Lifelines Of Logistics - How To (Not) Draw Your Transit Maps/Diagrams

[Dr. No]

Starting The Fourth Page: An Update For 2023 Quarter 2

My car is broken, the car repair scheduled a waiting time of half a year for replacement parts of my catalyst since January and now the car won't run anymore after five months have passed. Combined with the Deutschland-Ticket and the possession of a pedelec with appropriate cargo options, the Corpus Christi holiday (which prompts a bridge day on Friday for many employees) was a great opportunity to ride the land. I only took the bike on Sunday and failed with my final destination, but I got far enough and my pedelec recorded 40 kilometers of rides at that day. Thursday saw me in Frankfurt am Main, Saturday took me to Nürnberg/Nuremberg and Sunday took me to Ansbach where I dogded a train because it was too full for bikes and for similar reasons, I returned via Würzburg to Heilbronn. My final destination would've been at the westernmost lake of the Franconian Lakelands created for the hydrological benefit of the non-Danubian parts of Bavaria, their next best train station at Gunzenhausen between Ansbach (regional political capital of Middle Franconia despite the existence of Nuremberg) and Treuchtlingen (the Bavarian equivalent to Crewe) and the western Franconian regional train running into that region start and ends at the same platform as my very own Swabian regional train in Würzburg and you can just hop to the other side. As a common mutual terminus, I'd always be among the first passengers to embark and have an easy time to find space for my bike.

In the meantime, I've actually done all the lakes and a lost backpack has been replaced with an enormous fanny pack. And I've been to Frankfurt and back and saw a train getting to Limburg (Lahn) which is different to Limburg Süd and only connected to each other by busses. The former is the proper station of Limburg, best known as the seat of a diocese and its cathedral and the splendour associated with the former bishop Tebartz-van Elst, the latter is an isolated high-speed railway station that was greenlighted together with its sister station Montabaur on the other side of the state border due to insane federal politics in Germany along the Cologne-Frankurt connection, so that stations in the middle of nowhere are built along the line so that the respective states vote for the line to be built. Even without federalism, France shows that hardly a high-speed railway was built without its fare share of gares de betteraves (sugar beet station) which greatly added to the speed of the TGV on the LGV and yet the LGV Sud Europe Atlantique shows a practical abandonment of this concept where legacy rail lines can be accessed from the LGV so that the TGV can access various downtowns station along the LGV, but won't have too and can pass them by. The idea was that you can to somehow access all these small cities in France to their high-speed rail network and yet keep travel times short in the big picture, so it was very attractive to have some neuralgic stations along the LGV and that would ideally be somehow between two small cities accesses by busses to that station. In case of getting from Frankfurt to Cologne on the D-Ticket (€49 a month, runs everywhere except for IC and ICE trains), it's best to get to Limburg (Lahn) yet in the state of Hesse and interchange to Koblenz in the state of Rhineland-Palatinate before finally interchanging for Cologne. Due east form Limburg(Lahn), you get reasonbly get to Wetzlar, Gießen (home of a U), Marburg (also home of a U) and even Kassel (where Hesse ends).


The Ukraine Is Where Trains Run (Almost) On Time (Even When They Are Hit)

A Russian missile hit a waggon of a passenger train at Kherson station. The train was evacuted, the affected waggon was decoupled and the rest of the train ran nevertheless, arriving its destination almost on time. The train in question is a night train, taking eleven hours for the 700 kilometers from Kherson to Kyiv. It made quite a few rounds and prompted Germany's Tagesschau website to explain how the Ukrainian railways run on time even in the war and why (all in German, sorry). In essence, the railway makes the lifeline that keeps the country together and that it's not too different from the state of affairs of Russia. A non-functioning railway in Eastern Europe would be just as much of a reason to revolt as non-functioning motorways in Germany. Priorities matter.


Bavaria's Quiet Taxpayer Dumphole: Second Munich S-Bahn Trunk Lines Projected To Cost €8.5bn

Stuttgart 21 and Berlin Brandenburg International Airport are both considered to be notorious example of infrastructural projects that are costing more time and money than promised. Well, that's not too surprising, it happens everywhere in the world and is called politics. What's capable of turning into aghast is the fact that it takes a harder time to create a shitstorm than its more prominent sisters. It's not an issue of national or international scale as it's not about high-speed rail or intercontinental aircraft (original parlance of Tagesschau), but just the S-Bahn and yet it's a lot like reforming or recreated the main railway station as in Stuttgart. But the major construction works are done underground and are not that visible: Out of sight, out of mind! Some people officially fear that the costs may run as high as €14bn, whatever the reasons. The thing is, oh wonder, that the Bavarian state government is supposed to have known beforehand about the cost overruns.

