Australia's Funicular in the Blue Mountains - Rail or Rollercoaster?

I came across this awhile ago, and I always just found it simultaneously bizarre and impressive. It's Australia's Funicular railway in the Blue Mountains. This is the steepest railway in the world, and to me it literally looks more like an amusement park ride in a way than a method of transit. Here's a 30 second clip where you can see it starting. Notice at the end how the cars all just sort of drop off the steep incline once it gets rolling (sort of like a rollercoaster, no?).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tVLe8NthLnY

It has one of the world's steepest inclines for a railcar, as it descends with an angle of 52 degrees or a gradient of 122%. It also has a section during which it goes through a pitch black tunnel!

Lane Splitting

{Side note: I have done terribly with updating this blog regularly. I have a bunch of links saved or little items typed up that I saved as drafts, but I just never actually posted them. I apologize to anyone who logs on today to see just a myriad of new posts. I'll make sure to post them in the future to the site rather than just save as drafts for weeks a a time.}

When I lived in San Francisco, one thing that never ever ceased to terrify me was lane splitting by motorcyclists. I know that the first day I drove into the city upon moving there, I flinched every single time a motorcycle suddenly edged between myself and another car in what seemed to be rather narrow traffic lanes; this happened dozens of times every hour. You'd be sitting there stopped at a light or cruising slowly in heavy traffic only to watch a blur outside your driver's side window suddenly fly by you. Sometimes when the traffic was really tight or the cars were close together, the motorcyclists would literally extend an arm out and push off against my car to help keep themselves centered between vehicles. I'd hear a gentle "thud" as an arm nudged against my car and then accelerated away.

I was thinking about this earlier and decided to try to find what the actual rules on lane splitting in California are; I don't know that anyone follows them, because based on personal experience it seemed pretty haphazard from where I stood, but nonetheless I thought maybe if rules existed and were followed, this practice would be a little less risky. Here are the guidelines outlined on the California Highway Patrol site:

http://www.chp.ca.gov/programs/lanesplitguide.html

Most of the suggestions or guidelines seem valid enough, but in my mind it is still daunting.

I'm planning on trying to find some academic resources that have statistics on accidents relevant to lane splitting, and when I muddle through some of those I'll likely write a separate post on that topic, but I figured for now I'd just see if anyone had thoughts on the practice or the fact that it is currently only legal in California in the US (though it is common in other countries).

People for Bikes - Bike Lanes Funded in 6 US Cities

http://archinect.com/news/article/95482582/green-lane-project-brings-protected-bike-lanes-to-six-u-s-cities

I am on Archinect somewhat regularly, so I was pretty pumped to see in the last day this article that was totally transit related! Yay! As most of you know I'm a fan of walking and biking over taking a car, so it's nice to see funding being allotted for bike lanes in several cities to make that method of travel easier. Unfortunately I don't have any first-hand knowledge about traveling via bike in Pittsburgh, Atlanta, or any of the other cities set to receive funding for such lanes this year, so I can't say how bad traveling by bike sans bike lane in these places might presently be, but really I'm one of those riders who finds it mildly terrifying to ride anywhere that's got a reasonable amount of traffic when there's no designated lane, so for people like me in those places I imagine this might be exciting news. I just wonder if and how long biking as a trend may take to catch on in some of the cities...