Then we wouldn't have to worry about Global Warming or Peak Oil.

 

I know, and to top it all off, all those peak oil threads would be infinitely more fun if we were talking about the Peak Wood Crisis.

 

You know, for some Peak Wood isn't a crisis but an opportunity.

Don't joke. Go to the U.K. with the knowledge that much of the British Isles was covered by forests. So was Easter Island, where its inhabitants cut down all the trees for boats to support a robust fishing economy. But it all ended for a lack of trees and the population starved. So were the Greek Isles which were covered by thick pine forests and which fortunately are coming back.

 

Human beings have a sad history of self-destruction through consumption.

Don't joke. Go to the U.K. with the knowledge that much of the British Isles was covered by forests. So was Easter Island, where its inhabitants cut down all the trees for boats to support a robust fishing economy. But it all ended for a lack of trees and the population starved. So were the Greek Isles which were covered by thick pine forests and which fortunately are coming back.

 

By that argument, though, the switch to coal was a definite positive.  Forest cover in the USA has been increasing for something like a generation now, too.  That wouldn't be the case if we were actually relying on pre-Industrial Revolution fuel sources (i.e., wood, raw human & animal muscle power, etc.).

We wouldn't have as much population and carbon emissions either. But this is all a subject for another thread.

Responding to the critics was this thoughtful but lengthy piece:

 

http://www.infrastructurist.com:80/2009/08/25/hey-ed-glaeser-youre-wrong-better-numbers-shows-high-speed-rail-pays-for-itself/

 

Why Glaeser Got It Wrong: Re-Running The Numbers On High Speed Rail

Posted on Tuesday August 25th by Yonah Freemark

 

Over the past month, economist Ed Glaeser has explored the benefits of high-speed rail in an occasional series over at the New York Times website. To put it mildly, his reception in the blogosphere has been wretched. Ryan Avent at Streetsblog has been a particularly devastating critic, picking apart Glaeser’s analysis strand by and strand and characterizing the overall effort as “daft and indefensible.”

 

....The problem is that–through a sorry mix of omission, oversimplification, distortion, and deficiency–his calculations bear no relation to the effects he is claiming to consider. So it’s important to show that “the numbers” do not at all undermine the viability of HSR in the US, even outside the northeast and California. In fact, they tend to support it.

 

.........

 

Yonah Freemark blogs about transportation and land use issues at The Transport Politic and is a regular contributor to The Infrastructurist.

The anti-rail crowd says rail projects fail to meet their ridership projections. Gee, I guess they must mean in every city except low-density Denver....

_______________

 

Denver Light Rail turns 15       

Wednesday, October 07, 2009 

 

 

This month, Denver's Regional Transportation District is marking the 15th anniversary of light rail opening in the metro area. Since RTD opened the 5.3-mile Central Light Rail Line October 7,1994, RTD's 35-mile light rail system has carried nearly 150 million passenger trips. The light rail network carries an average of about 60,000 passenger trips every weekday, ahead of ridership projections. All four of RTD's light rail lines were built on time and on budget, and each exceeded ridership projections.

 

http://www.rtands.com/newsflash/denver-light-rail-turns-15.html

Darn good response to the hit-men....

 

http://citiwire.net/post/1391/

Driving on to Irrelevance: That Or a 21st Century Train System

Thomas Downs / Oct 09 2009

For Release Friday, October 9, 2009

Citiwire.net

 

There is an old saying that Americans will always do the right thing, but only after they have tried everything else first.

 

Unfortunately, it's hard to make the transition. Latest example: visceral opposition to high-speed rail by those who should be thinking more innovatively. Consider Robert Samuelson's recent column in the Washington Post- "A Rail Boondoggle, Moving at High Speed." Samuelson cites the usual statistics-that we are an auto culture, that not enough people ride trains, that the costs are high. So, he concludes, President Obama's commitment to high-speed passenger rail is a fool's errand.

 

But Samuelson's among those who has been playing this song for over 20 years. Their message has turned into a weird anomaly given what is happening around the rest of the globe.

 

First, lets look at the true subsidy costs of a mono focus on highway investment. At least $100 billion of state, county, and city general funds are invested every year in highways and highway costs. Those are direct subsidies to the highway system, outside of any "user pay" trust fund. The federal government has started to invest general funds into highways, in part because no one wants to actually have to pay for the costs of highways with an increase in user fees.

 

Second, there are over 2 million Americans injured every year on America's roads, at an annual medical cost of over $200 billion. Saving half of that cost would pay the entire cost of health care reform over the next decade.

