Union Pearson Express (better known as UP Express) is the 16-month-old rail connection between Pearson International Airport and Union Station in downtown Toronto. It launched on June 6, 2015, a month before Toronto hosted the Pan Am and Parapan Am Games. The train makes stops at Bloor and Weston stations as well as Union Station and Pearson airport. Trains depart every 15 minutes, and take 25 minutes to complete the trip from Union to Pearson.
The rail link, which was originally pitched as a private-sector service, cost the government $456 million to build.
At the time, the one-way fare between Union Station and Pearson airport was set at $27.50, or $19.00 with a Presto card. Discounts and special fares were available for families, airport workers, and same-day return trips.
In June 2015, UP Express had an average daily ridership of 2,858; in July, the average daily ridership was 2,383. Metrolinx expected that daily ridership would grow to 5,000 within a year.
Instead, ridership declined after the Pan Am Games; the average daily ridership bottomed out in January 2016, when only 1,967 passengers a day took the train, or 12.6 passengers per train operated that month. On Saturday, January 23, a mere 1,174 persons rode the UP Express, less than the daily ridership of the TTC’s 74 Mount Pleasant bus.
Customers have dwindled by the week at Indian Masala Hut, a curry stall in Singapore’s shipyard heartland. Manager K. Muralidoss blames the slump in oil rig-building that led to the elimination of thousands of jobs, many held by workers from India and Bangladesh.
“The lunchtime crowd has more than halved,” Muralidoss says, surveying the almost-empty Benoi Road food court, where only four of 12 hawker stalls were open one afternoon last week. As recently as September, he was busy filling orders from companies trying to sate hungry laborers working overtime. “That has come down quite a bit because there are fewer projects being worked on.”
More than $400 billion of proposed energy projects worldwide have been delayed since mid-2014 and pushed into 2017 and beyond, according to consulting firm Wood Mackenzie Ltd. In Singapore, the global center for oil-rig construction for decades, the slowdown contributed to the economy contracting the most in four years in the third quarter.
BP Plc abandoned oil exploration off the Great Australian Bight, it said last week, five years after beginning a search for resources in one of the world’s last frontier regions. BP had previously estimated the drilling program would cost more than A$1 billion ($769 million).
New York, even more than Frankfurt or Paris, is emerging as a top candidate to lure banking talent if London’s finance industry is damaged by Britain’s divorce from the European Union, according to politicians and industry executives.
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That’s because the largest U.S. city, rather than European finance hubs, is the place that rivals the depth of markets, breadth of expertise or regulatory appeal boasted by London. Continental Europe will win some bank operations to satisfy regional rules ensure time-zone-friendly access to its market, but more may eventually shift across the Atlantic to the only other one-stop shop for business.
“There is no way in the EU there is a center with the infrastructure or regulatory infrastructure to take the role London has," particularly in capital markets, John Nelson, chairman of Lloyd’s of London, said in an interview. "There is only one city in the world that can, and that is New York."
For many global investment banks, London is their largest or second-biggest headquarters. If the benefits of scale are diminished by having to move roles to Europe, banks may look to shrink their London operations even further by moving any workers able to do their job just as well from a different time zone, including global-facing roles in merger advisory, trading and back-office technology and finance.
Additional jobs may move as specific trading activities seek a new epicenter. London Stock Exchange Group Plc Chief Executive Officer Xavier Rolet was blunt, saying that if Brexit strips London of the ability to clear euro derivatives trades, the entire business would move to the only other city able to clear all 17 major currencies: New York.
Ireland is mounting a vigorous charm offensive to lure thousands of financial jobs from London to Dublin, exploiting the growing uncertainty about Brexit and what it might mean for banking operations in Britain.
Irish officials say US banks and other non-EU financial firms worried about the future possibility of using London to do business in Europe are already scoping out the option of moving some operations to Dublin after Britain leaves the EU.
“Our approach is very clear, we will go after every single piece of mobile [non-finalised] investment,” says Martin Shanahan, the head of Ireland’s Industrial Development Authority, who has been touring the US and China to sell Dublin as a gateway to the EU.
“Undoubtedly there are more opportunities because of Brexit,” he adds. “You can be assured that any opportunities there are, Ireland will seek to take advantage of and we will be in the fray, as will others.”
