gildone

Peak oil has always been about the flow rate of conventional oil supplies. Conventional oil = the cheap easy oil that requires only vertical wells in formations that produce it prolifically. These are the giant and super-giant, legacy oil fields in highly permeable formations, with a high energy return on energy invested, that are responsible for 80% of global oil production, and the production in which (globally speaking) is declining by about 4% per year. Conventional oil is not tar sands oil. It's not deep-water oil. It does not require horizontal drilling and fracking (To illustrate: A single well in Saudi Arabia can produce 12,000 bbl/day. One well in the Bakken Formation of North Dakota produces about 130 bbl/day and it requires horizontal drilling and fracking). Production of conventional oil peaked globally roughly a dozen to 15 years ago. All the horizontal fracking that has been done in the past decade, the deep-water oil drilling that brought us the BP Horizon disaster, the development of the Canadian tar sands are the result of peak oil. But, at the time we were able to switch to huge amounts of then untapped petroleum. There is no comparably energy dense source to switch to now, unless we can figure out fusion, but ever since I was a kid, fusion power has always been 30-years away, and it still is. Sidenote: peak oil has never been about "running out". The peak oil crowd, repeatedly and in vain and for more than a decade tried to explain this, but it never sunk in with most people, least of all the media.

The railroads had a hand in it before the auto industry. Read: Trains of Discovery: Railroads and the Legacy of the National Parks by Alfred Runte. Did Burns cover this?

Some suburban workers are staying home too. 🙂

Why is CVSR not so much considering it? ?

How does Cleveland Cliffs fit in with the CVSR extension? (I haven't looked at this thread in awhile, so just asking).

Good point.

