The worst part about living in the near-edges of Greater London is the lack of Tube service. With the introduction of the Oyster card years before I decided to live here, it looked like it was one card for all–Tube, bus, light rail, rail services–but not the case if you live in Kingston upon Thames or Surbiton.

To get into London the fast way, which is commuter rail, I had to do a tedious process known as purchasing a ticket at a machine. Not only was going to the ticket machine an inconvenience, but I had to accumulate paper tickets and watch them so I won’t lose them. Did I mention it’s bad for the environment as well?

The days of printing tickets will soon be over (well, almost) from January 2nd. Now all rail services in Greater London–all 607 square miles of it–are accessible for all Oyster Card user, not just weekly, monthly and annual Travelcard holders. Ta ta, paper tickets and hello to up to 30% cheaper fares!

A one-way ticket from Surbiton or Kingston upon Thames to Waterloo will cost only £3.20 off-peak. Quite expensive still, but better than paying £5 off-peak!

So rejoice, pay-as-you-go customers, you can conquer all of London without being beholden to the paper ticket, and welcome to “Oysterland”!

To access the map of “Oysterland,” click here.

An airport in eastern Antalya that opened in July has everything it needs to serve passengers – except planes to carry them. Gazipaşa Airport and its 40 staff members are still waiting for the first commercial flight to land.

Airport manager Cengiz Aşıklı told the Anatolia news agency that the airport has been available for domestic and international flights since July 13 with a C-II reference code that allows planes with a capacity of 150-160 passengers to land. Although the airport is technically suitable for such flights, airlines companies do not usually choose C-II airports, he said.

As such, Aşıklı said the airport has looked to expand and obtain a C-III reference code, which would allow larger planes and would be preferred by more airlines.

“We must expand the airport to update the airport’s reference code, but the main obstacle for that is the nationalization process in the land surrounding the airport,” he said, adding that if the land is nationalized by March, then the authority might start expansion work.

Aşıklı said there is no need to expand the 1,825-meter runway for the time being. “The current runway is sufficient [for the] C-III reference code, which will allow Boeing 737-400 and Airbus A 319 planes to use the airport. Some airline firms have contacted us about the possibility of using the airport in May, but they are waiting for the result of the expansion works.”

The ultimate goal is to expand the runway to 2,400 meters to serve long-haul planes, he said.

It took almost 15 years to build Gazipaşa Airport and only three planes have landed there so far, including one belonging to the General Directorate of State Airports Authority, or DHMİ, one belonging to TAVHolding, the company that runs the airport and the third belonging to Beykent University.

Gazipaşa Mayor Cemburak Özgenç said the airport and its employees have been ready every day for four months, but no planes have come yet.

Özgenç said the nationalization of the lands had been finalized and was needed to establish an enhanced lighting system and some landing-control devices.

Özgenç said the nationalization of the lands was a necessity to establish an enhanced lightning system and some landing-control devices. The nationalization processes for a 600-meter-long, 50-meter-wide land and an additional 200,000 square meters in front of the terminal building have been finalized, added the mayor.

“We have made progress in nationalization, but we should nationalize an additional 700 to 200 square meter land to allow long-haul planes to use the airport,” said Özgenç. “Of course, the DHMİ must give the green light to continue with the expansion work. We are still waiting for the permission; I don’t know why it’s taking so long.”

The highway between Gazipaşa and Alanya should go under the airport through a tunnel, which would cost approximately 2 million euros, the mayor said. “TAV Holding [the airport operator] will assume the cost of the tunnel and the nationalization of the lands. The company pledges to do everything necessary on behalf of the state and will pay 65 percent of the income it will receive to the state. I thus have no idea why the state is dragging its feet.”

Özgenç said the future of Gazipaşa and the surrounding districts such as Alanya, Anamur and even Manavgat lies in the success of the Gazipaşa Airport.

“Once the airport is fully operational, the region will be a center of attraction,” adding that agriculture and real estate industries would benefit from the airport, in addition to tourism.

15 years to build airport

The airport’s construction started in 1992. The plan was to serve not only the residents of Gazipaşa but also the locals between Antalya’s Alanya district and Mersin’s Anamur district.