Several European cities are jostling to court those businesses fretting that Brexit may disqualify British institutions from selling services into the EU. But while Paris is dangling new tax breaks for expatriates and Frankfurt, Amsterdam and Luxembourg are also making pitches, Ireland is presenting itself as the only English-speaking country in Europe that can offer continuity to banks in nearby London.
When Britain voted for Brexit, a strange thing happened in North Down, an affluent, unionist-dominated area of Northern Ireland with a strong sense of British identity.
As the results came in it became clear North Down had other affinities: European. The area voted in favour of staying in the EU, as the majority of people in Northern Ireland did.
The outcome of June’s referendum triggered a summer of speculation. Had attitudes changed? If unionists saw EU membership as important, might they reconsider their ancient hostility to reunification with Ireland?
Some asked if there should be a “border poll”, a referendum on whether Northern Ireland should stay in the UK or join the Irish Republic. Others feared a push by Scotland towards independence could fatally undermine unionist confidence in the unity of the UK.
But passions quickly cooled. Politicians, among them Bertie Ahern, the former Irish prime minister, said the time wasn’t right for a reunification vote.
In unionist strongholds voters stress that pro-remain is not the same as a pro-reunification. Even diehard loyalists say they are opposed to any “hard border” with the Irish Republic post-Brexit.
PwC, in collaboration with BAV Consulting, surveyed a group of 5,200 people from 16 countries about where they believe the best cities in the world to be.
The demographic was made up of "an equal number of business decision makers, informed elites, and other general population adults over 18 years of age."
London hit the number one spot in the ranking of 30 best cities in the world after the respondents scored the capital highly across 40 metrics, which included infrastructure, influence in terms of economics, politics, as well as culture, entertainment, and great food.
Matthew Lieberman, a director at PwC, told BI that Brexit could damage the perception of London as an open city and this could have a negative impact on the country overall.
"London scores number one in the metric 'connected to the rest of the world,' number two in political influence and number two in being a leader; these attributes are contributing to London’s position as the number one city overall – but they could foreseeably be impacted by Brexit," said Lieberman.
"We’ll have to see if it manages to keep the same ranking next year, or if, due to Brexit, we see a slip. We do not currently have empirical data on this, but based on judgment and anecdotal evidence, we would presume that there’s still a lot of uncertainty and perceptions are in flux."
After a journey of seven months and half a billion kilometres across the solar system, the fate of the European Schiaparelli Mars lander was uncertain on Wednesday night amid fears that a last-minute glitch had scuppered hopes for a historic touchdown on the red planet.
Earlier in the day, the half-tonne spacecraft was on target to become the first from the European Space Agency to perform science on the Martian surface. But despite a seemingly perfect approach to the planet, the lander appeared to run into difficulty as it neared, or reached, the ground.
At the European Space Operations Centre (ESOC) in Darmstadt, grim-faced mission controllers peered at their monitors as the moment they expected the probe to call home came and went in silence. Hours later, the veteran Mars Express orbiter relayed data back to Earth that the lander had gathered on the way down.
“Those signals stopped at a certain point which we reckon was before the landing,” said Paolo Ferri, head of mission operations at ESOC. “It’s clear this is not a good sign.”
The high-speed descent called for the Schiaparelli lander to slow from 21,000 km (13,039 miles) per hour to a standstill on the Martian surface in the space of six minutes. In that time, the spacecraft was programmed to release a parachute and fire nine thrusters to slow its fall through the tenuous, dust-filled atmosphere, before belly-flopping the final two metres to the ground, a crushable underside cushioning the blow.
Signals broadcast from the probe and picked up by the Giant Metrewave Radio Telescope in India showed that the descent was going well until the final moments when the telescope lost contact.
Its surface is hot enough to melt lead and its skies are darkened by toxic clouds of sulphuric acid. Venus is often referred to as Earth’s evil twin, but conditions on the planet were not always so hellish, according to research that suggests it may have been the first place in the solar system to have become habitable.
The study, due to be presented this week at the at the American Astronomical Society Meeting in Pasadena, concludes that at a time when primitive bacteria were emerging on Earth, Venus may have had a balmy climate and vast oceans up to 2,000 metres (6,562 feet) deep.
