Tag: Transportation

Another Brick in the Wall

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And another government has said that Uber drivers are employees, at least fore the purposes of unemployment insurance:


In what worker advocates are calling a substantial victory that could impact Uber drivers statewide, the New York State labor review board has made a final determination that three former Uber drivers were Uber employees for the purposes of unemployment insurance.

The finding applies to the drivers in question, as well as all “similarly situated” drivers.

The issue of unemployment insurance, while seemingly arcane, underscores a pivotal question for the global gig economy: Are the people driving for Uber or delivering coffee for Postmates independent contractors or are they employees with benefits like unemployment insurance?

New York state now appears closer to having an official position, one that Uber fought hard to forestall. The company has exhausted all options for challenging that decision within the confines of the labor department.

“We won and they lost,” said New York Taxi Workers Alliance Executive Director Bhairavi Desai, in an interview on Wednesday.

They are in a no win situation here:  Either they play this like the old Uber, or the the possibility of profit becomes even more ephemeral.

Not Surprised

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It appears that Uber has systematically structured its pay system to underpay women:

Uber Technologies Inc. is being investigated by the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission after a complaint about gender inequity, according to people familiar with the matter.

The inquiry, one of a series of federal probes of the ride-hailing giant, began last August and hasn’t been previously reported. EEOC investigators have been interviewing former and current Uber employees, as well as seeking documents from Uber officials, the people said. They are seeking information related to Uber’s hiring practices, pay disparity and other matters as they relate to gender, one person said.

………

Uber has struggled to overcome a reputation for being permissive of chauvinism that was largely sparked by former software engineer Susan Fowler’s viral blog post in early 2017.

………

Last week, Uber pushed out its human-resources chief, Liane Hornsey, following an internal probe of her department’s handling of racial discrimination claims. And Uber Chief Operating Officer Barney Harford, hired by Mr. Khosrowshahi from their former employer Expedia Group Inc., last week sent employees a letter of contrition after internal complaints that remarks he made were racially insensitive. The New York Times earlier reported on Mr. Harford. 

Uber abides.

Finally, a Google Update that I Approve Of

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Back in January 2017, Google and Uber teamed up to put a cool feature in Google Maps: You could search for, book, and pay for an Uber all directly from Google Maps. You didn’t even need the Uber app installed. Now, 18 months later, the feature is dead. Google posted a new support page (first spotted by Android Police) that flatly states, “You can no longer book Uber rides directly in Google Maps.”

The feature would have you search for a location in Google Maps and ask for directions like normal, but instead of choosing walking, driving, biking, or mass transit directions, a tab for ride-sharing would allow you to book a ride directly. The ride-sharing tab still exists, but instead of booking an Uber, it just gives you an estimate and offers to kick you out to the Uber app.

My guess?  Other ride sharing apps were looking for a similar space, and Uber attempted to steal autonomous driving tech from Google, and Uber has simply become toxic on many levels.

Of the three, my guess is that the latter was the deciding factor.

When People Who Hate Mass Transit Make Mass Transit Recommendations

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Appearing in The Atlantic, which seems to be ground zero for contrarian idiocy. is the suggestion that the solution to the chronic under-funding of the New York City subway is tearing out the tracks and using the tunnels for self-driving cars and hoverboards.

What we have here is a techno-libertarian who believes that the way to fix mass transit is to replaced it with personal transit, which have already clogged the streets of every major metropolis.

The reason that the subway, or for that matter surface mass transit, moves far more people in far less space than individual cars is because it is following a discrete route with discrete stops.

Personal mass transit is not mass transit, and has few, if any benefits of real mass transit.

As to innovations, one only needs to look at how app enabled Gypsy cabs have worsened traffic congestion, to see how they don’t f%$#ing get it.

Tweet of the Day

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— Shane Goldmacher (@ShaneGoldmacher) May 17, 2018

Cynthia Nixon is campaigning at a subway platform.

