Tag: HSR

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.

Perhaps there is a recipe for being “provocative” when you do not, after all, want to depart from the economic mainstream – despite the radical incapacities that have come to prominence in the last year – and do not want to upset powerful vested interests.

If I was trying to use Eric Morris’ “Freakonomics Blog” piece for the NYTimes, High-Speed Rail and CO2, to work the recipe out, my guess would be:

• Pick a challenge to the status quo as your target
• Pick a sexy public issue as your line of attack
• Narrow the frame to bias the case in favor of the status quo
• cherry pick information sources that are biased toward your desired conclusions
• mis-state as much of the rest of the evidence as required to bring your conclusion home
  

So let’s see this recipe at work as Eric Morris does a hack piece trying to argue that HSR funding is bad for CO2 emissions.

H/T to Rafeal at the California HSR Blog for bringing this piece to my attention.

Burning the Midnight Oil for Living Energy Independence

Dan Walters in the Sacramento Bee asks:

Is this the time to launch construction of a high-speed railroad line between Northern and Southern California that will cost at least $40 billion, much of it from bonds to be repaid from a state budget that’s already gushing red ink?

Yes, say its fervent advocates, contending that a bullet train, similar to those in Europe and Japan, will reduce air and auto congestion, reduce greenhouse gases and generate many billions of dollars in economic benefits.

Dan Walters then throws all the complaints about the California HSR project he can find into a big pot, and stirs. Underneath the individual “points”, lies the main New Hooverist thesis … in hard times, we cannot afford to invest in the future.

Crossposted from Hilbilly Report

This last weekend I wrote up a small diary, cross-posted to various places … which even stumbled into being wrecklisted at Agent Orange … about the High Speed Rail plan released by the Obama administration.

That diary focused on laying out the three “tiers” of HSR in the announced plan. “Express HSR” is one of the bullet train systems, like they are planning for California. But between that tier and conventional rail, are two more tiers:

• “Regional HSR”, with a top speed of around 125mph, able to provide trips at average speeds in the range of 100mph, operating in existing rail rights of way, but mostly on its own track, with upgraded signaling and substantial investment in grade separation and/or the top level of “hardened” level crossings, normally with electrified lines; and
  
• “Emerging HSR”, with a top speed of 110mph, able provide trips at average speed in excess of 80mph, operating on existing rail right of way with improved capacity, but sometimes sharing track with freight rail, the 110mph standard of quad gate, speed sensitive level crossings, and provided by either electric or diesel 110mph tilt-trains
  

The bullet trains are the show ponies … but for small town and rural America, the genuine seat at the table for Emerging and Regional HSR is the real good news from the announcement.

Burning the Midnight Oil for Living Energy Independence

… A Four Step Program

Step 1. Give states a framework to develop plans, either individually or in groups, and present them to the Federal government for vetting, approval, and funding support.

Step 2. States do that.

Step 3. Fund a substantial number of seed corridors, so that a large number of metro areas (House) and States (Senate) have a stake in maintaining ongoing Federal HSR funding.

Step 4. Keep funding the construction of more.

That is my plan. But, OTOH, I’m just an obscure Development Economist with a field specialization in Regional Economics, so the fact that its my plan is neither here nor there.

More newsworthy, it seems to be the plan of the Obama administration. So, unlike the Bank Bail-out, I find myself on the “cheerleader” side of Administration activity.

Give Me an H! Give Me an S! Give Me an R! What’s It Spell? One Piece of the Energy Independent Transport Puzzle! YEAH!!!!

Crosspost links collected at: Burning the Midnight Oil for Living Energy Independence

In Part 1, the testimony representing the Transbay Joint Power Authority, managing the Transbay project, resulted in such a pile of red herring left behind that it seemed that there was something fishy going on.

What that something fishy seemed to be was whether the Transbay Terminal “train box” was suited for serving as the main northern terminus for both California High Speed Rail (HSR) services and for Caltrain services.

But … what if the Transbay Terminal is not the terminus of the HSR services?

In that case, the problem turns from physical limits … to legal requirements that the design has to meet. A garbled version of that is showing up in the newspapers … join me beyond the fold as I try to ungarble the story.

Burning the Midnight Oil for Living Energy Independence

This is “part 2” of A Train Station Grows at Transbay … Hopefully not a Bonsai (pt. 1)

In Part 1, an effort was made to try to fit 8 High Speed Rail (HSR) trains per hour (tph), plus up to 8 Caltrain tph, into the proposed “train box” design for the Transbay terminal, which has 3 island platforms with a total of 6 platform tracks.

