Thursday Linkfest

H Street Streetcar tracks going in ???
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It looks like some electrification will make the difference between Zurich and Munich. About an hours difference. That's a lot of time.
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Some twists to the NAACP vs the Streetcar story in Cincinnati.
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Certainly the repeal folks in Charlotte would have given up by now. They got shellacked 70% to 30% in the last repeal try but gosh why not come back for more pain. Anyone want to explain why these folks get a voice at all after such a drubbing? Especially when the highway overruns were far worse than the LRT line that is performing beyond expectations.

But I did find out why it will cost so much:

The Lynx extension's 50 percent cost escalation from the 2006 estimate is largely because it's become more complicated. The original plan called for 10 bridges to separate the train line from roads. The plan now calls for 16 grade separations, including burying 36th Street under rail lines in NoDa. Despite the higher costs, the success of the Lynx Blue Line (between uptown and south Charlotte, along South Boulevard) still makes the project viable, CATS said.

In other words, the improved ridership from the South Corridor allowed the line to enjoy a "rail bias" in the ridership model that was demonstrated by the first line. Also, 16 grade separations is really going to bust any budget, though I still don't think $100 million per mile is low enough.
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Sign of the times: Edinburgh won't move forward with a tram spur due to the economy.

Guest Post: Remove the Wire Noose

George Barsky is a frequent commenter on one of my transit listserves. In a recent email, he asked that Washington D.C. be freed from its wire noose, ie the prohibition of wires in the federal city. Here are his comments he gave me permission to post and some photos of what he believes wires would look like in the district:

It's high time Congress allowed the District of Columbia to operate clean, green, efficient, electric surface mass transit on any of its streets.

Streetcars and light rail are making a strong comeback in cities all across the USA. Obviously, that form of mass transit is being recognized more and more as a worthwhile public investment to move lots of people. And there is a new transportation infrastructure recognition by the Obama Administration.

Until more reliable forms of power become available, the best system for more than 100 years to power streetcars is from a simple almost invisible overhead wire. This is how more than 400 other electric surface transit systems operate around the world and within other US cities. However, Congress banned overhead wires in parts of D.C. more than 100 years ago stifling electric surface transit progress and ultimately killing it almost 50 years ago.

It's time for Congress to take a leadership role and change that law to allow streetcars to use single simple, non-polluting almost invisible wire above their tracks and return to all of D.C. When the law was passed more than 100 years ago it was well intended to remove masses of utility wire from city streets. Utilities can bury their wires but transit cannot. The old underground conduit system used by the now abandoned D.C. streetcar network is too expensive and difficult to maintain or reinstall and not at all desirable.

I am not recommending a sky full of wires. A small single simple nearly invisible overhead wire supported by decorative lampposts or nearby buildings can be extremely architecturally effective and easy to maintain without destroying the visual landscape of D.C. There are thousands of examples worldwide in cities just as beautiful or more so than D.C. They are not harmed or defaced by them and their beauty is enhanced by modern healthful environmentally friendly electric surface transit.

Discussions abound about clean energy, CO2 reductions and global warming, but Congress has turned a blind eye in their own backyard by continuing to impose the antiquarian overhead wire ban for surface transit. Everyday Al Gore and other officials call for change and reform in terms of energy and environment but Congress does nothing to encourage D.C. to modernize its surface transport making it green and more inviting to use. The beauty of D.C. will not be marred by this minute change and will enable it to eliminate many noxious and polluting buses from its streets. It's time to CHANGE how D.C. does surface transit.

Congress has to get this message and take reasonable action by eliminating the overhead wire ban for surface transit within all of D.C and let D.C. decide where and how to institute its transit needs.

By comparison to other recent problems this may seem trivial. Basically it is, except that a change in the law requires an act of Congress. I doubt that many Congressmen and staffs today are even aware that giving D.C. this benefit lies within their jurisdiction. Many of them now have modern light rail in their own districts. It's one of those niche items buried in ancient D.C. history but is quite important to the District of Columbia and all who use or want to benefit from good surface transit therein. Allowing D.C. to resurrect electric streetcar service in all parts of D.C. by means of a simple almost invisible overhead wire will showcase an example to the nation and the world that Congress gets it. All that is required is a single simple nearly invisible overhead wire.

