Courageous journalism at the BBC

I kid, obviously. When describing the current controversy over the Washington D.C. Metro refusing to take any "issue-oriented" adverts until next year just so that they can avoid showing the prize-winning "Draw Mohammed" cartoon, the BBC resorts to words rather than a picture to describe the salient image.

The advert calls for Americans to support free speech and features a bearded, turban-wearing Muhammad waving a sword and shouting: "You can't draw me!"
In reply, a cartoon bubble portrays an artist grasping a pencil and saying: "That's why I draw you."

How odd, you would have thought that they would have included an image of the cartoon rather than laboriously describe its contents.

Just to make the point, here's the image in question:

The spineless BBC writer isn't shy of displaying their orientation towards issues:

Ms Geller insists the cartoon is a "political opinion" which does not contain any violence.

Ms Geller is of course correct. There's no violence in that picture: the gentleman depicted is holding a sword, but that's as far as it goes. Yet the writer takes particular care to use reported speech and quotes, presumably to demonstrate that he or she is emphatically not in sympathy with Ms Geller or (mysteriously unnamed in the article) artist Bosch Fawstin.

Deary me. Truely, the BBC has resigned from actual journalism in order to be at the back of the line when crocodile feeding time comes around.

I'm really not keen on Pamela Gellar, but the rest of the world seems to be bending over backwards to make her admittedly extreme opinions seem really quite rational and reasonable. And we are surprised when Muslim extremism is emboldened by this obvious cowardice?

Delays are good for you - the MTA proves it

No, really, they do. New York's Metropolitan Transit Authority (something like Transport for London) has produced an outstanding video that shows why making some subway trains late makes others less late:

Yes, the idea is that sometimes delaying a train can prevent further delays by not compounding the gap between trains. Anyone who has waited impatiently on a hot subway platform might find this concept counterintuitive, but transportation experts generally agree that that the evenness of service is as crucial as avoiding individual delays.

The MTA video makes a compelling case. The key insight is that once a platform gets crowded enough, due to constant feed of new passengers and a delayed train, it becomes slower for the next train to debark and embark passengers. So an already delayed train gets more delayed as it progresses down the line. The solution? Spot a train that's getting near the critical delay time and give it priority to progress through the network even if this involves delaying other (less delayed trains).

It's a great example that, even in what we regard as relatively simple systems, there can be a complex interplay between entities that produce highly unintuitive results. Deliberately delaying trains can actually be good for the system as a whole (if not for the passengers sitting in the delayed train with their faces pressed into a fellow passenger's unwashed armpit).

Safety training

Hidden underneath short screeds about "Lincoln" and Mad Men is a little gem from train-driving blogger Electro-Kevin. In the context of the recent train crashes in Spain and Switzerland he discusses the individual tweaks towards safety he makes in his job, summarising the situation nicely:

You can't pack a rush-hour train with doctors, businessmen, scientists, politicians and have an idiot at the front driving it.

A fully loaded train at rush hour, travelling into London, can easily carry many hundreds of such people to work. Assuming the average cost of a life at £1M, which is probably low for a professional in a rush hour train, you're looking at half a billion quid at risk on every single journey. On balance, you don't want this being done by a half-trained chimp. Ironically, for most lawyers and management consultants on the train, you could substitute half-trained chimps and make a net benefit for society, but I digress.

Electro-Kevin is acutely aware of this responsibility, and so aims to make his trains safer:

In addition to Press-and-Call I wear rubber charity bands. I use them in the following way:

• around my palm denotes that my train is longer than normal (so I stop at the right marker on platforms)
• around my fingers denotes that I have an irregular stopping pattern (so I don't miss stations)
• wrapped around fingers AND palm denotes that I am under a cautionary sequence of signals approaching a red.

I find this system works well at all times, especially in darkness. The light tugging of the band whilst traversing a long red section means that I am thinking constantly about the red signal.

