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Sunday Train: Taking the Train to the Airport by: BruceMcF Sun Feb 07, 2010 at 16:05:39 PST (noon. - promoted by ek hornbeck) Burning the Midnight Oil for Living Energy Independence Disclaimer: Nothing said here should be taken to imply that airport/train connections are the primary transport task for either light rail, mass transit, conventional intercity rail, or high speed intercity rail. In other words, the focus of an essay in a regular weekly series on one particular topic does not imply anything along the lines of "most important thing". However, recently, I keep running into the issue of taking the train to the airport. I read an recent article in an air travel industry publication that focused on the airport connections associated with the projects funded in the $8b HSR funding. I read an older piece about the proposed intermodal station in Chicago that would allow our Ohio trains to get to O'Hare. And the proposal to terminate the California HSR at the redesigned Lindbergh Field came up as part of the discussion at the California HSR blog. So with the Super Bowl coming up to distract things, I succumbed to what was clearly fate, and am going to discuss taking the train to the airport. There's More... :: (5 Comments, 1785 words in story)

Sunday Train: Going to Disneyland, Disneyworld, and Other Adventures by: BruceMcF Sun Jan 31, 2010 at 16:03:15 PST (noon. - promoted by ek hornbeck) Burning the Midnight Oil for Living Energy Independence Huh, seems me that whatever the state of my various concerns, the agenda of the Sunday Train has been taken over by the White House ... funny how announcing the recipients of a total of $8b will do that. The Transport Politic (aka Yonah Freeman and the TTP commentariat) has a very complete rundown. The allotments over $200m are: California, $2,344m Florida: $1,250m Illinois: $1,236m Wisconsin: $822m Washington: $590m North Carolina: $545m   Ohio: $400m So, what's the money for? Join me below the fold. There's More... :: (13 Comments, 1641 words in story)

Sunday Train: A Train Running A Profit is Charging Too Much by: BruceMcF Sun Jan 24, 2010 at 16:10:42 PST (noon. - promoted by ek hornbeck) Burning the Midnight Oil for Living Energy Independence Note that the statement is abbreviated for the title. The full statement is, a common carrier like a train, bus, or plane that running a profit based on passenger revenue while paying its full operating and capital cost is charging too much for its tickets. The radical abbreviation of the title is in part because of the radical abbreviation of the lie that is commonly used as a frame. The lie is that a common carrier like a train, bus or plane that is paying for its full operating and capital costs out of passenger revenue ought to run a profit, commonly expressed as a charge of, "SERVICE_XYZ is losing money, it needs to be reformed!", which assumes that Service_XYZ is supposed to be making a profit. And, of course, in the sense described above, if its a common carrier transport service, of course it shouldn't be making a profit. And further, if under the above conditions, if its making a profit, you're doing it wrong. In the sense given above, PROFIT=FAIL. There's More... :: (7 Comments, 1175 words in story)

Sunday Train: Freight and Passenger Trains Should Be Friends by: BruceMcF Sun Jan 10, 2010 at 15:08:36 PST ( - promoted by buhdydharma ) Burning the Midnight Oil for Living Energy Independence Flying home from the Economist's national conference Atlanta (see note1) my brilliant entertainment plan to pass the day lost flying home from Atlanta fell apart. I could not attend even the 8am session on Tuesday, because the flight left at 11:15, and I was warned about TSA security theater delays. So I got on the MARTA train around 8:30, to stand in line to check-in, to stand in line to get through screening, to get to the gate and wait, to get on the plane which waited in line for a runway. It was, however, only half an hour in the air, so that fact that with a 125mph train to Charlotte I could have gone to the morning conference session and arrived in Charlotte sooner is neither here nor there. Then I had a 3hr+ layover in Charlotte until the plane back home to NE Ohio. But I had my Netflix and some FullMetal Alchemist DVD's, so no problem. Except my portable DVD player decided to stop working (see note2), so there were no DVD's. Which meant I was forced to fall back on a "pbook" (paper book) I had brought with me - Waiting on a Train, which meant that I finally finished it (and still had several hours to wait after I had done so). And in particular read the fascinating discussion of the touchy relationship between freight and passenger trains. Regular readers will know that this is a critical point: indeed, the entire Steel-Interstate strategy to getting Higher Speed Rail for Appalachia rests on passenger trains running on infrastructure provided in support of 100mph electric freight trains. There's More... :: (14 Comments, 1505 words in story)