This is the same subway that Andrew Cuomo has been under-funding for years.

This is what they are handing out to would be subway passengers who are wondering why their train is late ……… Again.

Nixon is a long shot, but it does look like she will be putting the kibosh on his Presidential aspirations.

H/t naked capitalism

Why Does it Take So Long For Us to Build a Damn Bridge?

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Putin annexed the Crimea in 2014

The contract to construct the bridge was issued in early in 2015, and the bridge opened today.

The 19km span is the longest bridge in Europe, and it would have taken at least twice as long in the US.

It took 25 years to complete the Bid Dig, and that tunnel borer underneath Seattle keeps breaking.

The New York Times noted something similar, where they discovered that per mile subway construction costs are from 5 to 10 times that of other similar projects in first world nations.

There is something seriously wrong here.

One Setback from Being a Bond Villain

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You may recall that roughly a month ago, Tesla was kicked off the NTSB investigation of its fatal “autopilot” crash for issuing self serving pres releases, which the NTSB frowns upon.

Well, it can now be revealed that when the NTSB called Elon Musk, he hung up on them.

I am a firm believer that a leader needs to be receptive to criticism and differences of opinion.

William Durant, founder of General Motors, famously would defer major decisions if there was no opposition, on the theory that the lack of dissent meant that there had not been enough consideration of the downside.

Elon Musk clearly has some problems:

On April 11, Robert Sumwalt, the chairman of the National Transportation Safety Board, called Tesla CEO Elon Musk to tell him that the federal agency was taking the unusual step of removing the company from its investigation into a fatal March 2018 Tesla X crash in California.

Now, as Bloomberg reports, Sumwalt says that Musk abruptly ended the call, according to remarks that the safety official gave before the Society of Air Safety Investigators’ Mid-Atlantic Regional Chapter dinner on Thursday.

“Best I remember, he hung up on us,” Sumwalt said.

In a short email sent to Ars, Christopher T. O’Neil, the NTSB’s chief of media relations, confirmed Bloomberg‘s description of the call.

“The account of the Chairman’s remarks is accurate,” O’Neil wrote.

 ………

 On April 12, the NTSB formally removed Tesla as a party to the investigation into the crash.

“The NTSB took this action because Tesla violated the party agreement by releasing investigative information before it was vetted and confirmed by the NTSB,” the agency wrote. “Such releases of incomplete information often lead to speculation and incorrect assumptions about the probable cause of a crash, which does a disservice to the investigative process and the traveling public.”

For its part, Tesla said, in fact, that it withdrew before being booted out of the investigation.

A spokesperson even said that the NTSB was “more concerned with press headlines than actually promoting safety.”


No Mr. Bond, I Expect You to Die

I am not explicitly stating that Elon Musk has a screw loose, but I am saying that we should be very concerned if he buys a white Persian cat.

Michael Moore Could Explain This to You

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The military’s fighter pilot shortfall is reaching alarming proportions — and a new report from the Government Accountability Office shows just how bad the problem has become.

The Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps are each short about a 25 percent of the fighter pilots they need in crucial areas, according to the GAO report released Wednesday, titled “DOD Needs to Reevaluate Fighter Pilot Workforce Requirements.”

The problem has grown worse in recent years. And because it takes the Air Force, for example, about five years of training — and costing anywhere from $3 million to $11 million — before a fighter pilot can lead flights, holding on to these pilots is vital to recouping the military’s investments and making sure the services can carry out their required missions.

Over the last two years, the Air Force has particularly sounded alarm bells over its pilot shortfalls. The service has stood up a team led by a one-star general to find ways to stem the bleeding of its pilot ranks. Efforts include dramatically increasing retention bonuses, cutting out paperwork and other non-flying duties that keep pilots out of the cockpit, and taking many other steps intended to keep pilots in the service.

