a long way down the podcasting road before my first stick-on disaster.  Worse has happened to better people.  And at least when last week Michael and I sat down to see if we could pick up where my clumsy fingers had left us off we only had 10 minutes to do (although in the end we happily chatted away for 20).

Anyway, here in its authentic truncated form is Open Skies Part I in which - in the guise of a discussion about open skies policies - Michael Jennings and I manage to talk about the importance of Heathrow, the dire financial status of American airlines and the weird world of landing slots.

Here’s the trailer.

Open Skies Part II to follow Real Soon Now, as Brian might say.

Brian Micklethwait

Quotulatiousness links to an interesting WSJ piece about a revival in the fortunes of the US rail industry.  Quote:

Railroad operators are pressing for advantage over their main competitor, long-haul trucking, which has struggled with rising fuel prices, driver shortages and highway congestion. Railroads say a load can be moved by rail using about a third as much fuel as it takes to haul it by truck. And rail transport is becoming more efficient still, they say, as operators speed their lines and logistics companies build huge warehouse areas along routes.

Demand for rail service increased sharply when the U.S. economy and Asian imports surged starting in 2003. Tight capacity on major routes enabled railroads to raise prices. The growth in freight volume has slowed along with economic growth, but shippers say they’re still planning to increase their use of rail transport because of the cost.

“The railroad industry is finally making some money,” says Charles “Wick” Moorman IV, chief executive officer of Norfolk Southern Corp., based in Norfolk, Va. “And we’re pumping that money into our infrastructure.”

Containers are, as so often these days, at the heart of the story.

Patrick Crozier

...for a passenger transport executive (Greater Manchester in this case).

Hint:  In case you haven’t already spotted the flaw just imagine what would happen if you tried turning one of the gears.

Via: Association of British Drivers

Rob Fisher

I visited the London Transport Museum in January.  On display was this letter from “Ill-Used Traveller” to the editor of the Times.

Your excellent suggestion in a leading article this morning to have more frequent trains into the country, in order to develop residential traffic, will, I much fear, have little or no effect with the traffic managers to whose care our travelling convenience and comfort on the Mid Kent line are unfortunately entrusted, unless you can so agitate this matter, so important to so many of us now who live out of town, that Parliament will step in and free the national highway, as the railway now is, from the selfish obstructions thrown in our way by the quarrels of rival companies and other causes.

The letter was written in 1864.  Demands for the government to solve problems go back further than I thought.

Also at the museum I learnt about compensation to watermen on the opening of Westminster Bridge in 1750, Parliamentary trains, and Metro-Land.

Brian Micklethwait

Weirdness blogger deputy dog doesn’t do capital letters, but on the plus side collects strange structures and circumstances.  His latest weirdness is Funchal Airport, in Madeira, which is mostly not on the ground, but up in the air on pillars.  Lots of pillars.  It was on the ground, but was too short for comfort, and this was how they made it longer, apparently.  Underneath, there’s a big car park, which makes sense.

DD has photos of this, but the best photo of it that I found was this, on Flickr:

Whenever you find an interesting object, it’s worth looking for it on Flickr, I find.

This elaborate contraption - which looks rather like an aircraft carrier, I think – illustrates what an economic impact aviation can have on a region.  This is the trouble they are prepared to go to just to have airplanes serving them satisfactorily.  See also: Heathrow.

Brian Micklethwait

If you find your trains sometimes to be late and always to be crowded, try putting up with this:

China’s most important railway, Jing-guang Railway (Guangzhou-Beijing), cannot reopen to traffic for 3 to 5 days, due to the power supply cut in Hunan Province and the aggravated snowy weather in the regions along the line, according to the Guangzhou Railway Group. Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao has gone to Hunan to inspect and oversea the situation.

Some 500,000 people have been condemned to waiting in Guangzhou for their trains. Passenger accomodation sites in the city are in good order and there are no crowds seeking refunds.