The airport could be operational only after a successful bidding process brought the highly reputable TAV, a joint venture between Tepe and Akfen that won the tender for the Gazipaşa Airport, to eastern Antalya for the next 25 years.

Het Franse dagblad Le Figaro wijdt vandaag een artikel aan de nieuwe HSL-verbinding Parijs-Amsterdam: vanaf 13 december 2009 zal de Thalys er slechts 3:18 uur over doen om van het Gare du Nord in Parijs naar het Centraal Station in Amsterdam te reizen, tegen meer dan 4 uur vandaag. Voor Le Figaro aanleiding om haar lezers enkele suggesties aan de hand te doen voor een gezellig uitstapje naar Amsterdam. Omgekeerd geldt natuurlijk hetzelfde voor Nederlanders uit de omgeving Amsterdam/Rotterdam. Nu de reistijd naar Parijs aanzienlijk korter wordt, is het zelfs mogelijk om Parijs in één dag te bezoeken. Het vraagt wel wat discipline en vroeg opstaan. Tickets zijn vanaf 3 maanden van tevoren te boeken. Opstappen is mogelijk in Amsterdam (3:18 uur), Schiphol (3:04 uur) en Rotterdam (2:36 uur). Opgelet! Den Haag HS is geen station op de HSL-Zuid. Thalys stopt hier vanaf 13 december 2009 dan ook niet meer. Vanuit Den Haag kunt u wel gemakkelijk naar Rotterdam reizen en daar op Thalys stappen.

Naar de Thalyswebsite: >>>

Time to bring the blog out of hibernation to cover today’s big Oyster PAYG on National Rail announcement.

While in many respects of course this is a positive announcement, there will be a substantial minority of us who will be significant losers from the new system thanks to some aspects of how this is going to be implemented.

For the purposes of this post, let’s assume, as I’m sure many people living in outer London boroughs like Bexley do, that I have a Zones 5-6 annual travelcard loaded onto an Oyster card for convenience. This enables me to travel freely in my local area and on all buses in London, and gives me a Gold Card discount of one-third off all National Rail travel in the south east.

Currently, for me to travel into London and back for leisure, after a day’s work in Bexley, it costs me £3.50.

Under the new system, I will still have to queue (but at a newsagent rather than the station) but will then be stung, by my calculation, for £6.50 – that’s an astonishing 86% increase on a journey I make quite frequently (around ten times a month).

The explanation for this is as follows:

Currently I can buy an off-peak return from the last station in Zone 5 (Sidcup on my line) to Charing Cross and get the Gold Card discount on this. I can do this any time after 10.00am. It costs £3.50.

Under the new system I would have to queue up to get an ‘Oyster Extension Permit‘ (OEP) added to my Oyster card. This is to allow me to travel beyond the zones of my travelcard. On the TfL network this has never been necessary as the system just works out whether you’ve done this when you touch out on arrival. But on the National Rail network it seems the train operating companies are scared people will not touch out and they will lose revenue, so these OEPs have been introduced to save them from, for instance, having to staff their stations a bit more so as they can make sure people touch out. This requires me to visit an Oyster retail outlet, which doesn’t include any National Rail train stations, so means a newsagent – not really the convenience usually associated with Oyster.

The next problem is that, although you can load a range of discount-entitling cards onto Oyster, such as Young Person’s Railcard, and despite the fact that my travelcard is already loaded on my Oyster so it already ‘knows’ I am entitled to a Gold Card discount, all the announcements and documents about Oyster PAYG on National Rail are silent on the matter of Gold Card discounts, so it appears there is no intention to automatically apply these to travel after 10am, as with Young Person’s and others.

The third problem is that, although the National Rail companies have avoided adopting some of the customer-benefitting aspects of Oyster, such as not needing to plan and queue in advance to travel beyond a travelcard’s zones, they *have* adopted a new evening ‘peak’ period which TfL uses to charge higher Tube fares between 4 and 7pm. Of course, when I do go into London in the evening for leisure, my journey into the city is invariably taken between these times.