Ah yeah, there's a checklist from ten years ago (in German, sorry) by infamous Thilo Sarrazin (ousted from the SPD in 2020 because he succumbed to the far-right fringe with a best-selling book in 2010 translating as "Germany removes itself" and is exactly what it sounds like) who used to be head of the treasury in the state of Berlin after serving some time in Rhineland-Palatinate where he had more influence on the construction departments and is supposed to show how to avoid cost overruns:

1. Don't mention anything about expected costs and execution of a project until it's been planned so deeply that you can be sufficiently certain.
2. Avoid a situation where you're forced to execute a project and have a budget ceiling. Otherwise, redimension the project under the budget ceiling.
3. The more mature the planning, the better. If you have communicate costs, respect the following rules of thumb:
   • Guesstimates plus 40 percent equal planned costs;
   • planned costs plus 30 percent equal the perspective costs;
   • perspective costs plus 20 percent equal the expectable, realistic costs.
   • In the end, realistic costs outnumber the guesstimates by 120 percent (or a factor of 2.2) and it gets worse with tunneling and complicated terrain.
   • Only start a project if the funding for the realistic costs actually stands.
4. Don't be cheap on the wrong end. Goods planners cost a lot, but they are worth it and less expensive in the long run.
5. As a builder-owner, have staff that is not too few and not too bad.
6. Employ controlling for the construction that's independent from the builders and architecture and show interest in what they do.
7. Architecture and solutions that haven't been established as best practice should be avoided. Others are supposed to pay the price of learning the hard way.
8. Prime contractors rise the costs, so proceed with care. Bundle logical steps so that they are lucid enough to execute and digestable enough for a fair bid of tender.
9. Stick to the original planning even if changes seem tempting. They will cost money and time.
10. As a builder-owner or any kind of supervisor, show interest in the entire process, sacrifice time and don't believe anybody. Even an election campaign won't see as many lies as a botched construction project.
11. Be humble and critical of yourself. There will always be somebody more in the know then you. Talk to them and learn.

In the very end, Sarrazin talks about a real case during his tenure in the state of Berlin, the "culture brewery of Prenzlauer Berg" and that he awarded the owner to the second winner, not the first. The second actually did well and fired its Berlin subsidiary boss in the very end. The original first place got awarded another project in Berlin and the company went bankrupt which resulted in some problems in finishing it. Only he, Thilo Sarrazin, saw the danger of a contractor going bankrupt. Well, who would have thought? Say what you want about Thilo Sarrazin (or Mel Gibson), but that son of a bitch knows story structure!


Trigger Warning 1: Transit Nerd Takes Quarter Hour To Compare Metropolitan Railways
(What's An S-Bahn #4567 And Why London Overground Shouldn't Count Yet)

Oh yes, baby, you're doing it right. A proper trunk line makes you choose your personal main station to change to the proper last mile from the start!


Trigger Warning 2: Why Malls Fail In The United States But Not In Europe

Thanks to @Petike for contributing in the Urban Planning Thread! I did a whole post here on that issue, so let it be.


Meanwhile In Moscow: Big Circle Line Completed

On 24th February 2022, Russia started its invasion of Ukraine. On 1st March 2023 which is more than a year later, the capital of the same invading nation managed to open the final segments of the Bolshaya Koltsevaya Line, formerly called the Third Interchange Contour. Line 11 (or 11A in the meantime) was mostly known as a stub line in Moscow's south that would have been known as line "2bis" if Moscow had followed Parisian conventions, the only end in the first place before it was outdone by a new bifurcation that became part of the trunk line. It's just the oldest of three stub lines that have been merged into one in the end. The first new stretches were built from Moscow International Business Center to the first stretches of the actual circle and this initial appendix is supposed to be disconnected and extended due northwest to become line 17. In the northeast, the first parts of the circle were built as extensions of line 15 that was cut back in the event of the circle's completetion.

It's hard to say a good word about Russia nowadays, but I think that this great achievement is severely under-reported!​

Smaller openings were indeed done in the north, but the gap in the north between the interim line 11 (whose intial appendix will become line 17) and line 15 was only closed with the rest of the ring and the part around Kakhovskaya station (the old southern stub) already saw its merger in late 2021 after two years of rebuilding when ten stations in the southwest were opened. The last segment in the southeast (and the simultaneous closure of the northern gap) equaled an opening of nine stations out of a total of 31. Waiting with closing the northern gap may have made sense to avoid more mess in labeling the lines. You already had a continuous line 11 from the northwest to the southeast (and moving 11A from the former Kakhovskaya Line to the MIBC branch or future line 17) without touching line 15 that would be (and was indeed) cut short once the circle has been closed.

The completion of the big circle line in Moscow shows that Vladimir Putin was indeed successful enough to masquerade his "special military operation" in Ukraine as a not-war for its first year by making the new metro line complete. The question is, will he achieve a similar success in his second year? I really don't know.


1984 Berlin Is Like 2030 Moscow - A Threshold Is Broken And Reform Is Inevitable!

A guy from Russia reformed the Paris metro diagram to please him and applied the same principles onto the evolving Moscow network that has moved beyond its model-like ring-radial as it's been known from news reports if there's been a terrorist attack in there. Every system evolves and Moscow is no exception. I will cite diagrams from 1957, 1995 and 2021 to show.

