I'm always fascinated by complex infrastructure questions and how long they take to 'complete'.
I grew up outside Washington DC, where a plan was made in the early 1970s to 'fix' the highways interchanges around one major intersection.
In 2004 they opened the first section of these envisioned fixes, with a new piece opening approximately every six months since.
The 'final' piece of the 'fix' occurs by 2010 and they've already began extending the fix to account for the extensive bottom-up and top-down growth that has occurred... since 1975 or so. (The area in question is populated by very large companies, government and the military, so top down is often bigger and faster, the two together, than bottom up, unlike most areas of the U.S.).
In a piece this last week from the San Francisco Chronicle daily paper, "Larger agendas stall city's best-laid plans" by Joe King ( http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin
This massive delay isn't the real story; I think this timing was picked only because most of us have a hard time remembering back further than a decade.
Octavia is a story that began with the first highways designed to criss-cross San Francisco in the 1950s. Octavia was part of the Hayes street highway that was at least partly built before that planning program was stopped (only two of the seven highways were even begun, with the Embarcadero raised highway being the only one completed).
The story is updated again in 1989 when the Loma Prieta earthquake hit San Francisco, collapsing almost the entire Embarcadero raised highway and damaging just one small part of the Hayes Street raised highway.
It was at this point in 1989, with the destruction of one small part of the road and the realization that 40 years of hand-wringing about the earthquake danger of these raised highways, that the city decided to act. This 'acting' culminated in the Octavia street opening in 2006.
Which brings me to the interesting rail issues from across Europe. This morning's BBC describes the opening of Spain's second high speed rail line.
The Railteam site ( http://railteam.com/ I'll let you pick the language) shows a long-term view of high speed rail across Europe.
In riding through Switzerland last week I was taken aback with how much faster many of the city to city trains had become... only to find myself plunged into pitch black tunnels from time to time along these now-faster routes. And when I wasn't being put into a tunnel, I found myself staring at the walls of a new V-cut, placing the train either at level with built up berms or below level in an actual cut.
Of course this is similar to the thinking behind TGV, which I was reminded of as my train screamed across some of the most desolate looking, flat, boring parts of France at grade and then found the train in an all-too-reminiscent V-cut whenever the desolation saw even a bit of population.
bill
The article:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/7254630.stm
Spain's first high-speed rail link between Madrid and Barcelona has become operational, after years of delay.
Hitting speeds of 300km/h (186mph), the first AVE train took 155 minutes to cover the 550km (342 miles) to Madrid.
A total of 17 trains - each expected to carry some 200 people - will now be operating daily between the two cities.
At a price of some 180 euros (£136) return, the new train link competes favourably with air travel, the BBC's Danny Wood in Madrid says.
The added advantage is that the train takes passengers right into the heart of Madrid, our correspondent says.
"I think it was an excellent trip from Barcelona," one of the AVE passengers told the BBC.
The service is operated by Spain's national train company Renfe.
The high-speed link between the country's two biggest cities was planned nearly two decades ago, but its completion was delayed by a number of administrative and construction issues.
Spain's first high-speed train line - between Madrid and Seville - opened in 1992.
The Spanish government now says it will have more high-speed train lines than anywhere else in the world by 2010, our correspondent says.
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