Best of all, no funds are required for this enabling act.

It is time for new outside the box thinking regarding green electric surface transit within all of D.C. and remove the ancient wire noose from around the District's neck. If an overhead wire is OK for the new Anacostia streetcar line than it should be OK in all parts of D.C. The residents will applaud such new vital action.

Conduit at Union Station

With Overhead Wires

George Barsky
Germantown, MD

Oh for the Love of...

You can't make this up:

It would mean that the Millbrae-to-San Francisco route would have three separate electrified options for riders. Isn't that more than a bit redundant? Rail planners don't seem to be bothered one whit by the concept at this point. They are forging ahead.

How many roads go to San Francisco?

H/T BATN

Scott Bernstein Part 2: It Is All Potentially Reversible

Yesterday we brought you a first listserve post by Scott Bernstein of the Center for Neighborhood Technology in Chicago about some streetcar history. In further thoughts, he discusses how we can get at least some of what we lost back.

I sometimes skip long posts, but this one is certainly worth the time spent reading. All inserted links are my doing in order to try and give greater background and some edits have been made for capital letters and spacing.

Guest Post 2: Scott Bernstein

Here are some further thoughts.

The definitive history of the interurbans is The Electric Interurban Railways in America by George W. Hilton and John F. Due, Stanford U. Press 1960; 463 pages, very thorough analysis and directory of operating companies and maps, indexed; still in reprint but not hard to find a used copy.

It's impossible to fully describe what happened to the street railway systems without some description of the relationship they had to the electric power industry.

The divestiture you and I guess Andy refer to came as a result of the Public Utility Holding Company Act of 1935, aka, PUCHA, which left it to the newly minted SEC to implement via regulation. SEC was created, strictly speaking, to create and implement accounting standards, the lack of which were widely believed to be at the heart of the stock market crash and subsequent Depression. Hilton and Due state this clearly as follows:

"...the SEC interpreted the provisions concerning the elimination of holding-company systems to require that the power companies divest themselves of their electric railway affiliates and dissolve the pyramided holding company structures. As a consequence, the interurbans that were elements in the holding company systems were separated, usually by public sale of the stock...Most interurbans had been abandoned before the act became effective."

Hilton in particular believed that the interurbans represented a flawed interlude in the development of mass transportation, and he quite strongly and almost angrily stated this opinion when Congress revisited the Snell accusations and the GM-NCL case in hearings held April 4-11 1974 (Hearings Before the Subcommittee on Antitrust and Monopoly of the Committee on the Judiciary, US Senate, 93d Cong. 2d Session on S. 1167, part 4, Ground Transportation industries). In this testimony and subsequent committee discussion, he offers interesting opinions on why certain streetcar systems survived both the early wave of abandonments and the divestiture rulings, and most of these have to do with urban form, density, and the availability of special right of way (note--he's an economic historian, not a physical planner or urban historian).

In the 1960 work, Hilton and Due acknowledge that other means were used to extend the life of these systems-- State and sometimes municipal investment and support, conversion or merger into publicly owned systems, and inter-line cooperation of marketing and fare-media (which probably extended the life of the excellent interurban networks in Ohio and Indiana, among the best in the nation), among other methods. This testimony, in my opinion, actually makes a strong case that abandonment wasn't inevitable, rather, it was result of failure to grasp the networked nature of the tangible (infrastructure networks) and intangible economic networks) that are essential to successful places.

The PUCHA passage bears some further examination.