Last November, Air Force Secretary Heather Wilson said the service was short 2,000 of all its pilots, or about 10 percent, and sounded a dire prediction of what it would lead to.

………

But these stop-gap measures come with a cost, GAO said. Squadron leaders and fighter pilots told GAO that the high pace of operations for senior fighter pilots — some have been used to fill vacant junior positions, for example — limits their ability to train junior pilots. And that makes it harder for the military to grow the ranks of pilots with specific qualifications.

Deploying fighter pilots more frequently causes family instability and leads to career dissatisfaction, GAO said.

………

Retention of fighter pilots is also declining. Although the Air Force has dramatically increased the maximum retention bonus for pilots — first from $125,000 up to $225,000 in 2013, and finally up to $455,000 last year ― fewer and fewer pilots are taking them. Between 2013 and 2017, the take rates for fighter pilots declined from 63 percent to 35 percent, a 28 percentage-point drop.

One of the sources of recruitment for pilots of all kinds are people who want to become commercial airline pilots.

With changes in the industry making the positions far less pleasant, (Michael Moore discussed how the treatment of airline pilot by airlines have become increasingly abusive in his movie Capitalism: A Love Story) fewer people are considering putting in 5-10 years of military service as a entree into commercial aviation.

You see the same thing with truckers, where pay and benefits have been decimated over the past few decades.

If you have a job that requires specialized skills and training, and you devalue that job so as to overpay the banksters, fewer people will get the skills and training necessary for that job.

It’s Econ 101.

And Arizona Understands Why California Banned Uber’s Self-Driving Cars Now

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Once again, Gov. Doug Ducey’s dislike for government regulation has resulted in injury to Arizona, this time with tragic result.

Ducey on Monday rescinded Uber’s ability to test its self- driving vehicles in Arizona, citing the video of last week’s fatal crash into a Tempe pedestrian.

“As governor, my top priority is public safety,” Ducey wrote, in a letter to the San Francisco-based company.

This from the same governor, who in 2015 signed an executive order aimed at enticing Uber to use Arizona’s roads as a guinea pig.

The same governor who in December 2016 crowed over Uber’s decision to bring hundreds of its driverless cars to Arizona for testing “due to California’s burdensome regulations.”

………

The Ducey administration actually bragged about its lack of oversight of driverless vehicles.

………

Earlier this month, Ducey went a step further, issuing a new executive order decreeing that self-driving cars no longer need a driver behind the wheel, as long as they follow all the traditional traffic laws and rules for cars and drivers.

“As technology advances, our policies and priorities must adapt to remain competitive in today’s economy,” Ducey said. “This executive order embraces new technologies by creating an environment that supports autonomous vehicle innovation and maintains a focus on public safety.”

Now Elaine Herzberg is dead.

………

It’s not the first time Ducey’s preoccupation with bypassing government has caused problems.

Remember Theranos?

Ducey and the Legislature in 2015 cleared the way for Theranos to operate in our state, pushing though a new law that allowed consumers to purchase lab tests from a company without a doctor’s orders.

California shut down Uber’s self driving car program because they refused to get permits or report to regulators.

Even if you think that self-driving cars are just around the corner (I don’t), and you feel that development of self driving cars should be accelerated (again, I don’t), and that self driving cars will create a transportation utopia, Uber is a bad actor in their space, and they have ALWAYS been a bad actor in their space.

Smoothing the way for Uber is irresponsible and reckless.

Of Course it was Uber

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Why am I not surprised that the first self driving care that ran down a pedestrian was an Uber:

Arizona officials saw opportunity when Uber and other companies began testing driverless cars a few years ago. Promising to keep oversight light, they invited the companies to test their robotic vehicles on the state’s roads.

Then on Sunday night, an autonomous car operated by Uber — and with an emergency backup driver behind the wheel — struck and killed a woman on a street in Tempe, Ariz. It was believed to be the first pedestrian death associated with self-driving technology. The company quickly suspended testing in Tempe as well as in Pittsburgh, San Francisco and Toronto.