Build Steel Interstates with $1/barrel and 1% of the Carbon Fee by: BruceMcF Thu Nov 19, 2009 at 09:54:11 PST (11 am. - promoted by ek hornbeck) crossposted from Agent Orange The Steel Interstate concept (tagpage) is one that I have been discussing, off and on, in my Sunday Train series. The basic idea is to electrify the Department of Defense STrategic RAil Corridor NETwork, STRACNET (right), and establish 100mph Rapid Freight Rail paths, to allow an estimated (Millenium Institute pdf) half of long haul trucking to shift to electric freight rail at a saving of about 10% of our current oil imports. This diary is about how to overcome the only thing standing in its way: Public Finance. And that is to impose a $1/barrel tax on imported petroleum and petroleum products, and allocate 1% of any Carbon Fee to financing construction. There's More... :: (6 Comments, 2066 words in story)

Sunday Train: Leveraging Pittsburgh / Cleveland for Canton/Akron / UPDATED by: BruceMcF Sun Oct 25, 2009 at 16:50:21 PDT (noon. - promoted by ek hornbeck) Burning the Midnight Oil for Living Energy Independence crossposted from ProgressiveBlue, also available in Orange One of the stories that came out into the press this week was the pledge by the US Department of Transport to look into extending the designated HSR corridors to include Pittsburgh/Cleveland. This would extend the Cleveland/Chicago route via northern Indiana and connect with the Triple-C route at Cleveland (both currently competing for HSR Stimulus funding). This is a 145 mile alignment that would offer a 2:10 Express trip between these two cities as a 110mph corridor, for a 67mph route speed - and faster, of course, if later upgraded to a 125mph Regional HSR corridor. The focus today is not, however, High Speed Rail - it is conventional rail. The focus is on how to take this alignment that hit the top northeast corner of Akron's Summit County and leverage it into effective rail service for the Canton-Akron area. There's More... :: (3 Comments, 2186 words in story)

Sunday Train: The Pay-To-Grow Financial Model for Regional HSR by: BruceMcF Sun Oct 18, 2009 at 16:17:10 PDT ( - promoted by buhdydharma ) Burning the Midnight Oil for Living Energy Independence also Agent Orange Let construction or upgrade of a rail corridor be proposed, and almost immediately the cry goes up, "but we can't afford it! It costs too much!". Confusing the response to this cry is that there are two quite different types of "cost too much" - real, and financial. There first "cost of rail" question is the real cost question: what is the full economic benefit, including all material and energy impacts saved versus other alternative, versus the full economic cost. ___________ Note: The first kind of "cost versus benefit" question is the kind that Ed Gleaser fumbled so badly when he assumed Zero Population Growth in east Texas, no congestion today between Houston and Dallas on the intercity road network, either deliberately or through negligence bypassed important intercity transport demands along the route of his corridor, and presumed that the only available option was the most capital-intensive type of rail corridor, the all-new, all-grade separated, Express High Speed Rail corridor. ____________ The second "cost of rail" question is the financial cost - given the complex, sometimes ad hoc, and often inconsistent sets of rules we have established for allocating resources for both investment in transport infrastructure and paying for transport operations, how do we "pay for" construction or upgrade of those rail corridors that our best analysis of cost and benefit indicate are wise investments. That second question is what I am looking at today. There's More... :: (1 Comments, 2917 words in story)

Sunday Train: Supporting Rail Electrification with the Climate Bill by: BruceMcF Sun Oct 11, 2009 at 13:14:30 PDT (noon. - promoted by ek hornbeck) Burning the Midnight Oil for Living Energy Independence crossposted from ProgressiveBlue Transport For America (t4america.org) has a call to action out on the Climate Change Bill. "ACES" passed the House, and the corresponding (but of course not identical) legislation is presently up for consideration in the Senate. The basis of the call for action is straightforward: 1% of the revenues raised by the Carbon Fee is permitted to be used for clean energy transport - not even mandated, but optionally may be used for that among a range of other options. Transport is responsible for 30% of the CO2 emitted thus, "You can't solve 30% of the problem with 1% of the funds Now, about 14% of carbon fee revenue is dedicated to emissions reduction, so that is 7.2% of the emissions reduction budget allocated that is the maximum allowed to be spent on installing existing clean energy transport. Based on CBO estimates of carbon fees, the maximum amount that states would be allowed to devote to clean energy transport is: $391m in 2011; rising to $1.3b ($1,323m) in 2019 By contrast, the bill authorizes utilities to tax customers by $1b-$1.1b a year over 10 years to finance the installation of Carbon Sequestration Technology, which is the excuse given for permitting continued construction of coal-fired generating plants. (source: 1Sky analysis, pdf) This means: The most promising single opportunity to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in transport inside a decade, electrification of the STRACNET long haul rail freight network, is entirely out of bounds for any funding Funding for electric rail and trolley bus passenger transport requires first gaining approval through Federal programs that discriminate against energy-efficiency There's More... :: (6 Comments, 2649 words in story)

