Underwood Ribbon, originally uploaded by uppercaseyyc

Vintage Typewriter tins (background).

L’Enfant Station, originally uploaded by plemeljr

Go and read Ryan’s comparison of D.C.’s Metrorail Fares in Context with other systems:

The D.C. Metro and San Francisco’s BART are often described as sister systems. They serve similar sized cities, were built at a similar time, and provide a similar type of service to their riders. They both also use a graduated fare system rather than a fixed fare. Like Metrorail, BART has recently adopted fare increases.

I too would be interested in see what controlling for frequency and quality of service does to the value, real or implied.
Naturally, I don’t actually need to do this comparison, but rather I can ask the lazyweb to help out.

Hello Card, originally uploaded by queenbeeamy

Lantern, originally uploaded by plemeljr

More photos from Tokyo.

Neste Oy – corporate annual, originally uploaded by Grain Edit.com

See more at Grain Edit (via).

Motorway Mayhem, originally uploaded by Steve.Haigh

As previously linked, it seems that the Federal Transit Administration is on the course to derail the Washington DC Silver Line which would connect the urban core to Dulles and National Airport by heavy rail transit. It appears that the rationale isn’t due to the necessity or the viability of the project, but rather an ideology against certain mass transit:

Others point to a long-standing desire in the Transportation Department to move away from public investments in infrastructure. Peters, the transportation secretary, for example, refused to endorse a report published Tuesday by a bipartisan national commission on the future of the nation’s transportation system. She instead issued a dissent decrying wasteful spending and the federal government’s large share of the investment. She said she favored private investment and more tolling to control congestion.

This illustrates the direct effects of electing governments comprised of people who do not believe in the beneficial nature of government, or sometimes, government at all. By this logic, any money for the upkeep of highways, airports, port facilities is also wasteful. Q.E.D.
What is most unnerving about mass transportation in this country is best summed up by the Simpson’s episode Marge vs. the Monorail where the townspeople of Springfield decide to build a monorail instead of cleaning up Main Street. Who remembers when Light Rail was the solution and any other transportation solution wasn’t worth discussion. Similarly, now the FTA has decided that Bus Rapid Transit is the way to proceed everywhere. This same thinking is both wasteful and stupid, and emblematic of an Administration which doesn’t feel like doing its homework.
In a world where the Federal government takes policy and implementation of policy serious, then we all could work together to tailor transportation solutions to the local requirements, instead of building Monorails everywhere.

Interesting solution in Antwerp by Portugese firm PROAP (João Nunes) and the Belgian architectural planners WIT, to knit the waterfront back into the urban core while protecting the city from 4,000-year floods:

The reestablishment of Antwerp’s connection to its waterfront has been a goal for the city’s planners for more than a decade, but only recently have forces aligned to make that dream not just a practical reality but also a necessity. The 130-year-old bluestone quay wall running along the Scheldt (pronounced “Skel-duh” by locals) has deteriorated to the point where reconstruction is no longer a luxury. At the same time, the entire harbor must be brought into compliance with the state’s Sigma Plan, a regional flood-prevention initiative first implemented in 1977 as a response to massive flooding and then recommissioned in 2004, which requires that the city be fortified to withstand a 4,000-year storm.
…
The PROAP/WIT scheme was more diagrammatic, in both its form of presentation and its design strategy. “Landscape is created by successive processes and not by one action,” Nunes says. “We put together a master plan instead of a project. We decided to present a table of scenarios with approaches and consequences, trying to reduce things to a blank slate where some basic rules—a process—could be developed.”
That process will be governed by a series of ten topographical sections that read from above like the keys of a piano. Each key will address the river in a distinct fashion: one section, resting on pontoons, will rise and fall with the tides; another will slope down gradually from a protective berm; a third will cantilever out over the water. All suitably answer the demands of the Sigma Plan while retaining access—visual and physical—to the river.

• Metropolis: The City and the Stream
• PROAP
• WIT Architecten
• WIT Architecten Antwerpen Master Plan

General view of one of the classification yards of the Chicago and Northwestern Railroad, Chicago, Ill. (LOC), originally uploaded by The Library of Congress

That’s why it is so exciting to let people know about the launch of a brand-new pilot project the Library of Congress is undertaking with Flickr, the enormously popular photo-sharing site that has been a Web 2.0 innovator. If all goes according to plan, the project will help address at least two major challenges: how to ensure better and better access to our collections, and how to ensure that we have the best possible information about those collections for the benefit of researchers and posterity. In many senses, we are looking to enhance our metadata (one of those Web 2.0 buzzwords that 90 percent of our readers could probably explain better than me).
My Friend Flickr: A Match Made in Photo Heaven

This is amazing. The LOC’s digital collection is amazing and mostly free, as in beer and as in speech. Yet their search page is so horrible it is almost unusable (only the content makes slogging through the interface worthwhile).
More information:

• My Friend Flickr: A Match Made in Photo Heaven
• LOC’s Flickr Page
• Flickr’s announcement: Many hands make light work