The final insult added to the above injuries is that today’s announcement on the National Rail web site says that paper off-peak day return tickets will be withdrawn from 2 January. This means that continuing to purchase the £3.50 ticket I currently use will no longer be an option either. Instead I will have to travel into town on a £3.90 Zone 5 to Zone 1 Peak ticket, and out again on a £2.60 Zone 1 to Zone 5 Off-Peak ticket – a total of £6.50.

[Edit: There is some doubt as to whether I would need to pay the fare from Zone 5 or only Zone 4, when I have Zones 5 and 6 covered by my annual travelcard. I've been working on the basis that the current situation is that to travel into London I need to buy a return from Sidcup, the last station in Zone 5 on my line, and that Southeastern and other rail companies are unlikely to change this in the passenger's favour. If this basis is incorrect, the new fare would be £5.40 rather than £6.50, representing an increase of 54% rather than 86% - still not good!]

The combination of all these things means, as I say, the cost to me of travelling into London in the evenings for leisure is set to rise by 86% from 2 January. If you can find any rail fare elsewhere that rises by this much from 2 January I will be very surprised!

There is a caveat to all this. The actual increase in costs I will really experience in January is ‘merely’ 43%. This is because there is no point spending any more than £5.00 on any post-10am travel within London because I can simply buy an off-peak Gold Card-discounted Travelcard at £5.00 instead. But this fact speaks volumes about the absurdity of the new PAYG fares for those of us in this position: to carry out a simple return rail journey in the evening, a third of which I already have a travelcard covering, the cheapest method will be to buy a ticket which allows me unlimited use all day (after 10am) of just about all transport methods in the entire city!

So what can be done? Well, I hope the train companies enable Gold Card discounts for Oyster PAYG, and do away with the requirement for OEPs, but in the mean time I’m afraid this long-awaited announcement looks set to be very disappointing and costly for some of us.

Disclaimer: I’m pretty confident the information I’m presenting here is accurate but if any readers can find anything which contradicts me I would of course be very pleased to hear it, and correct my post accordingly!

ENDS EUROPE DAILY – 12/11/09

Green mobility group T&E (Transport & Environment) has suggested that EU policies designed to promote electric cars could increase rather than decrease total emissions from road transport. Electric cars are counted as ‘zero emissions’ under current legislation, even though the electricity they use can come from coal, in which case such cars can have a higher carbon footprint than that of conventional cars. The group highlights that EU car CO2 legislation includes ‘super credits’ that allow car-makers to sell up to 3.5 gas guzzling SUVs for every electric vehicle they sell and still reach their EU target. They therefore urge EU policy-makers to close off these ‘loopholes’. Whilst they do not deny that electric cars have a role to play in cutting European transport emissions, they feel that policy-makers should not incentivise them in this way and should instead tighten car CO2 emissions limits, promote green electricity and make smart meters in electric cars mandatory as part of the electric car type approval rules that are due to be proposed next year. Read the T&E press release…

On 5 November 2009, the Solar Impulse HB-SIA prototype left its hangar at Dübendorf aerodrome near Zurich. It underwent some initial series of stationary tests involving first its four engines, and the electromagnetic interference.

On Thursday, 19 November, the solar airplane made his first “trip”. He taxied down the runway powered by its own engines and  going through a series of acceleration and breaking manoeuvres, checking that the calculated and simulated strains are not being exceeded.

Solar Impulse HB-SIA. Image Credit: http://news.cnet.com

The results of these initial tests have fully met the expectations of the Solar Impulse team. The next critical stage will involve taking the prototype up to its 35 km/h take-off speed and having it do its first few “flea hops”. The objective will be to record numerous unknown parameters as the aircraft will be operating in an unexplored flight domain.

“If this is satisfactory, we will dismantle it and transport it to Payerne air force base in western Switzerland, where we will do the real first flight of about two hours, in February,” said André Borschberg (BBC News).

The solar aircraft, with the wingspan of a Boeing 747-400 weight 1600Kg. Over 12,000 solar cells mounted onto the wing supply renewable energy to the four electric motors with a maximum power of 10 HP each. During the day they  also charge the lithium-polymer batteries (400 kg), which permit the HB-SIA to fly through the night.

Sources and further reading: Solar Impulse, BBC News

Check out this Audi ad for their new diesel-powered car (thanks to ecorazzi for posting and bringing this to my attention!).