The accident was a reminder that self-driving technology is still in the experimental stage, and governments are still trying to figure out how to regulate it.

Uber, Waymo and a long list of tech companies and automakers have begun to expand testing of their self-driving vehicles in cities around the country. The companies say the cars will be safer than regular cars simply because they take easily distracted humans out of the driving equation. But the technology is still only about a decade old, and just now starting to experience the unpredictable situations that drivers can face.

There will no doubt be an investigation, and unless I miss my guess, they will find that Uber cut some corners, and that this contributed to the accident.  It’s a core part of their corporate DNA.

Live in Obedient Fear, Citizen!

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There are a growing number of reports of the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) searching the electronic devices of passengers on domestic flights in the US, according to the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), which has sued the federal agency for records.

The ACLU Foundation of Northern California filed a lawsuit against the TSA on Monday demanding that the government disclose its policies for searching the computers and cellphones of domestic travelers, arguing that anecdotal accounts have raised concerns about potential privacy invasions.

“We’ve received reports of passengers on purely domestic flights having their phones and laptops searched, and the takeaway is that TSA has been taking these items from people without providing any reason why,” the staff attorney Vasudha Talla told the Guardian. “The search of an electronic device has the potential to be highly invasive and cover the most personal details about a person.”

A TSA spokesman, Matt Leas, declined to comment on the lawsuit but said: “TSA does not search the contents of electronic devices.”

Over the past year, civil liberties groups have repeatedly raised concerns about US border agents expanding the invasive searches of international travelers’ phones. Some travelers reported authorities demanding they unlock their devices and allow officials to review text messages, social media accounts, photos and other private information – without warrants or reasonable suspicion. Now, there are questions about whether similar practices could be happening for passengers traveling within the US, raising fears that the government may be increasing surveillance and privacy violations at airports.

This is f%$#ed up and sh%#.

Why There Are Taxi Medallions

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While the various internet based taxicab firms are generally dismissive of regulation in their pursuit of “disruption”, they have particular contempt to things like medallion systems that limit the number of taxis in cities.

The justification for medallion systems has always been that allowing unlimited taxis would create more traffic congestion, while entities like Uber and Lyft have always maintained that their services would reduce congestion.

Well, the studies have come in, and the justification for medallions has been proved right:

Despite being heralded as services that will reduce congestion on our streets, ride-hailing companies like Uber and Lyft actually are making traffic problems worse, a new study from Boston’s Northeastern University has revealed.

The study showed that in many cities rather than encouraging commuters to leave their own personal vehicles for shared rides, the apps are instead siphoning ridership from higher-capacity transportation options such as buses and subways. The report also found that riders do not use the apps to connect to existing public transportation lines, as Uber founder Travis Kalanick has suggested, but primarily to travel directly to their final destinations.

This is not at all surprising: A car on the road is a car on the road is a car on the road.

While the Uber and Lyft Gypsy cab services might open up a few parking spaces, they have the effect of increasing the numbers of cars driving at any given time.

I am not necessarily a fan of medallion systems to limit the numbers of taxis on the streets, it converts a permit created for the public good into a negotiable financial instrument, I object to private profit being created through regulatory arbitrage in this manner, but it is clear that cars for hire need to be limited to serve the public good.

Not a Surprise

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When I worked on Future Combat Systems in the early 200s, one of the things it was supposed to do was to save fuel because it used hybrid propulsion.

Because it was carrying a large number of batteries, it was also supposed to be able to spend an significant amount of time running on battery power in “silent watch mode”, where it would be hard to detect, because it would be operating without running its engine while its sensors took in information about its immediate vicinity and relayed it across the network.

It turned out that a “significant amount of time” ended up to be something less than an hour because of the power consumption of the sensors, computers, and communications systems.