There will be no progress with Amtrak until they are forced to fix their deliberately misleading cost accounting system on which they base claims that the Northeast Corridor is profitable (it's not) and the long distance trains are the financial drain on the system (they aren't). Below is a fact sheet that several volunteers with the Rail Passengers Association distributed to 95 members of Congress (all members of the various committees that are involved with Amtrak) back in February of this year. If I were a state, I would be trying to do what the late and former ORDC commissioner Jim Seney was considering when he designed the Ohio Hub plan: not doing business with Amtrak if possible: Amtrak’s Route Accounting System: Fatally Flawed, Deceptive, Misleading Executive Summary Amtrak is deceiving Congress – deliberately and unlawfully. Other victims of its deceit are the Secretary of Transportation, its own Board of Directors, its management team and – most importantly – the American people. Amtrak’s route accounting system (APT) produces false information that misrepresents the real costs of Amtrak’s operations. Worse, it grossly exaggerates the actual taxpayer cost of individual routes and the savings that would result from their elimination. The upcoming reauthorization of the FAST Act makes the need for accurate and relevant information especially urgent because Amtrak is proposing a radical restructuring of the national passenger rail system based entirely on false and misleading data. Since Amtrak began operations, it has added, combined and eliminated routes; increased and reduced frequencies; expanded and contracted train capacity; upgraded and downgraded on-board service. It has made these changes based on faulty information derived from APT and its predecessor system RPS. As a result, the changes did not produce the outcomes desired. Congress established Amtrak as a publicly funded instrumentality of the Federal Government to provide the nation with a useful and beneficial transportation service that the private sector was no longer able or willing to provide. When Secretary of Transportation John Volpe designated the basic passenger rail network, his goal was to concentrate limited resources to ensure that the national passenger rail network made an optimum contribution to the Nation’s total transportation system. Today, we confront important issues and must make critical decisions. How should Amtrak meet the mobility needs of the traveling public? What parts of the nation should it serve? Should Amtrak add a route or eliminate one? Add or reduce capacity? Increase or reduce service frequency? How much should a State pay if it wants more service than Amtrak provides? These policy decisions have long term consequences. These decisions should be made by the people’s elected representatives in Congress, not by its unelected and unaccountable Board of Directors or management cadre. Because Amtrak is a publicly funded organization, profit is neither the appropriate goal nor a useful metric in making these decisions. They require cost/benefit analyses, which depend on the accurate determination of actual costs. APT in its current form does not provide this information. APT’s Fatal Flaws Discussion APT reports only Fully Allocated Costs that misrepresent the underlying economics and distort policy decisions. The Volpe National Transportation Systems Center (Volpe) explains that Fully Allocated Costs are not actual costs but accounting estimates of how much revenue each of Amtrak’s business lines, routes and trains would have to earn in order for Amtrak to cover all of its costs. Conceptually, Fully Allocated Costs are simply revenue targets established by accounting formulas. They do not indicate how much total revenues and costs would rise or fall with the addition or elimination of a route or a train because they include large allocations of costs for fixed overhead and shared facilities that would not vary with changes in service. To make correct decisions about the value delivered by various levels of passenger train service, Congress and the public require information about Avoidable Costs – information that Amtrak’s Finance Department has long worked to suppress. In the late 1990s, Amtrak’s Marketing Department developed the Market Based Network Analysis methodology (MBNA) that showed how changes in routes and frequencies would interact with each other to change the revenues and costs of the total system. Amtrak’s Finance Department gained control of the program and killed it. Later, Volpe developed an Avoidable Cost methodology for APT but Amtrak’s Finance Department, disregarding Congressional mandates, refused to implement it and ultimately abandoned it entirely. Today, Amtrak refuses to provide FRA with the information on avoidable costs that FRA requires for its quarterly performance reports. Both the Federal Railroad Administration (FRA) and Amtrak have ignored the Congressional mandate to engage an independent entity to create a methodology for evaluating Amtrak’s various routes and services. APT excludes significant operating costs in calculating route financial performance. According to Volpe, Capital Consumption is an operating cost. APT, however, does not include this cost in its route financial performance reports – even though APT calculates it. By concealing this cost from Congress and the public, Amtrak is able to propagate its false narrative that its Northeast Corridor is “profitable.” Few see beyond this topline claim to notice the three-word qualifier that Amtrak executives typically add – usually with a wink and a nod – “above the rail.” This concept is nonsense and clearly deceptive. Without rails, trains do not move or perform a mobility function. Amtrak’s treatment of track access costs, however, exempts only its Northeast Corridor; Amtrak treats the track access payments for all other routes as an operating cost. How much does this accounting alchemy understate the NEC’s operating costs? Amtrak won’t say. Its Fiscal Year 2020 Grant Request, however, provides a clue. In it, Amtrak stated that the National Network routes (Long Distance and State Supported) will impose $280 million in capital costs on the NEC in 2020. National Network trains account for 14% of either train- or ton-miles on the NEC. Mathematically it follows that the “capital consumption” of Amtrak’s NEC operations are be $1.72 billion. When this cost is charged against the $568.4 million in “adjusted operating earnings” that APT reported for the NEC in 2019, the true operating loss of the NEC could be in the vicinity of $1.1 to $1.2 billion a year. That’s billion with a B. APT relies on inaccurate data. Amtrak’s business practices do not allow collection of detailed data on its costs. For example, Amtrak is unaware of the actual cost of fuel and power used by each of its trains and routes. Moreover, errors in coding expenses in its general ledger system have been a problem that causes expenses to be misallocated. Other data inputs to APT also contains errors. For example, Amtrak treats the two sections of the Empire Builder (Chicago to Portland and Seattle) and the Lake Shore Limited (Chicago to New York and Boston) as two separate trains even though they run as a single train for more than 80% of their respective routes. The result is a significant overstatement of train miles, one of the statistics APT uses to allocate various costs. Revenue inputs also include errors. For example, Amtrak credits all of the revenue generated by the portion of the train that operates on both the Sunset Limited and the Texas Eagle entirely to the Eagle even though the majority of miles is on the Sunset. As a consequence, APT incorrectly reports the financial performance of the Sunset as being the lowest in the system. APT calculates costs in multiple phases, so small errors at the beginning compound to larger errors at the end. In technology parlance, APT’s problem is known as GIGO – Garbage In, Garbage Out. APT does not have accurate cost data. In 2013, Amtrak could only trace 20% of its costs to specific trains and routes; it had to “allocate” (guess) at the other 80%. By 2016, Amtrak had reduced this percentage to less than 50%, but only for each of its large business lines, not necessarily for each of its individual trains and routes. This improvement resulted primarily from better use of the cost data already available in its general ledger accounting system rather than from improvements in Amtrak’s business practices or cost data collection. Because the percentage of its total costs that Amtrak must indirectly “allocate” is high, the probability that the costs for a particular activity are misstated is also high, making Amtrak’s calculation of route costs less credible and reliable. Because APT relies on some 50,000 to 60,000 manually developed rules to make those “allocations,” the costs it reports are subject not only to human error but also to outright manipulation designed to produce predetermined outcomes. APT does not include revenue generated by passengers connecting with other routes. The number of passengers that use more than one train to complete their journey typically exceeds two million a year with revenue that exceeds $200 million. Amtrak collects this data but does not include it in the route performance reports that APT produces. As a result, these reports understate the amount of revenue the system would lose or gain if a route or frequency were eliminated or added. Volpe marked this issue as a problem that needed further work. Since Amtrak discarded Volpe’s work, there has been no progress in resolving this outstanding issue. APT lacks credibility and acceptance. Amtrak cites Volpe’s involvement in APT’s development to enhance its credibility. The reports Volpe submitted to Congress, however, reveal that its involvement was ultimately quite limited. Volpe joined the project after Amtrak had already begun work. Volpe concentrated on developing a methodology for Avoidable Costs while Amtrak continued work on its methodology for Fully Allocated Costs. Volpe’s work was constrained by the accounting structure that Amtrak Finance had already established that was more suitable to its Fully Allocated Costs. Volpe’s work was also compromised by Amtrak’s business practices, which limited its ability to obtain detailed information on costs. Ultimately, Amtrak discarded Volpe’s Avoidable Cost methodology. From the public record, a reasonable person could conclude that Amtrak’s Financial Department designed APT and that Volpe’s involvement was limited mainly to documenting Amtrak’s methodology. Amtrak claims that APT’s accuracy is ensured because it, FRA, Volpe and State partners “devote significant resources to this objective.” In testimony to Congress on November 13, 2019, Stacey Mortensen, Executive Director of both the San Joaquin Joint Powers Authority and San Joaquin Regional Rail Commission cited significant problems in dealing with Amtrak, its lack of data transparency; resistance to data sharing; inability to determine a fair cost sharing formula; inability to tie costs rationally to actual service, including its preposterous claim that a reduction in service would not necessarily produce a reduction in costs. Government reports show that other State “partners” have similar problems with Amtrak and its costing of services. Most interesting of all is that Amtrak’s own managers do not rely on APT to provide them with actionable information, preferring instead to obtain the data they need directly from Amtrak’s financial accounting system. APT gives Amtrak unconstrained pricing power over the States. PRIIA Section 209 required Amtrak to develop a pricing structure that would ensure that all States pay the same amount for the same service. This pricing scheme replaced the previous program that had allowed individual States to negotiate separate and different compensation agreements with Amtrak. The States and Amtrak settled on the APT. Since Amtrak has complete control over APT and its methodology, APT gives Amtrak the power to charge States for whatever costs Amtrak – at its sole discretion – claims them to be. Since it takes 50,000 – 60,000 allocation rules to determine those costs – each rule developed and overseen by Amtrak accountants – it is easy to understand why external oversight is virtually impossible, why Amtrak is so protective of its “proprietary” information and why Amtrak is so determined to prevent public disclosure of any information about its short- or long-term avoidable costs. APT’s Fully Allocated Costing allows Amtrak to conceal how much it marks up actual costs for overhead and joint facilities. If States knew the amount of the markup, it would alter the negotiating balance of power and make it more difficult for Amtrak to offload a large portion of its total costs onto the States. Final Note This paper supplements our previous critique of APT, Amtrak’s Route Accounting: Fatally Flawed, Misleading & Wrong, Rail Passengers Association, August 15, 2018, revised June 2, 2019 available on our website: https://www.railpassengers.org/happening-now/news/releases/amtraks-route-accounting-fatally-flawed-misleading-wrong/ Rev 1/31/20

