Sunday Train: States Rights to Living Transport

Burning the Midnight Oil for Living Energy Independence

Cap'n Transit Rides Again wrote about "Getting People Out of their Cars by Not Subsidizing Roads, which perplexed Yonah Freemark at The Transport Politic, which drew a response from Cap'n Transit asking whether we want to be serious, or right.

Boiling them down well beyond the point of oversimplification, Yonah argues that transit advocates must go along to get along, and Cap'n Transit argues that if you aint anti-car, you aint doing it right.

The same debate we get anytime the maximum that is politically possible is less than the minimum our society needs for survival. How do we break on through to the other side, where the minimum we must do lies within the maximum that we can do?
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As always ~ well, at least since I started doing it this way ~ more at:
Progressive Blue
HillbillyReport.org
Docudharma
and Agent Orange

Sunday Train: West Virginia River Runner Rail and the Steel Interstates

Burning the Midnight Oil for Living Energy Independence

The flashy rail projects are the very HSR projects to build bullet trains serving urban areas with millions of people.

But the role of rail in supporting sustainable extends beyond the bullet train system alone. It may not be critical to the financial success of these bullet trains to provide service to people living in urban areas of 50,000 to 200,000 ~ but its critical to these people to have access to some form of sustainable intercity transport.

Indeed, if we are going to be harvesting wind power, solar power, sustainably coppiced biocoal, geothermal, run of river hydro, and other sustainable resources ... we are going to be creating incomes in areas away from the 1m+ cities. We best look after the needs of the people who come to those areas looking for work.
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More:

• Progressive Blue


• HillbillyReport.org


• Docudharma


• Agent Orange

Sunday Train: Conventional Rail and the Steel Interstates ~ Best Friends Forever

Burning the Midnight Oil for Living Energy Independence

I've written several times about the direct potential of the Steel Interstate project to cut our oil imports by 10% by getting long haul freight trucking off the road. It would at the same time relieve the crushing burden imposed by long haul trucking on our over-worked, under-maintained Interstate, National and State highways, help get renewable energy resources from places that they are to places people need electricity, and of course support long distance Rapid Passenger Rail offering dramatically improved reliability and transit speed, supporting operating surpluses with multiple services per day.

I don't recollect that I have written very much about the benefit that the Steel Interstates offer to passenger rail elsewhere. So that's what I aim to do. Today I will look at one rail transport ideas I have talked about previously ~ Northeast Ohio Regional Rail ~ and what help it would receive from the Steel Interstates. Then sometime in the next week or two, I will look at the Columbus / WV / Atlantic Coast "RidgeRunner", and the benefit it would receive from the Steel Interstates.
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More:

• Progressive Blue


• HillbillyReport.org


• Docudharma


• Agent Orange

Sunday Train: HSR, Express and Locals Done Right

Burning the Midnight Oil for Living Energy Independence

After the outcry when the Caltrain system between San Francisco and San Jose (and once in a while beyond) faced a scare that it would drop from 86 trains per day down to a peak-commute-only 48 trains per day ...
... Caltrain was able to scrape together a 76 train per day schedule.

Clem at the Caltrain HSR Compatibility Blog ran the schedule through his commute service index, which weights 70% the average trip time, 30% the best trip time, 20% the average wait between trains, and 15% the maximum service gap.

So giving the original 86 train schedule a benchmark score of 100, how far did the 76 train schedule drop?

It rose to 104. On Clem's metric, the 76 train per day schedule is an improvement.

? What gives?

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More:

• ProgressiveBlue


• HillbillyReport.org


• Docudharma


• Agent Orange

Sunday Train: Oil Addiction is a Political Choice, not a Necessity

Burning the Midnight Oil for Living Energy Independence

We can tell that an energy policy is not aimed at ending our nation's oil addiction in time when the speech presenting it follows up:

The United States of America cannot afford to bet our long-term prosperity, our long-term security on a resource that will eventually run out, and even before it runs out will get more and more expensive to extract from the ground. ...

with

I set this goal knowing that we’re still going to have to import some oil. It will remain an important part of our energy portfolio for quite some time, until we’ve gotten alternative energy strategies fully in force.

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Sunday Train at this blog has been lagging badly, in large part because of the extra layout effort to port the posts from the community blogs where they are first posted. So from here on out, only the introductory section will be posted, to be followed by links to the various community blogs where the full post appears.

More at:

• ProgressiveBlue;


• HillbillyReport.org;


• Docudharma; and


• Agent Orange.