Do you see how clever this is? He has built himself an analogue reminder system - if he's proceeding towards a red light but forgets, and starts to accelerate to his normal speed, the sensation of train acceleration combined with the squeezing of his finger and palm will trigger "hey, this feels wrong" in his sensory system. He has removed the need to remember a special condition with no visual input ("I'm proceeding towards a red signal"), aware of the fallibility of human memory, and backstopped it with a sensory stimulus.

Clever, n'est ce pas? What Government agency or safety consultancy came up with this system?

This system is simple and cheap and is the most effective that I have come across and - best of all - it was invented by ME !

To be fair, this works for Electro-Kevin but may not work for other drivers who process sensory stimuli differently. It is however an excellent way of providing another layer of safety in the system of driving a train through a busy and complex mesh of track. It's a reminder that if your system relies on human recollection to avoid an accident, you're going to discover how foolish is such a reliance.

This is why paying train drivers very substantial salaries can make sense; if, as a result, you can employ people with an active interest in the safety of their train then you're buying yourself a bargain in reduced risk of accident. Of course, the real trick is ensuring that salaries and safety are actually aligned. How do you objectively rate the safety of a driver in a system where the first serious accident a driver causes is usually his last, and such accidents are in any case extremely rare? The best you can do is try to spot precursors to accidents, e.g. signals passed at danger (SPADs) and base salaries on incidence of precursors, but even then you give drivers - and to a lesser extent their friends in the signal box - a strong disincentive to report such precursors, which might otherwise warn you of an imminent accident at a given junction.

Considering the number of trains on the busy criss-crossing tracks around London, it astonishes me that we don't have a serious crash every couple of months. It seems to astonish Electro-Kevin too. I'm not sure whether that reassures me or not.

The Civil Service: how do you spell "accountability"?

It's beyond satire. How did the Department of Transport come up with the figures that gifted the multi-£billion West Coast main line franchise to First Great Western? Nobody knows, because they lost the spreadsheet. After all, it's not like there would have been any formal review process on that spreadsheet; with a mere few £bn at stake, who would care?

I'm honestly not sure which of these is the more depressing:

The PwC report shows revenue forecasts were not correlated with how many passengers could actually fit on the trains.
A DfT spokesman said: "We are not going to give a running commentary on what went wrong."

I imagine not, Mr. DfT spokesman, or you'd never get anything else done. Mind you, if this is representative of your general quality of business, perhaps that would be a good thing.

Honestly, if the Government wants to make a slam dunk against a potential claim for unlawful dismissal by the hapless Ms. Mingay, all they have to do is ask her to produce the revision of the spreadsheet which her team reviewed. I mean, frikkin' heck, does anyone at the DfT understand the concept of "accountability"?

A railway story worth telling

The recent death of Eric Lomax, a Signals officer captured by the Japanese in Singapore and tortured at Kanchanaburi camp in Thailand, comes shortly before the release of The Railway Man, a film based on the extraordinary story of what happened to Lomax and the Japanese associated with his abuse after the war:

A fellow former-prisoner then gave him a cutting from the Japan Times about a ex-Japanese soldier who had been helping the Allies to find the graves of their dead and claimed that he had earned their forgiveness. The accompanying photograph showed Takashi Nagase, the interpreter during Lomax's interrogation, and the man with whom he most associated his ordeal.

Nagase and Lomax finally met in 1994 and there was peace and forgiveness between them. The knowledge of what he had facilitated, including the deaths of several colleagues of Lomax, had haunted Nagase and receiving forgiveness from Lomax meant much to him.

But Nagase was not the only Japanese with a connection to Lomax. Osamu Komai was the son of the 2ic of Lomax's camp; that man, Mitsuo Komai, was tried by the British after the war, found guilty of war crimes and hanged. Osamu Komai grew up with the stigma of being the child of a war criminal; it would have been easy to resent this, and to resent the British who had hanged his father. Instead he took it upon himself to make apology for what his father had done:

Since I could not read English, I asked my acquaintance to translate the record. I found out that of those who my father beat severely, Lieutenant Lomax was seriously injured and Lieutenants Hawley and Armitage died as a result. Knowing the actual names of these British soldiers after 55 years profoundly affected me. Without realizing, I was bowing and apologizing from bottom of my heart. I forwarded the entire record to Mr. Nagase.
I learned from the reply from Mr.Nagase that Mr. Lomax was now a friend of his and was well in England. I wrote to Mr. Nagase, "I would like to meet Mr. Lomax and apologize on behalf of my father."

