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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)

Sunday Train: Frequency and Waiting on a Train by: BruceMcF Sun Nov 29, 2009 at 16:43:05 PST ( - promoted by buhdydharma ) Burning the Midnight Oil for Living Energy Independence I've been reading James McCommon's Waiting on a Train. And in cowed deference to the FCC, I will put the disclaimer up front that, yes!, I was more likely to read it and talk about it because Chelsea Green gave me a free review copy - since I would otherwise have had to wait until both it and I was in the library at the same time ... ... {of course, making me more likely to read it and talk about it is a gamble, since I'm not going to change my view of it because its a free copy - so if you have any publisher friends, warn them that if they reckon a book is a piece of garbage, they'd be better advised not to send a review copy} The Chapter that is inspiring today's Sunday Train is "Amtrak Cascades: it's all about frequency". "Uznanski" is Ken Uznanski, former passenger rail chief of the Washington DoT: "Once those intermodal trains can go through Stampede Pass, it will take some traffic off the main line and free up more room for additional passenger trains," said Uznanski. By bringing the number of trains up to eight a day between Vancouver and Portland, ridership and ticket revenue will increase significantly. Currently ticket sales - what is known as farebox - cover 43% of the Amtrak Cascades' operating expenses; the state subsidizes the remainder. Run eight trains daily, however, the farebox recovery goes up to 70%. There's More... :: (5 Comments, 1791 words in story)

Sunday Train: Revisiting 5 Lessons Learned from America was made for HSR by: BruceMcF Sun Nov 22, 2009 at 14:12:19 PST (11 am. - promoted by ek hornbeck) Burning the Midnight Oil for Living Energy Independence, crossposted from MyLeftWing I return to 2007 for "America was made for HSR" (Agent Orange links retained as the other blog I was posting to at the time is no longer up) Wow, what a ride. Sometimes on Thursday ... Thursday 22 March 2009, that is ... ... it felt like the America was made for High Speed Rail diary was going 200 mph itself. And I kept the ride going, cross posting the diary on the Euro and Booman Tribunes. And based partly on comments here and partly on comments there, kept polishing up the map. Like the first diary, this is only a sketch, and 200mph routes are not the be-all and end-all of passenger rail, and this isn't a silver bullet ... but damn if it isn't one silver BB that is cool as all hell. Now, I'm going to say the lessons follow below the fold in no particular order, so that if you see an order, I can call it serendipity, and if you don't see any order ... I told you so. ... ... (and anyway, any excuse to use the word serendipity is a good excuse, it's such a lovely word ... and you'd never believe how I stumbled across it ... but that, dear readers, is another story) ... ... with some additional reflections from late 2009. There's More... :: (2 Comments, 2383 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: The Birmingham Hub by: BruceMcF Sun Nov 15, 2009 at 14:13:49 PST ( - promoted by buhdydharma ) Burning the Midnight Oil for Living Energy Independence Now New and Improved with Poll Technology Programming Note: I recently received for review a copy of Waiting on a Train by James McCommons, published by Chelsea Green Publishing. I'll likely be talking about it next week, but til then, you can read James Kunstler's Intro online at AlterNet. Back in early September, I discussed the Steel Interstate in the context of the Appalachian Hub. The concept of the Steel Interstate is electrifying main rail corridors and establishing 100mph Rapid Freight Rail paths. The broadest application of this concept is the proposal to Electrify STRACNET, the STrategic RAil Corridor NETwork. The Appalachian Hub, recall, is a hypothetical Emerging / Regional HSR passenger rail network, modeled on the Midwest Hub and Ohio Hub plans. And it is hypothetical, of course, because the state governments of the Appalachian regions have been laying down on the job. The High Speed Rail corridor planning framework established under the Clinton Administration in the 90's is a bottom-up system, with states establishing High Speed Rail commissions, advancing plans to the stage of gaining designation as a HSR corridor, sorting out the financing, and applying for Federal funding. There's More... :: (1 Comments, 1357 words in story)

Sunday Train: Rescuing the Innocent Amtrak Numbers from SubsidyScope by: BruceMcF Sun Nov 08, 2009 at 15:04:18 PST ( - promoted by buhdydharma ) Burning the Midnight Oil for Living Energy Independence A few weeks back, SubsidyScope, "launched by The Pew Charitable Trusts, aims to raise public awareness about the role of federal subsidies in the economy", pursued its mandate into transport subsidies, coming out with a study with the headline figure of $32 subsidy per passenger for Amtrak. Why Amtrak? Why not provide a headline figure on federal subsidy per motorist or airplane passenger? Critics of the report suggest that the answer is simple - consider, for instance, Charleston WV mayor Danny Jones: Jones admits Amtrak relies heavily on subsidies, but so do other modes of transportation, he said. "I think it's just easier to see how much of it's subsidized with Amtrak," he said. And there is a lot of merit in that. Further, SubsidyScope is not focusing on Government subsidy, but on Federal subsidy. Not only is it harder to analyze government subsidies to driving and flying, given how many direct and indirect subsidies there are to take into account - but many of the subsidies are at the state and local government level, so for SubsidyScope's purposes they "don't count". But its worse that that. Even accepting SubsidyScope's twisted framing of the issue of government subsidies - the actual core part of the analysis that they themselves perform is hopelessly bad. The gory details, and then the numbers that pity forced me to rescue from the clutches of SubsidyScope, below the fold. There's More... :: (9 Comments, 2102 words in story)

Sunday Train: High Speed Rail - The Recruiters by: BruceMcF Sun Nov 01, 2009 at 12:04:15 PST (noon. - promoted by ek hornbeck) Burning the Midnight Oil for Living Energy Independence Crossposted from MyLeftWing, also in Orange The big knock against high speed rail is, of course, that it does not run door to door. This is, of course, why the passenger air transport market is such a strategic target ... it is an existing fuel-inefficient mode of transport where everyone travels as a pedestrian. And a well designed high speed rail system will deliver the target market among pedestrian travellers from as close or closer to their origin, and drop them off as close or closer to their destination. But those are not the only passengers that HSR will be catering to. A term I have heard railfans use for this type of activity is "recruiting" patronage, so, after the fold, I step through some of the important current, and potential, recruiters.   There's More... :: (9 Comments, 3019 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: 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: The Charleston WV Hub by: BruceMcF Sun Sep 13, 2009 at 13:57:01 PDT ( - promoted by buhdydharma ) Burning the Midnight Oil for Living Energy Independence crossposted from The Hillbilly Report, also available in Orange The Appalachian Hub Part 2: The Charleston WV Hub The increasingly infamous Appalachian Development Highway program started out with the goal of supporting the potential for genuine economic development in Appalachia by improving transport links into and within the region. And yet, with the decentralized, state-based system for planning 110mph, 125mph and 220mph High Speed Rail systems, there is the threat that the very problem that the Appalachian Development Highway system was established to address will be re-created as we modernize our regional passenger transport backbones from asphalt to steel. An Appalachian Hub project would aim to drag these laudable goals into the 21st Century by filling the gaping hole in Eastern US planning for High Speed Rail systems. "Would", since this is an exploration of what such a system might look like if West Virginia, Kentucky and Tennessee joined this planning process - not a report on ongoing, formal projects such as the Midwest Hub or Ohio Hub. There's More... :: (3 Comments, 1316 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)

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)

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