 

Third, the energy and environmental costs of our auto culture drive our defense and medical costs in ways that he have all agreed to turn a blind eye to-though the true cost is probably in the range of a half trillion dollars a year.

If we can manage to ignore the $750 billion cost of our highway fixation, then Samuelson's argument makes some kind of weird sense-though you have to suspend logic, economics, and global experience to get there.

 

Why has every industrialized nation in the world made, and continues to make, large scale investments in high-speed rail? That's what Samuelson's argument can't reach. If you look at the roll call of nations with high-speed passenger rail, it includes Germany, France, Spain, Italy, Japan, China, and South Korea. Could all of them be wrong? China alone is pursuing a 3,000-mile high-speed network. What propels all of these industrial nations to invest so seriously in this mode of transportation? They are making hardheaded decisions about their nation's future and their economic self-interest. We have just started to do so.

 

In the U.S. House of Representative, the Transportation and Infrastructure Committee has marked up a reauthorization bill for highways and transit. The bill proposes to spend $550 billion over the next 6 years. The vast majority of those funds would go to the highway program. The bill would allocate $50 billion over the life of the bill for high-speed passenger rail. That's less than 10 percent of our national transportation funding. The Samuelsons of the world may call it a waste. I see a humongous greater waste-the $750 billion we're incurring, year-in and year-out, in the indirect costs we incur by failing to build alternatives to our transportation monoculture. That's the unconscionable economic waste.

 

I am not suggesting that highways are going to be anything other than the dominant mode of transportation in the United States for a long time. I am suggesting that there are corridors, less than 500 miles long, where density and economic activity make high speed passenger rail the only viable mobility investment. The total trip time of air travel in those corridors, combined with the energy costs, makes high speed rail the logical choice and a far better choice than the costs of expanding highway capacity in those congested and dense corridors. For those trips, high-speed rail delivers you to the heart of the city, not to a remote airport. I am also suggesting that there is simply no comparison between the safety of a train trip verses the safety of an auto trip. In the end, we need a broader set of mobility choices than we have created for ourselves. The public seems to understand this, as editorial and public opinion polling is making clear.

 

What is discouraging in this debate is that someone as bright as Samuelson cannot think in broader, more expansive terms about the American future. We can do better. Yes, we can!

 

Tom Downs is chairman of the North American Board of Veolia Transportation and a former president of Amtrak.

 

Citiwire.net columns are not copyrighted and may be reproduced in print or electronically; please show authorship, credit Citiwire.net and send an electronic copy of usage to [email protected].

 

This article was posted on October 9, 2009. Trackbacks are closed, but you can post a comment.

Outstanding!

 

This also needs to be sent to our road-building, petrol-sipping, mother-trucking friends here in Ohio!

Here's some facts you can use to counter arguments like "XYZ Rail Line will carry only TINY percentage of trips in VAST REGIONAL TERRITORY" posed by the cementheads....

______

 

Strength in numbers

Kevin Brubaker, Deputy Director

Environmental Law & Policy Center (www.elpc.org)

 

As America embarks on its first investment in passenger rail in decades, it is important to remember that the strength of our transportation system lies not in single corridors, but in networks. The less reliant we are on a single corridor or mode, the stronger our transportation system.

 

Thus, when critics of high-speed rail point to the small portion of Americans who will use a particular train, they are missing the point.

 

Many components of America's transportation infrastructure with local and regional, if not national, significance carry only a small percentage of regional travelers or trips:

 

• America's busiest airport (Atlanta) handles only six percent of domestic boardings. Dallas, Denver, and Los Angeles each handle less than three percent.

 

• Interstate 494 in Minnesota serves popular destinations such as the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport, the Mall of America, and growing suburbs. Yet only seven percent of all trips made in the Twin Cities metro region utilize I-494.

 

• The Capital Beltway, the busy circumferential highway dividing Washington, D.C., from reality, carries less than 11 percent of area commuters. Replacing a single bridge along this road cost $2.5 billion.

 

• On a typical business day, only 2 percent of people entering Manhattan's Central Business District drive over the Brooklyn Bridge.

 

• And on the West Coast, trans-San Francisco Bay trips through the Bay Bridge Corridor, across the San Mateo Howard Bridge and over the Dumbarton Bridge comprise only 4 percent of all regional trips.

 

Nobody would seriously suggest that any of these pieces of transportation infrastructure is "wasteful" because it serves such a small portion of its potential users. Let's not let critics go unchallenged in saying the same about rail investments.

Hmm, methinks Mr. Brubaker is practicing the same rhetoric: replacing a single bridge on the Capital Beltway costs $2.5 billion? C'mon.