In 2007 Osamu Komai travelled to Berwick-on-Tweed to meet Lomax and the two men became friends.

"Continuing to hate gets you nowhere," says Eric. "It just damages you as an individual. At some point, the hating has to stop."

It has been 67 years since the end of the fighting in the Pacific, and some of the wounds inflicted in that fighting have taken many decades to heal. But if people like Nagase, Komai and Lomax can apologise for and forgive what happened, it shows hope for the human race.

Lomax's book "The Railway Man: A True Story of War, Remembrance and Forgiveness" on which the forthcoming film is based sounds like quite the read; I look forward to both book and film.

Transport official not going under the bus quietly

The first named official of the three Department of Transport civil servants suspended over the West Coast Mainline fiasco is Kate Mingay who was an Executive Director (aka Vice President) at Goldman Sachs up to 2003. Linkedin claims she was "Head of UK Debt Capital Markets" which seems quite a lofty title for a mere VP; one can only imagine that the UK debt markets were a lot less interesting in 2003 than they are now. Anyway, she's claiming that she was unfairly scapegoated:

"My role has been inaccurately portrayed, mainly due to statements and other comments made by the Department for Transport itself.
"I would like to make it clear that I did not have lead responsibility for this project; neither I nor any member of my team had any responsibility for the economic modelling for this project, or for any DfT project. Nor did I have any responsibility for the financial modelling in respect of this project."

Ironic, really; given that she came from the banking sector, you'd have thought she'd have learned more about politics and sacrificial goats than it appears she has.

Trying to kibitz what game she's playing, two main possibilities present themselves. First, that she genuinely believes that she and her team are in the clear and that she's being made a sacrificial goat; she's trying to get information out in public in the belief that The Truth Shall Set You Free. This seems naively optimistic to me; I would have thought that a far better move in this case would be to rope in an employment lawyer and use "going public" as a threat in early negotiation. Perhaps that's why I'm not an employment lawyer.

Alternatively, she realises that she's at least indirectly responsible for the mistakes, but figures she can bluff it out and rope in the PCS and Sir Gus (both of whom seem very willing to side with the civil servants) to face down the politicos; maybe she feels that putting a human face on the "mistake" is a better play for public sympathy than being a faceless "civil servant".

Ms. Mingay is listed as a (the?) corporate finance director for the DofT, and the issue around which the bid fell apart was apparently the GDP resilience model off which the bond amounts posted by FGW were calculated. It's not obvious that her team was in the clear - even if they had no input into the model (and why didn't they?) one would have thought that some sanity checks on the results would have been a prerequisite to starting their own calculations. It'll be very interesting to see the grubby details here if this gets as far as the courts.

Frankly though, I don't see this going very far. Either the DofT will cave and remove the staff suspensions (possibly with some token letter of admonition), or they'll come to a financial arrangement and pay off the protagonists as long as they find a job elsewhere in the Civil Service. After all, I can't believe that screwing up and wasting a few tens of millions of pounds is much of a bar to inter-departmental transfer...

Frantic rearguard action by the Civil Service

Following the well-publicised £40mm screw-up with the West Coast mainline bid and the (unprecendented?) suspension of three senior civil servants at the DofT, head mandarin Sir Gus O'Donnell tries to pull the Civil Service off the top of a very slippery slope:

However, Sir Gus O'Donnell, the former Cabinet Secretary, today blamed ministers for presiding over a Whitehall skills shortage and failing to pay enough to get the best staff.

They're screwing up! We should pay them more!

Interesting argument, Gus. I wonder how long the three civil servants in question have been working in the Civil Service. Are they part of the famed Civil Service fast stream? My experience with those clowns is that they are somewhat prone to leave a trail of destruction across each department they work with, and end up in a reasonably senior position with a large amount of experience in making mistakes. Either they learn from that and become tolerably competent, or their considerable faith in their own abilities is unshaken and they become positively dangerous.