It turns out something very similar is happening with self-driving cars:

For longtime residents of Pittsburgh, seeing self-driving cars built by Uber, Argo AI, and others roam their streets is nothing new. The city’s history with robot cars goes back to the late 1980s, when students at Carnegie Mellon University caught the occasional glimpse of a strange vehicle lumbering across campus. The bright-blue Chevy panel van, chugging along at slower than a walking pace, may not have looked like much. But NavLab 1 was slowly—very slowly—pioneering the age of autonomous driving.

Why did the researchers at CMU’s Robotics Institute use the van instead of, say, a Prius? First, this was a decade before Toyota started making the hybrid. Second, the NavLab (that’s Navigational Laboratory) was one of the first autonomous vehicles to carry its computers with it. They needed space, and lots of it. For the four researchers monitoring computer workstations, with their bulky cathode ray monitors stretched across a workbench. For the on-board supercomputer, camera, giant laser scanner, and air-conditioner. And for the four-cylinder gasoline engine that did nothing but generate electricity to keep the kit running.

Thirty years on, the companies carrying that early research into reality have proven that cars can indeed drive themselves, and now they’re swiveling to sort out the practical bits. Those include regulations, liability, security, business models, and turning prototypes into production vehicles, by miniaturizing the electronics and reducing that massive electricity draw.

Today’s self-drivers don’t need extra engines, but they still use terrific amounts of power to run their onboard sensors and do all the calculations needed to analyze the world and make driving decisions. And it’s becoming a problem.

A production car you can buy today, with just cameras and radar, generates something like 6 gigabytes of data every 30 seconds. It’s even more for a self-driver, with additional sensors like lidar. All the data needs to be combined, sorted, and turned into a robot-friendly picture of the world, with instructions on how to move through it. That takes huge computing power, which means huge electricity demands. Prototypes use around 2,500 watts, enough to light 40 incandescent light bulbs.

“To put such a system into a combustion-engined car doesn’t make any sense, because the fuel consumption will go up tremendously,” says Wilko Stark, Mercedes-Benz’s vice president of strategy. Switch over to electric cars, and that draw translates to reduced range, because power from the battery goes to the computers instead of the motors.

Don’t be depressed.  Self driving cars are only 10 years away, and will be just 10 years away for the next few decades, just like fusion and the Iranian nuclear arsenal.

NIMBY Bullsh%$

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A law is working its way through the California that would required towns to allow higher density housing near to major mass transit projects.

The mayor of Berkeley is calling it, “A declaration of war against our neighborhoods.”

No, it isn’t. It’s a common sense requirement to ensure that expensive mass transit projects benefit more than a few:

New proposed legislation, introduced by Sen. Scott Wiener and co-authored by Sen. Nancy Skinner, that would require California cities to allow denser, taller housing developments near transit hubs and bus lines, has ignited controversy in Berkeley and nationally.

With some limitations, SB 827 would eliminate restrictions on the number of houses that can be built within a half-mile of BART and within a quarter-mile of major bus routes, including Muni and AC Transit. It would also block cities from mandating parking requirements.

Skinner said the bill would help supply much-needed housing in Berkeley and the state.

“In the Bay Area alone, we’ve added thousands more jobs than we have housing units,” she said. “More housing is essential to reduce the pressure that lack of supply is causing in all our communities. And there’s no more logical place for housing than near transit.”

But the bill has drawn strong opposition from many who believe it would deprive cities of their rights to control their own zoning and could also lead to unwanted density. In fact Berkeley Mayor Jesse Arreguín characterizes the bill as “a declaration of war against our neighborhoods.”

Here is the deal, your honor: If you want transit in your neighborhoods, then your neighborhoods have to be transit friendly, and the first 3 requirements of transit friendly neighborhoods are density, density, and density.

This is Ingenious

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Comparison of various cycles


SPCCI Cycle


Pressure Profiles

Diesel engines have been getting a lot of bad news recently, but there is a another form of compression ignition that has been lurking in the laboratory for years.