	Metro Moscow diagram from 1957. Line 4 is suspiciously absent. You see a triangular network with the famous ring around it that deviates from its ring road whenever it needs to access a cul-de-sac railway terminal. It's yet a very simple network were geographically accurate representation still does its job. Schematic designed quickly replaced this but the insides of the ring still looked asymmetrically empty. Koltsevaya Line provided the framework for the network's future development. It's completely acceptable to build and open a new line as long as it's attached to this ring. Creating a diameter can wait and isn't the highest priority e.g. seen at the yellow line 8 with a yet prominent gap that bridged by this Koltsevaya line.
	Moscow Metro diagram from 1995. This is the design I'm used to from seeing in my German television news when there was indeed one or another attack in the 2000s. The traditional ring line, nine radial lines and one stub line freshly separated from its former maiden line that would become the nucleus of another future ring line. It is still very mono-systemic, but interchanges are already shown very properly. Blown up centre, compressed edges. Just how it was supposed to be. It's a bit like the state of Paris Metro for years after World War II when there were hardly any extensions and hardly any evolution of the entire network before the first lines of the Réseau Express Régional was opened in 1977.
	An almost current Moscow Metro diagram form 2021 before the recent extension binges at the big circle line. The system has become more complicated. The creation of Butovskaya Line (first L1, now 12) prompted the development of a less extensive, yet more outdoor-proof waggon class 81-740/741 that's also employed on the oldest outdoor metro line 4. The prospect of a world exposition in Moscow that failed resulted in a monorail up north that became line 13. The monorail may be abandoned, but the viaduct could be repurposed for a tramway. Besides the so-called "light metros" running on surface level with appropriate rolling stock, the biggest innovation was the introduction of a so-called Surface Metro which seems like the Muscovite way to say S-Bahn: Line 14 is a rebuilt Moscow Central Circle Railway and 2018 saw the introduction of the Diametral Lines, now lines D1 to D3 running and planned to go up to D5. This diagram shows a level of maturation after the network grew a deciding beard: West Berlin after taking over the S-Bahn, Paris after opening the RER, London after introducing the DLR and the Overground before featuring Crossrail after all.

This is a separate diagram for the Surface Metro only as it's planned to run by 2030. On a classic metro diagram, classic railway only existed to show which metro station to disembark for which railway station to go to which airport. This diagram gives the railway node in and around Moscow a face in the first place. There's a lot of white-room in the middle of the diagram, so it reads like an invitation to print it out and take notes. There are five stations where intercity terminals meet the Koltsevaya Line #5 and one isn't even part of the Surface Metro (Kievskaya), so it's prudent to note these five sites with a number 5. You can still look at the map inside the train to see where you want to interchange. If you take a look at stations also served by the new Big Circle (Bolshaya Koltsevaya) Line #11, you'll note that it features nine stations in a row in its northern and eastern course that form a bead chain of stations (save for Lefortovo) where you can interchange to the surface metro and six of them are inside the Central Circle Railway and more or less follow straight lines here. As long as you remember that belt of stations, you'll never miss the big circle. I just drew circles around them, keep it simple stupid. Never missing it, this explains a lot why the course of line 11 became so condensed in the north and east vis-à-vis the southwest. The southwest needed to create a meaningful orbital connection in the first place, the opposite already had it to some degree. Here it's vital that the load from the Surface Metro can be dropped off as broady and directly as possible.

Now the Moscow system is tipping over the edge. The masterplan for 2030, beyond the now finished circle line 11, envisions further metro lines up to number 18, mostly at the outer edges and the missing gap at line 8 in the middle of Moscow will like remain open for a long time.

The guy wanting reform the Moscow metro calls for hexagons to be employed. 60-degree angles are supposed to provide for pleasing bends. Line 5 remains round, but that's it. Moscow Central Circle Railway would look like a perfect, symmetric hexagon. And Bolshaya Koltsevaya Line won't even try to be symmetric and will show that its course is way more extensive in its west and south than in its north and east. And once again: I don't take credit for this, see it there!

To the left: THIS IS YOUR STARGATE! To the right: A version for inside the train.​

 

[Dr. No]

Right For The Wrong Reasons - The Future Triangle Of Belgrade With Loops At The Edges

Belgrade is going earnest. Just like the Second Avenue Subway in New York City after close to century, Belgraders are seeing something similar after have a century: This thing is actually under construction! This post is once again a successor to multiple previous entries: Open heart surgery for railway nodes, the tail wagging with the dog with beautiful wings or rather loop extensions., a so-called Soviet triangle in a formerly communist, albeit non-aligned country. The thing is that it's, as usual, a quagmire.

To the left, you see the actual current plans for the Belgrade system where line 1 is worked on since 2021.
To the right, you see the master plan from 1976 under the auspicses of Socialist Yugoslavia.​

A big part of the "mess" from 1976 has been tidied up after all and it looks like a neat one-service-per-line scheme. And yes, both designs feature the same triangle structure. A difference in priorities can be seen here: You see traces of M1 from 1976 in current line 2, ditto for M2 in current line 3. That's now line 1 used to be a north-south pré-metro trunk lines whose south would've ssen a convergence with low-priority metro lines M4 and M5. Just as the eventually speedy structural completion of Beograd Prokop was made for the benefit of paying back the loan to the Kuweiti creditors, the alignment of line 1 in its present iteration is also done to raise real estate prices at Belgrade Waterfront to be created on the ruins of the train tracks of the disused cul-de-sac terminal. The metro is very needed, everybody agrees, but the alignments are considered unlucky as an initial access for the university hospital and the new central railway station were surrendered for the sake of Belgrade Waterfront. Line 3 is seen by many commentators as an attempt to fix what will be missed with lines 1 and 2. Then again, the rough alignments indeed follow 1976 role models.

One anecdote is that an envisioned station of line 1 could actually built in a way that you'd have an accessible passageway of some sorts to the university hospital in 400 meters of distance which has been rejected by the fact that it would one day be accessed by line 3 anyway. These last words and the shown subway diagram are courtesy of the national-scale German newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung or FAZ for short.