But Amtrak is doing that by trying to extract money from the states to make it happen. Given the very serious problems with Amtrak's non-GAAP compliant route cost accounting and complaints from states that work with Amtrak already about how they are opaque about costs and can't even communicate how much it would cost to do a simple thing like add a coach to a train, I wouldn't trust them at all.

Eau Claire, WI -- St. Paul: 85 miles. Population density roughly 4,300/mi. I guess population density isn't as important as people think: https://www.wpr.org/chippewa-valley-eyeing-private-public-partnership-passenger-rail What an acquaintance of mine, who is involved in this project, has to say: "A fair number of people in Eau Claire actually work in St. Paul, which is 85 miles west and something of a hellish drive on I-94. If the train service opens it is a pretty sure thing that lots of other people working in St. Paul will settle in Eau Claire because housing costs are much cheaper. Many of them would be there now if it weren't for the punishing drive. The train service would be something like the Hiawathas between Milwaukee and Chicago--also 85 miles: a combination of daily commuter traffic, business trips and discretionary leisure/family travel. The trains would probably carry lots of cyclists from the Twin Cities out to Eau Claire on the weekends because the scenery is really pleasant and the bike trails well developed, and in winter the same trains and trails would carry lots of cross-country skiers."

Another private project. Commuter rail in the northeast. Boston Surface Railroad has a transport solution for the Northeast’s underserved metropolitan regions The railroad hopes to begin initial runs between Woonsocket, R.I., and Worcester, Mass., in late 2020. MISCHA WANEK-LIBMAN APRIL 25, 2019 https://www.masstransitmag.com/rail/article/21077811/boston-surface-railroad-has-a-transport-solution-for-the-northeasts-underserved-metropolitan-regions?fbclid=IwAR3SrWWoziuGZJ98Dm5xpWbMkbzOV3lfrZ82rBGGkJxLU3WYCMi3mmrikCk

With Richard Branson's Virgin Group investing in Brightline (which will soon be changed to Virgin Trains USA) and a private company looking to follow Brightline's model for a commuter rail project in Milwaukee (see latest post Private Intercity Passenger Rail Projects thread), it's looking more and more like the 3C Corridor (and some others in Ohio) would be good candidates for private investment/development to bring us train service. In fact, All Aboard Ohio has sent information to Brightline about the 3C, PGH-COL-Lima-FTW-CHI, DET-TOL-CLE-YTO-PGH, and CIN-CHI corridors about why they are worth considering for their investment.

Now this is getting interesting: A private company is looking to start a 55-mile commuter rail line in Milwaukee. Looks like they are following the Brightline (which is now Virgin Trains USA) model of using the train to generate profits from real estate development. And, the company doesn't own the rail line they want to operate on: Group seeking $1.4 billion for private commuter rail project A New York capital raising firm is helping a Wisconsin company attempt to raise more than $1.4 billion to support a private commuter rail project in metro Milwaukee along with related real estate development. The project by Transit Innovations LLC would use existing freight lines to create the commuter system, called E-Way. The company says it would build 21 new stations and use two existing ones along 55 miles of track across Milwaukee and Waukesha counties. Full article at: https://www.biztimes.com/2018/industries/banking-finance/group-seeking-1-4-billion-for-private-commuter-rail-project/?fbclid=IwAR0uUjs1YoGt8ADfbXD4o8gz3s9yt-rQ2qOm_oUZWgzvvC3-h213uQ6WLPU

This is a good piece that takes a broader look at who the "transportation disadvantaged" are. The author argues that it's not just disabled, elderly, and those who cannot afford cars, but also those in the broad swaths of the USA who have no choice but to reach for the car keys. He also brings up an interesting perspective that, while it is true that Europeans pay higher taxes, in much of Europe it is possible to get by without a car. Conversely, in the US taxes may be lower, but because a car is required if most people are to get to work and just run life's errands, but cars cost an average of $9000 per year to buy, operate, and maintain. In a typical American household with two cars, that's an $18,000 unavoidable "car tax" that puts the European-US tax argument in a new perspective: Who Are the Transportation Disadvantaged? http://www.resilience.org/stories/2017-07-20/who-are-the-transportation-disadvantaged/

I missed this Washington Post piece when it came out 2 years ago. It clearly shows how the so-called love affair with cars was nothing more than a public relations campaign that has become ingrained in the public psyche. It also rightly points out that it is difficult to respond to this thinking with logic and facts. Which is why I like to say that it's not a love affair, it's a shotgun marriage. It's not my line, I heard or read someone say that at least 15 years ago if not longer. I wish I could remember who it was, but it's absolutely right. The article also goes through a lot of forgotten history, including a movement in the 1920s to get cars out of cities: The Myth of the American Love Affair with Cars: “It’s one of the biggest public relations coups of all time. It’s always treated as folk wisdom, as an organic growth from society. One of the signs of its success is that everyone forgets it was invented as a public relations campaign.” https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/01/27/debunking-the-myth-of-the-american-love-affair-with-cars/?utm_term=.3c8e224f7a0d

People in Columbus need to organize and put pressure on the Mayor's office and the city council. Organize like they did in Cincinnati for the streetcar. That's what gets the job done.

