Infrastructure is a dull business. The guy talking about pipes and wires is not generally the life of the party (to my chagrin). But infrastructure is all the rage these days, with economists calling for broad stimulus, and Barack Obama's transition team planning big investments in the American economy.
The excitement seems to be catching. Even staid legislators are feeling energized by the new push to rebuild America. Last week, Senators John Kerry (D-Mass.) and Arlen Specter (R-Penn.) introduced the High-Speed Rail for America Act, a bill that would authorize $23 billion in bond sales to fund rail infrastructure generally, and true high-speed networks (with speeds in excess of 150 mph) in California and the Northeast corridor. If passed it would be the second bill this year to help lay the groundwork for high-speed rail investments.
The arguments in favor of high-speed rail are straightforward and familiar. It's green. It relieves congestion on highways and at airports. And by improving connections between cities, it boosts economic productivity.
But it's worth asking about the bigger picture. Is high-speed rail just a shiny new toy for high-rolling businesspeople, or is it a meaningful contributor to the green economy?
Ben Adler asks this question in a recent piece at Campus Progress, saying:
While making the trip from Los Angeles to San Francisco by high-speed rail instead of by flying would save some CO2 emissions, the bigger problem is not that you can't get from L.A. to San Francisco fast enough by train, it's that you can't get around L.A. or San Diego, the nation's second and eighth largest cities, respectively, without a car...
But the idea of long-distance high-speed rail is primarily of interest to business travelers and the relatively wealthy. The people who need subways, trolleys, and buses to get around the fringes of L.A. are poor and working class. Sure, when the Google gang comes down to L.A. they can take the high-speed train instead of flying, but the housekeepers who commute from East L.A. to Westwood by bus or car won't see their lives change at all.
Now, this is rather an unfortunate portrayal of the market for inter-city rail; in fact, many lower- and middle-income individuals find themselves needing to travel between cities, and it hardly seems equitable or green to force them to pay to drive or fly. But the bigger story is that investment in high-speed rail is likely to strengthen central cities and increase demand for local transit.
Why? Because high-speed connections between central city terminals increase the return to living and working in central cities. This is crucial. For decades, inter-city transportation has primarily been oriented around automobiles -- freeways and airports dropped miles from city centers. Because businesspeople require cars to travel, they own cars. And because they own cars, they often find it inconvenient to live in dense, walkable, centrally located communities.
And this influences the shape of the metropolitan economy. Business corridors grow up around highways and airports, and those job centers continue to attract residents to exurban developments. Given this kind of urban structure, the constituency for transit and the economic utility of transit are somewhat reduced. Sadly, local transit has failed to obtain the funding it deserves because the squeakiest wheels -- businesses and suburban, upper-income households -- have not seen that funding to be in their interest.
The northeastern corridor of the United States offers the embryo of an alternative. There, a legacy of density, transit, and inter-city rail supports central city economies. This, in turn, helps to support strong central city residential populations and a constituency for local transit spending.
It shouldn't be any wonder, then, that this corridor is home to some of the most ambitious transit planning around today. Washington and New York are each adding new heavy rail intra-city lines, and streetcar, light rail, and bus investments are planned up and down the corridor. These investments will help grow local economies, and they'll also provide faster, greener, more convenient transit to those unwilling or unable to purchase a car.
We have to remember that to build healthy, walkable cities we need robust urban economies. And to get those economies we have to make the transportation investments we've been unwilling to make in the age of highways. High-speed inter-city rail is an indispensable part of that equation.
More NYC farmers markets accept food stamps and sales soar
Comments
View as Flat
spaceshaper Posted 9:45 pm
27 Nov 2008
The true meaning of life is to plant trees, under whose shade you do not expect to sit.
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stevenearlsalmony Posted 12:35 am
28 Nov 2008
Steven Earl Salmony
AWAREness Campaign on the Human Population,
established 2001
http://sustainabilityscience.org/content.html?contentid=1 ...
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Delay And Deny Posted 1:17 am
28 Nov 2008
Texeme.Construct.Questioner
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Bob Wallace Posted 2:55 am
28 Nov 2008
Hopefully we would build ample, affordable parking adjacent to the rail terminals. Parking with plug-ins for recharging.
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Jon Rynn Posted 3:50 am
28 Nov 2008
Bob Wallace, that's the only way to save suburbs in the long run, imho!
