Category: Travel

Be a travel parasite

From Jodi Ettenberg:

2. Be a travel parasite.

No, this does not mean mooching off friends or family. What it means is learning how to use guidebooks to your advantage. While they are useful to have for the history of a place or the basics in itinerary planning, I rarely look to guidebooks for the name of a hostel or restaurant. Instead, I look at their recommendations as things to piggyback on. Lonely Planet recommends a place as “Our Pick”? Great, I go there, and walk two doors down to stay nearby. Rough Guides says “this is the best restaurant in town”? Perfect! Almost every one of those recommendations will spawn another restaurant within walking distance. Industrious entrepreneurs quickly learn that when these books recommend a place, they quickly get overcrowded and prices go up. The solution: they open a place right next door or nearby to handle the spillover. Without fail, those are the places that are cheaper, more delicious and not jaded. Being a parasite isn’t always a bad thing. (Having parasites? Not so much.)

There is much more at the link, all related to travel insights.

Richard Branson tries to fool people with his new currency

Richard Branson and Virgin Holidays have reacted to holidaymakers’ frustrations over exchange rates and poor value by launching a new currency today.

The ‘Branson’ will be accepted as legal tender at all Virgin Holidays destinations from April 2nd and can be bought through one of the company’s 100 retail outlets in the UK as well as in resorts upon arrival.

The ‘Branson’ launch follows research commissioned by Virgin Holidays and think tank Gray HL Division which found poor exchange rates polled highest in reasons for not travelling to a holiday hotspot, followed by bad weather, having to take vaccinations and deadly insects.

The story is here, and for the pointer I thank Angry Accountant.

Am I too rude to call this a lock-in effect, and perhaps price discrimination to boot?  How is this for a cynical sentence?

With two Bransons the equivalent of one British Pound, Virgin Holidays holidaymakers can forget about being stuck by fluctuating exchange rates – and enjoy more for their money.

Iberia, not Siberia

One of my “crackpot” beliefs about human migration seems to be panning out:

At the height of the last ice age, Stanford says, mysterious Stone Age European people known as the Solutreans paddled along an ice cap jutting into the North Atlantic. They lived like Inuits, harvesting seals and seabirds.

The Solutreans eventually spread across North America, Stanford says, hauling their distinctive blades with them and giving birth to the later Clovis culture, which emerged some 13,000 years ago.

When Stanford proposed this “Solutrean hypothesis” in 1999, colleagues roundly rejected it. One prominent archaeologist suggested that Stanford was throwing his career away.

But now, 13 years later, Stanford and Bruce Bradley, an archaeologist at England’s University of Exeter, lay out a detailed case — bolstered by the curious blade and other stone tools recently found in the mid-Atlantic — in a new book, “Across Atlantic Ice.”

Here is much more.

Facts about engines

The RMS Titanic weighed almost 50,000 tons and could carry 3,500 people. Before it sunk, it was world-famous as the massive titan of the sea. Its multiple engines, powered by 159 coal furnaces, were designed to deliver 46,000 horsepower.

Compare that to today’s beastly mode of transport: the Boeing 777. Bangalore Aviation points out that a single GE90-115B engine puts out over 110,000 horsepower, or more than twice the design output of all the Titanic’s steam engines.

And that power is obviously hooked up to a much smaller vehicle. The Titanic had to carry 14,000,000 pounds of coal alone; the 777 has a total weight of only 775,000 pounds.

Here is more and for the pointer I thank Roland Stephen.

Paying for Parking

Parking is too cheap and the price is too sticky. As Tyler wrote in his NYT column:

If developers were allowed to face directly the high land costs of providing so much parking, the number of spaces would be a result of a careful economic calculation rather than a matter of satisfying a legal requirement. Parking would be scarcer, and more likely to have a price – or a higher one than it does now – and people would be more careful about when and where they drove.

The subsidies are largely invisible to drivers who park their cars – and thus free or cheap parking spaces feel like natural outcomes of the market, or perhaps even an entitlement. Yet the law is allocating this land rather than letting market prices adjudicate whether we need more parking, and whether that parking should be free. We end up overusing land for cars – and overusing cars too. You don’t have to hate sprawl,

Slowly things are beginning to change, however, as this excellent piece on parking in LA and parking scholar Donald Shoup describes:

Shoup is not opposed to all parking lots; he’s against cities requiring parking lots. “Would you require every home to come with a pool or every office to include a dining room because someone might want it?” asks Shoup. “Why not let developers build parking where the market demands it and charge its true value?”