You're on the right track. Price volatility, demand destruction when prices get too high, etc. These are among the things that happen when you hit Peak Oil. It doesn't negate it, though, as Gramarye seems to think it does. OPEC not cutting production is a bit more theater than anything else. OPEC has never been good at sticking to production cuts.

Fluctuating oil prices, including extended of declining oil prices are not and never have been at odds with Peak Oil. Over a decade ago, the Peak Oil crowd explained this is one of the things that would occur. That aside, your argument doesn't change the fact that discovery of new sources of oil-- in terms of barrels found-- vs. barrels produced (on a global scale) have been lagging for decades. This is exactly Peak Oil. Just facts. Nothing alarmist. No crying wolf either despite your protestations and those of the industry and media to the contrary.

Sorry, but no it's not. Your statement is a good example of how we keep lying to ourselves about what's really going on. Plus it's awfully easy to make a statement like that without providing a shred of evidence to back it up. Anyway... 1. This is not a recent development. Production has been exceeding new discoveries for several decades now-- read the article and look at the data (I suspect you haven't actually read the whole thing?). 2. Oil companies never stop looking for oil. They need to replace their reserves in order to keep their stock prices up, the dividends going and the investors happy. This problem really started rearing its head in the mid 1990s when decades old oil companies began merging. They were merging because they could no longer increase their reserves anything but marginally with new discoveries, so they increased them by merging. In a similar vein, the reason Exxon, for example, has been quietly buying back its stock for quite a few years now is to artificially keep the price of their stock up because they can no longer replace their reserves like they used to. The new oil just isn't there in significant quantities anymore compared to the past. 3. New oil discoveries are expensive because they are smaller in size, lower in quality, lower in yield, and lower in energy returned on energy invested compared to the super-giant fields in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Mexico, Texas (the original Texas fields, not the new shale oil ones), Shallow Gulf of Mexico, North Sea, Daquing field in China, Iran, Iraq, Alaska Prudhoe Bay, etc that were discovered decades ago. If there were significant cheap, easy fields left that's what the oil companies would be going after, but there are none left. 4. 90% of global production today comes from legacy, super-giant oil fields that are decades old (see partial list above). There just isn't enough new oil out there to replace these huge, cheap, easy fields, many of which are in production decline. 5. Even when prices were higher, these new, expensive fields just couldn't do what the super-giant legacy fields (again, see above). It takes a couple thousand wells in the shale-oil fields of North Dakota, for example to produce what less than a 10th of that number can produce in Saudi Arabia. 6. On top of it all, and I provide this one to show the level of denial that is occurring: things that aren't crude oil have been included in "new oil production" since about 2006-- the industry and even the US government in the US Energy Information Administration changed the definition of crude oil to mask the problem. They started including things like biofuels and natural gas liquids in the oil production figures. These things aren't oil. I even saw a figure in the Wall Street Journal a few years ago that was comparing US oil production with Saudi production in an effort to show that our oil production was exceeding that of Saudi Arabia. But the US chart included natural gas liquids and biofuels, but not the Saudi chart. Sorry, but you can't take two bushels of apples and a bushel of oranges produced in one place and compare it to to two and a half bushels of apples produced somewhere else and say the first place produced more apples. Reality is what it is. Denial can't change it. We are in the midst of Peak Oil now.

Despite temporarily low oil prices and what the industry and media say, Peak Oil is still a reality. Discovery of new sources of oil have been lagging behind global oil production for decades and it is now at a 70-year low: Peak Oil by Any Other Name is Still Peak Oil One of the most compelling charts I have ever seen is the “Growing Gap” chart that used to appear on the front page of every ASPO Newsletter. This is the one from the last ASPO Newsletter, written by Colin Campbell and published in April 2009. Since then, more than seven years have passed, and peak oil has disappeared from the mainstream press headlines--almost. On August 29, Bloomberg published a story alerting to the fact that conventional oil discovery has reached a 70-year low. It published a very interesting chart, using data provided by Wood Mackenzie, the oil consulting firm, to show that fact. Unlike the ASPO chart, Bloomberg's chart only goes back to 1947, the year before Ghawar was discovered... Full article at: http://www.resilience.org/stories/2016-09-08/peak-oil-by-any-other-name-is-still-peak-oil