What's ocular are the loops in the northwest and northeast. Zemun looks like having more of a cul-de-sac nature than Mirijevo and Zemun was already featured as an interchange in the 1976 draft, yet I wouldn't be surprised if all three lines would actually be one big physical line where people can just stay sitting if they want to ride from one side of an edge to the other with the train just changing designations. Mirijevo didn't even exist as a designation for a station in 1976 even if the estates out there were definitely built or under construction. Zenum and environs is mostly known as an aircraft hub, civilian and military alike. Both the projects and the airports are bad enough as origins and destinations that they actually need more than one trunk line. Furthermore, lines 2 and 3 cross at Stark Arena in Novi Beograd which is like a city inside the city and the eponymous railwy station is treated as a factual central railway station for Belgrade ever since its opening in 1984, the extension of M2 from 1976 from a mere Old Belgrade line into a cross-river line 3 in the 21st century reflects this evolution. Seeing how Zenum (2/3), Novi Beograd (3), Prokop (3), Vukov Spomenik (1) and Pancevacki Most (2) as vital BG:voz stations are supposed to be accessed to the city by versatile metro services, the grid looks well considered.

Nuremberg and Munich in Bavaria come into my mind as rough comparisons.

• Nuremberg because of the loop: Near the Nazi party rally grounds, there's a documentation center about the rallies and the trials and the eponymous station "Doku-Zentrum" is the common terminal station of tramway lines 6 and 8 coming from differing directions. The station is in the middle of a loop where tramway trains just stop, wait and continue and switch from 6 to 8 or vice versa. It's due southwest from the city, yet not as far away as the projects of Langwasser.
  • Locals cherish the place for the lake, the Dutzendteich (Dozen's Pond) with a nearby open-air pub owning its own brewery and having an own assembly hall for gigs where I went to see a comedienne. First was the lake, than came the party to create the rally grounds, then came the visitors' camp, then the war, and ultimately the projects after the war.
• Munich because of the projects of Neuperlach in the city's southeast: Two of the three trunk lines of the Munich triangle converge at Innsbruck Square and booster lines U7 and U8 exist to change these rough alignments to provide direct services between Neuperlach and the city's northwest beyond the central railway station. Without the loop, it's nothing special however. A system like the New York City Subway lives off the fact, beyond a trunk line having final bifurcations as elsewhere, services often run along several separate designated rail lines inside and outside Manhattan and can therefore be recombined with relative ease. Even if a final stub as a terminus may not serve several trunk lines at the same time, it would have the theoretical capacity to do so.
  • Dividing the load from the start may be the reason why both trunk lines aren't as overrun as the remaining third that was opened first. U7 and U8 bypass from the start in the fringes. Said remainder is supposed to see relief in a so-called U9 bypass that will split two services into two separate lines and create new opportunites for new services elsewhere also. Diverting passengers to the central railway station also means digging in a place where there's sufficient unburdened subterranian room which is not the case for the two other nodes in the interchange triangle that U3 und U6 lines currently serve.

If you look at the Wikipedia's article about rapid transit systems, you'll see the different typologies of networks in the world. Most of them have been there for at least half a generation. The one exception is the very last one from 2019, the loop extension. It's fascinating that somebody bothered to include a type of branch as an own topology vis-à-vis all these center-oriented diagrams and they can only be understood as an addition. Singapore is included because of two small feeder circles contributing to the same major line. Naples is included because it has a central loop to overcome a steep gradient without too much of a hassle. Madrid is not included even if line 12, the so-called MetroSur, is hardly different from the thing in Singapore. I only count stuff like Sofia and the future Belgrade system. There is a demand for rapid transit in the outskirts where you cannot really decide which way is more important, so the answer is both and you build it like that and the feeder is integreated into the trunk lines as a common and seemless end or rather not-end.


The Way Of Water In The Way - Cry Me A River

Does this even deserve an own entry, an own post on its own? Probably not. Yet there's another reason why I opened a second post with Belgrade as some kind of role model. It's about the obstacles of geography and how something like a "New Belgrade" can even exist. The Danube River is not supposed to be crossed by the new metro (that's already done with the reformed railway network at its BG:voz trains), but the Save River is supposed to. Once political geography changed after World War I for Belgrade to longer end at an international border, urban development could grow beyond former constraints that however remain physical barriers: the Danube and Save rivers and the latter was easier to cross and therefore obvious to incorporate into the city of Belgrade.

Alon Levy wrote an article about rivers and why they matter some days before the Russian invasion of Ukraine and dealt with Kyiv. The topic was why the green line M3 is supposed to see quite a loop as its southeastern extension to interchange at central-east Darnitsya station served by the red line M1. That's because there's a bigger sub-center of Kyiv at the other part of the river that's so wide at that point that is better to avoid crossing it when you can. Then he's been talking about North London and South London and why the Victoria Line needed to cross the Northern Line on both sides of the Thames River that's not even that wide to bridge, let alone three neighboring stations in the north in a row. It's all about having a functional sub-grid on that off-center side of the river and they didn't even talk about the Jubilee Line that makes quite a radial for South London in itself.

And yes, how obvious it was too make stuff cross each other in a similar vein in Brooklyn even if they may not have had the idea of a "right side" of the river (Manhattan) and a "wrong side" of the river (Brooklyn, Queens) and that the latter needs some own functionality. For that matter, that's why there's also the Franklin Avenue shuttle in Brooklyn itself and not just the shuttle in Manhattan's 42nd Street to serve as an ersatz interchange, something that most systems in the world don't need because they were (mostly) centrally planned from the start and didn't suffer from interservice rivalry and their built legacies.

