Sunday Train: The Steel Interstate and the Great Highway Lie

Burning the Midnight Oil for Living Energy Independence

The last two weeks on the Sunday Train, I've been writing about the Steel Interstate. Steel Interstates & An America That Can Do Big Things (3 June) revisited the basic concept, and Putting Steel into the Amtrak Long Distance Backbone primarily discussed the first third of the Congressionally mandated reports on improving Amtrak's long distance rail network, but also discussed a bit about the role of long distance trains in the context of the Steel Interstate proposal.

This week, the attention shifts from the Steel Interstate infrastructure to the substantial benefit to our existing legacy Asphalt Interstates if the United States elects to retain a viable national economy by implementing some form of Steel Interstate electric rapid freight rail system for long-haul freight.

Along the way, I spend a bit of time talking about misconceptions about the cost of our legacy system. Myth and misconception that are sufficiently widely help may be sufficient platform for gathering majority support for a system ... but its not a sufficient platform for putting together a sustainable system, in either physical, ecological, economic, or financial senses of "sustainable".

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Sunday Train: Driving Ohio on Lake Erie

Burning the Midnight Oil for Living Energy Independence

Note: a reprint of a Daily Kos diary from Jan, 2007

There is a common trend in my part of the Great Lakes States (Ohio, Indiana, Michigan) for discussion of sustainable energy to focus on commercial exploitation of the Wind Resource of the Great Lakes.

And why the Great Lakes? Because that's where the wind blows, as shown on the trimmed down version of the 2004 50m wind speed map for Ohio to the right. The pink, purple and red are the highest quality wind resources. (jpg) And this is just 50 metres ... at 100 metres it gets better still.

So what does this have to do with driving? Well, sometimes the wind blows harder, and sometimes the wind blows softer ... and on this point wind power and driving snuggle right together with a whole bunch of Energy Independence posts I have already made. How things link together ... is after the fold.

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Sunday Train: A Dime A Gallon Tariff on Imported Oil for Energy Independent Transport

Burning the Midnight Oil for Living Energy Independence

The big news from July was: Senate's energy bill: What a disappointment (LA Times Editorial):

Amid tough fights over healthcare and financial reform, Obama's push for cleaner energy ran out of gas long ago. It looked like a losing battle anyway; with Senate Republicans universally opposing a cap-and-trade program or other efforts to reduce greenhouse gases, and some Democrats in heavy manufacturing states also opposed, it may have been impossible to round up the 60 votes needed to overcome a filibuster on a Senate energy bill as strong as the one passed by the House last year. But that doesn't excuse Obama or Reid for surrendering so easily, or so completely.

So we need to do something. And the strategy to stitch together a complex, multiple part, massive sprawling suburb of an Energy Bill that would be all things to all people has failed in precisely the way its opponents intended it to fail: this is a big reason why Big Oil was so heavily invested in the fight against health care reform, to make sure that it took so much time that the Energy Bill would run into election year politics and their direct lobbying efforts and come unglued.

Treason? Well, given that we are far more exposed to a disruption of our energy imports than to any threat to be found in Afghanistan, and are far more exposed to catastrophic climate change than to any threat being secured by our bases in Japan, Germany or any of the balance from the 687,347 acres of overseas military bases ... sure.

But what to do about it?

The proposal here is to get a target that can be fought for, now, and campaigned for, in the fall: as the title says, A Dime A Gallon on Imported Oil for Energy Independence

It won't get all of the way there, of course, but with sufficient leverage it can provide an immediate economic stimulus while getting an essential start on the problem.

The basic policy behind the label is:

• $0.10 tariff on imported crude oil. Crude oil, after all, is an "unscheduled" commodity under existing WTO agreements, so we are free to put any tariff on it that we wish
• Four funds (two and a half cents each) for electric transport, active transport, Steel Interstates, and High Speed Rail
• Spending must be on qualified projects, but money is distributed to state and local accounts on a per capita basis
• For capital investment projects, account holders in the first ten years can borrow on the OMB projected revenue in the first ten years

A Dime A Gallon: How Much is That

According to the US Energy Information Administration, our annual imports of Crude Oil in 2009 (a low year, because of the recession) were 3,289,675 thousand barrels. Each barrel is 42 gallons, so that is 138,166,350 thousand gallons. Times ten cents is $13,816,635 thousand, or $13.8b.

Divide this into fourths for each project, and that is $3.45b per task. At a real interest rate of 3%, that is up to $29.4b per task or, in other words, about $95 per capita (based on a Census July 2009 figure of 307m.

This is, admittedly, not sufficient for the magnitude of the task ahead, but, unlike the status quo, its a step in the right direction.


Electric Transport Fund

The electric transport fund is divided into state-based accounts, so that, for example, if the following states borrowed the full ten years ahead (based on 2009 Census estimates):

• California, 36,96m, $3.5b available;
• Ohio, 11.5m, $1.1b available;
• Iowa, 3m, $287m available; and
• New Hampshire, 1.3m, $127m available.

So, what could this money be spent on?

• Electrification of rail corridors
• Purchase electric rolling stock
• Electrification of bus corridors
• Purchase of electric trolleybuses
• Purchase of pluggable hybrid buses
• Charging infrastructure in support of electric vehicles
• Credits on the purchase of electric vehicles
• operations of an electrified transport system (this is not capital spending, so it would be out of current revenues)

The state presents a project, its vetted for qualifying as electric transport spending, if approved, the state can direct the money in its account to the project.


