Happy Knickers Map

Europe yay, Saudi Arabia nay. 😦

This was an email sent to me, by the way. I certainly don’t research such frivolities. 🙂

There’s a post on The White House blog featuring a video of Obama’s speech a few days ago on the future of America’s infrastructure – A Vision for High-Speed Rail. Cannot even tell you how thrilling it is to listen to him talk about transport and planning. I idolize him and his speechwriters, and I understand everything that he’s talking about. I remember an article in Monocle about the surprisingly sophisticated rail system in Spain, I’ve been on the German-engineered Maglev in China, and the trains in Tokyo. I know how rail has pulled smaller provincial French towns on the map, like Lille, with the Eurostar and other European networks. Is this how Kennedy moved people in the 60s? I feel.. good, to be here, in this world, at this time in history. Pretty powerful stuff. The transcript is worth reading, but the video is better.

What we’re talking about is a vision for high-speed rail in America. Imagine boarding a train in the center of a city. No racing to an airport and across a terminal, no delays, no sitting on the tarmac, no lost luggage, no taking off your shoes. (Laughter.) Imagine whisking through towns at speeds over 100 miles an hour, walking only a few steps to public transportation, and ending up just blocks from your destination. Imagine what a great project that would be to rebuild America.

Now, all of you know this is not some fanciful, pie-in-the-sky vision of the future. It is now. It is happening right now. It’s been happening for decades. The problem is it’s been happening elsewhere, not here.

In France, high-speed rail has pulled regions from isolation, ignited growth, remade quiet towns into thriving tourist destinations. In Spain, a high-speed line between Madrid and Seville is so successful that more people travel between those cities by rail than by car and airplane combined. China, where service began just two years ago, may have more miles of high-speed rail service than any other country just five years from now. And Japan, the nation that unveiled the first high-speed rail system, is already at work building the next: a line that will connect Tokyo with Osaka at speeds of over 300 miles per hour. So it’s being done; it’s just not being done here.

There’s no reason why we can’t do this. This is America. There’s no reason why the future of travel should lie somewhere else beyond our borders. Building a new system of high-speed rail in America will be faster, cheaper and easier than building more freeways or adding to an already overburdened aviation system –- and everybody stands to benefit.

And it’s fantastically frustrating not to not have physically been to the places he’s mentioning. I’m going to have 16 days off in July, and I think my plan is to hit the Northeastern US – there’s a sweeping ring of cities there I want to see – New York, Portland, Washington (where Jenny lives), Chicago, Boston, Pittsburgh and Detroit. I’m going to study now with materials from the web and with this course starting in a few months. I’m going to continue travelling the world and hopefully begin to recognize the different systems in place and grapple with the politics, the sociology, and the economics behind the built form at a local and international scale. If street furniture is that interesting to me, and I swoon for the psychological aspects affecting the layout of cities, then this is what I am meant to do. 🙂

Tunnel to a Dream

Satellite image of The Bering Strait, with Siberia on the left, Alaska to the right, and the Diomede Islands situated a beautiful dead-centre.

There’s a competition underway to design a bridge linking an 85km gap between the United States and the former USSR. This is around twice the length of the Channel that links Britain and France. The reality is that it’s highly improbable that any physical structure would ever actually come of this… But that doesn’t stop one being totally oh-so hooked on the idea. A distance of a measly 85km (give or take a few clicks) seems downright goofy in its shortness?

This project is a dream project attempting to connect two continents. In a wide sense, it includes building a tunnel or a bridge at both ends of the strait, extending an existing railways of the United States and Russia, and laying a world highway around the coasts of the world, which require a massive amount of construction.

Once the connection is made, the railway will go through both Uelen of Russia and Cape Prince of Wales of the United States linking the North American Rail System. A new highway will link the existing coastal highway of Uelen – Dezhnev – Tunytlino at Russia and Wales – Tin City – York at the United States.

There has been scientific stirrings that perhaps, in the past, lower water levels would have exposed a ridge allowing our ancestors to stroll between what is now Siberia and Alaska. This would also have been how the North and South American continents were originally populated.

It just seems particularly interesting to imagine a connection of the world’s extremities. Not counting the fact that these aforementioned extremities are but an illusion stemmed from the reproduction of a ubiquitous world map projections. Rarely would you stumble on a 2D global image in where Australia, for example, is ‘centered’ on the sheet. Rather Australia, more often that not, maintains a rather forlorn far-right posting. And why is this, anyway?

Further reading on the Bering Strait here at BLDG BLOG, and the Discovery Channel website.

Destinations

Etihad plans to have 70 destinations under their belt by 2010. They have 45 insofar. Naturally, I felt inclined then to make a desination list from an airport code site, Wikipedia and their route map. Beijing will be launched in March 2008. The small smattering of bolded text is me.