More Autonomous People you’ll meet in Transport
BDSM – Buses do so much
BESS – battery energy storage system
Comment Colonels – Armchair experts ready to comment to the death on their favourite topic, armed with nothing more than gusto and dodgy references.
ETHEL – Electric Train Heating Ex-Locomotive, an old loco placed behind a steam engine to provide heat and light to to carriages not equipped with steam heating. All the ETHELS left us by 1994.
FLIRT – Stadler’s Fast Light Intercity and Regional Train diesel electric multiple unit (DEMU)
HAROLD – Huddersfield Adhesion & Rolling contact Laboratory Dynamics hardware rig.
IRENA – International Renewable Energy Agency
JESSICA – Joint European Support for Sustainable Investment in City Areas, initiative of the European Commission.
LUCAS – London Underground Combined Access System smartcard scheme for construction and engineering workers to access their work on London Underground.
MARA – Master Availability and Reliability Agreement, the contract between DfT Rail and the Train Service Provider for IEP.
MOM – Network Rail’s Mobile Operations Manager, who operates ground frames.
NORA – National Organisation of Residents Associations. In effect, the collective noun for Karens.
RAMSES – European research project which aims to deliver quantified evidence of climate change impacts, and the costs and benefits of a wide range of adaptation measures, focusing on cities.
SUE – subsurface utility engineering
TALIS – Thames Alternative Link to the International Rail System, alternative route to the Channel Tunnel.
THOMoS – Train Hi-fidelity Motion Simulator
TOD – Transit oriented development, term for higher density residential, retail and/or entertainment development on, over or near transit stations.
TOMAS – Train Management System used to manage trains in and out of service and in depots, including composition of trains, timetables, service allocations, departure and arrival movements.
TRISTAN – Triennial Symposium on Transportation Analysis.
TWaTs – long distance commuters who travel to and from London mainly on Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays. See also EuroTWaTs.
Dante’s Nine Levels of Hell transposed to Modern Day life
1st – Position of personal awkwardness
2nd – Position of public awkwardness
3rd – Face to face burn
4th – Public burn
5th – Workplace burn
6th – Social media burn
7th – Social media ostracisation
8th – Burn on mainstream media
9th – Ice cold societal ostracism
Is your Train headed Up or Down?
The convention was generally for up to be towards one of:
London
the company’s head office
(on a single-ended branch line) the junction with the mainline
the largest town on the line
More Transport and Other Modern Collective Nouns
a chain of escalators
a chase of wiring
a chorus of leafblowers
a cloud of witnesses
a cluster of gauges
a clutch of shops
a condescension of vegans
a dash of commuters
a pavement of good intentions
a sneer of vinyl record enthusiasts
a sprawl of malls
a squabble of factions
a stench of roadies
a suite of electronics
a swarm of drones
a throne of lies
a transplant of suburbanites
Heinrich Triangle Accident Theory
Heinrich proposed that, for every major injury, loss or event, there are 29 minor and 300 no-injury accidents, losses, or events. To reduce a major risk, it is incumbent to investigate and eliminate the greater number of minor and no-injury accidents or losses. Don’t just look at the tip of the iceberg, think about what’s below the surface. Heinrich’s formulated his theory in 1931 and it was verified and revised by Frank Bird in the 1970s based on insurance company claim data.
Is it called a Car or Carriage?
Tube trains are made up of cars, railway trains are comprised of carriages. Whilst railways have always been called ‘carriages’, Charles Yerkes, the American financier who acquired and completed a number of Tube railways, imported the term ‘cars’ from the US. Hence the carriages on what were to become the Piccadilly, Bakerloo, and Northern lines, and the term extended to all Undergound lines.
Transport Planning, and some people that confound it
backcasting – verifying ridership or traffic modelling outcomes against actual data, ie the opposite of forecasting
BCR – Bean Counters’ Requirements, publicly called Benefit Cost Ratio.
commutershed – the travel to work area around a city.
isochrone – a curve joining points of equal travel time from a location.
caballista – nickname of self-nominated individuals who join working groups and official Community Partnerships and/or Local Enterprise Partnerships that produce Neighbourhood Plans. Caballistas choose and promote their own agendas in isolated and often unreviewed proposals.
POPS – privately owned public space
SLOAP – Space Left Over After Planning, coined by critic Ian Nairn in the 1950s to describe those leftover triangles of grass on verges at road junctions and in housing estates that had no function, as well as the random mixture of carriageways, footways, traffic lights, bollards, islands, bus shelters and odd kiosks. The concept of placemakingwas developed to make the public environment much more pleasant.
social cleansing – nickname for gentrification effects when transport improves, which increases housing prices, pushing locals out of the area.
Technical Curves useful in Transport
Engineers, scientists, even economists use various graphs to plot phenomena. We at LR Towers have referred to some of them:
Bathtub Curve
The plot of reliability of any product throughout its life cycle, which looks like the cross section of a bathtub. That is, high initial teething problems, thence resolved for low ongoing failure rate for most of the lifespan of the product, followed by increasing failures as the product wears out.
Diffusion of Innovation S Curve
Everett Rogers’ 1962 work Diffusion of Innovation Theory explains how, why, and at what rate new ideas and technology spread, and introduced the term ‘early adopter’. It shews that rates of adoption tend to follow an S-shaped pattern as it is affected by innovations, communication, social influences, and other factors.
Duck Curve
In renewable electricity generation, the graph of electricity production over the course of a day shows the imbalance between peak demand after sunset and the decline of renewable energy production when the sun sets. The resulting graph resembles the silhouette of a duck due to the significant dip in demand during the afternoon and a sharp rise in demand during the evening as people come home from work and turn on appliances, lights, and heat. This misalignment leads to excess generation during the day when solar power is abundant and a shortage of power in the evening when solar power is no longer available.
Hockey Stick Curve
This describes a straight and consistent plot, then a linear climb, as seen in climate and sometimes startup economic phenomena.
Ragone Plot
The relationship between energy density and power density for storage technologies. Batteries generally have high-energy densities and low power densities.
Technology Maturity Curve
Also known as Gartner’s Hype Cycle for emerging technologies, after the company which produces detailed curves annually for different industries.
Not shown is the Valley of Death, which often happens when companies fail in the Trough of Disillusionment:
Every Connexion Matters.
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