No small part of the political impetus to pass PUCHA came from enmity between two people--Samuel Insull, founder of the American electric utility industry, former secretary to Thomas Edison and head of the Chicago-based Commonwealth Edison empire and affiliates; and Harold Ickes, confidant to FDR, Secretary of the Interior (where many of today's separate domestic cabinet agencies were formerly housed), and civic leader in Chicago and the North Shore suburb of Winnetka. Simply put, they despised each other; Insull's business model required demonizing the concept of public ownership and Ickes' view requiring that it be embraced.

At the time that PUCHA was being conceived, Insull controlled not only the remainder of the former traction empire controlled by Charles Yerkes (who interestingly went on after having been pushed out of Chicago to help lead the construction of the London Underground) but also much of the midwest electric transmission system, the main midwestern interstate pipeline system and the local natural gas utility, plus Peoples Gas Light & Coke Co. too. Insull wrote the first check to the Commercial Club of Chicago for underwriting what became the Burnham/Bennett Plan of Chicago, but did not play a role in its development or in its subsequent marketing (as far as I could tell, Dennis I know has studied these matters too and may have a different opinion). Insull, while vilified for his monopoly, helped buy much public goodwill in playing both sides of the smoke abatement campaigns in Chicago for decades--electric utilities were powered by very inefficient coal-burning power plants, but so were railroad locomotives. He was able to sell railroad electrification as a civic and public health virtue, and simultaneously to sell natural gas as a "smokeless fuel for a smoke-free town." (To convert from the use of so-called manufactured gas to "natural" gas required tuning, retrofitting and/or conversion of all gas-fired appliances in Chicago, which was amazingly accomplished in 1 year, 1931; also, one of the themes of the 1933 Century of Progress Chicago World's Fair was that it was billed as the first "smokestack free fair.")

Nonetheless, Ickes and others were able to paint Insull as the prototypical villain at a time when heads needed to roll, and was convicted of securities fraud (reversed in 1934 but he spent his remaining years a broken man). To be fair, Ickes presided over much of his era's "recovery" investments through the Public Works Administration, and on the transportation side, the majority of the PWA's investments were in highways not in regional mass transit systems (an important exception was PWA investment in Chicago's subway, but Ickes refused to support building east-west tunnels for Chicago's streetcar lines, an action that bears further examination).

The divestiture and subsequent efforts to keep these systems viable, both the urban and interurban street railways, took a number of bizarre turns. In Chicago alone, a simple listing of the changes in policy, court rulings on bankruptcy proceedings and re-organizational changes along with maps runs over 400 pages (Weber, Outline History of Chicago Traction 1936, and it gets even more complex after that). The influences that needed juggling were truly vast, not half-vast; Frank Gruber's point about the iconic importance of the nickel fare posted yesterday is a good example, there were similar examples almost everywhere.

PUCHA seemed to be passed without regard for the potential urban damage that divestiture would likely cause. Around 1920, a federal commission on the future of electric railways failed to come to any firm recommendations for future federal interest, and as far as I can tell, that was the last time that a serious national examination of this essentially urban form of mass transportation occurred. But it was made clear at those hearings, in industry publications, in discussions held at various local governmental trade associations, that these private corporations were playing an essential public service (sound familiar?) role.

By divesting, public transportation lost a more or less guaranteed source of revenue for capital investment, whether it was made directly, through rate-basing of these costs, or indirectly, by using the backstop credit facilities of their holding companies.

And this occurred at more or less the same time that the fascination with modern road building and the idea of "limited ways" (later "superhighways" and "limited access highways") was taking hold (in the 1920s, Insull similarly promoted "super" transmission lines and pipelines).

Perhaps someone on the list can comment on this, but in reviewing the Burnham/Bennett Plan, and associated documents from the resulting Chicago Plan Commission, the transportation focus, outside of the central area, was on inter-city travel, not on internal circulation or accessibility. (this is also the point expressed in the late Paul Barrett's excellent The Automobile and Urban Transit: The Formation of Urban Policy in Chicago-1983) I suspect this was largely the case in city planning in the era that followed. In framing the issue in this way, and leaving it to the private sector to sink or swim w/ regard to mass transportation, a powerful force for decentralization emerged. Similarly, Burnham and contemporaries did not grasp the notion of the networked city, and in re-reading, that era's fascination with the promise of regional highway networks and what promised to be a viable airline industry evokes Henry Ford's comment that "we shall solve the problems of the city by leaving it."