In a generally depressing assessment of Obama, the economist Michael Hudson makes a fascinating point about using the windfall from real estate gains around transit stops to fund the transit:The gains from providing better transport infrastructure typically are so large that transportation investment could be self-financing by taxing these property gains - recapturing the added rental value in the form of property windfall taxes. London's tube extension to Canary Wharf, for example, cost the city £8 billion - but increased real estate values along the route by some £13 billion. The city could have financed the entire project by issuing bonds that would have been repaid out of taxes levied on the windfall gains created by this public expenditure.
Likewise in New York City, the transport authority has just announced that subway and bus fares will be jacked up (adding no less than $10 to the monthly commute card) and services cut back sharply. Mayor Bloomberg has just stopped work on the 2nd Avenue subway, its completion will add at least as much to upper East Side property values as the subway costs itself. The city thus could finance its construction not by issuing bonds to be paid off by city and state taxpayers in combination with user fees paid as fares. Taxpayers wouldn't have to pay, and riders could enjoy subsidized fares simply by taxing the real estate owners.
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Bob Wallace Posted 4:43 am
28 Nov 2008
What won some of us over to the arguement is that it would be less expensive to build high speed rail than to upgrade our airports and freeways to carry future traffic in the ways that we now utalize.
We're going to spend money, one way or another. Best to spend it in the most efficient manner.
Being able to board in city-center rather than making the trip out to the airport is a big extra for many.
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The suburbs are going to surive, one way or another. Kunster makes some idiotic statements and predictions. He's earned the right to be ignored.
As higher gas prices return (probably in the next six months as surplus supplies get burned off) people in suburbs will make short term and long term adjustments.
Short term - look for more car pooling, reducing unnecessary trips, heavier use of what public transportation exits, "sleeping at work", etc.
Look for people to pay more attention to gas mileage when purchasing a new vehicle. The data (as I remember it) says that 50% of our driving is done with cars which are 5 or fewer years old.
I'd guess that those 5 years or fewer cars tend to be owned by people who commute distance. Moving from a 20 mpg to a 30 mgp car makes $5 gas into $3 gas.
Long term - good batteries will mean affordable, long-range BEVs. We know how to bring affordable electricity to the grid. We know how to move electricity long distances with minimal loss.
The 'burbs are likely to be full of BEVs and owners who have a lot more money in their pocket than when they were spending $2 per gallon.
(The weak point in my scenerio is "good batteries". I'm sure hoping that we get there soon.)
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amazingdrx Posted 5:00 am
28 Nov 2008
Maybe higher speed tube sections could be part of the system, to handle high speed 200 mph commuter vehicles? Trucks on regular freeway lane rail only.
http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog John Schneider, Northern Wisconsin
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Jon Rynn Posted 6:40 am
28 Nov 2008
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Bob Wallace Posted 7:21 am
28 Nov 2008
The real question is "What adjustments will the suburbs make as petroleum gets more expensive?"
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People are going to be very resistent to the idea of huddling together cheek to jowl in crowded cities. Sure, some people like that lifestyle, but many people don't.
People are willing to pay a bit more, in both money and time, to live where they can have a more space and less crowding.
BEVs, light rail (like Sacramento and Bangkok), electric express buses, lots of more efficient ways to move people in and out of cities. And we are looking at a "real soon" generation of 40+mpg cars.
Moving some of the cities to the suburbs as is happening in some cities such as Sacramento where businesses are locating well outside of the city center which allows people to live in the 'burbs with short commutes. Villages which have 2-3 "major" employers and all the daily shopping needs covered. Connected by efficient public transportation.
More tele-commuting. I've got a neighbor who teles 6-7 hours away from his "workplace". He goes into the office every couple of months.
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Sam Wells Posted 9:34 am
28 Nov 2008
Most authorities cite freight as being 4 to 14 times more efficient when using rail instead of highway trucks (400% to 1400%). However, the best passenger trains can do it about 18% more than a conventional car in terms of fuel consumption and resulting CO2 emissions; the Acela high-speed train can only add another 8% for regenerative braking for a total of a 26% increase in efficiency over cars (not bad).
Of course this is a little smoke and mirrors, because things are getting more efficient over time, and the nature of vehicle activity changes as well. But the FACT is that any passenger rail anywhere doesn't really reduce emissions in such a significant way and is not sustainable in terms of revenue. I wish I didn't have to be the bearer of such news but it is the truth: reductions in CO2 from passenger rail are marginal and come at great expense. The budget for AMTRAK is an additional 2.6 billion over what it makes of tickets and all its other revenue, a very large annual investment.
it would have been so much cleaner if passenger rail made money and had some modest reductions in CO2 emissions - let's put it that way.