A diesel compresses the air, and then squirts in fuel, which ignites in the hot air.

The other form of compression ignition compresses a fuel air mixture until it all ignites simultaneously.

Theoretically, this could result in superior fuel economy and low levels of pollution.

This is a tremendously difficult thing to do since things like this, since the line between ignition and nothing is a very fine line, and things like ambient temperature, barometric pressure, etc. can cause premature ignition, i.e. pinging, which hits the inside of an engine like a hammer.

Nissan has come up with an innovative way to fix the timing, they have added a spark assist so that they can control the timing.

As opposed to a conventional spark ignited engine, where the flame front progresses from the spark, in their “Skyactive X®” technology, and the initial local ignition kicks up the pressure and temperature enough for the compression ignition to kick in.

Mazda is now has a car with this technology on the road:

Despite rumors to the contrary, the internal combustion engine is far from dead. Recently we’ve seen several technological advances that will significantly boost the efficiency of gasoline-powered engines. One of these, first reported back in August 2017, is Mazda’s breakthrough with compression ignition. On Tuesday, Mazda invited us to its R&D facility in California to learn more about this clever new Skyactiv-X engine, but more importantly we actually got to drive it on the road.

The idea behind Skyactiv-X is to be able to run the engine with as lean a fuel-air mixture (known as λ) as possible. Because very lean combustion is cooler than a stoichiometric reaction (where λ=1 and there is exactly enough air to completely burn each molecule of fuel but no more), less energy is wasted as heat. What’s more, the exhaust gases contain fewer nasty nitrogen oxides, and the unused air gets put to work. It absorbs the combustion heat and then expands and pushes down on the piston. The result is a cleaner, more efficient, and more powerful engine. And Skyactiv-X uses a very lean mix: a λ up to 2.5.

………

This is known as homogeneous charge compression ignition, or HCCI, an idea that Kyle Niemeyer covered in depth for us back in 2012. HCCI has some other advantages, too. On top of burning cooler and with fewer pollutants, the combustion event happens faster, with a higher pressure peak, so you get more work out of the same energy. All of that sounds pretty wonderful, so you’re probably asking yourself why every gasoline engine on the road doesn’t just use HCCI.

Unfortunately, it has been one of those ideas that worked in the lab but couldn’t ever quite be translated into a production engine. The biggest problem has always been controlling exactly when during the engine cycle compression ignition occurred, something that you want as close to top-dead center as possible.

………

Obviously, this wasn’t without challenges. The fuel:air mix needs to be a little richer near the spark for it to ignite than you want it to be throughout the rest of the cylinder. These need to be distinct regions to avoid λ dropping to 2 or below (which won’t undergo compression ignition). That’s achieved by swirling the air inside the cylinder and generating a vortex effect, where the calm center has a low enough λ to ignite by spark, surrounded by a high λ region that then undergoes compression ignition.

Mazda’s next challenge was to prevent pre-ignition, or knock. Higher compression ratios increase the potential for knock, which is why higher compression ratio engines usually also require more expensive, higher octane fuel that is knock-resistant. Now, technically, compression ignition is knock, but if it occurs before you want it to—at top dead center—bad things can happen, because a combustion event will exert downward pressure on the piston as it’s moving up on a compression stroke.

The solution here was to use less time to heat the fuel:air mix. There’s a small initial injection of fuel at first, then the bulk of the fuel is introduced into the cylinder as late as possible during the compression stroke. This is done using multiple orifice injectors to increase atomization and mixing of fuel and air.

If all that wasn’t enough, there’s the added problem of keeping track of compression ignition. In the past, this has been one of the hardest problems for HCCI engines to solve. Ideally you want combustion to happen at the same point in the engine cycle each time—about four degrees after top dead center. But as ambient conditions change—a cold day in Denver versus a hot one in Houston—the time needed for the fireball to reach sufficient pressure also changes. So the engine ought to be able to change spark timing to keep the peak pressure at the right spot.