How to fix the damage from in-city highways Every time an in-city highway has been replaced by more human-scale infrastructure, the city and region has benefitted, according to transportation experts who led workshops for USDOT. ROBERT STEUTEVILLE SEP. 1, 2016 Transportation and planning experts Peter Park and Ian Lockwood each helped lead recent workshops for US Department of Transportation (USDOT) and the Congress for the New Urbanism (CNU) called the Ladders of Opportunity Every Place Counts Design Challenge. The events were the first of their kind: USDOT sought to alleviate the negative impacts of in-city Interstates built in the 20th Century that divided neighborhoods and often displaced hundreds or thousands of people. Lockwood served as a leader of two-day workshops in Spokane and Nashville and Park steered workshops in Philadelphia and the Twin Cities of Minneapolis/St. Paul. The events occurred in mid-July. Public Square editor Robert Steuteville interviewed Park and Lockwood about freeway caps, highway teardowns, complete streets, and what they learned from USDOT’s “Every Place Counts.”... Read more at: https://www.cnu.org/publicsquare/2016/09/01/how-fix-damage-city-highways

Traveling Between Berlin and Munich Is About to Get a Whole Lot Easier Trains on a new high-speed route could ultimately be driverless, too. Feargus O'Sullivan @FeargusOSull Sep 1, 2016 On Wednesday, the E.U.’s most populous country got a little bit smaller. Thanks to a newly electrified stretch of railway track just opened across Germany’s Thuringian Forest, travel times between Berlin and Munich will soon be slashed. By December 2017, it will take a whole two hours less to travel between Germany’s largest and third largest cities. Reducing the 505 kilometer (314 mile) journey to just over 4 hours, down from 6 hours and 15 minutes, will finally offer genuinely fast land transit across one of Central Europe’s most important routes. When the convenience of downtown-to-downtown travel is factored in, the high-speed rail link (trains will eventuall run at speeds of up to 300 kilometers per hour) will give planes and highways a run for their money... http://www.citylab.com/commute/2016/09/berlin-to-munich-train-high-speed-rail/498332/

Canada Opening 22,000 km Car-Free Bike Path Across The Country In 2017 by Jeremy Hazan · September 1, 2016 Canada has its very own “car-free highway” currently being built and so far it’s 20,770 km long! Construction began in 1992 and is scheduled to be completed by 2017, just in time for Canada’s 150th anniversary. So far over 87% of the trail is complete, and it already connects most of the major cities in Canada. Although it isn’t a bike path in the traditional sense, it is exclusively designated for recreational purposes and only allows bikes, hikers and horseback riders in the summer and in the winter it is used for cross-country skiing and snowmobiling. Read more and see map and photos at: http://www.mtlblog.com/2016/09/canada-opening-22000-km-car-free-bike-path-across-the-country-in-2017/#

Texas Central is facing more hurdles now that the Surface Transportation Board has ruled that the project lies entirely within state jurisdiction. Opponents are now foaming at the mouth over stopping the project: Texas Bullet Train Opponents Hope to Block Project Next Year https://www.texastribune.org/2016/07/26/lawmakers-take-high-speed-rail-next-sesssion/ Excerpt: The state Legislature could put up major road blocks next year for a private firm's plans to build a high-speed rail project connecting Houston and Dallas now that a federal transportation board has decided the project falls under state jurisdiction.

You are correct. Development of expensive, low energy returned on energy-invested oil (EROEI) is the result of peak oil, which was never about running out of oil but about how fast you can get it out of the ground to keep production growing an affordable price. We're stuck between an inability to grow production as fast as we did for the first 150 years of the oil age and an economy that needs cheap oil to function.

Eastcost Greenway: This 3,000-Mile-Long Bike Lane Will Let You Ride From Maine To Florida If you ride 50 miles a day, you could do the entire trail in less than two months. But they have to finish it first. One day, not too far in the future, cyclists will be able to ride all the way from Maine to Florida, thanks to a 3,000-mile bike path that is already almost one-third completed. The lane is being cajoled into existence by the East Coast Greenway Alliance (ECGA). So far, 850 miles exist, and another 200 should be in place by 2020. In the U.S., it seems amazing that such a thing could exist at all, but the really amazing part is how it’s being built. Full Article At: http://www.fastcoexist.com/3061881/this-3000-mile-long-bike-lane-will-let-you-ride-from-maine-to-florida/?utm_content=bufferd28be&utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook.com&utm_campaign=buffer