Sunday Train: Breaking Free of the Population Density Myth by: BruceMcF Sun Oct 04, 2009 at 13:28:34 PDT ( - promoted by buhdydharma ) Burning the Midnight Oil for Living Energy Independence crossposted from The Hillbilly Report Today, the focus is on one lovely rhetorical ploy used by anti-rail advocates to try to put one over on people with limited experience with trains. This relies on the false framing that "trains is trains", and uses something that is true about a particular kind of local rail transport to mislead people about 110mph Emerging High Speed Rail in particular. Randall O'Toole, working for The Cato Institute (Sourcewatch), recently completed another of his series of propaganda pieces against High Speed Rail, for the "Show-Me Institute". Sourcewatch does not have much on the "Show-Me Institute", but it does note that in 2006, a contribution of $50,000 to the "Show-Me Institute" appeared in the annual report ... of the Cato Institute. And what is this shell game? High capacity, high frequency local mass transit rail systems yhtive best with high population densities Therefore the higher the population density, the better for High Speed Rail Therefore the Northeast Corridor shows the best that is possible for High Speed Rail Didja catch it? Local mass transit rail and intercity High Speed Rail share people sitting in carriages with steel wheels running on steel rails - nowhere near enough in common to support the weight of the "therefore". In reality, the Northeast Corridor could well be over the threshold where population density starts to undermine High Speed Rail operating ratios. There's More... :: (6 Comments, 1708 words in story)

Sunday Train: Rapid Streetcars and Suburban Retrofit by: BruceMcF Sun Sep 27, 2009 at 12:26:13 PDT ( - promoted by buhdydharma ) Burning the Midnight Oil for Living Energy Independence crossposted to Agent Orange The people's choice award in the Re-Burbia "Rethinking Suburbia" design competition was the entry titled Urban Sprawl Repair Kit: Repairing The Urban Fabric. But I want to adapt these ideas from the repair of the urban fabric to the original creation of a healthy suburban fabric. From further below: After all, no matter how much one may love big cities - big cities have never been the be-all and end-all of settlement. Part of a healthy big city economy is a healthy network of relationships to a surrounding network of healthy smaller cities. And part of what makes them healthy is a healthy network of relationships to healthy small towns and villages. And that is the foundation of the Suburban Town and Village design pattern, using the Rapid Streetcar as its transport infrastructure backbone: providing suburban Towns and Villages that work in their own right, replacing the two-dimensional movie-set facade of Town and Village life offered by most suburban sprawl communities. There's More... :: (1 Comments, 3740 words in story)

Sunday Train: 21st Century Steel Interstate by: BruceMcF Sun Sep 06, 2009 at 12:16:14 PDT (noon. - promoted by ek hornbeck) crossposted from MyLeftWing Having lost sight of our goals we redoubled our efforts - Mark Twain I have blogged on this topic before (links below the fold), and the concept is both powerful and simple. Electrify main rail corridors and provide the capacity to support 100mph Rapid Freight Rail. The points are direct: Electric rail freight needs under 10% the energy of diesel truck freight Even with short-haul trucking to origin railhead and from destination railhead, 100mph Rapid Freight Rail is faster door to door freight than long-haul trucking In underused Rights of Way, rail capacity is decreasing cost, with additional capacity cheaper than existing capacity As a side-effect benefit, any system that supports high reliability scheduled freight delivery automatically support substantially upgrade passenger rail services With the focus on Long-Haul Freight, this proposed system has been dubbed the "Steel Interstate" (pdf). Virginia is facing a Dinosaur Economy proposal to expand I-81 to  eight lanes to cope with the combination of truck and car traffic. RAIL Solutions has turned to the Steel Interstate that: is a lower cost alternative is not addicted to oil, and takes semi-truck traffic off I-81, rather than imposing more semi-truck traffic on the motorists using I-81. There's More... :: (3 Comments, 2728 words in story)