I'm actually fine with the principle of paying good civil servants significantly more. However I want the overall wage bill to be neutral, Gus. If you want to pay some people more, you have to pay others correspondingly less - or fire them, and not splurge out horrific sums on the overly generous statutory redundancy. Gus seems to be wanting more pay and the current near-total protection from being fired. It is actually possible to fire someone from the Civil Service for incompetence, but it takes co-operation from the HR department and a good couple of years. Hardly the model of dynamic efficiency that Gus is promoting.

What now?

Sir Gus, who ran the civil service for a decade, today said mistakes will happen as under-qualified civil servants are forced to run increasingly complex projects.

I see a possible solution: stop trying to run complex projects when the department doesn't have the skills. How about that, Gus? I realise this may mean that the DofT has less to do and hence requires fewer staff, but from my point of view this is a win-win. For important projects like the West Coast mainline bid, bring in a small but competent outside team and make sure their financial incentives are aligned with the public's.

So whose fault was it?

He said it was not ceratin [sic] yet whether ministers were responsible for flawed policy or civil servants had wrongly carried out instructions.

I'd translate that as "my staff are frantically scrabbling around trying to put together a paper trail that provides cover for the three suspended personnel." Good luck with that, Gus.

Oh, and here come the PCS:

The Public and Commercial Services union, which represents one of the three Department for Transport employees facing disciplinary proceedings over the bungled procurement process, said public servants had been targeted as scapegoats.

Well, I guess "held to account for their actions" doesn't play as well to the peanut gallery. I suppose we couldn't expect anything else from Mr. Serwotka who clearly doesn't believe that pissing away a mere £40mm of taxpayer money due to outright incompetence merits suspension (note, not even disciplinary action yet, just suspension and presumably with pay).

The article does give what sounds like a plausible reason for Worst Great Western being allowed to win in the first place; the DofT has had a downer on Virgin for a while:

It [the antipathy towards Virgin Trains] stems from a renegotiation of the west coast franchise in 2006 – the consequence of a bungled upgrade of the route – that left the DfT feeling that it had been outwitted and outmanoeuvred, to the benefit of Branson and to the detriment of subsidy-paying taxpayers.

I bet people were happy with the result of the flawed calculation, and no-one wanted to look too closely at the numbers to check them...

Atlas Shrugged - the film(s)

I happened across the trailer for Atlas Shrugged part 2 yesterday, which made me remember that I actually hadn't seen Atlas Shrugged part 1; it came out before I read the book. So I ordered the DVD of part 1 from Amazon and watched it via Amazon streaming (thank you, Amazon, for letting me immediately stream a film that I'd just bought, a fantastic idea).

It may be an unpopular perspective, but I think the film was an excellent adaptation of the book. The casting was inspired, with Taylor Schilling nailing Dagny Taggart. Grant Bowler was a more likeable Hank Rearden than the book character, but I was Just Fine with that. Even the smaller characters (Wyatt, Rearden's wife, Willers) were well portrayed and written. The visual effects were OK, though you could tell they weren't the same grade as a George Lucas masterpiece; that's what a smaller budget does for you. The dialogue was well tweaked to feel current with the 2011 political and labour scene; the world of Rearden, Mouch and the Taggarts didn't feel a million miles away from today's America.

Unlike the book, the 96 minutes of film really packed in the story; the main criticism I have is that so much was happening so quickly that if you hadn't read the book you'd be sunk; it would need maybe 2-3 viewings to appreciate it fully. Overall though it kept me on the edge of my seat, and the sudden jarring end (or "stop" as some critics had it, which was fair) was well-timed. Recommended to anyone who's read at least some of the book and is more interested in the story than the philosophy.

I'm not sure about part 2. The complete recasting is going to be rather jarring. It opens in US cinemas in October so hopefully will be available on DVD before the end of the year. We'll see how they do.

Sensible talk on rail fares

With all the current wailing, gnashing of teeth and casting into the outer darkness on the subject of the rising railway fares in the UK, Jackart talks a remarkable amount of pithy sense on the subject:

There has been an astonishing amount of bollocks being spoken about train-fare rises. Especially commuters, whose season tickets are rising by hundreds of pounds. "The trains are crowded" they complain. Yes, and cutting rail fares will help that, how exactly?