So why go over all this?

Because it is all potentially reversible.

And because it is essential that we figure out how to make it so.

As we've discussed on this list, only by switching from liquid fuels to non-motorized and electric transportation can we meet any of our energy independence or climate goals.

And only by reducing dependence on individual vehicles to a greater reliance on mass transportation can we transition to a nation of great cities and regions.

Here are some tools to think about in framing methods of getting there--

1. Local electric distribution utilities never lost the legal right to power electric transportation; all 50 states have a common method of enabling electric distribution utility financing of all or part of the necessary systems, which is a rate filing to help finance these systems. This offers opportunities for cities, transit operators, developers, metropolitan planning organizations and states to build new kinds of financing mechanisms to more systematically support local and regional surface transportation infrastructure. A similar case can be made for local governments and special service districts (which own and operate almost all of the nation's airports outside of NJ, MD, Alaska and HI) to partner with the electric utility industry to support the infrastructure necessary for inter-city high speed rail.

2. Deregulation of the electric utility industry has been a mixed bag, but in over a dozen states a fait accompli. So in a sense this is an opening to partner with contemporary holding companies too. These companies need to re-certify their "market-based" rate making authority every three years with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, another opening for the new administration to address potential urban consequences of energy and climate policies.

3. PUCHA was repealed in the 2005 Energy Policy Act ( one outcome has been at least 100 municipalization efforts, 20 successful, most recently Winter Park Fl, but the repeal also opens up the potential for other kinds of ownership too)

4. A national debate on the future shape and location and purposes of the electrical grid has started and needs an urban voice, no less than does the analogous debate about transportation infrastructure.

5. A push by leaders in the public accounting profession and in the investment community for more transparency in State and municipal accounting led to the creation of the Government Accounting Standards Board in 1984, and their rules on accounting for infrastructure investment, aka Statement 34, implemented from 1999 to present, lay a first-time basis for disclosure of the life-cycle costs associated with different types and patterns of major capital investments. More recently, a push for better state and local disclosure in the waning days of the Bush administration, has been taken up in the Senate and House Banking committees. This is a real opportunity to show well how the hidden assets of cities and urban places perform.

Electric Surge

An article in USA Today discusses one California city's preparation for the surge in power needed for electric cars. When is the surge in electric transit coming?

Automakers envision electric cars as a solution to gas price jumps. Environmentalists see bluer skies. And electric utilities? They could be the biggest winners of all.

Seems to me electric utilities could be even bigger winners if they built electric transit networks. Then we wouldn't be sending our money to companies that provide diesel but rather the local power company, which hopefully has a smart grid linked to alternative energy. But its better than breathing the diesel fumes even now.

Incentivizing Clean Energy Consumption

I was reading Jim's post on public utilities providing a push to build more solar.

What a great idea: incentivize ( I hate the 'word,' but it's descriptive) consumers to install wind and solar power equipment by paying them a premium for the power generated.

It got me to thinking, what if the FTA incentivized cleaner transit such as trolley buses making the replacement cost to transit agencies lower if they or the utility build the infrastructure. It seems to me that allowing transit agencies just to replace with diesel buses because they are a bit cheaper is looking only at the short term benefits instead of the long term. Anyways, just thoughts.

Vintage Trolley Bus

I love the English Russia blog. You have to see these pictures of old trolley buses still in service that look like they have been to hell and back. I'm glad Muni keeps its trolley buses together better than this.

Extra: If you don't have a ROW, run your tram on the ice.

The Overhead Wire is Done

No not me or the blog, rather the wires that bring electricity to streetcars and light rail. Yonah brings our attention to an MSNBC article in which Bombardier unveils their new technology advancement.