…This spring the DOT plans to introduce an $18.5 million smart wireless meter system based on Shoup’s theories. Called ExpressPark, the 6,000-meter array will be installed on downtown streets and lots, along with sensors buried in the pavement of every parking spot to detect the presence of cars and price accordingly, from as little as 50 cents an hour to $6. Street parking, like pork bellies, will be open to market forces. As blocks fill, prices will rise; when occupancy drops, so will rates. In an area like downtown, ideal for Shoup’s progressive pricing, people will park based on how much they’re willing to pay versus how far they are willing to walk to a destination. In a trendy area like Melrose Avenue’s shopping district, where parking on side streets is forbidden to visitors, Shoup would open those residential blocks to market-priced meters, wooing home owners by guaranteeing that meter profits would be turned over to them in the form of property tax deductions. (That benefit could add up to thousands of dollars a year per household.)

Brooklyn’s Park Slope neighborhood is already experimenting with a version of the system, and so are San Francisco, Seattle, and Washington, D.C.

In D.C. you can now pay many parking meters via cell-phone. I’ve used the system and it works well.

Here are previous MR posts on parking.

The culture that is Germany, kein eurobond für den Papst

A GERMAN citizen has filed a complaint against Pope Benedict XVI for not using a seat belt in the Popemobile during his September visit to his homeland.

Lawyer Johannes Christian Sundermann has filed papers in Dortmund on behalf of his unnamed client, charging the Pope with “repeated breaches” of Germany’s seat belt law.

“Herr Joseph Ratzinger, born 16 April 1927 in Marktl/Altötting” travelled on September 24th and 25th “for the duration of more than an hour” without a seat belt, the lawyer states in documents.

Mr Sundermann and his client say they can prove the repeated misdemeanour during his visit to Freiburg – using videos from YouTube.

Here is more.

A Bridge to Somewhere (but in the wrong place)

Here is an excellent economics puzzle by David Kestenbaum at NPR:

You would never look at a map of the Hudson River, point to the spot where the Tappan Zee Bridge is, and say, “Put the bridge here!”

The Tappan Zee crosses one of the widest points on the Hudson — the bridge is more than three miles long. And if you go just a few miles south, the river gets much narrower. As you might expect, it would have been cheaper and easier to build the bridge across the narrower spot on the river.

So I wanted to answer a simple question: Why did they build the Tappan Zee where they did, rather than building it a few miles south?

MR readers will no doubt guess the correct answer in general terms, Kestenbaum had to dig hard to find the interesting specifics.

The Port Authority — the body that proposed putting the bridge further south — had a monopoly over all bridges built in a 25-mile radius around the Statue of Liberty.

If the bridge had been built just a bit south of its current location — that is, if it had been built across a narrower stretch of the river — it would have been in the territory that belonged to the Port Authority.

As a result, the Port Authority — not the State of New York — would have gotten the revenue from tolls on the bridge. And Dewey needed that toll revenue to fund the rest of the Thruway.

So Dewey was stuck with a three-mile-long bridge.

The decision to locate the bridge at the much longer location has had continuing costs and repercussions:

Today, the Tappan Zee is in bad shape, and the State of New York is looking into fixing or replacing it. But none of the proposals would move the bridge to a narrower spot on the river. It’s too late now: Highways and towns have grown up based on the bridge’s current location.

We’re stuck with a long bridge at one of the widest spots in the river. The repairs are expected to cost billions of dollars.

Hat tip: Monique van Hoek and Mark Perry at Carpe Diem.

Claims about happiness and vacations

Such studies you should take with a grain of salt.  Still, I found these results interesting:

Jeroen Nawijn of NHTV Breda University of Applied Sciences in the Netherlands found a holiday happiness curve: Our mood tends to be lowest through the first 10 percent of a holiday and quite high during the “core phase,” which spans about 70 percent of the vacation time. Our spirits soar on the day before going home.

…Philip Pearce of James Cook University in Australia studied tourists visiting tropical islands along the Great Barrier Reef and discovered that their moods were particularly negative on the second and third days of their holidays, the time during which they also seemed to develop the most health problems. These ailments included skin rashes, tiredness, allergies, ear infections and asthma.

Yet it is not just a new climate or cultural differences that can make you feel bad; it is also the free time itself. Ad Vingerhoets, a quality-of-life expert at Tilburg University in the Netherlands, calls this a “leisure sickness.” People with this condition develop symptoms of illness during weekends and vacations, even though they rarely feel bad at work, he says.

In praise of travel in middle-income countries

Mexico, Turkey, and Brazil stand between “the developed world” and “the underdeveloped world.”  They are all diverse regionally.  They are different enough to be exotic, and wealthy enough to be comfortable.  On your trip you can move between worlds with ease.  They all have superb food and world-class sights.  They are not finished works, but rather they are in the process of creating themselves.  The journey is full of suspense.  Two of the three (not Brazil) are cheap to travel in.  Two of the three are safe.