Sunday Train: The Appalachian Hub, Part 1 by: BruceMcF Sun Aug 30, 2009 at 12:33:59 PDT Burning the Midnight Oil for Living Energy Independence , crossposted from The Hillbilly Report It is widely remarked that the US Department of Transport map of High Speed Rail Corridors leaves a lot of obvious holes. Often, this reflects a misunderstanding of what the DoT is mapping. This is not a "Master Plan". There is no HSRail planner division inside the Federal Rail Administration inside the Department of Transport that is working away at deciding which corridor should be added to the corridor. Instead, what they have mapped are the corridors that are eligible for HSRail funding. The way that things are set up is that a state or group of states do some planning, petition Congress be designated as a HSRail corridor, or added to a corridor, or for less sweeping changes petition the Department of Transport to revise an existing corridor, and {*voila*}, that's a designated corridor. There's More... :: (25 Comments, 1920 words in story)

Samuelson transforms Glaeser's hackery into The HSR Stupid / Update by: BruceMcF Mon Aug 24, 2009 at 08:46:11 PDT (11 am. - promoted by ek hornbeck) Morris says he and his tag-team High Speed Rail partner Ed Glaeser ... that's HSR or #HSrail for short ... are taking at least a one week break. So Robert Samuelson steps into the breach. He repeats the old familiar argument: (1) Amtrak requires operating subsidies. (2) Rail operators overseas had the same problem. (3) Rail operators overseas found out that increasing the speed solved the problem. (4) So if we do the same thing, it will lose money. Why does (4) follow from (1), (2), and (3)? It doesn't, of course, its just guilt by association given the form and shape of an argument to allow intellectually dishonest rhetoric to pass as if it were real argument. There's More... :: (2 Comments, 377 words in story)

Sunday Train: Ed Morris Duped by Libertarian HSR Hackery by: BruceMcF Sun Aug 23, 2009 at 08:48:53 PDT (10 am. - promoted by ek hornbeck) Burning the Midnight Oil for Living Energy Independence Freakonomist Eric Morris finishes up his tag-team attack with Ed Glaeser on the HSR policy with a post that confesses to the hack jobs both are doing on HSR policy - but works hard to spin the confession into a defense of the hackery. Eric Morris's efforts have been clearly the weaker of the two, to the point where Ryan Avent, who wrote blog posts to pick apart the analytical flaws of Ed Glaeser's four part series as well as the first posts by Eric Morris, responded to Eric Morris' last effort via twitter: @ryanavent: Eric Morris closes HSR series by referring readers to Randal O'Toole. You know, in case you thought he and Glaeser were aiming for an honest critique The main takeway point from below? So the bait and switch is as follows. By overstating the costs and understating the benefits of Express HSR, "it costs too much", or is only useful in a very few special cases, and therefore we cannot afford its "transformative benefits". And by ignoring the fact that the benefit of investing in Emerging HSR is greater than the cost, and focusing on dismissing the quality of the benefits, the Emerging HSR is "unworthy" of investment because it is not "transformative" enough. There's More... :: (1 Comments, 2451 words in story)

Sunday Train: zOMG these aint REAL HSR trains! by: BruceMcF Sun Aug 16, 2009 at 16:38:13 PDT (noon. - promoted by ek hornbeck) Burning the Midnight Oil for Living Energy Independence I've seen this before ... indeed, it was mentioned recently in some discussion threads of Libertarians Against Choice ... the effort to play divide and conquer by arguing "if it doesn't go 220mph, it isn't worth doing". John Hilkevitch of the Chicago Tribune asked last Monday Are 110mph trains on the right track? (secondary link - I'm having trouble with the primary), establishing at the outset the false frame that 110mph and 220mph trains are two different "tracks" and we have to choose between them. This is, of course, nonsense. Indeed, the first generation of bullet trains were 125mph trains, which is the second tier of the three-tier Department of Transport system. However, there may be more going on here than just the run of the mill "make stuff up based on my uninformed reaction without finding out the facts" that seems to dominate the op-ed pages. There's More... :: (2 Comments, 1797 words in story)

Ed Glaeser Flat Out Lies about High Speed Rail by: BruceMcF Thu Aug 13, 2009 at 11:19:10 PDT (noon. - promoted by ek hornbeck) Crossposted from The Hillbilly Report, crossposted to Agent Orange Burning the Midnight Oil for Living Energy Independence Ryan Avent has provided high quality debunking of many of the flaws of Ed Glaeser's ongoing analysis of Cost and Benefits of HSR. His current piece, Ed Glaeser's Rail Fail, does not let us down. Hell, I decided I'd read Ryan Avent's piece first, before reading Glaeser, so I would not get riled up and start a long rant, only to find that Ryan has explained it more clearly ... and to more total readers, to boot. But I got riled up anyway. Ed Glaeser in the most recent piece comes out with a blatant lie, and one that'll trap almost all casual readers. There's More... :: (2 Comments, 525 words in story)