The innovative principle of the PRIMOVE system is rooted in the principle of inductive power transfer, a technology used in cleanrooms in the computer chip and automotive industries. With Bombardier's introduction of PRIMOVE, inductive power transfer comes to rail vehicles for the first time.

Apparently they have been testing in Germany since 2003 and the system apparently can work in all weather, unlike the Alstom APS system which reportedly has problems with ice and snow. Now we wait for commercial installation and testing under real life conditions. I'm cautiously optimistic.

Clean Air

One of the things I harp on constantly is the need for clean air which is part of the reason that I like electric transit. Well Matt at Orphan Road has some news about lifespans and clean air. Seems like it helps people live longer. Who knew?

A Clean Urban Ring?

Planners are still stuck in the brown air past, planning the Boston Urban Ring project with regular diesel buses in part because of complains about visual pollution. Bill complains, as he should, that they get BRT tunnels shoved down their throats but aren't willing to fight for cleaner air and trolleybuses? That's bullshit. Transit agencies need to get with the program and the future and stop being wimps about pushing back on aesthetic issues that people will get over once in place. As I have said before. I'll take visual pollution over air pollution ANY day. Future lungs will thank us, you can always look away.

Missing Something?

Something is missing from all this talk of Climate. We keep talking about it but how can we educate the rest of the country that just building electric cars is not going to solve their problems. Grist has a post up on the Grand Climate Plan. See what's on the list.

1. Carbon pricing
2. Efficiency standards
3. Carbon-free electricity
4. Smart electrical grid
5. Electric cars

The author, Adam Stein notes there are gaps. Most glaring to me, nothing about land use or transit. Nothing about walking or cycling. These are some of the best ways you can personally reduce your carbon footprint. I personally drive only once a week now to visit my Grandmother. When I lived in Austin I drove three or four times a week even though I lived next to the Number 1 bus, the most frequent in the city. Land use matters. But what happens when everyone gets electric cars. Are the freeways all going to suddenly free up?

But how come no one talks about it? Is it really because its not that sexy as Rachel Maddow thinks it is?



Or is it something more? What is the deep seeded want not to take transit or build denser? Part of it I know is our entrenched non market based land use system. It's not like your ultimate mobility is compromised by driving less and walking/biking more with optimal land use. Why are the livable community groups so separated from the enviros on this? I can't quite make it out.

Take a Walk Down To Electric Avenue

There was an article today in the New York Times discussing spending out infrastructure money wisely. So many times we've build freeways to nowhere and sports stadiums instead of things that will actually make our cities livable. It's kind of funny because the article really repudiates everything that Mary Peters is all about, yet she twisted it to her idea of funding. No Ma Pete, it's not about toll roading for new capacity. The article discusses what is wrong with the system:

It’s hard to exaggerate how scattershot the current system is. Government agencies usually don’t even have to do a rigorous analysis of a project or how it would affect traffic and the environment, relative to its cost and to the alternatives — before deciding whether to proceed. In one recent survey of local officials, almost 80 percent said they had based their decisions largely on politics, while fewer than 20 percent cited a project’s potential benefits.

This means most of those toll roads that she wants. It also means the sprawl roads that really have no environmental or fiscal benefits, such as the one we discussed yesterday. Yet Mary Peters still wants a cost benefit analysis done on projects. If it's the one that she's performing on the Central Corridor or the Dulles extension no thanks. We need better measures, and ones that put livability before driving fast or moving more cars.

But we also see articles like this, where the utilities are thinking about ordering electric cars. What the heck are you thinking? String up some wires on major corridors and order some buses that can be made fast. If they were so worried about making the shift to electric vehicles, they should start with modest changes now and public transport.

One interesting point the Journal piece gets into is that utilities want to play a much bigger role in managing the shift to electrified transport, to ensure that it doesn't put strain on the grid the way that the sudden burst in popularity of air conditioners did after World War II, taking the power industry by surprise.

On trunk lines this would be cheaper for the transit agency and the electric company, not diesel makers, would be pulling in more money. I'm ashamed we have such tunnel vision.