Nail, meet head. Crowding of trains is a signal; a signal that the price for travelling on that particular train is too cheap. If peak hour trains are crowded, and off-peak trains are quieter, then peak fares should rise to force people at the margins to choose the less-crowded trains. Bingo, less crowdedness and more income which could (at least theoretically) be fed back into improved and extended rail infrastructure.

Wonderful aphasia in the DM

An otherwise unremarkable article about a family in negative equity being slightly shafted by the HS2 route is given colour by the journalist's poor English and/or the sub-editor's poor proof-reading:

Some homes on the train line route face being the subject of a Compulsory Purchase Order by the network - which pays an aggravated valuation of each house.

I rather suspect you mean "aggregated" there, Tammy Hughes..

Still, let's look at the story now we're there. So is the rail line forcing them out of a modest semi?

But they discovered the planned HS2 network high speed rail link between London and Birmingham will pass through their 13 acres of land - just 130-metres from their home.

Oopsie. This is in Warwickshire, and the house is a sprawling 7-bedroom affair. The house was mortgaged for 600K at the height of the property bubble in 2007, but now is only (optimistically) worth 400K. The father of the family died, which is tragic, and yet didn't have a life insurance policy that would pay off any significant amount of the mortgage.

You have to feel sorry for Vikie (sic.) the mother of the family, as it's clearly a hard situation to be in. Nevertheless, if you were intending to spend all your money and borrow up to your limit to get a house of that value, wouldn't it have been a good idea to set aside £50/month for a life insurance policy that would have paid off most of the house?

The real meat is tucked away at the tail of the article:

A spokeswoman for HS2 said: 'We have advised the Shanks' family that their building has not been identified for demolition or as being at risk of demolition in our assessments to date.
'According to the land ownership information we have obtained from Land Registry, the line does appear to pass through some of the land associated with the Shanks’ property.
'Until further design and planning work has been completed we are not in a position to confirm the extent of the land that would need to be acquired.

Ok, so what's the fuss?

'We have advised the family that if it did become necessary to buy land which they own, they would be fully compensated for it.'

Hmm. This smells like the family trying to press-blackmail HS2 into giving them a lot more money than their house is technically worth...

This is what you get if you decouple reward and results

Anyone who has worked in a non-unionised private sector job is liable to spray coffee at their screen when they read what civil servants who work over 36 hours a week can do:

A growing number of officials are understood to be working nine-day fortnights by cutting short their lunch breaks and extending normal hours by staying in their offices until 6pm. Civil servants are also allowed to count delays in arriving for work because of late trains or traffic congestion towards their contracted working week.

Until 6pm! Those poor slave-driven creatures. The irony of London Underground Government employees reducing the hours worked of other London-based Government employees is delicious. Unless you're the poor schmuck paying taxes to fund this.

We shouldn't be surprised at this. It's the natural consequence of the fact that there's a very loose connection between civil servants' presence in the office and the practical output of their department. It's even possible that there is a positive result for the tax payer, in that the natural tendency of office-based Government employees is to obstruct and destroy practical productivity by the rest of the nation; few indeed are the non-vocational Government employees whose hours in the office make a positive contribution to the nation's GDP.

The Civil Service’s "flexitime" document, which covers the working conditions of tens of thousands of officials, says that "with the exception of the senior Civil Service, all staff are eligible to work flexitime".
It says that the standard working week is 36 hours in London and 37 hours outside the capital. This means the standard working day is slightly longer than 9am to 5pm, with an hour for lunch.

May I quote Dilbert: "Work can be very rewarding; you should try it."

Joined up transport - go Dutch

I'd like to endorse heartily the sentiments of White Sun of the Desert writing of his experiences of the Dutch transport systems. Having flown into Schipol myself, it all rings true; someone has actually sat down and thought about what arriving passengers need in terms of information and facilities to buy tickets, and taken care to ensure it's in the right place. Read the whole thing.

