Transport Electrification

There is a lot of talk here of passenger rail but little discussion of freight. I can't say that I know about the business that much but I wanted to share a few ideas that I had seen that look promising.

The first is a plan thought up by Bruce McFadden over at Docudharma. His idea is to create a backbone energy corridor along freight lines to transport stranded wind.

It should, I hope, be clear that much of the best resource is in areas that do not have the highest electricity consumption. And at the same time, that is a lot of the terrain that the transcontinental freight rail must traverse to get where its going. And, at the same time, we desperately need to get the main freight rail trunk lines electrified, by hook or by crook. Ergo, I got a grossly oversimplified policy proposal to present.

• The Federal Government invests in publicly owned infrastructure to electrify the main railroad
• In return, the owners of the right of way cede use of the right of way above the part that they need to public use, together with access to the ground level right of way for support structures
• That right of way is used to establish long distance High Voltage DC trunk lines to bring sustainable energy from the places that have it to places the need it
• In areas where there is a commercial wind resource, the usage rights above those trunk lines are available to be leased out for wind farm operators, with the lease payments rolled back into the funding for the program

Some answers to some challenges to the proposal, after the fold.

Another of interest is a plan to reduce energy consumption in 10 years through transport electrification, mostly by electrifying the freight lines by granting property tax waivers for railroads that electrify. It also includes more rail transit and trolleybuses. Alan Drake discusses that plan over at Light Rail Now! I'm not sure how feasible it is, but its an interesting idea to ponder.

Most Prolific Coach in NCAA Retires

Every once in a while I have to toss in a track or cross country blog when the news is important enough to share with the world. Tonight I tip my hat to Arkansas' retiring coach John McDonnell.

Bigger than any Football or Basketball coach in the NCAA, John McDonnell at the University of Arkansas won 42! National titles in Cross Country, Indoor and Outdoor Track. When I was in school the Hogs were always in the running for a title and beating them in a relay or at a Cross Country meet was a badge of honor. We didn't like them much as rivals but you had to have respect for Coach Mac and his teams. Congrats Coach on the many years and your contributions to the sport.

In his 36 seasons at the helm of the Arkansas track and cross country program, McDonnell redesigned the face of collegiate track and field.

42 NCAA championships since 1984: 11 cross country, 19 indoor track and 12 outdoor track

More national championships (42) than any coach in any sport in the history of college athletics.

Five NCAA triple crowns(Cross Country, Track, Indoor Track), including three in a row (1991-94).

20 conference triple crowns since 1982, including eight straight between 1987 and 1995.

83 conference championships overall since 1974 including 38 in the SWC and 45 in the SEC.

12-consecutive NCAA indoor track championships (1984-1995), the longest string of national titles by any school in any sport in collegiate history.

Coached all but three of Arkansas’ 185 track All-Americans in school history. Those athletes have earned a combined 652 All-America honors.

Every school outdoor and indoor track record is held by a McDonnell recruit.

34-consecutive league and 17-consecutive SEC cross country championships (1974-2007).

Has produced 55 individual national champions.

Has coached 23 Olympians spanning three decades and six different Olympic Games, including a gold, silver and bronze medalist.

Coached former Razorback Daniel Lincoln to the American record in the 3,000-meter steeplechase is July, 2006.

That man could coach.

Juno & Planning

There's not much that I agree with Sam Staley on, but i thought this post on Planetizen captured some of what I was thinking when I watched the film Juno.

This perception fits the landscape. As Juno is driving to meet Vanessa and Mark, we see her drive through her run-down neighborhood of eclectic single family homes and enter into the wealthier, cookie-cutter sprawl of large, well adorned ones inhabited in St. Cloud, Minnesota.

This sets up a cinematically and artistically visual contrast. It turns out Juno’s family, living in the decidedly less affluent neighborhood (albeit early 20th century sprawl), is far more stable, loving, and grounded than the picture perfect couple in the wealthier contemporary suburb.

From the looks of the neighborhood, Juno probably lived in a Streetcar Suburb.

No Party Like a Tram Party

What if we had enough rail lines and vehicles to run a party vehicle once in a while? Well you'd be doing it just like Prague.

Travelers waiting for one of Prague’s traditional trams will occasionally see something strange pull up to the station: a streetcar with a full-bore dance party taking place inside, complete with high-energy music, disco lighting and bartenders.

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.

A National Infrastructure Plan

Speaker Pelosi has issued a challenge. Let's rebuild and renew America. It's a really long article basically covering her speech to the awesome Regional Plan Association which has some of my favorite researchers working for them including the awesome Jeff Zupan and Bob Yaro. Here are a few highlights:

"Rebuilding America is a national security issue. 90% of our oil imports are used for transportation. With investments in public transportation, more efficient roadways, and a broadband backbone that removes commuters from roads, we can reduce our dependence on foreign oil and reduce its implications on our foreign policy.

"Rebuilding America is an economic issue. By improving our efficiency, we improve our competitiveness and create the next generation of good-paying jobs.

"Rebuilding America is an equality issue. Earlier this month, when I held an Infrastructure Forum in the Capitol, Darren Walker of the Rockefeller Foundation spoke eloquently to us about transportation as a matter of basic fairness. As he said, the civil rights movement in America was sparked by one brave woman, and one public bus. Transportation is the road to opportunity.

"Rebuilding America is an environmental issue. Making greener choices will bring us cleaner air and water, reduce sprawl and congestion, and cut greenhouse gases, to the benefit of the American people and our planet.

"Preserving our planet for future generations is our most urgent challenge.

...