 

And the Atlanta airport handles 99% of Atlanta air travelers.

 

A network is a network...of course looking at one piece of the network is disingenuous. But the real problem remains that a passenger rail network only handles 2% of travel.

Hmm, methinks Mr. Brubaker is practicing the same rhetoric: replacing a single bridge on the Capital Beltway costs $2.5 billion? C'mon.

 

 

OK, you've got him there! The cost of replacing the Woodrow Wilson Bridge was only $2.47 billion.

No, his clear impliction is that every bridge costs 2.5b to replace, and that is disingenuous.

I didn't get that implication at all. I've known Kevin for a decade, and that's not Kevin's style to make those kinds of implications.

 

But, to each their own.....

BTW, in another thread, some urban-minded young person asked "Who is Albert S. Porter" so I offer this background:

 

Albert Porter was Cuyahoga County Engineer for 30 years until 1977. He is famous for:

 

+ Being a proponent of using highways to demolish what he called the squalid conditions of low-income tenements, without considering relocation plans for their residents. One of the most notable were neighborhoods southeast of downtown leveled by the Willow Freeway (today's I-77). Many of those residents overcrowded into Hough, creating the tinder box that ignited into the riot a decade later.

 

+ Saw highways as being the tool to remove "substandard" or "deficient" structures. In practice, that meant historic homes and buildings, including those built in dense settings that made auto use difficult and unpopular. Porter was a student of the land use principles espoused by the big car manufacturers and oil companies, like GM and Shell which unveiled their "Futurama" visions at the 1939 World's Fair.

 

+ Porter was also a student of Studebaker President Paul Hoffman, who wrote in the Saturday Evening Post in 1939: "If we are to have full use of automobiles, cities must be remade. The greatest automobile market today, the greatest untapped field of potential customers, is the large number of city people who refuse to own cars, or use the cars they have very little, because it's such a nuisance to take them out." To get at that urban market, Hoffman continued "We must dream of gashing our way ruthlessly through built-up sections of overcrowded cities."

 

+ Planned to build the Clark Freeway through the Shaker Lakes, calling them "two-bit duck ponds" but his plan was stopped.

 

+ Proposed demolishing the magnificent Guardians of Transportation statues on the Lorain-Carnegie Bridge, so there could be more lanes that studies showed weren't even needed. "Those columns are monstrosities and should be torn down and forgotten," the Cleveland Press quoted Bert Porter as saying in 1976. "There is nothing particularly historic about any one of them. We're not running a May Show here."

 

+ Planned to build U.S. Route 6 (Clifton-Lake) through the leafy and swanky Clifton Park neighborhood in Lakewood. Porter, a Lakewood resident, first proposed this roadway connection in 1929 when he was a young engineer in the County Engineers office. While outer suburbs supported this project, many objected to it, including the City of Lakewood which fought it all the way to the Ohio Supreme Court in 1960 and lost. Dozens of beautiful homes in Lakewood were demolished and construction of U.S. 6 was completed in 1964.

 

+ Required that Cleveland Transit System remove the city's last streetcar lines in exchange for support from Cuyahoga County for the proposed east-west Rapid Transit line (today's Red Line).

 

+ Opposed the bond issue passed by 65 percent of countywide voters in 1953 to build a downtown subway. Porter got the county commissioners to put so many requirements on the project, including an assurance that there would be no cost overruns, that there was no way the subway could be built. That was part of the fight. The other was that least two of the three county commissioners reportedly engaged in a bribing war between Public Square and Playhouse Square interests. The Public Square interests (Higbee's, May Co., etc), who were against the subway out-bribed Halle's, Sterling-Linder, according to the family that owned the Hanna Building back then.

 

+ Advocated numerous other freeway projects that bisected and destroyed Cleveland neighborhoods, significantly eroded the city's taxbase by demolishing homes, businesses, turned private properties into public properties, made it easier for people and businesses to move farther away, thereby spreading the taxbase thinner and over a broader area -- ie: sprawl. Porter was an staunch advocate of it and even hired former Cleveland News reporter and transit historian Harry Christiansen to help him make his case.

 

+ Planned to demolish the historic town center of Olmsted Falls to build an interchange-style intersection between Columbia and Bagley roads. A schoolgirl responded with a passionate letter to Albert Porter, essentially asking "Please Mr. Porter, don't destroy our town." Porter responded with a letter of his own -- a vile piece that ripped the little girl to shreds and reportedly brought her to tears. The letter was shared with the media, and disgraced Porter. It was one of his final undoings.