Michael Way, who led the work at the Nasa Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York City, said: “If you lived three billion years ago at a low latitude and low elevation the surface temperatures would not have been that different from that of a place in the tropics on Earth,” he said.
The Venusian skies would have been cloudy with almost continual rain lashing down in some regions, however. “So while you might get nice sunsets you would have mostly overcast skies during the day and precipitation,” Way added.
[. . .]
Way and colleagues simulated the Venusian climate at various time points between 2.9bn and 715m years ago, employing similar models to those used to predict future climate change on Earth. The scientists fed some basic assumptions into the model, including the presence of water, the intensity of the sunlight and how fast Venus was rotating. In this virtual version, 2.9bn years ago Venus had an average surface temperature of 11C (52F) and this only increased to an average of 15C (59F) by 715m years ago, as the sun became more powerful.
On Monday, at a launch center in the middle of the Gobi desert, two taikonauts boarded a spacecraft and rocketed into space. Yesterday their ship, Shenzou-11, docked with China’s experimental space lab, Tiangong-2. For the next 30 days—China’s longest crewed space mission—they will conduct experiments, test equipment, practice repairs, try to grow plants, and keep track of how the space environment affects their bodies. Sound familiar, space fans?
It should. Tiangong-2 is like a baby International Space Station. Sure, it doesn’t have the ISS’s scale, technological sophistication, or multi-national backing. But it’s the technical testing ground for the grown up space station China plans to launch in the next couple of years. Which will more permanent, and about the size of Mir, the Soviet Union’s space station in the 80s and 90s. But mostly, Tiangong-2 an important part of China’s long term plan to build a Moon base. And from there, it’ll be hard to deny China a seat at the space superpower table.
Like everything China does, people consistently underestimate the nation’s space program. Common snubs include: It’s miles behind the curve; their gear is all Russian knockoffs; their launch schedules are hopelessly slapdash. Yeah, those have all been true at one point, but not an honest assessment of the program as it currently stand.
China did not launch its first satellite until the 1970s, and didn’t really invest heavily in their space program until the early ’90s (the Cultural Revolution was a bigger priority) but they’ve been gaining ground on the US and Europe ever since. Early on, the nation’s program relied on Russia, both for components and training for their would-be taikonauts.
And the Shenzhou spacecraft do resemble Soviet (now Russian) Soyuz. But don’t hate: “The Shenzhou is the same idea, but not a copy,” says Jonathan McDowel, an astrophysicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. “In its present form, it’s very much a Chinese vehicle.” The Chinese spacecraft is bigger, more powerful, and its forward habitation module has solar panels that can provide power for a separate mission—even after the astronauts climb aboard Tiangong-2.
The Obama administration has been pursuing a visit to Mars for years. But Obama may be overlooking an easier target, if the arguments of one NASA researcher (and numerous supporters) are to be believed. While Mars may seem to be an attractive destination, we should consider sending people to Venus instead, these people argue.
Obama's essay conjures images of NASA habitats on the Red Planet like we saw in the film “The Martian.” But that future is a long way off: As the actual author of “The Martian” has said, it's far more likely that NASA's first manned Mars mission will involve humans orbiting a few times and coming back. Even Elon Musk says he'll be creating a “cargo route” to Mars long before he sends actual people to land there.
You see, Mars is a challenging destination. It's far away, the gravity is a fraction of Earth's — posing additional health hazards beyond the lack of atmospheric radiation shielding — and you have to be suited up just to breathe outside.
By contrast, Venus is a lot closer to Earth than Mars is. At their closest points, Venus is only 25 million miles away, compared with Mars's 34 million miles. The shorter distance means you'd need less time and fuel to get there, reducing the cost. And although Venus's surface temperature is hot enough to melt metal, and the crushing pressure will squish you like a bug, the upper atmosphere is actually rather habitable.
“At about 50 kilometers above the surface the atmosphere of Venus is the most earthlike environment (other than Earth itself) in the solar system,” wrote Geoffrey Landis, a NASA scientist, in a 2003 paper. Landis has spent much of his career dreaming up ways to make a human trip to Mars actually feasible, so he knows what he's talking about.
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