Electric Grids, Gas Taxes and Transit Expansion

David Roberts has a post up on how a gas tax isn't enough. He's right. There is no way we can ever raise enough money for anything we really want with just a gas tax. Especially if we really want to reduce VMT and increase walking, biking and transit. Well as usual, I'm going to do some thinking out loud and let you all shout me down or make the thought better.

What if we got rid of all those laws that pushed apart electric companies and transit companies? Some comments have been made about just getting people on transit instead of changing the vehicles. But honestly, I feel like San Francisco is a better urban place because bus exhaust is not flowing in my face when I'm walking down the street. One thing I noticed this weekend in Charlotte was that the bus terminal is going to lead someone to cancer. The downtown bus center has buses idling under a canopy at all hours creating a smell that means particulate concentration can't be very good.

In any event, with the electric grid needing a serious upgrade, how much more would it really cost to bring overhead wires to the most traveled routes and tie them into the new grid? Some of these could be light rail, some could be trolley buses, and other could be streetcars. But all could be easily adapted to alternative energy if they were using electricity to start with. But also, how could this be a mutually beneficial relationship?

Some thoughts I came up with:

• Use power rates as sort of a business carbon fee. Businesses paying the tax would directly benefit because infrastructure is used to get to work and retail spaces. Bikes, transit, even roadways would benefit from such funding mechanism.
• Transit could get a lower power rate as part of the power company. This means operations could be less expensive meaning more service and if enough transit vehicles are running, perhaps cheaper energy because of power equalization during greater off peak power consumption.
• If we improve the grid and transit is a part of it, charging your plug in hybrid or scooter would pay into the transportation fund as well generating funding for the transport agency as well.
• If we have a business power fee, could it allow us to get away from the sales tax?
• This type of fee would reward more efficient building practices.

Any thoughts on this? Does anyone have any other crazy fundraising schemes?

Super Capacitors in Transit

New technology is gaining ground really fast. A promising development in energy storage is the nanoflower supercapacitor. The reason why its so important is that if perfected, it would be possible for light rail lines to gain more power through regenerative breaking and burst through intersections or short stretches of track without connecting to overhead wires.

Electrifying

The Seattle PI makes the case for electrified transit.

As If a Darwin Award Wasn't Enough

No one should be able to sue over the excuse "They should have known people would tresspass."

The Benefits of Electric Transit

After a few posts where people have been wondering about the benefits of electrification, I thought it might be useful to post on here the reasons why electrification is not just an energy argument, but rather an efficiency and operations benefit.

1. Point Source Pollution

It has been revealed in the last few years that higher rates of respiratory ailments including asthma occur near freeways, especially places like the Port of Oakland where diesel trucks and ships move in and out near the West Oakland neighborhood. In terms of transit, these emissions occur along a complete corridor. With electric propulsion, it occurs at one source, the power plant. This point source pollution is the issue and in the next 30 years of any project, we have to assume that alternative energy sources will come on line (if they haven't already, San Francisco for example gets electricity from hydro, Calgary is 100% wind) or better scrubbing technology will be available on coal and natural gas plants.

2. Operations Efficiency/Accelerations

Electric drive transit also has faster acceleration and stopping. According to TCRP report 59, 50% of energy for buses specifically is used for acceleration. Hybrid electric buses are able to capture 25% total through regenerative breaking. This type of system is available for rail systems as well, recently being introduced in Sacramento.

Electric motors also create more torque for faster acceleration. For example, the DART Kinky Sharyo LRV accelerates at 3 miles per hour per second(mphps). The Colorado railcar DMU accelerates at 1.44 mphps (1.6 according to Caltrain specs). Buses typically get around 1.5 mphps.

Caltrain has put together a matrix of all the specs for cars they are looking at for the future. DMU is 1.6 mphps, EMU is 2.0-2.5 mphps, the savings by using EMUs over a 15 stop run estimated for Caltrain is 10 minutes every run. That is a big time difference that would allow for more runs every hour. If the run takes about an hour. That means they can have 1o minute headways with 6 vehicles. You would have to add another vehicle with another driver to get the same with diesel.