Libertarians Against Choice: The Attack on Obama's HSR Policy by: BruceMcF Sun Aug 09, 2009 at 13:47:59 PDT (noon. - promoted by ek hornbeck) Recently, I speculated on what was behind the recent surge in op-ed articles using slipshod reasoning to attack the policy of the Obama administration to support investment in High Speed Rail travel options for the American Public. And, I stress, it was speculative: However, just as with our Freakonomist Eric Morris, its a lot easier to adopt the stance of declaring "skepticism" and use that declaration as a magic incantation to dispense with any need to actually find information. Simply paint a specific Sustainable Energy Independence project as receiving "uncritical support", declare yourself a skeptic, and you are free to spout the a Libertarian anti-HSR talking point without dwelling on such messy things as facts and figures. However, in searching for specific examples of the "libertarian talking points" that I referred to, I came across this excellent collection at the Midwest High Speed Rail Association, in their High Speed Rail: Fact versus Fiction, where they collect a series of talking points from the three main anti-public-transport think tanks - Cato, Heritage, and the Reason Foundation (just google if you need the links). There's More... :: (10 Comments, 2272 words in story)

Glaeser Hacks up the Numbers on HSR by: BruceMcF Fri Aug 07, 2009 at 12:19:32 PDT (noon. - promoted by ek hornbeck) Last things first ... after reading and commenting here, go ahead and comment at Running the Numbers on HSR by Edward Glaeser. This last weekend, I looked at a low-brow attack on HSR by John McCarron in the Chicago Tribune. This week, I look at a high brow attack by the economist Edward Glaeser at the NYTimes "Economix". However, the attack by Edward Glaeser is different. Even if some suspect a partisan motive, given Glaser's support for McCain ... this is not the kind of hackery we are seeing in the health care debate, where paid partisan hacks are just blatantly lying. Its the kind of hackery that is embedded in a frame, and which will bias the results of any honest analysis done within that frame. There's More... :: (7 Comments, 2796 words in story)

A False Contest between Local Rail and HSR to kill off both by: BruceMcF Sun Aug 02, 2009 at 10:24:31 PDT (11 am. - promoted by ek hornbeck) Last Thursday, John McCarron in an op-ed at the Chicago Tribune used the excuse of "skepticism" to trot out slopping thinking and laziness about digging up facts, in Slow down those fast-train dreams Among many "God, I want to file a bug report" passages in a fairly short piece is: The purpose of high-speed rail, near as I can tell, is not to ease the daily commute of millions of Chicagoans -- we'll still clank along on what is, in many places, a century-old system -- but to rocket a much smaller group of occasional travelers to places like St. Louis, Detroit and Minneapolis at speeds approaching 220 m.p.h. Two hours to St. Louis! All we'll need is a reason to go there. So, (1) McCarron frames local transport and regional transport as either/or tasks ... we either do one or we do the other. Unlike any other time in our nation's history, we are unable to address both. And (2) McCarron likes his opinions unadulturated by fact. The 220mph Express HSR project is in California. The actual projects that the states of Illinois, Missouri, Michigan, Indiana and Ohio are requesting funding for are in the "Emerging HSR" tier of HSR ... trains running at 110mph. There's More... :: (7 Comments, 900 words in story)

Looking Past the End of the End of the Recession by: BruceMcF Mon Jul 27, 2009 at 14:24:16 PDT (11 am. - promoted by ek hornbeck) crossposted from Daily Kos ... comments there after the "recent diary list" deadline has passed are also welcome. Bonddad has YERRD (yet another reclisted Rosenberg diary) up, on the issue of whether the recession is coming to an end, or the sky is falling and we face an unending recession from now through to the visible horizon. But the Great Depression was not made of a recession that did not end for ten years. It was, indeed, made up of one and a half complete business cycles ... the post-Crash Recession, from late 1929 to 1932, the New Deal Recovery, from 1932 to 1937, the Roosevelt Recession of 1937/38, and then the recovery that merged with the start of WWII, which was the government spending program substantial enough to actually bring us back to a full employment macro equilibrium. So the question of whether or not we face another Depression is not, "will this Recession ever end?" ... but rather, "After this recession, what comes next?" So over the fold, I turn to that, far more urgent, question. But first, an Action Note: Transportation for America reminds us that its not too late to tell your Congressmen to increase support for clean transportation. There's More... :: (7 Comments, 1371 words in story)

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