For anyone who's ever arrived at a British airport, this will evoke disbelief:

Immigration in Schiphol took one minute, and my bag arrived in less than five. And even while I was waiting I was able to buy a train ticket as in a stroke of genius you’d seldom find anywhere else in the world, there were ticket machines in the baggage hall.

For the record, Den Haag (whence I travelled after arriving at Schipol) was quite possibly the cleanest, quietest, safest city I've ever been in. Figuring out the public transport system was a breeze despite not speaking a word of Dutch. The hotel and restaurants were painfully expensive - I remember the hotel receptionist quipping that there were only three real cities in Holland, with Rotterdam where all the money was made from trade, Amsterdam where the money was made from vices, and Den Haag, free from trade and vice, where all the decisions were made about where to spend the money.

WSotD nails the reason why building a transport system like this wouldn't work in Britain:

For sure, the Brits would have conspired to ensure getting from Amsterdam to Eindhoven would have taken three trains, the first being undersized, the second leaving from somewhere near The Hague and costing a fortune unless you booked two months in advance, and the third running via Antwerp and taking as long as the flight into Holland.

The Guardian columnists and railway unionistas can complain all they like about the cuts in government funding, but it's no good spending all the money in the world on the UK transport system when it's so annoyingly Balkanized and intransigently opposed to making the customers' lives easier.

Network Rail fines

So Network Rail has been fined £4mm for negligence resulting in the Grayrigg crash.

Great!

Except, isn't Network Rail taxpayer-funded? So where's this money coming from? What employees or shareholder in Network Rail will receive a total of £4mm less this year as a result?

"Where failings are found those at fault will be held to account and the entire rail industry must continue to strive for improvements to ensure that public safety is never put at a similar risk again."

Mmm. "Held to account". I do not think those words mean what you think they mean.

Railway engineering - a new challenge

I periodically give Network Rail (or whatever it's called this week) a hard time, and the proposed £30bn+ London-to-Birmingham rail link is economically daft, but today I have to concede that our transatlantic cousins have us beat.

For those of you not following West Coast USA news, the state of California has been planning a high-speed railway link from San Francisco to LA, a journey of 500+ miles. The link will eventually goes from San Francisco itself down to central LA, but the first stretch to be funded will run in the central valley from Modesto through Bakersfield down to Burbank on the coast.

Note that even this first stretch will be horrendously expensive (in the tens of billions of $ even on the current and therefore wildly optimistic plan) and will have no chance of any significant revenue because many of the central valley towns are bankrupt or near bankruptcy, and hence have very few rich business commuters willing to pay significant sums to be able to commute by rail.

Who's going to use this link even when it's complete? Even a 125mph rail link will take 4 hours to travel LA to SFO, best case, and that assumes it doesn't stop anywhere. You can fly the distance in an hour, which will cap the potential ticket prices, and travellers have a wider choice of airport destinations each end than the single railway station endpoints.

I also invite my readers to inspect the current 7-day map of earthquakes \ in the California-Nevada region, and consider the likely impact of a nearby 4+ magnitude quake (which occurs maybe once a month in the Bay Area) on a precisely engineered high-speed railway link.

Defending London Midland

"How does it feel having those words come out of your mouth?" "Like ashes."

An unfortunate gentleman decides to end it all by jumping in front of a train at Selly Oak, and London Midland tweets:

Go to the pub - things will be rubbish for at least the next hour

and later:

When another commuter asked if the victim was OK, the train worker tweeted ‘nope’ and then said to another user: ‘Can’t stop someone jumping off a platform in front of a train I’m afraid.’

Cue outrage at the "insensitivity" from the usual suspects.

While I yield to no-one in my general poor disposition towards London "asleep at the switch" Midland, I'm actually with them on this one. It's not their fault that the guy jumped, and they can't do anything to speed up the clean-up, so the advice of going to the pub is probably the best idea going.

I very much doubt the dead chap's family and friends much care about what London Midland is tweeting. Anyone else expressing faux outrage should consider that the jumper stuck London Midland with this situation, and they're just making the best of a bad job.