Active Transport

This is an area that is often overlooked, but an important aspect of this was addressed in the PBS BluePrint America show Dangerous Crossing. Outer suburbs were, of course, established for people who could afford cars, but as suburbs have grown to account for half of US residences, there is a growing share of suburban populations can't afford or don't wish to spend on a car.

Watch the full episode. See more Need To Know.

And that leads to situations like that documented in Dangerous Crossing:

27-year-old Nimia Larcia lives in a suburban housing complex just outside of Atlanta, Georgia. She moved here from Honduras six years ago in search of a better life.

Suburban America used to be synonymous with good living, not the least of which was because its streets were so much safer than those in the city. Not anymore.

Every morning when Nimia walks from her apartment to her minimum-wage job at a jewelry store, she has to cross one of the most dangerous roads in Georgia: Buford Highway. People in cars race back and forth, many if not most exceeding the 45 mile per hour speed limit.

A system that is designed so that it kills people for crossing a street - on foot is not one that encourages existing transport systems that can be shifted toward oil-independent transport ... and, indeed, active transport to get to a public transport stop is especially dangerous in these kinds of communities:

Demand for transportation is so high here that taxis, freelance car services and private buses race down these roads competing for customers with the public transit system, often using the very same stops.

People rushing to and from buses account for one in four of the accidents here [Buford Highway].

And of course, there is demographic change:

Demographers are warning that millions of older Americans living in car dependent communities could be left isolated, unable even to get to the grocery store. Dunham-Jones is hoping the country will design its way out of these problems. Even Buford Highway, she says, could be transformed with medians, trees and buildings set closer to the road. Changes that are known to slow traffic. But outside of the ivory tower, change does not come easily. Or quickly.

Last year Georgia spent more than two billion dollars on transportation, but only a tiny fraction, less than 1 percent, went specifically to pedestrian safety.

Of course, the typical state -highway- transportation department faces a situation just like Georgia's, with roadworks having dedicated funding while pedestrian facilities do not.

So this is allocated to local communities: incorporated cities, towns and villages, and for residents in unincorporated areas, counties and reservations. Qualifying projects include:

• Capital spending on sidewalks and pedestrian crossings
• operating spending on sidewalks (eg snow removal) and maintenance of pedestrian crossings
• Pedestrian benches and bus stops
• Dedicated cycleways
• Shared use bicycle boulevards
• Public bicycle parking and secured storage
• Recreational bike and hike trails

Steel Interstates

The Sunday Train has covered Steel Interstates several times in the past. The basic idea is to start with the Department of Defense Strategic Rail Corridor Network (STRACNET), and upgrade selected corridors to support electric heavy rail and rapid rail, including 110mph paths (whether by separate track, passing track, or time scheduling), including provision to support High Voltage Direct Current transmission line to connect renewable energy resource grids to renewable energy consumer grids.

This is a single fund, since the purpose is to establish a single network. Unlike the first two funds, this is an interest subsidy on capital funds, with the capital funds themselves paid by user and access fees paid by the various freight railroads and passenger rail operations that might make use of the corridors.


High Speed Rail

The Sunday Train has also covered High Speed Rail projects once or twice in the past.

The High Speed Rail fund is set up with state by state accounts. States such as California, Florida, and Illinois that already have Express or Emerging HSR programs already in progress can simply apply their accounts to existing projects. At the other end of the spectrum, are states that do not have projects in hand, which will be applying the state High Speed Rail account funding to project development, design, and environmental impact assessment.

The Department of Transportation is already in a position to vet whether a project qualifies for HSR funding, with the project evaluation framework established for Stimulus II HSR funding.

For the 220mph Express HSR projects, such as in California and Florida, and for the most promising approach to the 125mph Regional HSR as well, the same project can draw funding from both the HSR fund and the Electrification Fund. This increases the total that could be applied to the California Express HSR project from these account based funds to around $7b for California, and around $3.5b for Florida.

On the other hand states such as Ohio that are (or may be) pursuing the less capital intensive Emerging HSR corridors might focus the HSR funding, around $1.1b in our case, on Emerging HSR and focus the electrification funding on local electric transport.

Of course, states that do not have programs up and running would be in a position to simply draw on the current revenue in the account on project development, to put their state in a position to launch a system.


But the Politics Are ... Possble, Maybe?

As we have seen over the past year and a half, its a lot harder to stop something from being done than to get something done.

While it is nicely symbolic to be using a tariff on imported oil to be financing these things, and while it sidesteps a lot of investment in framing by the drill baby drill crowd ... it also includes a substantial wedge for the opposition. For US based oil production, what a tariff means is that $4.20 gets added to the cost of each imported barrel of crude oil. So while the projects being funded will cut oil production profits in the long term ... its an extra $4.20 per barrel in the pocket of each owner of a domestic oil well.

That's the production offshore of Louisiana, the production of the Bakkan field in North Dakota and Montana, ongoing (if declining) production in Texas ... an extra $4.20 per barrel in the short term, against the substantial reduction in oil dependency a decade from now.


Could it actually get started?

If I were designing a program from scratch hoping for a Presidential candidate to run on in the primaries and then take into the General Election, this probably would not be it. However, pragmatically, that is four to five years in the future, and we don't really have that much time to sit on our hands.

In the aftermath of the abandonment of the Energy Bill, and the aftermath of the BP oil spill ... having foreign oil finance our return to the Energy Independence that we relied on from Independence through two World Wars and the height of the US economic development in the 50's and 60's is the best shot that I can see from here.