 

+ And his last straw - he left office in disgrace when it was learned that he required employees of the county engineer's office to contribute to his re-election campaign. Porter pleaded guilty to 19 counts of theft in office, was fined $10,000, and placed on probation for 2 years. That happened shortly after he chewed out the little girl in Olmsted Falls. Porter ran for reelection in 1976 and lost. The public had had enough of Albert S. Porter.

 

+ Porter died January 7, 1979 at the age of 74.

 

If you would like to read more about this guy, see:

 

http://ech.cwru.edu/ech-cgi/article.pl?id=PAS

http://clevhist.blogspot.com/2009/06/albert-s-porter-award.html

http://www.shakersquare.net/news/pd-sept25-shakerlakes.htm

The transportation encarnation of Scrooge.

Passenger rail coalition questions timing, intent of rail subsidy study   

Railway Age Magazine

 

The States For Passenger Rail Coalition is publiclyquestioning the recently released study, sponsored by Pew Charitable Trusts,that highlights Amtrak subsidies, pegging the average cost to the individualtaxpayer at $32 per passenger trip. Subsidyscope, an arm of Philadelphia-based PewCharitable Trusts, conducted the study.

 

“Why Amtrak was singled out in this study is a mystery,”Coalition Chair Frank Busalacchi, who is also Wisconsin’s secretary of transportation,said. “The fact is all forms of transportation require federal support. Anational transportation system cannot exist without all modes receiving supportfrom the federal government. The irony in this study is that it singles outpassenger rail, which receives the lowest level of support.”

 

More at:

http://www.railwayage.com/breaking-news/passenger-rail-coalition-questions-timing-intent-of-rail-subsidy-study.html

The transportation encarnation of Scrooge.

 

And Cuyahoga County got Scrooged...

The transportation encarnation of Scrooge.

 

And Cuyahoga County got Scrooged...

Porter probably is a transportation planner in Hell for all eternity - all the more reason to want to avoid going there! I'm stayin' sweet and innocent!

Does anyone have Porter's pic? I bet he even LOOKED like scrooge!!! :-D

Every organization with an interest in this should pile on and give Pew a load of grief.

As we ponder the removal of urban rail transit systems that anchored walkable neighborhoods, the abandonment and destruction of many U.S. cities over the past 50 years, the isolation of the urban poor, the nation's immobilized elderly population, the creation of sprawling car-dependent suburbia where transit cannot effectively serve or survive, our depletion of our once-world leading domestic oil reserves and thus ever-worsening dependence on imported oil, as well as dangerously high carbon emissions, consider these issues in the context of the eye-opening Harper's article by Jonathan Kwitney from February, 1981, "The Great Transportation Conspiracy."

 

The article, scanned column by colum, was uploaded to a friend's web site as a series of JPGs displayed by an html file. A text search won't stumble across it; one has to know where to look. Well here it is:

 

http://robertpence.com/streetcars/streetcars.html

 

From time to time, interviews and articles surface where some current or retired transit official claims it never happened. That's not too suprising, considering that when Kwitney researched his article he found "no more than three" such people who claiimed to have any knowledge of the events. Probably a lot of former execs and employees from that era had already died off, and I speculate that some who denied any knowledge were trying to conceal their own complicity.

 

Kwitney presents such a thorougly-researched, detailed narrative that it's pretty hard to believe the claims of those who deny it ever happened.

John Diers published an article in the January 2006 issue of Trains about the GM "Conspiracy".  He claims that there is no evidence that there was a conspiracy, in part, because they weren't convicted of a conspiracy.  His argument is that GM merely wanted a bigger piece of the transportation pie, but those streetcars were just too expensive.  Kwitney's article does a good job of casting quite a bit of doubt on Diers' position.  When I read Diers' article, I had a nagging feeling that something didn't add up.  It's not that I would prefer to believe there was a conspiracy as I read his article with an open mind, I just felt something wasn't adding up-- and still do. 

 

Interesting, though that there were some cities that wanted to get rid of streetcars because they were "in the way" of auto traffic on city streets.  Someone told me that the Cleveland Press published an editorial in, I think, the early 50s arguing that the streetcars needed to be removed from city streets.  Of course, we were well on our way to auto dependence by then. 

 

Thanks for posting this. 

 

 

 

I remember Diers' article in Trains. I had read Kwitney's article years earlier, and as I read Diers', I couldn't help reflecting back. I couldn't figure out where Diers was coming from, but I was pretty sure he was either misinformed or in denial.

No exaggeration, Albert S. Porter is singularly THE most destructive person in Cleveland history.  The subway destruction plus freeway agenda has created negative city trends that have not been reversed for Cleveland.