Speaking of New York City, I remember a round of MiniMetro I played in New York City and I had three lines stretch out into the east in Brooklyn in Queens from Manhattan and New Jersey and even if I hadn't seen any of these circle stations overload with the triangle passengers up to that point, I was happy how a single triangle station popped up out in the east and turn it into the common eastern terminus of all three lines. They could be fetched in both directions and the overrun in the end must have been somewhere else. This therefore goes full circle.

Speaking of circles, the water is the entire reason for the existence of Glasgow Subway. The various river from the Highlands are so enormous of an obstacle that going underground was really the best way to go. That why it's the oldest circular subway in the world with no extension. Everything else could theoretically end as a cul-de-sac on their respective urban peninsulas.


Meanwhile in Montréal - Réseau Express Métropolitain as an ersatz for Line 3

With all the little isles and isolated shores, I found Montréal to be the most difficult city to play on at MiniMetro and I've never hit the 2,000 passengers threshold in Normal mode. An old tunnel under the Mont Royal that morphed into the city name Montréal often rose questions what to do with it. In the very end, they decided to create the REM or metropolitan express network which, just as young systems in the French-speaking world are supposed to be, as an automated VAL (driverless light vehicle) system and is currently the youngest maiden system to have been opened in late July this year. It runs overground in the outskirts, connectes both mainland shores around the Hochelaga Archipel with it and each other and features strategic bifurcations into the rather Anglophone west of Montreal Island. At the moment, only the most southeastern part from Gare Central to Brossard is opened with the rest supposed to come in 2024 and 2027. And when it's finished, its network will somehow resemble the Linee S of Milan: Connecting some outskirts into a wonderful Passante with supreme interchange opportunites to several metro lines crossing in a rectangular fashion. And once again, is says a lot about Jesus Island with its Laval municipality: It's connected, but hardly because only a fraction of it is seriously urbanised. Tell me without telling me, again.

 

[Dr. No]

What the Horizon franchise taught me about autonomy

First of all, happy All Hallow's Day! Or rather Eve, Halloween being a contraction of All Hallow's Eve.

Yeah, by the smith shop, what have they been eating?​

This year I've been playing the Horizon franchise and both playgrounds, Colorado and Utah as in #1 Zero Dawn as well as Nevada and California as in #2 Forbidden West, feature so-called cauldrons whose completion will allow you to override various beasts you couldn't before. Parallels in both playgrounds: You don't get to choose the first cauldron (or at least its data) if you want to progress in the game; the second cauldron is the only non-compulsory one found before the mid-point of the map, the third cauldron is just beyond that mid-point and there's a side quest to one of them in each playground; the fourth cauldron is in direction of the end game site and somehow derelict compared to the others; the fifth cauldron is accessible from a progressed point along the main quest off the main direction of the end game; the sixth cauldron is exclusive to the beasts only found in the DLC and therefore found in its respective area. The former three cauldrons and their beasts to override are roughly easier than the latter three.

Cauldrons are automated robot factories and therefore comparable to automotive plants (you don't build that many airplanes anyway) and mints and the last one makes these cauldrons in the Horizon universe downright political. Speaking of airplanes, well, the third cauldron of #2 (IOTA) is actually a tallneck factory (arguably for the entire North American continent) and you can assemble one that's hidden in there whereas the "obvious" tallneck in the area is locked until you can override a mechanic bird (completing GEMINI in the progessed game) to fly onto its capital saucer element for global or at least continental effect vital to the main quest. On another plane, it's obvious that the cauldron for glitchhawks in #1 (XI) is beyond Meridian when part of the main quest demands you to shoot off half a dozen of them in a row and it's at the end of the map, but these birds can come quite early if you go up north in the Sacred Lands, also in the main quest.

I once read in German how a representative of the German-speaking community in Belgium said that "autonomy needn't mean that you need to do everything by yourself" when it's about yet another Belgian state reform and the German-speaking community is quite small compared to the Walloons and the Flemish. It's also been smaller nations that joined the Eurozone after its initial start (book money from 1999, physical tender from 2002) and yet they're supposed to print and mint everything that's supposed to circulate in the entire Eurozone. Slovenia joined the Eurozone in 2007 before Malta and Cyprus in 2008. I once read that even though Slovenia started issuing banknotes and coins from own Slovenian production from the start, same issues were first import-only. I guess that they meant stuff like €200 and €500 banknotes and I knew petrol stations that visibly declared not to take them. That's because they were quite rare in circulation, not needed in daily transactions and a very obvious choice for forgeries. And unlike Malta and Cyprus, Slovenia is next door to Italy and Austria and Germany isn't far away either and much, much bigger.

If you think about it, the only post-Communist countries in the EU not in the Eurozone have some strong traditions: Poland is the biggest one, struggled against foreign dominance and extinction, but is also big and needs a flexible currency to develop. Czechia was the workshop of Austria-Hungary with a robust industrial base and needs to redevelop on its own. Hungary is one of these sunken empires itself or what remained of its imperial nation. It's also structurally weak with a lot of sparsely populated countryside and the devaluing of the Forint currency in 2008 shows that it wouldn't have been great to have in the Eurozone for the time being. Slovakia, however, was historically sandwiched between being Upper Hungary until World War I and the smaller nation inside Czechoslovakia after it. Seeing how democratization was at peril in the 1990s in Slovakia unlike in Czechia, as well as the proximity betwen Bratislava and Vienna, joining the Eurozone in 2009 was also a way to force a lock-in effect that makes a Slovakian withdrawal from the EU very painful. For the same reason, I see a UK rejoining the EU some time in the future (let's say 2040) also quickly adopting the Euro in order to make a second Brexit too costly to desire.

