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ChineseDaily Transit Links Roundup for 6/12/08
Contributed by Fred Camino on June 12th, 2008 at 10:22 am
Image courtesy of mac steve.
- House passes $15 billion bill for Amtrak funding.
- New and improved Amtrak Coast Starlight beats major airlines in schedule reliability.
- Shocking. Conservative think-tank Heritage Foundation doesn’t like Amtrak subsidies, prefers oil subsidies.
- Wait, the ghettoized lowest-common denominator bus based mass transit systems in the U.S. can’t handle the surge of new car culture refugees? Really? Wait. Really?
- People in America’s heartland finding out that with rising gas prices making them forgo meat and church donations for gas money, the no-alternatives freedom of car culture is actually quite binding.
- There was a time where there was mass transit and pedestrian congestion in a lively and active downtown Los Angeles. Yuck!
Discussion
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Good to hear about Amtrak.
Underinvestment in rail, and overreliance on highways and airplane, with the expectation of eternal cheap gasoline has finally caught up with enough of the masses to warrant reinvesting in rail. Who knows how long it will take to catch up to where we should be. Unfortunately, Reaganomics was sold to the electorate with the wishful thinking and believing that infrastructure investment doesn’t actually have to be paid for.
From a dreaming standpoint, I’d love a high-speed rail route that goes north from San Diego, Anaheim, Los Angeles, Bakersfield, Frenso, San Jose, San Francisco, Sacramento, Eugene, Portland, Tacoma, Seattle. Not that it will happen in my lifetime, but investing in the whole West Coast Corridor is important.
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Conservatives worship the automobile. Little individualized units all trying to move in different directions, deluding themselves they aren’t being subsidized by taxpayer money and social engineering, not having to interact with anyone unlike themselves. Imagine their horror of having to sit next to someone of a different race, class, culture, ethnicity, religion or sexual orientation.
The Heritage Foundation article reminds me of Cato Institute’s recommendation to ditch long range transportation plans. Car culture will only continue its inevitable decline in quality. No wonder they cannot face the future.
Yikes. It’s 35 hours EACH WAY from Los Angeles to Seattle on the Coast Starlight. So much for taking the train to see my family.
35 hours. That’s insane. Could High-speed rail eventually create an 8-hour Los Angeles - Seattle trip?
I went from Paris to Berlin on an overnight train in eight hours, INCLUDING a train stop in Brussels to boot.
Dan Wentzel: dan, as long as that trip might be just think about how much you can do in that time. its more of a hotel stay that a transportation modality.
los angeles to detroit is much, much longer but i will be taking that for the annual family trip ’round december
Dan: LA to Seattle is nearly twice as far as Paris to Berlin. But 35 hours is still obscene.
I think the most important thing to do in terms of that route is get an LA-SF-Sac high speed rail route going. That’s a high-traffic route and will provide a ridership base to expand the system up to Seattle or Vancouver, especially once SF fixes the Bay crossing issue and trains can stop in SF rather than the ass end of Oakland. But we’re talking decades of planning and construction.
Now that Amtrak may have something resembling stable funding, is it too much to hope for restored service between Los Angeles and Las Vegas? Especially since the feds are also authorizing $45 million for “feasibility studies” of a maglev covering the same distance. When, you may ask? Sometime before Cher gives her final Farewell Tour?
Right now, Cher, Bette Midler and Elton John are all there. What more incentive does a gay man like me need to take high speed rail to Las Vegas?
None.
Even high-speed rail is not meant to be feasible for a Seattle to L.A. trip. That’s about 1,200 miles.
High-speed rail is optimal for distances of up to 500 miles.
Also, when dealing with this particular trip, the population is too small to support high speed rail between Sacramento and Eugene/Springfield, Oregon. There are some smaller cities, such as Chico, Redding and Medford, Oregon, but otherwise it’s mostly forests and mountains.
Trips like L.A.-Seattle are why there are airplanes.
Cato, despite being libertarianism’s Kool-Aid man, should be given great credence on this recommendation.
Yes, everything Cato thinks up is anti-transit. This myopic recommendation is quite farsighted. It’s something that affects everyone, not just something that will expand libertarians’ power position.
Long-range transportation planning is very much like several-day weather forecasts. Cato’s reasoning is a red herring though. It says internet information and knowledge-sharing renders the planning process obsolete. That’s the think tank’s MO, but really they want to focus on planners when the real crisis is that recent world events have wrecked all existing models, and even with all the tools at our disposal, forecasting is increasingly erratic.
Remember, the think tank establishment bet on the wrong horse in the global warming debate, so there’s some major rear-guard efforts to maintain their legitimacy.
Future planning is much too chaotic even for all of our powerful models. The price of gasoline has hit the point where people are driving less, and coupled with what will be a prolonged financial crisis, people are going to be spending less, too. What’s more, a surprisingly large number of people are coming to the conclusion that the high prices are a signal that oil has peaked.
Most models are based on continuing growth, and that growth will continue to disperse to open land. What’s been happening, though, is that cities on the beginning of a renaissance. They are starting to repopulate, and that older cities are showing a competitive advantage because of sunk infrastructure that can be repurposed and that cities that established large populations before the automobile age lend themselves better to reduced automobile use.
Peter: Yeah, I agree. Each individual leg would get use but I highly doubt anyone would use the entire length of it. It’s LA-SF that’s screwy, especially because the LA airports are all in the wrong places.
There’s an additional problem.
Once you have a line that long, the overall line becomes less reliable. A small bottleneck or snarl can ripple throughout the entire line. Unlike airplanes, which are point-to-point, trains are dependent on the smooth flow for the entire line.
Heavy rains in Oregon could prevent a train from ever emerging in California to pick up riders traveling within the state.
The big danger is that we might lose an extant service that treks the entire West Coast. The big problem, though, is that the line has a huge demand doughnut in southern Oregon and Northern California.
Otherwise, Seattle-Eugene/Springfield and San Diego-Sacramento make for some clover corridors. In California, you could extend Sacramento as far north to Chico or even Redding.