I recently had coffee with a man who has been a transit advocate in Cleveland for several decades. He told me that a member of the family which owned the Hanna Building said a bidding war erupted after the 1953 subway bond issue vote. The bidding war was between the major department stores and property owners at Public Square vs. those at Playhouse Square. The bidding was to see who could bribe the Cuyahoga County Commissioners the most. The Playhouse Square interests wanted the subway because it would provide access to their stores and increase their property values. Public Square interests wanted to block the subway to restrain competition from Playhouse Square.

 

If this story is true, history tells us which group offered the bigger bribe.

Yeah, I'd read something years ago that Porter/the comishes were carrying the water for Higbee's/May's ... of course, with a little something in thier pockets when they walked away.

An excellent piece of work by a Tampa, Florida newspaper on the anti-rail tactics of some of these so-0called "think tanks":

 

Think tank rejects rail

By Michael Van Sickler, Times Staff Writer

 

Published Friday, November 27, 2009

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

 

TAMPA — For two decades, the Center for Urban Transportation Research has advised Florida policymakers on how to spend billions of taxpayer dollars to improve the state's overwhelmed transportation system.

 

The University of South Florida think tank says every transportation option it examines undergoes a rigorous and objective analysis. It says it plays no favorites.

 

But a St. Petersburg Times analysis shows CUTR has often criticized one type of travel — passenger rail — while promoting alternatives it is paid millions to study.

 

An examination of the center's research and funding shows:

 

Full story at:

http://www.tampabay.com/news/one-of-rails-biggest-critics-gets-millions-to-study-and-promote/1054927

Awesome article. Now THAT is what journalism is supposed to be!

Conservative Tea Party Movement Targets Florida Rail Plan

by Elana Schor on December 4, 2009

 

The conservative "tea party" movement, last seen complaining about the government-funded local transit system that they took during an anti-government march in Washington D.C, is veering back to form in Florida with an organized protest against the state's proposal for broad new investments in rail transit.

 

The "Tea Party" is now a registered political party in Florida. The Florida chapter of Americans for Prosperity (AFP), one of three national conservative groups driving the "tea party" effort, has asked its members to protest on Monday in Tallahassee.

 

Full story at: http://dc.streetsblog.org/2009/12/04/conservative-tea-party-movement-targets-florida-rail-plan/

 

The following is the closing paragraph from an article published in the Pittsburgh Post Gazette regarding a proposal to have the Federal Government set standards for safety on local public transportation systems. Note that John Mica is the ranking Republican on the House Transportation & Infrastructure Committee. Obviously he doesn't read the USDoT reports which have attributed all but one Amtrak fatality in the last decade to factors outside of Amtrak's control.

 

 

Two Republicans on the transportation panel, John L. Mica of Florida and John J. Duncan Jr. of Tennessee raised questions about the need for federal oversight, citing its potential added costs and the generally solid safety record of rail transit. Mr. Mica noted that Amtrak, which is federally regulated, has a higher passenger fatality rate than rail transit systems.

 

 

 

Read more: http://www.postgazette.com/pg/09342/1019275-455.stm#ixzz0Z8VwNnKr

 

Mica is a moron.  He has ridden the fence for years being anti-rail one minute and pro-rail the next....depending entirely upon what audience he is in front of.

This is from a friend of mine who is a Republican and an economist .....

 

http://www.heritage.org/Research/Reports/2010/03/America-s-Coming-High-Speed-Rail-Financial-Disaster

 

This yet another in a long line of so-called “conservative think tank” authors who support the “Know nothing - Do nothing Party” and their lazy accomplices who reference one another “proving highways are more than paid for by gasoline taxes and user fees” and trains are colossal failures because they only account for 6 percent of total travel demand and do not pay their way.  No one takes a high-speed train to the grocery store and high-speed trains do not operate in every travel market, only where they make sense economically. A great critique of Ronald Utt and his past associations with other think tanks and junk scientists is contained here:

 

http://dc.streetsblog.org/2009/07/20/a-brief-reply-to-heritages-ronald-utt-phd/  Note that several of his reference citations are of other articles he wrote and articles written by another infamous “researcher”, Wendell Cox.

