Changchun-Harbin(?) express passing through Shuangchengpu station

excellent, comprehensive examination into Japan's railway successes by @borners.bsky.social ky.social and @carto-graph.bsky.social. was flattered they linked to a couple of my Japan railway history posts on Substack to reinforce their many good points worksinprogress.co/issue/why-ja...

Thinking about Toronto's trains: every delivery to Davisville or Greenwood (i.e. every train from 1954 to 2001) was by rail, but the TRs, which arrived at Wilson, weren't. Streetcars have always arrived by rail to Hillcrest, and Line 5 LRVs by rail to EMSF.

Finally Korea will get high-quality Google Maps. www.reuters.com/world/asia-p...

This, continual procurement, is the one reform to US federal vehicle procurement I want. We need structures that allow continual fleet renewal at 1/x lifespan, not bulk purchases every 30 years that inherently have big issues.

My research article “Quantitative Method for Assessing the Quality of Intermodal/Interagency Connections and Service Integration at Suburban Rail Stations” has been published in the @trb.org Transportation Research Record. This is based on my MASc @uoft.me on coordination between transit services.

How is commuter rail in the US and Canada faring? It depends! In terms of ridership recovery, Toronto, Boston, and the LIRR lead, while Chicago and Los Angeles lag far behind. Caltrain modernisation has brought the system far ahead of it's region's metro, BART.

North American commuter rail ridership through 2025 shows a couple of upwards trends: -LIRR benefitting from expanded City Ticket, congestion pricing, ESA. -GO improved off peak service. -Caltrain reinvigoration

The discussion about "modular" construction would be a lot more lucid if we viewed it as an extreme on the prefabrication spectrum. There's lots of prefab already viable (like this!) – and we can make it more viable!

waiting so diligently for the analyst at APTA to upload the q4 ridership report so i can know how canadian systems are holding up

Suprematism, by Nikolai Suetin, 1920-21, 📸 by @tiltoncreative

And before the wars, Korea strangely functioned as an agri-colony of Japan, where much of the rice crop was exported for Japanese consumption and the lost calories substituted with Manchurian coarse grain imports.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=4OkB... Toronto in 8mm. Line 1, Line 2, Line 5, Kitchener Line and UP Express.

when the eglinton line was conceived, 8mm video was fading but still in broad use. so, here's eglinton on tape

This issue actually destroyed US transit. So many trams might still exist if there had been a 7.5¢ coin in 1920

Sewoon Sangga has been long an obsession of mine. A massive complex of brutalist shopping mall buildings which span four wide blocks in a straight north-south line from Jongmyo Shrine to Namsan Mountain, it pioneered the Seoul as we know it -- and has lived many lives during its steady decline 🧵

Review of the diet of troodontid dinosaurs: onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/... 🪶🧪 (📷Fan et al.)

the Fushun municipal government proposed reviving the old local electric railways as part of an integrated (light?) rail loop, integrating with the old Shenyang-Jilin railway, for the 14th 5 Year Plan. It looks ridiculous on a map. corridor reuse final boss

It took English consultants to get Toronto to come up with anything that wasn't this. There was some diminishing returns over the years, Bloor had 150 streetcars for peak service but Eglinton only 80 busses before they got their subways.

eglinton

i feel like you see this when contrasting cities in china and the upper-middle ASEAN gang. the latter are richer but provision less space per capita, less rapid transit, and exist at lower lower densities

chinese T1s have vastly higher floor space per capita as well as population density than Tokyo. but they would be so much better with japanese surface rail

missed another light cycle westbound at Atlantic because of the restricted speed policy under underpasses. This outdated policy was due to trolley poles losing contract with the overhead during elevation changes. We don't have trolley poles on tbe network anymore!!

this isn't shit that TSP alone can fix!!! Our dated infrastructure and nonsensical procedures are some of the biggest hindrances to efficient service. there should be ZERO reason two streetcars can't be crossing the same intersection at the same time in our holy year of 2026

It’s interesting how many people seem to think subway and bus riders are entirely distinct communities and not the same one that people back and forth between.

The original Tokyu 7000 series only has articles on the Japanese and Korean Wikipedias, which surprises me, given it was Japan's first production all-stainless train

I reaaaally want them to use the Don branch and Belleville subdivision to enter Toronto, not because I think it would lead to better project outcomes but because the aesthetics of trains gliding over the Don Valley there would be good.

Old hand-written timetable signs show a substantial but not huge passenger service. It's hard to find any historical schedules, so I don't know how the service level evolved over time.

an eternal curse on North Korea for making impossible a hypothetical shen-dan/gyeongui through HSL, which i would find slightly useful

The new Shenbai PDL (in the top right, in red) is kind of funny in that it exists largely to service Changbaishan a.k.a. Mt. Paektu, the mythical homeland of both the Manchu and Korean people, atop which sits Heaven Lake

Nikkei video of the area around Tokyo station. Has incredible pics showing the change from 2000 to the present, plus the planned future. The Koizumi administration's "Urban Renaissance" agenda worked. www.youtube.com/watch?v=fFkR...

One of the Ontario Northland Railway's new Siemens passenger trainsets passed through Hamilton today on their way north. It's a pretty attractive train!

The more you study old US transit plans the more you realize that ~everyone was rightfully fixated on travel time savings, noting times right on the map. Philly did a particularly impressive analysis with isochrones in *1914* babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=hv...

The Russian and Chinese railways have very intensive freight traffic and also carry very high pax-km/capita. But the US network suffers from really low investment compared to those systems. There proabbly isn't any American railway that can measure up to Transsib or BAM in infrastructural standards.

It's interesting that there seems to be little desire in traditional rapid transit foamer/railfan circles to understand CBTC in the same way they understand traditional signalling systems. CBTC info isn't super accessible to the public, but I feel like there's more to it than that.

This is the obvious approach, but the project team seems to really believe in the Quebec-Montreal segment, which has a really poor case if it has to bear the cost of some creative solution of the eastward exit from Montreal.

densha otaku videos with the yukkuri TTS feel like the spiritual equivalent to canadian bus foamer videos with ugly title cards reading [This or that] Productions

Australia, like Canada, permits a lot of housing - nearly 200k units last year - but unlike Canada ~60% is Houses i.e. single detached dwellings.

Seeing this going on nationwide as housing construction grinds to a halt in Toronto is really saddening

The combined population of Australia and Canada recently exceeded that of the UK, which feels somehow significant ..?

Yes! Here are images of the St Clair streetcar with the current # of stops, and then with proposed stop reductions (which are still fairly close - see line 2 stations for reference), configured as you suggest, with tips 400 metres from stops but in a diamond shape to better model walk time in a grid

Marco's transit priority atlas will be an eye-opener, and I hope traffic engineers will use it to reorient toward managing car access directly to benefit transit, rather than trying to bolt on transit priority to their current practices, which are all about getting more cars everywhere faster.

In general anglo Canada needs to embrace French more. Bilingualism is a good trait of a healthy society and would provide an important cultural firewall against Americanism.

Opening of Finch West LRT was very exciting. I love seeing the new infra, beautiful trains & people excited to ride! But we're clearly not done yet. Scheduled travel time of 46 minutes & often over 50 mins in reality just isn't okay when the local bus was scheduled at 38 off-peak and 53 at peak. 1/

Mosaic transit group please come back to save us

we are reaching new levels of inane traffic delays

This is so bad

Capitalism is when you're good at building car, Communism is when you're good at building train. This is why the Soviet Union was Communist, Japan and China are mixed economies, and why America was capitalist but now is feudal.

fixed :)