Midnight Oil ~ A River Runs Red

...
So we came and we conquered and found
Riches of commons and kings
Who strangled and wrestled the ground
But they never put back anything
Now I'm trapped like a dog in a cage
Wherever the truth is pursued
It must be the curse of the age
What's taken is never renewed

Sunday Train: Can the US get its Energy Freedom Act Together?

Burning the Midnight Oil for Living Energy Independence

Here we are:

• a long, long way from full employment and full capacity utilization, when only the ignorant and ideologically insane would imagine any general objections to increased government spending on useful long term
• and with a gusher in the Gulf reminding us that the Oil Companies are lying liars and listening to their assurances and advice leads to disasters at best and calamities at worst

... and yet there is a genuine question whether or not the Federal government will take the bit between its teeth and push ahead toward funding a 21st century oil-free transportation system.

While it is a fun thing to imagine different institutions to see through the development of different alignments, lurking in the background is the worry: what if our body politic is just broken, and this time we cannot do what needs to be done?
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The Dread Specter of Deficit Errorism

The main reason for concern is the problem of Deficit Errorism: people engaged in magical thinking of one sort or another who work under a fantasy model in which the Federal Government faces a finance constraint on the spending of its own sovereign currency. This malignant fantasy once again raised its ugly head in the recent Senate vote on extending Unemployment Benefits:

Resolving the impasse that has pitted deficit concerns against traditional social safety net programs provides an object lesson on how hard it is for Congress to legislate at a time when public anger over government spending is growing but the appetite and need for government programs has not waned.

And where does that "growing public anger over government spending" come from? Its stoked by well researched memes irresponsibly spread by corporate media. Find out that people are angry about government bail outs of big banks, and then find a way to direct it to generate poll results that scare Senators into voting against extending unemployment benefits.


Throwing the Baby Out With the Bathwater on "Energy Independence"

But, "oh! That is just the GOP = Generosity of Oil Party". Yet then to listen to Rachel Maddow declare:

Want to know why Energy Independence is still a goal ...? Its because its not a real thing.

Bull excrement. Of course its a real thing. Its because we have talked about it but not done anything about it.

Well, she qualifies this, but then launches into the silly red herring that has so taken the centrist and progressive blogosphere, that cutting our net oil imports down to zero would not be accomplishing anything because "oil is fungible".

The fact that oil is fungible of oil has nothing to do with why every President elected since 1968 except Jimmy Carter has been lying to the American People when pretending to be pursuing Energy Independence. They've been lying about Energy Independence because they have been proposing to pursue it with policies that are incapable of achieving Energy Independence

Oil was just as fungible in the 1940's and 1950's as it is today, and we were Energy Independent then and addicted to imports now.

Bulk wheat, rice and corn is fungible, but a country that is food self-sufficient cannot be starved into submission, no matter how much cross trade they have in any cereal grain or how much they tend to export one crop an import another. A blockade or disruption of external supplies can never be the cause of famine in a food self-sufficient country.

Dependency matters. Dependency is a loss of freedom of action. No matter how much the authors of political fiction that pass as foreign policy speeches for so many elected officials wish to imagine that US military might makes us mighty - we are a giant with shoulders of steel and feet of clay.

Before the 1970's, the United States has never been dependent on outside countries for food or energy or transport or shelter. It is true that at one time we were dependent on outside countries for the equipment required to maintain a manufacturing industry, and worked very hard to eliminate that dependency. And then, once we had ... we were not a wealthy country, we were in income terms at best a middle-income country ... but we were an independent economy, free to pursue our own national interests as we saw them.

But since the 1970's, increasingly, not. Since the 1970's, we have been trapped by our addiction to imported energy.

It is true that this is about oil, and ideally we would target zero oil consumption in 20 years ... but if we achieve 80% to 90% reduction in oil consumption and simply get back to an oil surplus, and at the same time avoid becoming dependent on some other imported energy source ... that would be real, genuine, energy independence.

The reason that the Republicans in the last campaign were lying is because we already tried Drill Baby Drill, and we got our oil imports reversed by tapping lots of little pockets of hard to obtain oil, and then the ongoing decline in our old big oil fields reversed that and imports started exploding again. They were lying about the safety of offshore oil production, but more critically they were lying in pretending that tapping every single oil field physically in reach despite all safety hazards and environmental impact could not conceivably reverse the decline in our oil production.

The Democratic position was not so much a lie as a clever bit of rhetoric that meant far less than it sounded like. Obviously, being in the Western Hemisphere, the US tends to buy more oil from producers like Venezuela and Nigeria and Angola than from producers like Saudi Arabia and Iraq and Iran. So promising to get "independence from Middle Eastern oil" was just empty campaign rhetoric. Its not Energy Independence unless its independence from Imported Oil.

Or, perhaps, if Energy Independence has be ruined by far too many people led to think it has something to do with using using less than 1% of total world oil production on top of our existing 10% of oil production to feed our oil habit consisting of 25% of world oil production ...

... if too many people think that "Energy Independence" means covering a 15 cents on the dollar budget shortfall with less than a penny on the dollar in resources ...

... then hell, call it "Energy Freedom".



An Independent US Economy Requires Oil Free Transport

60%~70% of our oil is imported, 60%~70% of our oil is consumed in transport. If we do not do a serious full court press for Oil Free Transport, then as we experience the coming series of serious oil price shocks - the ones that will let people know that $4/gallon was a pre-earthquake tremor, and by no means the main event - our Economy is screwed.