For the time being, all seems well.  But this blogger, who has pictures of various bits of the teeming thousands, reckons it will soon turn much nastier:

Because of the vastness of the situation, it was very hard to get a decent photo from the ground ... the pictures I have here only tell the story from a short vantage/viewpoint.  It is important to click on these pictures and to examine what lies beyond the initial view of the shot...what you will see are people.  Thousands and thousands of them.

I worry that as these people run out of money and grow more and more frustrated, tired, hungry, cold and wet, things will come to a boil.  You can imagine what will happen with these crowds once the first trains are announced on the loudspeakers ... the crush of those wanting to get tickets or those that have tickets trying to get through in time to catch the train.  It will be ugly ... no doubt.

I heard about this when Instapundit linked to the story.  Half a million people.  Half a million.

Rob Fisher

The fog at Heathrow is lifting but my flight is delayed for some time yet, so a blog post is in order.  My in-flight entertainment, this month’s Bike magazine, has an article about DfT’s proposed changes to the penalty points system.  The idea is to introduce 6 point penalties for “excessive” speeders.  They have a nice chart illustrating speeds at which various penalties apply under the current and proposed systems.  Currently, on the motorway, you won’t (in theory) be prosecuted until you drive at 79mph.  Between 79 and 83mph you’ll be fined and offered a “speed awareness course”.  I can only imagine how useful that course is.  Between 83 and 96mph you’ll be fined and get 3 points.  Over 96 and you’ll be banned.  The proposed change is to introduce a 6 point penalty at 94mph.

The changes make more sense in a 30mph zone, where you’ll face the 6 point penalty for going faster than 45mph, and a ban for going faster than 50.

Various people are quoted.  Paul Mostyn of the Met is the most interesting.  He says, “Personally I don’t think the threat of more points will scare people into slowing down.” He goes on:

The DfT has completely given up on dealing with driver standards and they just want to focus on speed.  Even though their own figures show that 50% of drivers regularly exceed the speed limits—70% of drivers on motorways—excessive speed is a contributory factor in in only 5% of accidents.  The real issue is the decline in standards, with 80% of of accidents caused by the worst 20% of road users,

Suppose we drive past a school at 3:45am at 35mph.  The place is deserted and no danger is caused.  But to drive past the same school at 3:45pm with traffic everywhere and kids spilling off the pavements also at 35mph may well be extremely dangerous.  Clearly these two offences are not equal, but the new penalty proposals will make them equal.  It’s absurd.

This sort of common sense is why I like the idea of police having discretion about who to prosecute.  As ever, I wonder what type of penalty system would be used if insurance companies made the rules.

Brian Micklethwait

Oh dear.  Foreigners are pretty good at devising their own versions of English and good for them, but it seems they’ll never really master English English:

Go here for the story.  Which is pretty obvious really, except that the airline in question is Turkish despite sounding rather South East Asian.

Rob Fisher

A Samizdata commenter linked to a story about a security vulnerability in Mifare Classic RFID cards.  According to the wikipedia article for Mifare, which cites an article on what looks like an independent website called Mifare.net, these are Oyster cards, but there are variants of Mifare card so Oyster cards could be different.

The press release from the University of Virginia has the important details about the vulnerability, and an article by the CEO of a smart card consultancy company goes into even more detail.  What it boils down to is that only a 48 bit key is used to encrypt tha data stored on the card, so with the right equipment and know-how it is possible to quickly try all the keys and find the one that unlocks a given card.  Then it will be possible to read and write the data.  How useful this is depends on what is stored on the card.

If the prepay balance is stored, it would be simple to modify the balance.  But there may be other safeguards in place.  Certainly it should be possible for TfL to spot discrepancies between journeys made and balance deposited to a card.  But would-be hackers might be more sophisticated, so if Oyster cards do rely on Mifare Classic encryption the situation has changed from mathematical certainty that Oyster is secure to a battle of wits between TfL and computer hackers.

On the other hand, the effort required may outweigh the benefits of fare dodging.  Things could be much worse if Oyster cards had evolved into general purpose micropayment cards.  That idea was dropped last year.