There's a wonderful entry at German-language Wikipedia about the Turkish Lira and where the banknotes of each of the now nine series have been printed. Midway in the fifth series from 1958 on. At some point, you no longer need to say "all banknotes were produced in the Republic of Turkey" though they still do up to the penultimate series. The now ultimate series is only described as "that's the latest and current issue". Authoritative infrastructure, I don't know a better name, would ideally be run by your domestic government, but outsourcing became a trend in post-Fordist societies and in the case of developing countries, you need the banknotes now before you can even think of growing the expertise to provide this stuff by yourself. In Germany, we have five mint workshops of the Mint of Germany that were and are easily recognizable on German coins (formerly Deutschmark, no Euro) and they are quite concentrated in the South.

Once at a time, I visited Jablonec nad Nisou near Liberec in the Czech Republic. Bohemian glass is world-famous and they have a so-called bijouterie museum about the local glass and jewelry industry, a lot looking quite Habsburgian and also delving into the modern era. Also showing that glass was also political, first trying to break German ethnic dominance in glassworks in Czechoslovakia, then no longer being an issue due to ethnic cleansing in favor of Czechs and the now state enterprise in Jablonec responsible for the entire international trade of Czechoslovak glass. And last but not least, that Jablonec also used to have a tradition in minting medals, but only minting coins as legal tender from 1993 on as Czechoslovakia divided and its only mint was in Slovakia and Czechia needed one on its own. And you can see coins for the Cook Islands with Queen Elizabeth II upon these coins. Nice.

After about ten years, the European Central Bank began issuing new banknotes with another value in the next year to prevent falsification even harder which also meant that there wouldn't be new €500 banknotes. And whereas the first series had one specific letter for the printing country (X for Germany), they switch to the more easy to remember two-character country code according to ISO 3166 (DE for Germany) and this means that any new accession or withdrawal vis-à-vis the EU won't be problem.

So that's it, I came from Aloy in the post-apocalypse to contemporary physical tender just because I desired overrides for glitchhwaks in the Nora-proximate Banuk territory that are in the way to repair the tallneck up north. But the ornaments in the sky of the remnants of Las Vegas are priceless, this is a thing that money can't buy.


Postscriptum: Life Imitating Art - Thank You, ChatGPT 4

I didn't plan on making two contibutions, but you can only save a draft for a post at this board software for so long and it made me did compact re-writing on the fly. Seriously, I had all these cauldrons hidden behind a spoiler to become brief and then I dropped it. And just as Halloween came in handy to connect my playstation account to Web 2.0 services (Youtube and X/Twitter) to create some kind of greeting card and open this small new chapter, the recent AI Summit 2023 in London, UK is great occassion is a great excuse to have a post about the rest I failed to remember after the last saved draft reached its shelf life at this board. It's not a thesis, it's just the Internet.

Here at AH.com, we have the Chaos Timeline whose very end is both about a hot topic recently in the news (the dangers of artificial intelligence) and the other hot topic that led to the world of Horizon (self-replicating assemblers as a form of nanotechnology) whose combination made for the imagined disaster of nano-apocalypse. The closest thing to the Hartz-Timor Swarm Incident in Horizon's TTL's 2064 in the Chaos Timeline is the 1989 incident on the Shetland Islands perpetuated by the Socialist Block that was killed with fire before it was too late and the other close call was, of course, its original end in 1993 with the aborted World War III. The 1970s and 1980s with progressing mass employment due to AI and nanotech is parelleled in the Horizon world by its own 2040s and 2050s where dismay about human redundancy by said humans can be seen in the records.

In some ways, OTL sees itself seven decades behind the Chaos Timeline, though every timeline will, of course, come with its own shortcomings. And staying in tune with the general aesop of the franchise, it all started with climate change going rouge in the 2030s and the pressure to now repair the damage instead of just preventing it for the present and future. And the same tools making repair successful also providing the seed of doom. Greta Thunberg as the progenitor of Fridays For Future got quite some backlash after her Stand With Gaza photo and there are voices that see the climate change battle movement at peril now. What is true is that we are deep into this global warming right now and stuff like these A22 kids and others may be necessary to prevent further damage but not nearly enough to prevent a scenario like the Hot Zone Crisis in Horizon and the whole terraforming and anti-terraforming unfolding in that timeline. I've also found a video describing the Horizon timeline that described legal ceiling of AI power (the incident being the Yellowstone caldera AI going into hiding out of fear) to prevent Skynet-style scenarios (or the fate of the Kaylons' builders in The Orville universe where servitors became sentient enough for demands answered by violence leading to their eventual genocide) that parallel the latest far future story entry of the Chaos timeline... and SCOTUS somehow allowing corporations to stand their own candidates for election, providing the backstory for coffee-producing corporations doing automated warfare resulting in the glitch leading to the Horizon timeline. The complete drop of human fighters by replacing them with AI that hijacks other robots when put against is still bad enough without corporate warfare, however. OK, let's stop the spoilers.