 

If you follow the logic in Utt’s diatribe against high-speed rail in Europe, he lumps all passenger rail into the pot (including commuter trains and urban transit), mixes it up with high-speed rail and then says it is all subsidized.  It’s not.  High-speed trains in Europe and Japan actually make money.  The TGV in France in fact helps subsidize the TER local train network much the same way the FAA subsidizes regional jet service to small towns in the U.S. that feed the large network carrier flights at hub airports. And in the travel markets high-speed trains operate in, they absolutely kill the airplane in terms of market share and in some markets actually kill the automobile share as well.  He uses systemwide averages and fails to look at the micro-economics of individual saturated travel corridors.  In the U.S., Amtrak enjoys 60 percent of the air/rail market in the Northeast Corridor.  The author cherry picks the data to make his point, which is fraudulent research technique.  But hey, when you’re PAID to come up with answers based on political philosophy, you have no ethical issue with cherry picking data.

 

All forms of services are provided for the public benefit because they promote the general welfare of the population.  These public services are all “subsidized.”  If users of public libraries had to pay the full cost of "borrowing" books, very few people would use them.  If the people who used emergency medical services had to pay their full cost when they were rushed to the hospital by EMS staff, lots of people would die because they could not afford to pay.  If parents had to pay the full cost of sending their kids to school, we would regress to the 19th century because no one could afford the school tuition.  But we have public libraries, public emergency medical services, and public schools.  Because public services benefit everyone, they are supported by taxes.  And don't forget all the other added "user fees” such as gasoline taxes, which in Ohio can only be used for highway expenditures.

 

Public transportation users do not pay the full cost of riding buses or trains as a matter of enlightened public policy.  This is done to encourage people to use transit and passenger rail services.  The general population subsidizes public transportation systems across the world because they provide meaningful and substantial economic and environmental benefits for everyone, including reducing peak period congestion, improving air quality and reducing dependency on foreign oil.  The difference between revenues and costs are made up by taxes collected from everyone.

 

 

 

Highway users do not pay the full cost of building and maintaining roads simply by buying gasoline or driving on a toll road.  The transfers from the US General Fund to the Highway Trust Fund are testament to that.  And Ohioans pay income and sales taxes into the General Fund to support the Highway Patrol, pay for courts that adjudicate automobile accident claims and provide jails for drunken drivers.  Property and local income taxes pay for the local road system.  And with fuel economy increasing and gasoline consumption decreasing, revenue from gasoline taxes will decrease placing a growing burden on the general population to maintain aging and deteriorating highway infrastructure let alone expand the system where warranted.

Cross-posted from the 3C thread. Use this the next time you hear someone says public funding for rail is not a conservative value......

 

William F. Buckley Jr. on Railroads on National Review Online

June 14, 2002 2:15 p.m.

Yes to the Railroads

A national endowment of the railroads is defensible.

 

...Now, the argument against federal financing of rail travel begins with the axiomatic rule: Let the rail passengers pay for their own conveniences.

 

A pretty fair rule, but it's not a violation of it to remark the complexities.

 

The first of these is that the government is heavily involved in subsidizing traffic of every kind. The motorist can hardly drive around the block without driving over asphalt primarily financed by town and county, but also with contributions coming in tangentially from the federal government. When you debouch from I-95, you travel from road surface 100 percent paid for by the federal government, down the ramp to cutoffs toward the construction of which the feds made a lesser contribution, but a contribution nonetheless, onto roads paid for by the state, and by lower echelons of government, county and city. It takes hardy pioneering into highly exclusive warrens before the user runs into the driveway he actually paid for himself.

 

The same holds true, of course, for the airlines, an intimation of whose problems was given us by U.S. Airways last week, when management said that service could not continue until $1 billion was raised.

 

READ MORE AT:

http://old.nationalreview.com/buckley/buckley061402.asp

Here's some ammunition to use against "The Great Hypocrisy"....

 

High-Speed Rail No Laughing Matter

By: Bill Cawthon

September 10, 2010 07:16 PM

 

In any case, the argument against government support is a bit ingenuous; we dont ask airlines to build airports, we dont ask automakers to build highways but, by golly, we sure expect railroads to lay their own track and theyd better do it out of their own pockets.

 

Where do airports come from? Most of the airports that handle commercial passenger traffic are built and operated by government agencies or quasi-governmental agencies. Where do they get their money? According to Airports Council International (ACI), an industry group representing the operators of commercial airports in the U.S. and Canada, airports rely on four primary sources of infrastructure funding: Airport bonds (58 percent); federal AIP (Airport Improvement Program) grants (21 percent); local passenger facility charges used on a pay-as-you-go basis (11 percent); and locally generated revenues, such as revenue from concessions operations and such (10 percent). More than 60 percent of airport-issued bonds are required to be sold as tax-exempt private activity bonds (PABs) rather than governmental purpose bonds. Incidentally, ACI is lobbying to have those PABs receive the same tax considerations as government bonds to make them more attractive to investors.