Ankara is splendid, yet it receives few words of praise.  Imagine that by visiting the current city you would be witnessing a world from centuries away.  How you would swoon!  The markets, the intact buildings, the exotic foodstuffs, the political monuments, the dynamism of the human spirit there, fill in the desired travel cliche.  Suddenly you wake up and realize that you are viewing the Ankara of your own time.  Why should all of that swoon go away?

Drop your bias against the temporally proximate; ruins are ruined, Ankara is not.

Shimon Peres on Foreign Aid

Shimon Peres gave a press conference for a small group of bloggers. He was very impressive. When asked about foreign aid, specifically foreign aid to some Arab regimes he had this to say (again a paraphrase from my notes, the clever lines are his, the order may have changed somewhat and this is incomplete).

Look, the West can’t help everyone and the regimes would be insulted if we tried. But they don’t need our help. The greatest poverty in our time has been in China and India. Did these countries reduce poverty because of our help? No. They did it themselves.

Giving is problematic. We take money from poor people in rich countries and give it to rich people in poor countries. Aid sometimes creates corruption.

And suppose we gave people computers. Would computers help? No. There is no technology without civilization, civilization is the carriage of technology. It is a matter of institutions. If a country discriminates against women, for example, no computers will help. Do you know who are the greatest opponents of democracy in the Middle East? The husbands. As long as husbands discriminate against their wives the husbands will support the dictators.

Now, however, there is a young generation who are realizing that the glory is within. The glory [of civilization] it is within their power to grasp.

Peres was also great on science, a question I asked. More on that later.

In other news Dr. Ruth criticized social media, “I like to touch my friends.”

Random Thoughts from Jerusalem

The first session of the Shimon Peres Presidential conference I am attending began strangely with a session featuring Dan Ariely, Sir Martin Sorrell, Jimmy Wales, Shakira and Sarah Silverman.

Ariely was fine, he gave his usual talk on self-control and temptation, cleverly labelled the “Adam and Eve” problem. Most interesting thing I had not heard. Just like people, rats and pigeons have a hard time resisting a short-term pleasure even at the expense of a much larger future pleasure. The interesting part is that just like people, rats and pigeons seem to know that they are making a mistake so they will pay to have the short-term choice taken away from them (like people locking their refrigerator.) Ariely,however, kept his insights on the “how to lose weight” level and didn’t attempt to address any larger issues.

Sorrell was a total bore.

Wales talked about Wikipedia, the power of voluntarism, and the Wikipedian assumption of good faith.

Shakira told us about the importance of early education. She was earnest and I’d rather hear it from her than Jim Heckman but it was still boring.

An incompetent interviewer tried to make jolly with Sarah Silverman. She was the only, however, to address real issues and was quite clever although she also told us that she really had to pee.

The opening acts over with, we then had Shimon Peres, Tony Blair, Bernard Henri-Levy and Amos Oz.

Peres at 87 is vigorous, optimistic and pro-science (“science cannot be contained by governments and flourishes most with peace.”) Impressive.

Tony Blair gave a very pro-Israel speech, even more than expected (“the model for the region”).

BHL said nothing wrong–indeed, he discussed a topic I would have discussed, democratic peace theory, albeit presented too strongly. He also noted that for decades the Libyans and Syrians have been taught that Israel is the great Satan but now the veil has been lifted and Satan is found closer to home. I find it difficult to take BHL seriously, however. No doubt the fault is mine.

The highlight of the evening was Israeli novelist Amos Oz. Oz gave a hard-hitting speech full of quotable moments (here are paraphrases but look for the speech online for a real sense). Many will disagree with the conclusions but it was still an excellent speech in delivery, allusion, and insight:

The suppression of the Palestinians is immoral and not in Israel’s genuine self-interest. The building of settlements is immoral and not in Israel’s genuine self-interest. The expansion into East Jerusalem is immoral and not in Israel’s genuine self-interest.

I love Israel even when I don’t like it.

I am not a hippy. I say make peace not love.

Why is it that the same Europeans who hate Hollywood treat the Israel/Palestine conflict with the subtlety of a Hollywood movie with bad guys and goods guys?

It’s going to be an amputation for both sides.

Oz’s speech was mostly well received by this audience of Israel’s secular/liberal elite but there was heckling especially when he said that there would have to be a two-state solution along the 67 lines (with modifications) and that Israel would have to give up biblical lands. Oddly Sarah Silverman had hit on this point earlier, “What do you want,” she asked, “acreage or values?”

Today we have Larry Summers, Dr. Ruth, and a course on game theory from Aumann. Strange but interesting.

P.S. The rugelah at the Marzipan bakery was excellent.