Keys Corner

Everyone wants a bit of the action:

• Debt-laden Eurotunnel to slash costs and capacity

  Eurotunnel’s revenues have never met its own projections because usage of the tunnel has been far below its expectations. Its trucks business continues to be hit by competition from ferry operators, while many potential car users take the ferry or leave their cars and use low-cost airlines instead.



• P&O to slash workforce by 1,200

  The group announced the closure of four of its 13 ferry routes and cut eight ships from its fleet…
  ...The company has been losing business in the face of rising competition from no-frills airlines and Eurotunnel



• Ryanair reiterates budget ‘bloodbath’ warning

  Ryanair, Europe’s largest discount airline, today said there were already signs of the “bloodbath” it had predicted for the winter months as budget airlines cut their fares.

A couple of months ago I mentioned the real time traffic monitoring / forecasting site for Nordrhein-Westphalen, which has good forecasts of delays and jams for up to an hour ahead of time.

There are quite a lot of real time traffic services on the web. Did you know, that you can also get a real time view of the disruptions on the London Underground? (Although why Transport for London feels it is necessary to show the date last updated in American format is a mystery to me.)

We had an invitation to visit Ingrid, an old friend of ours, who came back from a 9 year stint in London last year. She was holding a housewarming party in Korschenbroich, which is where she grew up and where her family still lives. It gave us an opportunity to try out our latest toy, a Garmin iQue 3600 navigation unit, when we drove up to visit her.

We bought it, because we are going to change my car soon, and rather than have a built-in unit, which we have in the current vehicle, I thought it would be better to have a portable unit, which we can both use and which we can also use in rental cars on holiday. The delivery time for the navigation unit is a lot shorter than for the car, so we already have the new unit, but are still waiting for the car, which won’t be available for another 3 months. Recent tests in magazines claim that portable units are almost as good as the fixed installations. After considering the new TomTom (not currently possible to load or buy detailed maps for more than one country) and Magellan (expensive) offerings, I decided to go for the Garmin unit, which can also double as a normal PDA. There are lots of reviews on the web for all three products, so I’ll just say that considering that the Garmin device costs half of what the cheapest nagivation system costs in the new car, it provides an excellent system for the money although a permanent installation still just has the edge over the portable unit.

The main differences that we noticed are that the Garmin, with its more limited memory for spoken commands does not give the place name to look for when turning off, whereas the built in system from Toyota says “turn right to Dortmund”, for example. And being mounted on the dashboard directly under the windscreen, the Garmin screen tends to suffer more from reflections. However, we hope to cure that with a non-reflecting plastic screen protector. We were a bit concerned that the volume of the spoken commands might not be loud enough, but the car-kit for the Garmin includes an external loudspeaker in the power plug and we had no problems, even on the Autobahn with the radio on. Both units get confused on winding roads and sometimes tell you to turn left or right if a minor road joins the road that you are on in a corner, rather than keeping quiet – the Garmin is more prone to do that than the built-in Toyota unit.

Here by the way, is an unsual shot – both Ruth and I are on it – taken in the evening at Ingrid’s housewarming:

We’ve added an extra page with a list of hotels that we have visited and enjoyed in the last few years. I’m still playing around with the page – it is built from a mySQL database which also contains photos of the hotels, but right now, I haven’t suceeded in reading the pictures out without damaging them – they display as ASCII text strings! If we add many more hotels to the page, I will also have to add selection by country, so that the list displayed doesn’t get too long.

Update:
I’ve solved the problem of storing the pictures, so we are adding some thumbnails to the list.

In the UK, frequent traffic jams on motorways are causing the Government to consider implementing the American idea of having dedicated lanes for cars carrying two or more persons (with fines for lone drivers caught in the wrong lane). Friends of the Earth is concerned that the scheme will be used as a reason to widen roads to create the new lanes.

There is an alternative, being tried in a country, which on occassion has seen traffic come to a grinding halt on motorway stretches up to 100 km long in the summer vacations. And where traffic jams on the motorways in the heavily populated parts of the country are common.

In Germany, a pilot traffic-forecasting scheme sponsored by the EU in Nordrhein-Westfalen, (covering 2250 km of Autobahn in the area roughly surrounding the line connecting Köln (Cologne), Essen and Bielefeld), offers 30 minute and 60 minute forecasts on the web of where traffic jams are going to occur.

It has been so successful, that some 300 000 people per day use it to plan their trips, which in turn has been enough, to make the forecasts measurably less reliable. The operators, worried that 3G mobile phones will mean even more people using the service and lowering its accuracy further, are now considering making less detailed information available on their web site, to force drivers to use more varied strategies for avoiding the jams.

The European Commission formally agreed yesterday to provide the Department of Homeland Security and officials from the Bureau of Customs and Border Protection in the USA with data on airline crew and passengers flying from Europe to destinations in the USA. This was against the wishes of the European Parliament, which voted three times against the deal.

The 34 data fields which will be made available are listed on the last page of the document of agreement, which you can read here (pdf file, 70 KB). They include the traveller’s address, contact phone numbers, full payment information, e-mail address, and bag tag numbers.

Should be enough to allow the Department of Homeland Security and US Customs to find out all about you.