Tag: rail

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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 is the evolution of the Midnight Oil series that evolved on Daily Kos earlier in the year.

Burning the Midnight Oil is a place for me to compose diaries that normally end up crossposted hither and yon, normally including Docudharma. It also has an eclectic RSS sidebar of some interesting blogs, but there are more interesting examples elsewhere on the Intertubes.

It also has a regular series of “New Oil” posts of links encountered on my way around the blogosphere, which then becomes “Burning Fires” as the next lantern is opened up to get its New Oil.

Since there’s only been one visitor to the Midnight Oil that I am aware of, I thought as a Christmas pressie, I’d share the New Oil for the last two months.

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.