It really is that simple. While the Generosity of Oil Party sells one after another fantasy simplification of reality, and the Democratic Party establishment seems to aim to make every policy proposal into a hopeless muddles so nobody can tell how far short it has fallen of the lofty campaign rhetoric ... here, at least, we do have a simple, true no matter what the economic conditions are, stable place to plant our flag.

Recession? We need work. We need the government to spend money to directly or indirectly put people to work. But we are a dependent economy, so we do not have the freedom we once had: if our dollar melts down, gasoline and diesel prices will skyrocket and our economy is screwed.

Solution? Spend money on things that will reduce our dependency on oil. Then there is on the one hand less reason for speculators to dump dollars, and on the other hand less damage done if they do.

Overheated economy leading to inflation? In the face of demand-driven inflation, we need to increase productivity and increase productive capacity. The short-circuit to a classic wage-price inflationary spiral is to cut producer price inflation, so that rising wages do not force an equal increase in prices leading to pushed for "catch up" wage increases and so on.

Solution? The simplest, most easily accessible sources of increased efficiency are the massive energy waste build into our transportation and logistics system.

Imported cost inflation? This is the easiest of all: all three episodes of substantial imported cost inflation that we have experience, in the 70's, early 80's, and just recently, have been due to oil price shocks. Reduce our dependency on imported oil, reduce our exposure to oil price shocks.


Getting Around Deficit Errorism

Paradoxically, the malignant fantasies that lead politicians into Deficit Errorism leave the door open for getting serious about oil-free transport.

The thing is, over the long term, the shift of our transport from inefficient oil fed systems to more efficient, domestically powered alternatives will have a stimulus impact just because we are importing less oil. What we need is to get the ball rolling.

So we can fund this with dedicated taxes and other revenue sources, setting up Development Banks that allow borrowing against future dedicated revenue streams. If done right, the bill is in formal terms balanced budget - and of course in terms of the national economy an overall surplus, because cutting our energy imports is a real saving to our national economy.

So, just hypothetically: take the Cantwell / Collins carbon auction system with a 75% Social Dividend built in. Instead of a free for all for the other 25%, allocate 10% according to the location of employment in affected industries, and 15% to subsidizing Connie Mae financing of carbon reducing spending by consumers and businesses. Since Connie Mae financing is primarily funded by the reduced energy cost of the financed projects, the leverage of putting 15% of carbon permit auction revenues is tremendous.

And then, allow five times the present annual Social Dividend to be allocated to Connie Mae financed spending. Now instead of just offsetting the cost of the carbon permits, the system is leveraging more business nationwide for qualifying Connie Mae financed spending.

Then, add to that same bill a 1% plus 5 cents per gallon import tariff on imported petroleum and all petroleum products were countries have a free hand on setting import tariffs. Devote 20% of the revenue to individual accounts for cities, counties and reservations in oil-free transport systems. Devote 20% to each of four Line Development Banks to develop national "Steel Interstate" rail corridors providing electric freight rail, including 100mph rapid freight rail, from coast to coast, combined with a national network of Long Haul HVDC grid to grid transmission lines to connect all domestic renewable electricity resources to the grids serving the nation's electricity consumers.

In rough terms, that is from a quarter to a third of the way there. So fracking pass the bill and get to work on the next one.


The Question Is Not Whether It Can Be Done ...

This is not a theoretical question. This is not something that requires development of amazing new technologies. This is not something waiting for breakthroughs.

Enough breakthroughs have already been made.

New developments would, of course, be nice. Under mature technology, this will rely heavily on utility scale wind power and point-of-use solar power, supplemented by some utility scale peak solar power. Under mature technology, this will rely heavily on electric catenary and trolley-wire rail and trollery-wire/battery trolleybus transport systems, complemented by suburban infill to support pedestrian and cycle access, and supplemented by pluggable hybrid electric buses.

And if we start doing it, that may well not be the final shape of things, because if we start doing things, we may end up finding some new ways of doing things that as they mature take over in unexpected ways.

But even without any big technological advances, we can get this, in terms of the available, already proven hardware. Hardware is not the problem.

What is subject to doubt is whether we can get our act together. We have a clear and straightforward goal to aim at. A goal that our politicians have been lying about and paying lip service to for years. And our decades of time to slowly edge toward a solution has been completely wasted in a combination of phony policies and aggressive counter-attacks from the vested interests who are on the wrong side of history.

But can we get our act together? Can we seize this moment, shed our Addiction to Imported Oil and pursue Energy Freedom?


Midnight Oil ~ River Runs Red

Sunday Train: Working on the Railroad for Energy Independence

Burning the Midnight Oil for Living Energy Independence



Well how the frack d'ya like me now?

I'm not going to say "toldya so", since many who will be reading this diary said much the same during the "Drill, Baby, Drill" absurdity in 2008 ... but the undersea oil volcano underlines, boldfaces and highlights in red the basic facts of the situation that we face:

• Our country produces about twice as much crude oil per person as the world average
• Our country consumes about five times as much crude oil per person as the world average
• And we have been producing oil a long time, have passed our peak of domestic oil production, and aint ever getting back to it.

And, anyway, we already tried Drill, Baby, Drill. Its played itself out already.

Obviously, the direction to go to insulate ourselves from oil price shocks and the recessions they cause is to cut our consumption. Which means, in part, Train, Baby, Train.


So, what is it about trains, anyway?

