Electroexecution of the Milwaukee Road

Every once in a while I'll stop reading articles and pick up a book. Sometimes its a book I started but put down for reasons unremembered. Recently I opened up Internal Combustion again. I highly suggest the read, especially the chapters on the Milwaukee Road. It's fascinating to see how efficient and cost effective the Road was before you factored in the corruption and construction mischief.

An ICC investigation concluded that the total cost, more than quadruple the orginal estimate, could not be justified by any adequate engineering or traffic surveys that were made. On the contrary, everything indicates that the project was the result of rivalry between powerful groups. Competitor railroads immediately began snatching up land to sell to the Milwaukee at severely inflated levels or started calculated bidding wars to drive up the prices.

It's sad really that more lines hadn't been electrified and that the true sustainable value of this route was not emulated in places inside of the United States. Ultimately it was in Europe, and they enjoy the success they built after our lead with the MR.

But here are a few key passages on pg 188 that stood out in the book to me on how the Milwaukee died after its tough beginning.

JP Kiley was a Milwaukee vice president determined to eliminate all electric lines. The reasons, Kiley presumed, would be cost, technological obsolescence and lesser capability. This was the assumption.

Laurence Wylie was an electrical engineer devoted to clean, electric trains. Wylie was appointed by Kiley in 1948 to oversee to oversee the dismantling of all electric. Having worked with electric rail since 1919, Wylie balked. On his own volition, Wylie ordered comparative studies of electric trains versus diesel. His finding contradicted Kiley's theories. The old electric could outpull the new diesels and run cheaper, dollar for dollar. In fact, on one typical run to the West Coast, three diesels were shown to annually cost more than $104,000 extra. In mountainous terrain, diesels fared even worse. Newer electrics constructed by GE in the 1950's for the Soviet Union showed still better results. These powerful new GE electrics, nicknamed little Joes for Joeseph Stalin, were almost twice as economical and powerful as the GM diesels, especially on long runs.

For example, six Electro Motive Division F diesels were needed to haul 3,300 tons, and five electro motive division GP9s were required for about the same chore. But that same tonnage was easily pulled by just four old GE freight electrics. The electrics also beat the gas burning locomotives on flatter terrain. Kiley dismissed Wylie's findings and instead relied on his own engineering tests. in large measure provided by the Electro Motive Division. Whylie, who had worked his way up from a Montana trainmaster to a district superintendent, could not understand why the engineering reports did not jibe. In his campaign to replace electrics with GM diesels, Kiley was constantly butressed by GM's glowing engineering reports. Finally, Wylie realized the newest diesels were being compared not with the newest high speed electrics, but thirty year old electrics. Moreover, other data from General Motors Electro Motive Division was constantly being skewed in favor of Diesel.

Who was heading up GM's Electro Motive Divison efforts in the late 1940's? It was Dana Kettering, the son of Charles Kettering, and the same inventive genius who'd helped Gray and Davis Electrical Engineers develop the starter battery array that mysteriously undercut Thomas Edison's attempt to create an electric vehicle with Henry Ford. In that instance, the testing had also been challenged as disingenuous.

It's amazing what you can do when you don't have to carry around your own powerplant. It's also amazing how comparing apples and oranges continues to allow people to make decisions.

Unofficial Gas Tax

This is what you're paying for in other cities around the world:

Prepared by the Emirate’s Department of Transport, with assistance from Mott MacDonald and Steer Davis Gleave, the master plan aims to create a comprehensive public transport network connecting Abu Dhabi island and the international airport with the UAE’s planned new capital city. The main proposals include:

• 590 km of regional high speed railway linking Abu Dhabi with neighbouring emirates and countries;
• 130 km of metro lines linking key areas in Abu Dhabi, including the airport, the new capital city, Yas Island and the central business zone;
• 30 tram projects in Abu Dhabi and Al Ain totalling 340 km;
• highway improvements totalling 1 560 route-km;
• demand management measures to support the infrastructure, including parking management and possible congestion charges.

Your "tax" dollars at work. Why can't we keep it at home?

St. Exxon and the Church of the Unleaded

Apparently this church exists in Arlington Virginia.

H/T GGW

Inernational Rail Updates

Wow lots going on in the world. We have updates from China, Nigeria, and Saudi Arabia.

Lagos is one of the world's densest cities. They plan to float a bond to pay for two new rail lines. I'm not sure where this relates to the BRT lines they have been planning, but part of this project concerns value capture schemes for the land around the transit stations. I wonder if they'll have to change their Euclidian zoning. Sure.

“The Lagos State Government intends to finance the infrastructure for both rail lines through the capital market by floating an estimated N275bn worth of rail infrastructure bonds.”

He also gave the details of the capital cost of project as Okokomaiko-Iddo ($582m), Iddo-Marina ($215m), and Agbado-Iddo ($402m). He stressed that the project would assist in traffic decongestion and landmark public/private partnership and opportunities for real estate development near the rail stations.

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Mecca plans on building a light rail line as well. Seems silly in a place where oil is king no?

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And we've seen the numbers before, but here is an article in another format on China. Business Week:

China is now undertaking the world's biggest railway expansion since the U.S. laid its transcontinental line in the 1860s. Beijing plans to spend $248 billion through 2020 on 75,000 miles of new track, for both freight and high-speed passenger lines. At that point, China's high-speed passenger network will likely be the biggest on earth.