The newest Beatles song became possible due to AI in the first place. It was about filtering away the background music from John Lennon's vocals, so it's still an original song from the original voice. What hasn't been done is recombining old snippets of John Lennon's voice to make him pronounce new things he never did to create new lyrics beyond his power. This is where deep fakes start and why there's so much concern about it. Somewhere inbetween you see a reincarnation of a young Carrie Fisher playing Princess Leia shortly before the real Carrie Fisher died. Deep fakes provide a challenge that can be seen as plagiarism squared. Things can appear obviously (or not so much) repetitive, but how long will a human remain to be eventually fool-proof until this obstacle has also been overcome? It's bad enough now that the actors' guild was very right to go on strike over royalties from their selfs getting realized by AIs. Elon Musk is aware enough of the shortcomings of his ego that he doesn't want to become a Ted Faro.

The AI summit in London has happened one year after the release of Chat GPT 4. It baffled a lot of people. And it's good that there are many people out there that have actually learned from a century of science fiction. And in the end, I avoided a second post.

 

[Dr. No]

An Update For 2024 Quarter 1 - Records Despite An Abysmal State

2023 has seen the biggest passenger numbers for German Railways in history. This has been news recently. The major reason cited is the €49 ticket. It's definitely not the awesome state of Germany's railway grid. There will be total closure of the Riedbahn from June 2024 to December 2024 to overhaul this legacy railway line between Frankfurt am Main and Mannheim and combat delays in the entirety of Germany as the most burdened intercity connection. It's the very first of many overhauls to come to fix the entire grid. The construction of a high-speed rail line between the mentioned cities is legally ready to go and supposed to be finished after 2030. In Stuttgart, the 21 project will only see a partial opening in 2025 as the digital railway node u/c as the first of its kind in Germany can't avoid growing pains and the legacy terminal may only be ditched by late 2027 and the 2026 re-scheduling of connections pre-supposed a continued employment of the terminus.

Ever since I started to become an "experienced patient" as someone recently called me at my Stuttgart clinic, I got to know how to live with an eternal construction site. If there's no direct connection between the stop at my clinic and the central railway station or I don't want to wait another five minutes for the appropriate train, I gladly take an interchange at Staatsgalerie and, when the link was actually broken, at Charlottenplatz. Only on the way to the clinic and without bad weather, I appreciate a direct walk from the station to Staatsgalerie to have both lines to the clinic handy at site with the station being very lucid also.

In 2020 regarding my bariatric surgery, some incentives and dis-incentives urged me to park my car for a week inside the secondary house of the clinic before it was consolidated into the maiden house with the subsidiary being sold to another foundation: A car is a shell to be alone which is vital during a pandemic; you needed to watch out for snares in the ticketing which you can now avoid now with the €49 ticket; a regional train between by hometown and the big city came only every hour and missing the train could feel like having to wait longer than being stuck in a jam; the Stuttgart 21 project made parts of the inner city a repellant to transit users and there are still signposts leading you to two separate passageways for two separate light rail stations to circumvent broken lines which were fixed only now.

In 2024, the COVID-19 pandemic became a thing of the past, I can walk in and out intuitively, the Ukraine War brought us the €49 ticket and there are once again direct light rail connections to both railway stations and a headway of half an hour between them.


UEFA EURO 2024 in Germany and Summer Olympic Games 2024 in Paris

With the multitude of cities in Germany and their ongoing projects everywhere, it's not prudent to talk about projects being somehow due for the soccer competition this year. Most venues Germany features were at least built ready for the 2006 FIFA World Cup and transit links have been there as a matter of course. Paris didn't manage to finish the MÉTÉOR (line 14) until after the FIFA World Cup 1998 in its country. At least, the extension of line 14 down south to Orly Airport will be finished by the start of the Olympic Games in Paris this summer. It's the most humble step in the Grand Paris Express project and yet it can be seen as a job creation measure: As a measure for climate politics, Franche prohibits direct internal flights where the TGV does the job in less than 2½ hours and most of these flights are done via Orly instead of CDG.

Melbourne 1956 had to outsource its equestarian competitions to Stockholm. Why? Notoriously draconic quarantine rules in Australia.
Paris 2024 will outsource its surfing competitions to Tahiti, 100 more kilometers than in 1956 and still within France's political boundaries. Why? Rule of cool.​

What's great about the EURO 2024 in Germany is that every venue has already served its purpose in the past and needn't be done from scratch or see any major overhaul. And seeing how controversial events like these have become in first-world democracies and traffic projects as well, you can say that it's hardly possible to combine the two nowadays. Especially in Germany in several equally important cities.


Applied Geography Of Germany - The Infamous Cash Nation Loses Its Grip

In the recent 2020s and greatly helped by the COVID-19 pandemic, Germany adapts to the rest of the developed world by reducing its fetish for cash. Yes, there are still a lot of gastronomers still accepting nothing but cash, still confirming the cliche. But vending machines are increasingly accepting for cashless and contactless payments and people using less and less cash also means that banks try to scrap local bank branches as much as possible. This is also helped by the fact that Dutch gangs specialized in blowing up ATMs moved their operations from their native Netherlands (less cash aficionados and beefed up ATM terminals due to hard experience) to cash-loving Germany.