I would admit that I have a big model train set in the basement - except its not mine, its my stepfather's. For me, trains are transport, a way to get from Point A to Point B. Indeed, the mode of transport that has a special place in my heart over and above their functional utility is not trains so much as bikes (and living in NE Ohio, I must hasten to explain "Bikes like Schwinn's are Bikes, not Bikes like Harley's are Bikes").


No, this is why trains. We consume 28% of our energy in the transportation sector. If we are going to reduce our oil consumption by 5% a year each year for the next 20 years, that means we have to consume the consumption of petroleum by transport by 5% a year, each year for the next 20 years.

We also have to get off mineral coal, but it turns out that trains can contribute to that as well.

My focus here, today, is how to use the process of breaking our oil addiction as a means of providing the jobs that our economy needs, and does not and will not otherwise have, over the next decade.

Of course, when we focus on oil, transport is even more important. To get more specific, according to the government numbers, transport consumes about 2/3 of our petroleum. We produce about 40% of our oil consumption, and even if we cut our oil consumption by 5% a year ... by the time we have cut 60% of our present oil consumption in 12 years time, we will be producing less oil than we are producing now.


And once we get to the point where we are getting the majority of our transportation energy from sources other than oil, we can start looking to the future. One of the bright, glaring points about "Drill, Baby, Drill", why Drill, Baby, Drill represented the complete abandonment of Republican pretensions about being the grown ups in the room, is that when you pump out and burn oil, its just gone, never to come back.

After all the Republican pretensions I remember hearing ever since being a kid in the 60's and 70's about the Republicans being the party of "responsibility" - their approach to our non-renewable natural resources is "Burn It All As Fast As Possible and the Devil take the Hindmost!".

So, to cut our oil consumption by 5% a year over the decade ahead ... which will still leave us an oil importer, but take us off the front line for being the demand reduction via recession in future oil price shocks ... we need 7 of those 5% reductions to come from transport. And each and every one means more work over the coming decade.

I'll look at three of the seven, today.


1. The Steel Interstate


I described the Steel Interstate approach to Electrified, Rapid Freight Rail a couple of months ago, and then polished up the network map a bit the following week.

So, broad brush strokes here:

• 15,000miles+ of STRACNET corridors electrified with rail improvements that allow scheduled slots for 100mph Rapid Freight Rail
• Built primarily in existing freight rail rights of way by distinct government owned, not for profit "Line Development Banks"
• Those using the infrastructure pay Access and User fees that cover up-front capital costs
• Interest costs covered by a $0.01/gallon tax on imported petroleum, rising to $0.05/gallon over five years

This is based on the full scale plan offered by Alan Drake and studied by the Millenium Institute, and projected to be able cut our petroleum consumption by about 7%. And of course, the "first half" will result in more than half of that, provided it provides a rough grid that covers the bulk of the long-haul transport markets in the country ... so I'll slate this in as the first of the seven transport "5%/year" projects.

Note that the way I have sketched it out, the Access and User fees are ongoing, on a simple formula, and that a Line Development Bank has completed its line, it would be chartered to devote any capital surplus to the funding of energy-independence transport within its broader service area. So on the back of that funding, the Steel Interstate proposal is also one of the seven required 5% reductions in the second decade of our Freedom from Oil in Twenty Years program.


2. Local Electric Transport

Back in March of 2009, NBBooks wrote $3.195 trillion -TRILLION - for urban RAIL transit.

Where this is derived from is a target for rail transit density:

Building 50,757 kilometers of new rail transit lines, at a cost of $3.195 trillion. is based on building urban rail mass transit systems to the same service density found in New York City, in the next 38 largest urban areas. I began by assuming a desideratum of having a rail transit line no more than 2.5 miles from any point in an urban area. That is, if you took a square of urban area five miles on each side, we want to have a rail transit line running directly across the middle of that square. Slice that 25 square mile area into one mile strips, and you get one mile of rail transit line for every five square miles of urban area, or a density of 0.2 mile of rail transit line for every square mile. Converting square miles to square kilometers, and miles to kilometers, what we are looking for is a density of 0.124 mi {sic.=km} of rail transit line for every square kilometer of urban area.

This is a fine density for densely populated areas, but I am of the view that moving to a sustainable settlement system from our current system that is dominated by sprawl-suburban settlement (in terms of representing half or more of all residential population, just as over half of the nation's residents at the previous turn of the century lived in urban rather than suburban areas) will require both rebuilding residential population in core urban areas and establishing urban density walkable neighborhoods along dedicated transport corridors running through suburban areas.

This "clustered network city" approach of suburban transit villages connected to urban centers would seem to permit a looser rail network complemented by a mix of local transport access - by foot, bike, neighborhood electric vehicle, battery/trolleywire trolley bus, etc. So I ease this back to a rail transit line no more than 5 miles from any point in the urban area. That is then, above, a 10 mile square line with a line running down the middle, or a density of 0.1 miles of rail transit line for every square mile ... or 0.62 km line per sq. km.

However, taking the rest of NBBook's estimates, that is $1.6T (trillion with a T). Spread across ten years, $160b/year ... about 1% of our national economy.

How to finance that? Most directly, impose a 5% payroll levy on earned and unearned income received by those making over 7 times median income, roughly $280,000.

In order to achieve broad based oil independence, this would be allocated on a per capita basis to municipalities, counties and reservations, which they could annually allocate for construction or improvement of dedicated transport corridors and dedicated support facilities for electric common carrier transport. Since not all municipalities or counties cannot allocate their share, the annual surplus would be re-allocated to those able to invest their original share.