"With the economy slowing down and job losses accelerating, we must also look for opportunities to take advantage of the stimulative effect of investing in infrastructure.

"In conversations with the White House, leaders in Congress have placed a number of proposals on the table, including funding for infrastructure projects - clean water, passenger rail, transit, highways - where dirt will fly and people will be put to work that simply lack the funds to begin now.

"We will explore these options in addition to all the regular order transportation and appropriations bills which give us built-in opportunities to be innovative and creative.

"Right now, both the House and Senate are at work on legislation that has the greatest potential to address climate change yet: a cap-and-trade system, which will not only limit emissions, but also generate revenue through the sale of greenhouse gas permits. Some of these revenues could be used for public transit or other infrastructure that further reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

"In order to renew and rebuild our nation, we need to engage the public in our 21st century vision.

"Once again, Congressman Blumenauer is leading the way, with legislation for a new national commission that would involve the public, members of Congress, and stakeholders all around the country to determine our priorities and look at all the dimensions of this challenge together.

Clay Chastain Keeps Attaching Conditions

Ok, let's repeat a few phrases.

Streetcars are a subset of light rail.
Streetcars are a subset of light rail.
Streetcars are a subset of light rail.

Streetcars can be coupled.
Streetcars can be coupled.
Streetcars can be coupled.

Streetcars can run in their own lane.
Streetcars can run in their own lane.
Streetcars can run in their own lane.

So with that out of the way, it seems dumb that the only way you'll accept a transit plan for a city is if you're so rigid that you limited the plan to one technology. And by limiting the plan to one technology, he's ignoring that there is a way to get what he wants with streetcars if that is a more workable alternative. This is what made Clay Chastain's plan for Kansas City Light Rail unworkable in the first place. He mandated that the line include building an Aerial Tramway over a park and that it had the electric system of Bordeaux France without an overhead wire even though the proprietors of the technology have said they weren't bringing it over anytime soon. But putting it exactly the way he thought it should be on the ballot without doing any engineering was what killed it.

On further reflection however, Chastain has come up with a possible compromise.

“This is an idea that should electrify the entire city and end the cold war between me and the city,” he says. “If there is a settlement between the parties, and the city wants me to support their light-rail plan in November, I will do so.”

Under certain conditions.

“I will do so only if the transit technology for the main spine is conventional light rail and not streetcars,” Chastain says. “And if there is a direct connection to Union Station, and if the city agrees to put on the same November ballot an ordinance in which the voters can choose whether or not to do away with Section 704 of the City Charter allowing the City Council to repeal or amend voter-initiated ordinances.”

Sigh. No wonder no one wants to work with him, he keeps attaching conditions. At the same time, the Mayor is looking to lay the groundwork for a regional rail system. He seems to be starting to look at it the right way, with a starter line. The other cities that have gotten networks started have built a small starter line first; Houston, Denver, Salt Lake City, and Minneapolis. Now they are all expanding, some albeit faster than others.

But I guess the whole point of this post was to say you can configure these transit technologies to do whatever they need to do. Just saying "I don't want light rail" or "I don't want streetcars" is silly. The things that matter are what the right of way is like and the capacity needed on the line. I can understand when folks say "I don't want it in mixed traffic." But don't write it in stone so that you can't have a small section on the line that might only have that option if the ROW in the corridor is too narrow.



Europeans laugh at us. They call them all trams.

Socialist Roads Scholars

I'm a huge fan of Alex Marshall. Sometimes he writes at Streetsblog and others in different magazines and journals. Today he's in Governing Magazine saying what everyone was thinking. The Libertarians and Conservatives who hate transit so much and are all about free markets become socialists when it comes to roads. Government intervention? Only for roads.

Given all this, I find it exceedingly strange that a group of conservative and libertarian-oriented think tanks — groups that argue for less government — have embraced highways and roads as a solution to traffic congestion and a general boon to living. In the same breath, they usually attack mass-transit spending, particularly on trains. They seem to see a highway as an expression of the free market and of American individualism, and a rail line as an example of government meddling and creeping socialism.

Among the most active of these groups is the Reason Foundation, a self-described libertarian nonprofit organization with a $7 million budget that has its own transportation wing. Some typical highway-oriented papers on Reason's Web site include "How to Build Our Way Out of Congestion" and "Private Tollways: How States Can Leverage Federal Highway Funds." Rail transit is taken on in papers with titles such as "Myths of Light Rail Transit," and "Rethinking Transit 'Dollars & Sense': Unearthing the True Cost of Public Transit." I didn't see any papers about unearthing the true cost of our public highway network.

Nope, in their minds, if you toll it, they will come. Don't get me wrong. I think congestion pricing has merits in certain instances, but wholesale tolling of roads is dumb. Depending on a single mode of transport is dumb too. Didn't anyone ever tell them when they were kids that they couldn't eat steak all the time but needed bread, milk, fruits, and vegetables?

H/T The Political Environment

Help Sacramento Enter the Transit Space Race

Update from comments: Brian also mentions that when the page comes up only scenario A comes up. Hopefully they will remedy this so that folks see all three scenarios from which to choose.

Sactown is looking at scenarios for future transit. In order to build out their network, they will need to build light rail, commuter rail, streetcar circulators and new BRT lines. I think a true network expansion is something that everyone can get behind. Well they are asking for folks opinions. So if you live in Sacramento, give them your ideas.

Scenario A - Limited Funding


Scenario B


Scenario C - Full Funding

Also, take a visit to the local transit blogs. RT Driver & RT Rider

Thanks to reader Brian Goldner for the heads up.