It’s basically an ingenious use of the stratified charge engine to create an HCCI engine.

Neat.

Terrorists Are Not Daleks

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A real estate developer in New York is, as part of his development deal, building an elevator to the allow the disabled to access the Subway from that stop, neighbors are objecting because they are afraid that terrorist will use the elevator to attack them.

Seriously? Terrorists are going to attack via the subway? And they cannot climb stairs?

To some, the prospect of adding new subway elevators not far from the World Trade Center is a godsend, a desperately needed portal for the disabled to a subway system that is among the least accessible in the nation.

To a group of neighbors who live beside the proposed site, the elevators seem like something else entirely: a hazard a terrorist could turn into shrapnel.

On one side of a growing skirmish on Broad Street in Lower Manhattan are disabled riders, advocates and a real estate developer building the elevators in exchange for being granted permission by the city to add more square footage to the mixed-use building the developer is erecting at 45 Broad Street.

On the other are tenants of nearby buildings like 15 Broad Street, a high-rise designed by the architect Philippe Starck. It is a pocket of the city that has long been under intense security because of its proximity to prime potential targets like the New York Stock Exchange, and critics say the elevators could pose a threat in an area where police and bomb-sniffing dogs routinely check vehicles driving through.

“The idea that people can then ride in on the subway with a bomb or whatever and come straight up in an elevator is awful to me,” said Claudia Ward, who lives in 15 Broad Street and was among a group of neighbors who denounced the plan at a recent meeting of the local community board. “It’s too easy for someone to slip through. And I just don’t want my family and my neighbors to be the collateral on that.”

This, “Is one of the most insanely idiotic things I have ever heard. At no point in your rambling, incoherent response were you even close to anything that could be considered a rational thought. Everyone in this room is now dumber for having listened to it. I award you no points, and may God have mercy on your soul.”

Terrorists climb stairs, you bloody moron wankers.

Why Elon Musk Will Not Solve Our Mass Transit Problems

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Because he does not, in any way shape or form, have even the vaguest idea of what mass transit is:

Like many tech entrepreneurs, Elon Musk is trying to reinvent public transit. But his comments at an event last month, as reported by Aarian Marshall in Wired, made many people wonder whether he understands the business he’s trying to disrupt:

“I think public transport is painful. It sucks. Why do you want to get on something with a lot of other people, that doesn’t leave where you want it to leave, doesn’t start where you want it to start, doesn’t end where you want it to end? And it doesn’t go all the time.”

“It’s a pain in the ass,” he continued. “That’s why everyone doesn’t like it. And there’s like a bunch of random strangers, one of who might be a serial killer, OK, great. And so that’s why people like individualized transport, that goes where you want, when you want.”

Musk is a symptom, not a cause.  You find that most “Great Thinkers” in mass transit are PEOPLE WHO WOULD NEVER USE MASS TRANSIT.

It’s Robert Moses all over again.

Airline Passenger Does to Plane What Airlines do to Passengers

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After a passenger let loose in the bathroom in a way that it, “Resembled the sets in The Wild Bunch if the film had been directed by John Waters instead of Sam Peckinpah,” United Airlines flight 895 was forced to make an emergency landing:

United Airlines passengers found themselves in a fetid situation when their Chicago-to-Hong Kong flight made an unscheduled landing in Alaska after a man had smeared feces all over some of the plane’s bathrooms, airport officials said.

United Flight 895 was diverted to Anchorage on Thursday night, according to CBS affiliate KTVA, and police officials at Ted Stevens International Airport said the landing was due to a “passenger smearing feces everywhere.”

More specifically, officials said the man had dirtied “a couple” of lavatories on the plane and had also tried to cram his shirt down a toilet.

United said in a statement only that the flight was diverted due to “a disruptive passenger.”

This is some sort of metaphor lived in real life.