 

So less than a quarter of the funding for infrastructure improvement comes from revenues, only slightly more than what taxpayers kick in as grants. The bulk of the rest of the money comes from bond buyers who get tax-free interest, meaning the rest of us have to cover the taxes those people would have paid had the bonds been securities from private companies. Milton Friedman would be so proud.

 

READ MORE AT:

http://www.modelrailroadnews.com/voices/from-the-editor/blog/high-speed-rail-no-laughing-matter/d5a8681b83.html

An excellent response to the nay-sayers & hitmen...from the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel

 

The $54 question: Is rail worth it?

By STEVE HINIKER

Sept. 25, 2010 |(61) Comments

 

With anti-rail activists whipped into a frenzy over threats that passenger rail services pose to Wisconsin and the state's finances, it's time to step back and take a closer look. Are rail opponents onto something, or are they on something?

 

Rail opponents rail against the cost of rail. They would like to have the money for rail either returned to Washington or spent on highways. Dream on. The $810 million is a part of a larger plan to restore intercity passenger rail across the United States. This is a federal project that won't be derailed by Wisconsin politics. Restoring rail is expensive, but transportation projects are expensive. The Zoo Interchange will cost more than $2 billion to reconstruct. The Marquette Interchange was close to $1 billion. Where's the outrage over that spending?

 

In any case, the money can't be spent on highways, and even if it was sent back to Washington, it would be reallocated to another state to build their rail system - leaving Wisconsin in the dust. (We also would be sending millions of our tax dollars to another state to build rail instead of us getting the hundreds of millions from other states.)

 

Full editorial at: http://www.jsonline.com/news/opinion/103754469.html

How does interchanges cost that much in Wisc? Their real estate that high?

Nope. Transportation construction projects are very expensive, regardless of mode. The two complicated interchanges are old and need to be replaced.

It's always good to keep things in perspective. 

 

So any time you feel down or wonder if the fight for passenger rail in Ohio is worth fighting.... think of the people trying to build a railroad in Afghanistan.

 

http://www.cnn.com/2010/WORLD/asiapcf/09/27/afghanistan.first.railroad/index.html?hpt=Mid

Since All Aboard Ohio has been at this for 35 years, does that mean Ohio is only one-third as backward as Afghanistan?  :-P

How does interchanges cost that much in Wisc? Their real estate that high?

 

The Marquette i/c is an entirely elevated interchange next to Downtown Milwaukee, I think it involved mainline work along I-94 and I-43. Dunno about the Zoo i/c tho.

I was thinking (while driving, of course) that one reason there may be lots of highly vocal rail opposition  at this time is that the U.S. government is preparing GM for it's IPO. It's certainly in the government's best interest for GM's IPO to go well. All this talk about improving our rail system could lower interest in GM.

I was thinking (while driving, of course) that one reason there may be lots of highly vocal rail opposition at this time is that the U.S. government is preparing GM for it's IPO. It's certainly in the government's best interest for GM's IPO to go well. All this talk about improving our rail system could lower interest in GM.

 

I think that's a stretch, and I would challenge you to stop thinking about cars and trains as direct competitors.

 

Has GM been hurt by the existence of the NY or D.C. train systems?  There are still plenty of cars on the roads in those areas.  If we could Sim-City a train network into Columbus tomorrow, how many people would honestly give up their cars entirely?  Maybe some, but very few.  There would still be plenty of people who kept them.

 

GM and other auto companies have to be much more concerned by the reports of places where the roads are being left to return to gravel (or wilderness) than by proposals for passenger rail.  And, far more than that, they have to be hoping for a broad economic recovery.  Auto companies are strongly procyclical.  In good times, people who might otherwise buy a Honda might buy an Acura.  In bad times, people who might otherwise buy a Honda start looking at used cars--and people who bought new cars a couple years earlier start defaulting on their loans, too, much to the dismay of the car companies' financing arms.

[i think that's a stretch, and I would challenge you to stop thinking about cars and trains as direct competitors.

 

 

I think it's a stretch too. But they are direct competitors to the interests who earn money from each mode. Some companies (the smart ones) earn money from both modes. But many who are myopic fear competition rather than seize opportunity.

As we all know, in the past GM felt that local rail systems were enough of a competitor to warrant purchasing them and shutting them down. In recent years, Wall Street has rewarded companies that have shed subsidiaries to focus on "core competencies", which can easily transform into myopia.