Is this a 5% piece? I think it likely will be, but I will have to look into that more closely. In any event, it is a piece that will be generating 3.75m jobs per year, every year for a decade.


3. Personal Transport


The third piece I would offer today is Personal, or "Active" Transport: Walking and Cycling.

The objection might be raised that this is not a rail project ... but in reality, it is the flip side of the local rail project above. A bike is a fine thing to ride for a couple of miles, but a ten mile ride is not a commute for a regular transport cyclist.

So the focus of increasing Active Transport sufficiently to save 5% of our petroleum imports is the establishment of a walkable zone around stops along the dedicated transport corridors, with a mandatory easement to allow three story, mixed used and stacked townhouse development within a quarter mile of the stop on the corridor.

Given the capital-efficiency of these modes of local transport, the funding can piggy-back onto the above system as well: for all funds drawn from the municipal, country and reservation accounts in support of dedicated transport corridors, 1% must be allocated to qualifying projects in support of Active Transport.


OK, so those are my three ...

... what are yours?


The Headliners: Midnight Oil with Truganini!



There's a road train going nowhere / roads are cut, lines are down ...

Sunday Train: King of the Mountain, Part 1

Burning the Midnight Oil for Living Energy Independence

I noted near the beginning of the Appalachian Hub series about the special advantages offered by rail electrification for this project.

Now that I have sketched out a process by which a national Steel Interstate network of corridors can, in fact, be built in this coming decade, this is probably a good time to come back and take a look at the challenges that are faced when putting the Steel Interstates through hilly and mountainous terrain.

Of course, if rail electrification was a particular benefit in mountainous terrain, one would expect to see it in places like, say, Switzerland.

Picture of a Swiss electric freight west of the Albula tunnel
_________________

Trans-Alpine Freight and Swiss Rail

When tuning in to news from Switzerland, the big story are so-called "base tunnels". These are tunnels that cut through "the base of a mountain". The Lotschberg Base Tunnel, featured in World's Most Spectacular Tunnels, cuts through the mountain a 1,312 feet lower than the tunnel that it replaces ... that is about a quarter of a mile lower.

Just as the original investments in Japan and France in capital-intensive HSR passenger lines, what is driving this investment in base tunnels is the capacity limits of the present rail routes. As AlpTransit's description (pdf) of the Gothard Base Tunnel Project puts it:

Construction of base tunnels under the Gotthard and Ceneri creates an ultramodern flat rail link whose highest point at 550 metres above sea level is no higher than the city of Berne. This is much lower than the highest point of the existing route through the mountains at 1150 metres. Gradients will be no steeper than where the railway crosses the Jura mountains through the Hauenstein tunnel (Basel – Olten) or the Bözberg tunnel (Basel – Brugg). The route through Switzerland becomes flatter and 40 km shorter. Italy and Germany come much closer together.

Freight trains travelling on the flat route can be longer and pull up to twice today's weight – 4000 tonnes instead of 2000 tonnes. They will be up to twice as fast, too: the fastest freight trains will have a top speed of 160 km/h. Trains like this cannot be used on existing Alpine routes because of the steep gradients and tight curves. When the flat route is complete, it will be possible to transport an equal volume of freight with fewer locomotives and personnel, and less energy.

Just as with the Japanese and French investment in Passenger HSR, it is important to put this investment in context. This is not a result of the failures of the existing Swiss electric freight rail system - it is a result of its success. That is, the growth in interstate freight transport is pushing up against the capacity limits of the Swiss system because the Swiss rail system was effective in capturing a substantial share of freight.

This figure from sheet 5 of the Gothard Tunnel pdf makes the point in no uncertain terms. The original Swiss electric freight system has carried a majority of the Trans-alpine freight that passes through Switzerland, while in France and Austria, the majority of freight has been passing by road.

And when digging further into the description of the Base Tunnel makes it clear the benefit that the Swiss have obtained from electric rail.


Why Electrification in Mountain Rail Corridors?

Bear in mind that a normal maximum gradient in many US mainline rail corridors is 1%, or "10 per thousand", when considering the following description of the route being replaced:

The ramps of the present-day railways through the Gotthard and Ceneri have gradients of up to 26 per thousand. The flatness and straightness of the base route – maximum gradient 12.5 per thousand overground and 8.0 per thousand in the base tunnels – allow productive deployment of long, heavy trains through elimination of time-consuming shunting operations. Today, a heavy freight train travelling north-south over the Gotthard and Ceneri mountain routes requires a pushing locomotive because of the steep gradients. The goal of freight trains hauling more than 2000 tonnes travelling through Switzerland without stopping at Erstfeld or Bellinzona, and without midtrain or pushing locomotives, can only be accomplished when both the Gotthard and Ceneri base tunnels are completed.

Consider that: a gradient of 2.5% and "only" being able to move 2,200tons of freight at 50mph.

As the Wikipedia machine notes, the secret to this success in the mountains lies in the higher power-weight ratio of electric locomotives:

The high power of electric locomotives gives them the ability to pull freight at higher speed over gradients, in mixed traffic conditions this increases capacity when the time between trains can be decreased. The higher power of electric locomotives and a electrification can also be a cheaper alternative to a new and less steep railway if trains weights are to be increased on a system.

Putting the Advantages to Work

Of course, one way to cope with mountainous terrain is to avoid it. In the proposed Steel Interstate system, line one, the Liberty Line from New England to California, runs along the Shenandoah River Valley, the original "highway to the west", mostly avoiding the type of terrain that the Swiss would consider to be Mountains. To the west, it runs through the lower land of southern New Mexico and Arizona, a similarly easy route through the western cordillera, and then runs up the Central Valley to bring most of California within its catchment.

