Tag: transport

Burning the Midnight Oil for Living Energy Independence

When looking at the famously mis-titled “Vision for High Speed Rail in America” map trotted out last year, showing those of state-planned High Speed Rail corridors that have already applied for and received official designation as High Speed Rail corridors … there are ghosts on that map.

The Ghosts of Trains Past, also known as the Amtrak long distance routes.

As discussed on November 8th of last year in Rescuing the Innocent Amtrak Numbers from SubsidyScope, some of these ghosts are healthier than others. One of the ones in the most dire shape is the Cardinal, responsible for the only line on that map that enters either West Virgnia or eastern Kentucky.

Why it does so badly, and how it might be fixed up a bit, after the fold.

Burning the Midnight Oil for Living Energy Independence

Today’s Sunday Train is focusing on attacks that have been launched against Ohio’s 3C plan, which was granted $400m in the HSR round of Stimulus II grants. There are attacks from Republicans, engaged in their usual games of negotiating in bad faith and basing critiques on focus group testing of talking points rather than substance. There are attacks from “transport experts”, calling for all of our HSR spending to be focused on the coasts with no systems developed to serve the needs of flyover country.

There is even an attack launched against the award of funds to Ohio by President Obama’s Department of Transportation paradoxically by a kossack who goes by the name of “Ohiobama”.

So today is focused on examining the attacks and seeing what there is to them. And lest it seem that this is a single-state issue, many of these same arguments may be used against all of the plans already in place between the Rockies and the Appalachias, as well as the Pacific Northwest and the South Atlantic Coast.

In honor of the “3C” project (Cleveland/Columbus/Cincinnati), I have Three C’s of Attack” the “Conservative” attack, a “Claim-to-Fame” attack, and a “Clown-Train” attack.

Burning the Midnight Oil for Living Energy Independence

I’ve been like a hare chased by a hound this weekend, darting this way and that, so while I’ve got a lot of topics I could be writing on, I’ve got nothing coherent for a full fledged diary. So this week will be bits and pieces and this and that.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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%.

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.

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.

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.