 

So yes, it is a bit of a stretch, but some of the best marketers in the world (the ones working for GM) know that young people are hungry for rail, have a distaste for automobiles and the debt required of most of them to purchase a new car.

[i think that's a stretch, and I would challenge you to stop thinking about cars and trains as direct competitors.

 

 

I think it's a stretch too. But they are direct competitors to the interests who earn money from each mode. Some companies (the smart ones) earn money from both modes. But many who are myopic fear competition rather than seize opportunity.

 

Even when you have companies that are in only one mode, I don't think it matters.  Norfolk Southern, for example, does not have a trucking line (at least, I don't think so).  Yet they would have much less business without the highways and the trucks that move on them.  Likewise, without the freight rail network for long intercity hauls, you might think that that would mean a surge in demand for long-haul trucking, but what's equally likely is that it would simply mean an overall contraction of the transportation and logistics sector of the economy, which would hurt the trucking industry even more than it would help.

 

Put yourself in the seat of a hypothetical trucking company CEO in Columbus in 1990.  The plan to make an intermodal hub at Rickenbacker is finally starting to show signs of life.  Are you thinking, "oh no, more competition from all these trains and cargo planes?"  I think it's more likely that your eyes would be lighting up with dollar signs.  {Insert a cheesy cash register "ching" here}

Several of the major, national trucking companies (Schneider International, CRST, and others) have worked out deals to put more of their long-haul loads on trains.  It saves them fuel and the costs of long-haul drivers, as well as being able to offer savings to shippers.

 

Witness the Marion (Ohio) Intermodal Center.  It's a joint operation of CSX, Kansas City Southern Railroad and Schneider International.  They run a direct route from Marion to KC that bypasses highway & rail congestion in Chicago.  (see the photos below)

 

Another impact of intermodal rail has been a growth in short-haul trucking business (same day and even multiple load runs) between the Intermodal yards & distribution centers.  That has certainly been the case around the Rickenbacker Intermodal yard south of Columbus.

Even when you have companies that are in only one mode, I don't think it matters. Norfolk Southern, for example, does not have a trucking line (at least, I don't think so).

 

Actually they do. It's called Triple Crown Services -- so named because they started it in conjunction with Conrail and a third company (a trucking company but I can't remember which), hence the three crowns. After NS acquired 58 percent of Conrail in 1999, Triple Crown became a wholly owned subsidiary of NS. I believe all of their trucks are roadrailers (the trailers sit directly on railroad wheel bogies -- no flatcars -- to reduce weight and loading/offloading times). Here is one scooting through one of my railfanning haunts from the 1980s in Ravenna...

 

Mile-long trains of those Triple Crown trailers crawl out of N-S's Cincinnati yard over the Southern RR bridge every few hours. 

GOP Wants to Bring Transpo Policy Back to the 1950s

by Tanya Snyder on November 19, 2010

 

A top Republican transportation staffer gave some clues yesterday about the GOPs plan to drastically restructure national transportation policy and reverse many reforms of the past 20 years.

 

In an off-the-record luncheon with the Road Gang, a sort of fraternity of Washington highway executives, Jim Tymon gave the view from his seat as Republican staff director of the House Highways and Transit Subcommittee. Streetsblog spoke to sources who attended the gathering.

 

...What does that mean for reforming our broken transportation system? Well, everyone wants to stabilize the highway trust fund its not sustainable to continue spending more than the fund brings in from gas tax revenues. (According to Tymon, the trust fund currently spends roughly $50 billion a year, while taking in revenues of just $35 billion.)

 

But if the option of raising taxes is off the table (Mica believes in VMT fees but says itll take years to get there, and has flatly opposed raising the gas tax), the only solution is to cut spending and thats just what Mica and his Republican colleagues seem poised to do, to the tune of $7 billion to $8 billion per year. Tymon called it cutting the fat.

 

Apparently, for Republicans, the big target for cuts appears to be transit spending. Tymon suggested to the Road Gang that the current $8 billion allocated for transit annually could shrink to $5 billion. The Road Gang was, apparently, relieved to see that transit would bear the brunt of the burden of spending cuts.

 

READ MORE AT:

http://dc.streetsblog.org/2010/11/19/leaked-gop-wants-to-bring-transpo-policy-back-to-the-1950s/

Well, percentage-wise, that's a massive cut ... but if they need to cut $7-8 billion per year and they're cutting $3 billion from transit (8 minus 5), doesn't that mean that $4-5 billion is coming from highway spending?

 

Yes, I know that most people here think that all $8 billion should come from highway spending (or that $58 billion should come from highway spending and $50 billion more go to transit), but still, I'm just commenting on the strange math.