A lovely visitor to the depot today! Say hi!

We need light duty freestanding electric tower cranes that are remote operated in NYC. The knuckle booms need to be GONE and these kinds of tower cranes made cheap and easy.

Little retrofit elevator in our building, big enough for two people standing with luggage (or, I think, one person seated in a manual wheelchair, although there were other barriers in the building to that). A million reasons ways the US regulatory system forbids this – no acceptance of global…

Yes agreed - Bouygues, Dragados, etc run big projects in the UK. Often the case that many of the senior contractor staff are French. Relatedly, I would love to sit down with some of those firms and work out why projects go so much better elsewhere

The contractor I work with is Al*tom lmao

Effiage building the HS2 Bat Tunnel and the same for diff projects in France is something that needs to be studied

It's not ignorance per se imho but procurement practices, regulations, and honestly sometimes just chauvinism but as the bat tunnel discourse shows the same companies and sometimes the same engineers operate in Britain and France, why the different results?

I don't think the situation in Britain is comparable to say America or Canada - given that we regularly interact with French, German, Italian professionals on a daily basis

I know we talk a lot about transit best practices being localised with Anglosphere professionals and technicians being ignorant of that knowledge that's usually in other languages

We also rely a lot on ad-hoc signage and boards too much which a customisable LED display should fix, should be much cheaper than handwritten signs and printed boards

TFL should invest in this in the busiest stations given how much we rely on tannoys and staff to guide passengers in peak times

I think the insularity of British practices is even more egregious than the others, given that french and Italian and German contractors work with us on a daily basis!

Also an inverter getting installed plus we had a possession for our monthly clean of the roads

Not posted in a while but this was last weeks graffiti, which was very gorgeous shame we had to clean it

Yesterday

more users are joining
and the hog grows longer

machine is fixed and ready to do its job

Yep!

Average housing cost burdens in Europe over time.

Comparison of country-level incidence of EU housing cost overburden and High-Cost Low-Income measures, 2018.

According to this new analysis by Rod Hick and colleagues, the UK had the 2nd highest housing cost burden in Europe in 2018 (behind only Greece), and also the 2nd highest rate of overburdened low-income households www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

Royal Commission on Local Government in Greater London 1957-60 - A London Inheritance The Royal Commission on Local Government in Greater London 1957-60 paved the way for the Greater London Council. Many of the themes in the report are the same today, as they were over 60 years ago.

'The Royal Commission on Local Government in Greater London 1957-60'. Lots of maps and details for all you local government nerds ...
alondoninheritance.com/london-books...

Which global cities have the highest and lowest average building heights? New blog post delving into a fantastic new dataset to find out jamesjgleeson.wordpress.com/2024/11/12/w...

Really useful report to read

one thing where we can be a lot more efficient - it really seems like we keep trains for like 12hrs or for two 12hr shifts more often than not

Turnaround time is quite long , tools for a lot of stuff is basically kept locked up in a vending machine or in the store, engineers are not assigned their own tools, if it's being used - you have to wait or borrow it

Wheels are getting shaved and bogies are being replaced

my view on what's happened in Amsterdam are quite simple, away fans starting nonsense and getting beat up is a normal part of football culture, any more discourse than that is incredibly stupid and pointless 👍

Beats me what the boys are doing with this today

Thankfully - the fires have been always localised and we have caught them in time but the related smoke is bound to cause issues especially for drivers and passengers in the very enclosed tunnels London has

it's not just a rolling stock issue, track maintenance as well - both amplify each other's issues - incredibly temperamental in their old age