And the result is an ugly kludge that quite possibly cannot physically fit, and certainly would put a cramp on the operations of Caltrain. Since the 1999 San Francisco Proposition H made it a local ordnance for the Transbay Terminal to serve both High Speed Rail and Caltrain services, a design which is incapable of genuinely serving both certainly violates the spirit, if not the letter, of San Francisco law.

… Hopefully its not a Bonsai

Burning the Midnight Oil for Living Energy Independence

I was able to get an interesting look into the proposed future of Intercity Travel in the Bay at the Transbay Terminal (TBT) in San Francisco.

Senate Info Heairing on High Speed Rail in California

Note that I am not trying to give “objective reporting” on this issue but rather to give vent to my reaction to watching the hearing online … see The Troubling Discord Between Transbay and High Speed Rail Authorities for a less hot under the collar reaction.

One piece of information is that in California, when one public authority has the funding for sufficient staff and another doesn’t, and it comes to a fight, it is considered fair game for the staffed up authority to toss up spin and red herrings and biased analyses, confident that the other authority does not have the capacity to answer promptly.

Burning the Midnight Oil for a Brawny Recovery

This information from the Midwest High Speed Rail Blog, Ohio Proposed Budget Includes Developing Passenger Rail Between 4-5 Cities (who themselves give a h/t to Transportation for America):

As part of a two-year, $7.5 billion proposed budget, Ohio plans to continue developing passenger rail service connecting four cities Cleveland, Columbus, Dayton and Cincinnati (DispatchPolitics) – and possibly including a link to Toledo. Rail advocacy group All Aboard Ohio supports the so-called “3-C” plan and describes it here.

Burning the Midnight Oil for Living Energy Independence

I’ve been following with interest the discussion of California to Las Vegas HSR at the California HSR blog.

To catch up with the state of play, before the passage of CA-Prop 1A, Senator Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Confusion), who hails from Nevada, supports a maglev line from Las Vegas to Anaheim, and there was an article in the Las Vegas Sun indicating that Gov. Schwarzenegger and Gov. Gibbons had talked up the maglev:

Near the bottom of a news release detailing Gov. Jim Gibbons’ meeting last month with President-elect Barack Obama was the announcement that Gibbons and California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger had agreed to move ahead with the high-speed train project.

“Arnold and I agreed to jointly work together on the project,” said Gibbons, who is planning to travel to Sacramento to talk with Schwarzenegger about it.

Also before the passage of CA-Prop 1A was the DesertXpress proposal to build a private Rapid Passenger Rail system to capture part of the stream of cars heading up the I-15 from LA to Las Vegas. The proposed system starts at Victorville.

Victorville? Why Victorville? If you’d care to follow along, and consider how CA-Prop 1A changes the whole picture, join me after the fold.

Burning the Midnight Oil for Living Energy Independence, also available in Orange

This series started with the following clip:

And I have asked for Electric Trains (Part 1) and High Speed Electric Trains (Part 2). But I am greedy, so I want it all. What I really want is SUSTAINABLE High Speed Electric Trains.

First, it appears that Electric Trains, and Electric High Speed Trains, offer an important step in that direction already, since they offer substantial energy efficiencies … the most sustainable Watt is intelligent design that eliminates the need for that Watt.

Second, the foundation of the nationwide Electric Train system, the electrification of STRACNET, could be the “donkey that carries its own lunch” … there may be an opportunity to use the program to cost effectively accelerate harvesting of our nation’s sustainable renewable energy resources.

So, yes, I want a coast to coast, 100mph, electric freight and passenger train system. Yes, I want the break through the bottlenecks for the Acela in the NEC, establishment of the Empire Corridor, Keystone Corridor, Ohio Hub, Midwest Hub, Southeast Corridor, Gulf Corridor, T-Bone Corridor, Front Range Corridor, Cascadia Corridor, and the CA-HSR.

And, being greedy, powered sustainably.

Burning the Midnight Oil for Energy Independence also in Orange

For the last eight years, development of Energy Independent transport has been faced with a dog-in-the-manger administration fighting furiously to move forward into Cartopian vision of endless crude oil fueling endless road works so people can drive endless hours to actually get wherever they need to go to do whatever it is they need to do.

However, there is hope. This year, the Amtrak funding bill included substantial funding for restoring the North East Corridor to an adequate state of repair. On November 4, California passed Proposition 1A, providing $9.95b in bonds for the California High Speed Rail (HSR) and connecting infrastructure. And then, on November 19, John Kerry and Arlen Specter introduced the a bill for funding High Speed Rail projects:

Titled the High-Speed Rail for America Act of 2008, the bill would provide money for tax-exempt bonds to finance long-stalled high-speed rail projects.

So let’s look at the projects that are on the drawing boards.