30% fewer emissions than what… a bike? The bus? The vege oil car? Even the annoying guy on the footpath? (He really shouldn’t be riding there, and I would get serious pedestrian rage if he was telling me to get out of the way, but that’s beside the point.)

The point? I don’t think the new Audi has 30% fewer emissions than any of those. Maybe it has 30% fewer emissions than a regular petrol car.

Audi, is your target audience the greenies, or just the light-green greenies who wanna look like they’re doing the right thing without having to actually go to any effort?* Or maybe it’s the people who are sick of paying huge petrol prices. What are you really going for?

Cos I think you just pissed a lot of people off.

*I probably just pissed a bunch of people off too, cos that was pretty cynical. Oops, I’m sick, my brain-mouth/typing fingers filter is gone.

202412     ปรากฏการณ์การถ่ายโอน     Transport Phenomena

กฎความหนืดของนิวตัน กฎการนํ าความร้อนของฟูเรียร์ กฎการแพร่ของฟิกส์สมดุลของโมเมนตัม พลังงานและมวล วิธีการดุลแบบเชลล์ สมการการแปรเปลี่ยน การถ่ายโอนโมเมนตัมพลังงานและมวลระหว่างวัฏภาค ดุลมหาทรรศน์

(Newton’s law of viscosity; Fourier’s law of conduction; Fick’s law of diffusion; momentum balances; energy balances; mass balances; shell balance method; equations of change; interphase momentum energy and mass transports; macroscopic balances.)

(202412 มหาวิทยาลัยเกษตรศาสตร์)

Letzte Woche haben wir für den Transport unserer süßen Kleinen ein paar Euro in die Sicherheit investiert.

1. Beleuchtung für den Kinderwagen:
Zwar hat die Babywanne des Kinderwagens zwei dünne, reflektierende Streifen an der seitlichen naht, doch das war uns zu wenig. Vor allem wenn es sehr neblig ist und sich kleine Wassertröpfchen auf der Oberfläche sammeln und somit das einfallende Licht “falsch” brechen.

Wir haben uns deshalb für die Micro-LED-Leuchten von Sigma entschieden. Beide zusammen kosten keine zwanzig Euro, verfügen über ein Klettband (gut wenn der Rahmen des Kinderwagens nicht rund ist), zwei Leuchtmodi (konstant und blinkend) und sind sehr klein.

2. Babylook – Babyüberwachungsspiegel für das Auto:
Eine tolle Sache um sein 1-12 Monate altes Baby, welches in einer Sitzschale (z.B. MaxiCosi oder Römer) auf der Rücksitzbank positioniert ist, während der Fahrt im Auge behalten zu können, da das Baby ja zur Heckscheibe raus schaut. Der Babylook-Spiegel kostet zwischen 30 und 40 Euro.

Aber Vorsicht!!! Nicht zu oft in den Spiegel schauen, sonst leidet die Konzentration im Straßenverkehr zu sehr.

MFG
Projekt Sunstorm

Location: Mexico & Guatemala

From all the movies we’ve seen we were expecting to see armed border control, strict vehicle searches, booms, tolls and metal detectors – instead, we struggled to find the tiny concrete building amongst the shacks which was the Mexican final frontier. We then walked down the river bank with our backpacks expecting to see a P&O Ferries, Dover to Calais-style ferry, instead we were hustled in a really narrow thatched roofed canoe (with our backpacks still on our backs). Luckily the currents were in our favour and we managed to cross in about 30 minutes without the boat capsizing.

We were met on the other side by two very friendly Guatemalans with wads of cash, calculators and heaps of entrepreneurial spirit, who immediately exchanged our remaining pesos for quetzales – a bit like a human ATM.

The only thing that pierced the perfection of the Guatemalan landscape were the barely existent roads – this slowed our 60km journey in a chicken bus to about 3 and a half hours to get to Santa Elena. Our ever so helpful driver escorted us to an ATM and kept guard whilst we drew cash, just as well – as we spotted a couple of AK47’s around the town.

The first sighting of the classy ferry

On the boat - with our backpacks and all

The rest of our group

Our first sighting of the Guatemala side

Immigration office on the Guatemala side

Our chicken bus that took us to Flores

Country no 4