As part of my ongoing mission to replace myself with a robot intelligence, I've been playing with a new AI text generator. This one, called Grover, is designed to help readers detect fake news - but also has an option to generate it. Know your enemy, and so on. It's done a pretty good job … Continue reading Lumpy scarred clumps of empty seats
Category: Transport
...but it's Lion Air. It's always fun to be writing for a new place, and I'm delighted to have my first piece up at Foreign Policy. It's on how Asian budget aviation, although important for transforming the economic prospects of remote locations, is very much a double-edged sword. Particularly when it turns out that American … Continue reading Oooh, it’s a mess all right…
This is mostly a traditional "I aten't dead" post, of the sort that you'll recognise if you're the sort of person who still looks at blogs that have been going for over a decade. I've been busy doing two day jobs at once, finishing up my often fun, sometimes frustrating, always interesting, and now finally … Continue reading One step short of Barking
I have a thingo up at Citymetric on how agent-based modelling would have helped the poor sods at Govia Thameslink Railway realise how stuffed they were, at least in time to everyone from getting fired. There is a bit of dispute* in the extremely nerdy parts of the Internet about whether I'm being reasonable in … Continue reading And Bayes and Bayes and remembering nothing boy
I'm travelling in Europe and the US for the next month or so, with an exciting combination of work meetings, weddings, visiting places to write about, and hopefully the occasional piece of not doing anything at all. This will be good. My travelling around Europe will involve trains, because trains are good and short-haul aviation … Continue reading I’ve got some tickets to ride, and I care a bit
The trains in Sydney are a bit stuffed at the moment. I've written a piece in CityMetric that gives some of the details on why. Although I touch on the comparisons with the UK a bit in the piece, I thought I'd go on a bit more about them here because the original had to … Continue reading Sydney Trains and Southern Railway: a striking resemblance
I wrote a thing at CityMetric on the Melbourne rail-fail yesterday - go and read it. It turns out that 40-year-old state-of-the-art technology doesn't age super-well if you don't upgrade it, and that only having one train line through your city isn't a great idea either. Disappointingly, they rejected my suggested song-based title, so I'm … Continue reading Dumb Ways (for your train service) to Die
As we all put on our party hats for the UK election, I've written a couple of pieces at CityMetric on the parties' manifestos and why their transport plans are stupid: Why Labour's rail nationalisation plan is interesting but basically stupid Why the Tory plan to drop Crossrail 2 is interesting but basically stupid I … Continue reading I confess, my destiny’s manifestos
I did a thing at Citymetric on the interesting way folks are completely happy for Scottish companies to run the railways in southern England, but lose their minds when Hong Kong companies do the same thing. My favourite self-quote: The RMT, famous for being the least sensible or survival-oriented union in the UK since the National … Continue reading Depends on how foreign your Aberdeens are
Southern's parent company know that they're in the G4S bracket of mean thugs. The government know it, and that's what they're for. The RMT know it, and fighting them is their job. The non-union marketing people at Southern, who are probably your nice mates, don't. This is unfortunate. Me at the New Statesman