If you've ever been on a PCC, they have high torque and accelerated at one time at 4 mphps often tossing patrons to the ground. It was later revised to 3.5 mphps. This is at the expense of top speed, but since they stop more often its not as necessary.

Another benefit is the lighter cars used because of electric motors being lighter which reduces wear and tear on the track as well. The electric motors also have less moving parts meaning they last much longer. The official amortization period for rail vehicles is 24 while buses are 12. However there are still PCC cars still in operation and some rapid transit vehicles like BART are reaching their 40 year mark (they should really be replaced soon though).

3. Energy Conservation

Another issue is energy conservation. In addition to regenerative breaking, there is the power draw during stops and at the end of runs. Commenter NJH mentions that when passing Diridon Station, trains are always idling, wasting energy. Electric vehicles do not need to do this, especially at stops.

Electrification is not that expensive either. Even with copper costing more and more, NJH makes the calculation.

Regarding the price of copper, you have: 3.4$/lb*pi*(0.5cm)^2*mile*9g/((cm)^3)

Definition: 8526.9645 US$

So we're looking at $8.5k/mile for the conductor. Double it, add in connections and throw a bit out for waste. The copper is not going to be a big part of the cost (given that estimates are usually around $1M/mile).

I've heard about $1.5 million per mile is somewhat normal, which is small change when you think about the benefits as mentioned above.

VMT & Foreign Oil

So watching the Pickens commercial below gave me a thought. He was discussing dependence on foreign oil and showed some percentages of how much we import. So I went to the data. In terms of foreign oil I went to the Energy Information Administration and pulled an excel chart for historic crude oil imports and production. Since its monthly I averaged 1970,1990, and 2005. T Boone uses current 2008 to say 70% but the most recent transportation data is from 2005. So foreign crude imports went from 12% to 44% to 66% of the total U.S. supply.

Then I went to the BTS and found the Vehicle Miles Traveled (VMT) charts and put the totals together. A word of caution from the last chart I put up. Correlation doesn't necessarily mean causation, but I thought this was interesting and more relative. If anything I hope it starts some discussion on how this oil dependence is related to our auto dependence.
Perhaps its also related to this: Spending on highways over transit from PIRG.

I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that our transportation policy has led us to this predicament. I believe we all knew this, but its always good to have charts right? Thoughts?

The Indian Electric

It's worth mentioning again Alan Drake's (and others) call for electrification of the freight railroads in the United States. Here's another area though where we are being beaten by other countries. This time its India.

Mumbai: In one of the largest deals of its kind, India will buy 660 electric railway engines worth an estimated €3.5 billion (about Rs23,835 crore).

...
The engines would be deployed on the dedicated rail freight corrridors India is building, besides hauling cargo on the common rail network. India’s 2,700km-long dedicated freight corridor project was conceived in 2005 as a way to ease traffic on some of the country’s busiest freight routes running through 12 states. The corridor will connect New Delhi in the north to Mumbai in the west and Kolkata in the east. These routes account for 60% of the freight transported by the railways, which had initially estimated the project to cost around Rs28,000 crore.

What would the benefits of electrification and a shift of freight to electric rail be? Well Alan says a 6.3% reduction in fuel usage in the United States. With more electric transit and biking incentives it could possibly be even better.

Epic Fail

I think LOLstuff is pretty funny. This one probably wasn't funny when it happened but its quite transit oriented and a bit humorous now. There's a similar picture of a railroad fail where the train fell out of the second story of a station. Ah I think I found it.

But the photo below kind of got me thinking on how diesel buses are the work horse of transit yet they are still susceptible to all the price hikes and gas issues that hit cars. I wish they weren't, but they don't all have alternatives to diesel yet. Perhaps more trolley buses would help save agencies money. Just a thought.


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