Here's a question for you. What do you get if you forget your Blogger account password? Answer? Nothing. Remembered it now, just as I'm about to head off for Johannesburg for ITS South Africa's e-Transport Conference and Masterclass. I lived there for a while in the late 1970s and haven't been back since so it should interesting.

A few things of note before I go.

1) By the time I get back there should be two more issues of Thinking Highways in existence, one of each. For those of you joining us in Jo'burg you can have yours a week earlier than everyone else. The North American issue will be out the week after.

2) By Wednesday 25th our first podcast show should be online and ready to listen to or download. The Thinking Highways Half Hour Show No 1 actually lasts for about 43 minutes but it's well worth a listen so please go to the PODCAST section of the website but not yet, on Wednesday please.

3) Our new member of the team joins us in three weeks but Lucy Cone (©Yes, Daughter of Robert) has already filed her first copy and her report from the ASECAP meeting in Innsbruck can be found in the LATEST NEWS section.

Right, I'm off to South Africa then.

Wanted: improved VMS security

Copy and paste this link into your browser and it just makes you think that some people must have a lot more spare time than others...

http://news.cnet.com/8301-13772_3-10149229-52.html

Over and out. Oh, and fear not - this will NEVER turn into one of those blogs where the protagonist tells you every last little detail of what they are doing. "Steve is currently eating a slice of toast and reading the New York Times". Good for you, Steve. Wouldn't it be more accurate to say "Steve is currently posting something horrifically trivial and inconsequential in his blog"...

Anyhoo...

KB, H3BHQ, Wallington

OK, you can all breathe again now

I do realise the slightly pointless nature of telling you that our website is now up and running as that's probably how and why 99.99% per cent of the people reading this have come to view this page. However, there are a few who come to it from Gary Bridgeman's iTravel blog (see the link elsewhere on this page) so this is more or less for them (or you, if you are one of "them").

Anyway, after months of frustration, elation, mitigation, rumination and cogitation, we now have a great new website that we're really proud of. Basically, it's everything you liked about our old site plus a hundred and one other things that have significantly improved it. And it's still black. That was one of my requirements. Not too many photos of me (there are three in the main site and 27 in the online magazines, so sorry about that) and it must stay black. I know what people say about black websites but they are wrong and that's that. I'm having a blunt day.

I'll post something else tomorrow that won't mention our new site at all. Honest.

KB, H3BHQ, Wallington

A site for sore eyes...

Imagine our new website as a brand new, Formula 1 racing car... we've been keeping it under wraps for months and employed security guards to make sure no interlopers get a sneak peek at it. Now, we are about to whip off the big black dust sheet and reveal all... on Wednesday by the looks of things. It'll have been well worth it, I can assure you but we thank you for your patience and we'll be right back after these messages...

KB, H3BHQ, Wallington

GOODBYE VII...

So that's the end of VII, then. Not the program itself of course (although Paul Brubaker's resignation from the DOT today, although hardly unexpected, may alter its course a tad) but the name VII. It's been consigned to history, folks. As of now it has a new name. Intellidrive.

I'm meeting Valerie Briggs tomorrow to discuss all kinds of things, this being one of them, but the change of name has been, along with next week's presidential inauguration, been the talk of TRB, you won't be surprised to hear. But, it has to be said, the reaction has been mixed.

A selection of my favourite comments so far have been...

"It sounds like the automatic transmission for a 1950s Buick."
"It made me think of an electronic screwdriver that knows what type of screw you are screwing in so can instantly adapt the head to fit."
"It's the name of Australia's leading foot spa."
"I love it, VII was too nondescript. This is more... descript."

Shelley Row's husband had once confused VII with 511 and it was thought that VII was too ambiguous and indeed nebulous and needed too much explanation. It appears that the a team of branding experts were brought in to give it a more appropriate name and it now has the epithet - "smarter, safer, greener". You can't argue with its sentiments but I'm not too sure of the new name... I just can't help thinking of the smart screw driver (OK, I admit, that was mine). I'll report back tomorrow once I've spoken to Valerie. Let's not get too excited, though as it's just a different name for the same thing, after all..

KB, TRB, DC

TRB or not TRB - that is the question

Despite this being my 23rd visit to the US, there are still two things that I cannot get used to. Conferences beginning on a Sunday and breakfast meetings. Yesterday I was invited to a 7.30am breakfast briefing. On a Sunday. I just couldn't - I did find myself in a congestion pricing session at 9am though so I'm certainly not treating this as a holiday.

We're renting a house in the Brookland district of DC and amazingly I arrived at the front door at exactly the same time as our new President of H3B North America, Justin Peters, pulled up in his rental car after a 13 hour drive from Toronto. Synergy, I believe...

One long session, a lunch of equal length (including JP being served a meal we calculated as being 36 square inches of pasta), a fascinating coffee with Richard Bishop (the coffee wasn't fascinating, the conversation was) and a short trawl around the exhibition hall later and it was already time for dinner. We relocated to Marshalls on 26th and Pennsylvania for a highly contentious meal with Paul Najarian, his wife Philomena and daughter Emma, RicK Weiland, Richard Bishop, Justin and Amu Zuckerman. WHile Paul and I discussed the vagueries of the Premiership transfer window, Amy, Rick and Justin hammered away at the standards process with Richard B in no-man's land - too light in one direction, too heavy in the other but talk of Andrei Arshavin's £18m transfer from Zenit St Petersburg to Manchester City saw him join in with the standards banter.

Some interesting-looking sessions today, lunch with Neil Schister (not a typo) of World Trade Magazine and dinner with Phil Tarnoff to come and potentially a blog from either Justin, Amy or Richard tomorrow as an added bonus. We'll be promoting our new online magazine, FOOTPRINT, today so what with officially opening the North American office and launching the new website, we've got a rather interesting week coming up...

KB, DC

London 1 Manchester 0

So, the good people of Manchester said a huge, all-encompassing "no thanks" to the idea of Congestion Charging. Asking the public if they would like to pay for something that they've had for free for the past 100 years is rarely going to get an overly positive reaction ("Sorry about this but how would you feel about having to pay £10 to breathe in the air that's all around you?" "No problem, that's a great idea, can I pay by direct debit?") but the negativity that greeted Manchester's Congestion Charging idea was greeted with a fair amount of surprise in some circles.

I received a number of "told you so" emails from friends and colleagues and to be fair we had spent the previous day guessing what the percentages of NO v YES were going to be so it didn't come as a great surprise to me. However, that being said, I know how hard the likes of Sir Howard Bernstein, Stephen Clark and Jack Opiola had worked on convincing the public that a congestion charging scheme was exactly what was needed to solve Greater Manchester's growing traffic problems.

As one consultant said "It's all very well them saying no but they'll soon start complaining when there's no money available to repair the tram network" and you have to say that he has a point.

For those of us that live in Greater London there's the feintly embarrassing feeling that other cities have been playing a game with us. "London, got an idea for you. You say yes to congestion charging, right? And then we'll see it's worked and when it does then we'll have it as well. So, you go first, what with you being the capital and all that..". So we say yes to Congestion Charging, then five years later we turn round, with every intention of nodding to Manchester, et al, only to find they've gone home and left us there on our own, like a mug.

I may have taken this analogy too far but is London going to be left holding the Congestion Charging baby for ever? Surely not...

KB