H/T Orphan Road

Oil Shortage Straight to Roads

Seems like there is an asphalt shortage. This is why we need to get off of oil sooner rather than later.

Public Transportation in Advertising

My dad sent me a Shell ad from The Economist a few weeks ago. He thought it was good that they mentioned the importance of urban planning and public transport. My guess is that this was from the Shell International Office in Den Haag. It is a dutch company. I wish they would say this a little louder here, perhaps in newspapers and TV advertisements.

The United Nations predicts that half the world’s population will live in urban areas by the end of 2008 and about 70% will be city dwellers by 2050. There are expected to be more than 27 ‘mega-cities’ - each with more than 10 million people - by 2050.

More crowded cities means more fumes, more noise and more smog. So what to do?

At Shell, we believe the solution is a combination of cleaner fuels, cleaner engines, better public transport and better urban planning. We are doing our best with fuel improvements.

You can find the full text here at the Shell site.

(Full disclosure: My dad worked for shell for over 30 years before retiring.)

Negative Externalities & Congestion Pricing By Insurance Rates

While Randal O'Toole keeps trying to wedge his foot in the door before it shuts, the evidence against the autopia of Futurama gets worse. The New York Times blog goes into detail:

Which of these externalities is the most costly to U.S. society? According to current estimates, carbon emissions from driving impose a societal cost of about $20 billion a year. That sounds like an awful lot until you consider congestion: a Texas Transportation Institute study found that wasted fuel and lost productivity due to congestion cost us $78 billion a year. The damage to people and property from auto accidents, meanwhile, is by far the worst.

In a 2006 paper, the economists Aaron Edlin and Pinar Karaca-Mandic argued that accidents impose a true unpaid cost of about $220 billion a year. (And that’s even though the accident rate has fallen significantly over the past 10 years, from 2.72 accidents per million miles driven to 1.98 per million; overall miles driven, however, keep rising.) So, with roughly three trillion miles driven each year producing more than $300 billion in externality costs, drivers should probably be taxed at least an extra 10 cents per mile if we want them to pay the full societal cost of their driving.

Basically they are setting up an argument for Pay as You Go Insurance or PAY D. Man would I love this type of pricing. First off, I only drive once a week. I really don't even need to drive that but it can be a bit hard on some days to get to my Gramma's house out in the East Bay. But driving about 40 miles a week is much less than the 90 I used to run in college. And it should cost me less than it does now. But the bad economic balance is not lost on the authors of this article:

This brings us to automobile insurance. While economists may argue that gas is poorly priced, that imbalance can’t compare with how poorly insurance is priced. Imagine that Arthur and Zelda live in the same city and occupy the same insurance risk pool but that Arthur drives 30,000 miles a year while Zelda drives just 3,000. Under the current system, Zelda probably pays the same amount for insurance as Arthur.

Is this perhaps a way to get to the mileage tax as well? Everyone has to get car insurance, so what if the mileage was reported to the government like capital gains and sent to you in a 1099 type format. Then it becomes part of your tax return. This could also be coupled with your income quite nicely and lower income folks could get tax breaks. It could possibly make pricing more progressive and might also be a way to recover the true cost of driving, or perhaps provide more incentives to reduce VMT, walk, and use transit. This one market based tool has the possibility of reshaping our urban landscape, likely for the better.

Two Views of CO2

Wired has two maps on CO2 emissions. One is the per capita emissions map that shows cities are actually better at dealing with CO2 than exurban areas. The other is the total CO2 map which shows cities as the main culprits when it comes to CO2 emissions. What is interesting is that they point out the west is much worse off due to its sprawlyness.

There's a lot of information you could mine from these maps, but one thing stood out to me: the West, for all of our hippie do-gooders, isn't doing well (as a whole) from a per-capita emissions perspective. We simply don't live in dense enough situations to benefit from the efficiency gains created by urban living. Lots of infrastructure serving only a few people generates high per-capita emissions.

This comes after CNT put out the same types of maps a few years ago for Chicago. Guess where the CO2 emissions are per capita, not along the Metra lines or in the transit rich core. Interesting.

Our Low Gas Taxes

Stephen Rees has a post up from the Economist showing gas taxes around the world. On this list we're the lowest! Yay....or something...not. We don't pay the full price for the externalities of using oil. Not only that, we've developed in a way that forces our dependence on it.

Last week I filled up my tank and saw it was about $50. Not a big hit considering the next time I go back to the pump will be about a month and a half from now. Last year I figured out that I spent 4% of my income on transportation. The average American spends 17.5%. So imagine if every person had an option to reduce their transportation costs by 10% or more. For a family that makes $35,000 per year, thats $3,500 that could go to a new home, to education, to local businesses, or to better food. Otherwise that 10% goes to an oil company, which I must say paid my dads salary which kept a roof over my head and well fed, but also makes a lot of fat cats at the top rich, and can send money to folks that don't like us.

If we paid the true cost of gas and everyone could have access to transit like Fred, Adron, or Ben we'd be a lot better off as a country and investing more in our respective communities.