Tag: transport

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.

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.

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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.

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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.

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.

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.

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.