One of the most prominent victims appearing in national television is the VR-Bank Mittlere Oberpfalz, a cooperative bank covering rural areas east of Nuremberg in Bavaria and whereas this says a lot about the geography of the Upper Palatinate (the biggest towns at the edges have their own cooperative banks and the rest is the middle of nowhere needing one for them all), it also says a lot about another trend: Landlords are hesitant to rent out to banks for their branches because of the explosive risk and insurance rates become insane due to the same reason. This means that affected banks resort to hole-in-the-wall ATMs as much as they can and turn staffed branches into mere self-service branches with only their head offices being staffed and often stopping 24/7 service also. In my native city, the local cooperative bank branches only have their self-service areas opened from 6 AM to 11 PM in order to keep off the gangs and keep landlords and insurers happy.

Aside from that, there are many places where the drop in cash demand urged cooperative banks and saving and loans associations to band together and employ single ATMs together, just that there's still some cash supply in some locality after all. The only hole-in-the-wall of our local cooperative bank (and only 24/7 accessible one) has also started to run it in tandem with our local S&L that decided to close its nearby branch and advises to its centrally located HQ if you want to have coin rolls. The building with the hole-in-the-wall features a dozen apartments and various medical practitioners with a pharmacy and a bakery with café adjacent. I didn't check up exactly on our local S&L branches if and when they close off and other banks don't even try to have a branch in every corner and maybe have one branch in the city (such as mine that also closes self-services at 11 PM) and are therefore not of concern here.

Germany from now on pays the dole for its asylum seekers via a so-called "payment card" that looks a lot like a normal debit card, but is only useful to do groceries and other essential shopping and won't allow withdrawal of cash from ATMs and you can argue about the xenophobe bent in this measure to keep people from sending money to their families in their homeland or even trafficers, hoping to dry out abusers of whatever "asylum system". And one excuse for banks to close their branches is that supermarkets offer cash withdrawals at the cashier if you buy a minimum amount of purchases and allowing a sum up to some level, e. g. REWE allowing up to €200 cash withdrawal when buying for at least €5. Make of that what you will.

As we're already it: My hometown features twelve consumer banks and virtually everyone is situated along light rail tracks with a branch or at least in a very walkable distance to it and it's usually the only branch the respective bank has in this city. There is a case of one bank having two brands (Deutsche Bank bought up Postbank) and retaining the separate branches in town. The VR cooperative bank has its HQ at the major bank street crossing here, but branches in every corner. The local S&L association also has branches in every corner (including opposite to Market Square), but its HQ is a bit off the heartbeat opposite to the concrete sin called the Woolhouse that makes the southern end of our Old Town. Also near the Woolhouse, but part of the city's nucleus, there's a so-called "ReiseBank" that specializes in foreign money exchange and precious metals in a building that used to house the local branch of Commerzbank... before they swallowed Dresdner Bank and moved into their centrally located legacy branch house.

Neckarturm station features a Banco Santander branch in the eponymous tower and the other bank of the river features a branch of HypoVereinsbank (UniCredit) better accessed by the next station; Rathaus station easily accesses the branches of the mentioned Hypo, Oberbank (behind the town hall to walk under), Targobank and the mentioned S&L branch and said S&L is usually called the KSK; Harmonie station accesses very closely the branches of Commerzbank (the former Dresdner Bank branch), BW Bank (state bank LBBW's consumber bank daughter), Deutsche Bank and the HQ of the VR bank and less closely the branches of the also co-op Sparda-Bank, Südwestbank and the Postbank at Allee Post (d'oh), a brand of Deutsche Bank.

What I failed to do is actually creating maps comparing the memberships of various municipalities of Heilbronn County (not be confused with the independent city-county I live in which is like a hole in the donut) when it comes to vintage cooperatives and banking cooperatives because stuff like this has experienced a lot of fusions. Shortly beyond the borders of Heilbronn in Erlenbach, there's the wine press house of the biggest vintage cooperative in Germany, WG Heilbronn and I attended its last extraordinary assembly in its local assembly hall after it swallowed four smaller cooperatives in the last twenty years. The same Erlenbach features its own small Raiffeisenbank on the other hand, sitting neck on neck with bigger banking cooperatives like the Volksbank Sulmtal stretching the entire Sulm valley due east up the hilly Löwenstein that has its own small vintage cooperative and the VR-Bank HN-SHA eG where the old VR-Bank SHA-CR eG came to help the interest rate bet-squandering Volksbank Heilbronn with a fusion after the head organisation of said cooperatives (BVR) bailed them out. Both big neighbors divide the town of Weinsberg with the core town served by HN-SHA and its town part Wimmental served by Volksbank Sulmtal where I also have a share as grandma used to grow up there. Yes, this is nuts.

Following is my inspiration, say hello to the western HQ of our local VR cooperative bank!

Just walking home due to a token strike, I shot this. Hometown is to the left in the west. Do you notice the gap between it and the rest? Exactly.​

And the end of this post, I'm providing you with yet another iteration of my light rail spreadsheet. Its latest innovation is adding the northern artery road as yet another postal code border in spite of a station being in the middle of it and another line indicating that the preceding three stations are indeed part of a postal code border themselves and conveniently saying that these tracks will vanish into a tunnel on the other side. Let's see how long the shelf life will be. Oh, the comprehensive school at the revenue service has been rebuilt and the former fenced playground (used to be an elementary school and secondary modern of sorts) has been opened up enough to signalize that it's supposed to be treated as the new main entrance.