The roughest terrain that this corridor needs to tackle is the alignment west and north of Chattanooga, where the existing STRACNET corridor does a sweeping S-curve to avoid the rougher terrain where the Interstate has simply been blasted through. This is a key point where the Line Development Bank will have to carefully analyze the alternative alignments, and could well opt for taking the Rapid Freight Rail corridor out of the conventional freight rail corridor, where the Rapid Freight Rail path gains time by operating at a steeper gradient than the conventional rail corridor. That is, operating at 60mph over half the distance may well be a faster path than operating at 100mph along the heavy freight alignment.

Unlike the Swiss freight system, the electrified heavy freight paths will not have to contend with constantly shuttling aside to make way for passenger trains, since the passenger trains will be on the Rapid Rail Paths, whether those are provided by dividing up the time of day that different trains run on a track, by providing separated track in the same right of way, or by providing a Rapid Freight bypass on its own Right of Way.

Once the Chattanooga to Nashville, alignment is determined, that also solves the only stretch of rough terrain that the Heartland Alignment faces, while the Gulf and Atlantic Line only ever runs to, but never through, rough terrain.

In other words, other than the Chattanooga/Nashville alignment, all of the challenging terrain has been focused on the National Line:

• Harrisburg to Pittsburgh, within the territory tof the Appalachian Hub;
• east of Salt Lake City and east of Sacramento, on the line to Oakland;
• the northeastern and northwestern Oregon corridors on the line to Portland; and
• the Southern Oregon / Northern Californian corridor between the Pacific Northwest and the California Central Valley

Indeed, it has been suggested to me that this is a line that should not exist at all. So in a couple of weeks, in King of the Mountain Part II, I'll take up the focus on the need for a genuinely national network, and the flexibility that the institution of the Line Development Bank gives us in pursuing a genuinely national network, focusing on the proposed Steel Interstate system both with and without the National Line.


The Headliners: Midnight Oil / King of the Mountain

Walking through the high dry grass,
   pushing my way through slow
Yellow belly black snake,
   sleeping on a red rock
Waiting for the stranger to go
Sugar train stops at the crossing,
   cane cockies cursing below
Bad storm coming, better run
   to the top of the mountain
Mountain in the shadow of light,
   rain in the valley below

Sunday Train: Freight and Passenger Trains Should Be Friends

Burning the Midnight Oil for Living Energy Independence

Flying home from the Economist's national conference Atlanta (see note1) my brilliant entertainment plan to pass the day lost flying home from Atlanta fell apart.

I could not attend even the 8am session on Tuesday, because the flight left at 11:15, and I was warned about TSA security theater delays. So I got on the MARTA train around 8:30, to stand in line to check-in, to stand in line to get through screening, to get to the gate and wait, to get on the plane which waited in line for a runway. It was, however, only half an hour in the air, so that fact that with a 125mph train to Charlotte I could have gone to the morning conference session and arrived in Charlotte sooner is neither here nor there.

Then I had a 3hr+ layover in Charlotte until the plane back home to NE Ohio. But I had my Netflix and some FullMetal Alchemist DVD's, so no problem. Except my portable DVD player decided to stop working (see note2), so there were no DVD's. Which meant I was forced to fall back on a "pbook" (paper book) I had brought with me - Waiting on a Train, which meant that I finally finished it (and still had several hours to wait after I had done so).

And in particular read the fascinating discussion of the touchy relationship between freight and passenger trains. Regular readers will know that this is a critical point: indeed, the entire Steel-Interstate strategy to getting Higher Speed Rail for Appalachia rests on passenger trains running on infrastructure provided in support of 100mph electric freight trains.


The Bad Old Days Are Not So Many Days Ago

One of the striking passages in the book is the following:

... at breakfast I got an earful from Tom Landolt, an engineer who had retired from UP [Union Pacific] a few months earlier.
...
He said, "Let me tell you a story. I was running a freight train in New Mexico on a real cold night, and the Sunset Limited was coming up behind us. Now, I had a real heavy train, and we had to go up a grade, so I talked with the dispatcher and said I would pull over and let the Amtrak go by. And he said, 'No, sir, we don't pull over for them, they can just slow down.' And I started up that hill and broke down. Now, the Amtrak had to back up more than ten miles, and wasted hours. Now there's no reason for that to happen, but that's the attitude. They just do not give a damn." (pp. 163-5)

That is, however, Union Pacific. By contrast, there is this from the Burlington Northern Santa Fe (the one that Buffet recently bought):

Mitchell looked down at a printout of my submitted questions. "You ask what makes us different. Why do passenger trains on our tracks have such good on-time performance?"

He looked up, "OK, here's the the simple answer: 'We Care.'"

"You care?" I said.

"We do. We really do."

I was remembering Hubbard's "We don't care" anecdote.

"Well, why? What's in it for you guys?"

"Because we believe Amtrak and the commuter services that run on our network are customers. And like all of our customers - coal, grain, or industry - we believe they deserve good treatment. (p. 190)

Of course, caring alone does not guarantee Zero Delays.

In Texas, for example, the ports of Houston and Galveston can get so congested that freight trains back up all the way to Oklahoma City because its a single track railroad. The Temple to Forth Worth section has terrible on-time performance. The ground dries out in the summer and the ballast sinks. In winter, the soil turns to gumbo, the ballast slumps, and the rails become "bumpy". In both instances, slow orders have to be put on until repairs are made. (p. 191)

There is only so far that sincerity can go before reaching the point where capital investment is required for further improvement.


The Bright New Day for Passenger/Freight Rail Cooperation

By the second half of 2008, under the pressure of the capacity constraints that were preventing the Class I railroads from taking full advantage of the windfall of the Oil Price Shock, the major railroads had adopted a new line (though of course, I will believe that Union Pacific is an enthusiastic supporter of the industry line when I hear tell of some direct evidence):

... I went to Washington DC and interviewed Ed Hamberger, President and CEO at the Association of American Railroads ...
...
Hamberger has been President of the AAR since 1998, a time when the organization was suing Amtrak to stop hauling freight cars on its passenger trains. He testified several times in front of congressional committees that Amtrak should pay fully allocated rather than incremental costs. Hamberger is a sharp and articulate guy, comfortable with politics, and the repositioning it sometimes requires. He wasn't unaware of the ironies of what he was about to say, and acknowledged them with some humor.
...
"The industry is taking an aggressive stance to link its message with that of passenger-rail advocates. Perhaps we haven't been as forthcoming in the past as we could have and should have been, but now were are saying: We think the country has to move forward with both freight and passenger-rail service," said Hamberger.

I'd gotten wind of this turnabout in attitude from Don Phillips and Carmicheal, but it was still striking to hear it directly. Its a strategy capsulated in the phrase: "Commuters vote, boxcars don't." Delivering improved passenger service benefits freight railraods.

Although the recession has given railroads some breathing room, the industry is clearly worried about capacity. If just 10 percent of highway freight switched to rails, the railroads would be inundated. As one executive tol me, "Corporate America is ready to move a hell of a lot more goods on trains, but they won't do it if the railroads are incompetent."

Ensuring that Freight and Passenger Rail are Friends on the Steel Interstate

Now, what the railroads are pushing for is an investment tax credit. However, as discussed before, the Steel Interstate strategy opens up the door to something far more dramatic.

It is a compelling national interest, after all, that if we have an opportunity to shift long haul freight from diesel road freight to electric rail freight, we do so. Irrespective of the source of electricity, the electric rail freight offers reduced CO2 emissions, with further reductions if the power comes from a carbon-neutral source. And at the same time, many of our largest untapped domestic energy resources, such as wind power, originate their power as electric power, so using the power in the form of electricity avoids conversion losses.

Suppose that the original capital cost of infrastructure for 100mph freight paths - and, incidentally, 110mph to 125mph passenger rail paths - is paid for out of user fees and access fees, but the interest on the capital cost is subsidized.

For example, a quarter per barrel import tariff is imported on imported petroleum and petroleum products, rising by a quarter per barrel each year for 10 years. This would yield about $3b per year to finance twenty year tax bonds, which at a real interest rate of 5% would be about $60b new capital spending per year. The public authorities building the Steel Interstates would then buy back the tax bonds with access and user fee income.

These tax bonds could even be structured in a way to make Wall Street speculators happy, promising a given share of the tax revenues, which Wall Street investment banks could then slice and dice to their hearts content into various senior, more stable, and junior, more speculative tiers - except rather than feeding a process of debt-financed consumption, they would be feeding a process of real, physical, protection against massive oil price shocks.

What does this mean for relations between freight and passenger rail? Simple: the fast freight trains on 100mph paths would be running on publicly owned infrastructure, built on the freight railroad's right of way. When the Rapid Rail dispatcher says that the freight is making way, then its the freight dispatcher's choice whether the freight goes onto a siding to wait or returns back onto the heavy freight line to continue making headway.

And as BNSF has shown, when the infrastructure owner cares about the passenger trains running on time, then it becomes possible to perform far better than when faced with the antagonistic (see note3) approach of Union Pacific.

You probably still wouldn't want to be a local commuter railroad relying in whole or part on Union Pacific infrastructure - but if it means an opportunity to winning far more market share from road freight for more quickly than they could on their own, it seems likely that even Union Pacific will be willing to at least pretend to be friends with passenger rail.


The Headliners

Midnight Oil - Truganini

There's a road train going nowhere
Roads are cut, lines are down
We'll be staying at the Roma Bar
Till that monsoon passes on

The backbone of this country's broken
The land is cracked and the land is sore
Farmers are hanging on by their fingertips
We cursed and stumbled across that shore
...

Notes

(Note1: At the conference, I mostly went to the Association for Evolutionary Economics sessions, so didn't see a lot of calculus, though bizarrely I did learn a lot about the Economy - which is of course not what one would ordinarily expect from going to the Economist's national conference.)

(Note2: The DVD player is a V-Zon by Coby, with all sorts of nifty media features - it can play MP3's and several video file formats on both USB keys and SD flash ram cards. Its just that it sucks that when a portable DVD player so dislikes being ported that it stops playing DVD's. By contrast, my Samsung player continues to work as a DVD player even after I stepped on it, breaking its LCD screen. So if you were asking me, I'd recommend Samsung as making a more durable portable DVD player than Coby.)

(Note3: Note that the attitude of Union Pacific is not only antagonist, but it likely results in multiple actions by dispatchers that are, in fact, illegal, under the terms of the agreement reached in the 1970's in which the Class I railroads handed off their responsibilities to provide passenger rail service. The action of the dispatcher reported by the retired UP engineer was certainly illegal.)