I can see the Bos-Wash and Chicago areas expanding train service in those areas, which has been borne out by recent statistics for these old-city regions. Other states such as Texas pay for a lot of that rail and subway funding through the gasoline tax while the locals do not. That raises the specter of what I call "geographic injustice." Why can't Texas get high speed, regional, and local funding like what we give to the Northeast? And if Peak Oil Theory is right (I have some doubts about the immediacy), won't we need a new way to fund such expensive commuter rail projects, other than the gas tax?
To reiterate: moving people is a poor idea on rail simply because the railcars weigh so much, and the passenger load weighs so little. It is very simple math. It makes far more sense to move 50 or 100 ton loads per railcar of freight. If you design a lightweight passenger railcar that is safe, I suppose it might work - suffice it to say MAG-LEV and other technologies are a horrendous waste of electricity and that electricity came from power plants (a reason why I question electric cars powered by coal power plants). It's not looking too good, folks, unless we get some revolutionary technology here. -sam
Onward through the fog
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Bob Wallace Posted 12:15 pm
28 Nov 2008
Just eyeballing it, the type of cars use by BART or Bangkok's SkyTrain look efficient in terms of car weight/people on board. They look to weigh less per person than does a typical private vehicle.
Hooked together, several of them are going to be more aerodynamic than a group of individual cars strung out along the highway. (Train cars draft.)
And the lead car can be more aerodynamic than what most of us would be willing to drive in public.
Then, we know how to make electricity in "green" ways. We can send electricity along metal tracks more efficiently than we can run personal vehicles with battery packs.
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Sam Wells Posted 12:41 pm
28 Nov 2008
I've helped conduct studies of light rail in Austin TX and we similarly only found marginal CO2 benefits from the program. The real purpose of the whole thing is to reduce congestion and enhance "rail development districts" which yes, do seem to benefit as to land prices. Been there, done that.
Onward through the fog
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Bob Wallace Posted 12:50 pm
28 Nov 2008
And are you saying that there is some sort of reason that we must continue to make electricity from CO2 emitting fossil fuels?
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Jon Rynn Posted 1:53 pm
28 Nov 2008
Second, I think that cost comparisons based on anything running on an oil derivative needs to have a huge boulder of salt added to it -- in other words, it needs to assess the comparison between oil-based cars , through time, not just right now. That is, if one is interested in something long-term.
Third, and I wish I had the statistics readily available but I don't, electric trains, if filled to a decent extent, have much better CO2 comparisons than any other form of transit -- I mean, if they're electric, and they don't use coal-based electricity, they have virtually no emissions, as would electric cars.
So the bottom line is, if the country (world) wants to get serious about climate change, it seems to me, we need a solar/wind electric network supplying electric trains and electric cars. The idea is very simple, the technical problems are not overwhelming, and the political challenges are ginormous, certainly the worst part of the problem.
Bob -- I admit sometimes Kunstler overdoes it, but caution would indicate, I think, that we need to understand how many suburbs would be able to move anything around in the absence of oil. The lack of planning for anything approaching horribly expensive gasoline is rather mind-boggling. I mean, you don't have to assume that the worst would happen, but I think there should be plans in place to deal with reasonably bad scenarios, and I see no indication of that.
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Bob Wallace Posted 2:16 pm
28 Nov 2008
OK, electric light rail gets masses of people from home to work. Short distant freight moves on the same rails during non-commute time.
"UPS" runs their trucks on electricity. They establish change points where they can swap out a set of fresh "40 mile" batteries. Wouldn't need to be any larger than a tall one car garage. And fully automated.
Large, long distance freight moves on big rail. Perhaps fueled by biofuels as electrification from coast to coast might be too expensive.
Once at distribution hubs it moves to light rail/electric truck.
--
Where the "K" blew it was in accepting that peak oil = no oil.
We don't go from cheap oil to no oil. We go from cheap oil to slightly expensive oil to more expensive oil to very expensive oil.
Along the way we introduce alternatives to oil, just as we are now doing. Each of those alternatives takes some steepness out of the curve.
Steepness, because I think we've led ourselves astray by portraying "peak oil" as a type of bell curve. You know, supply goes up, plateaus, falls off.
That's not reality. Supply continues more or less at what we desire for a long, long time (remember we could tap shale oil, etc.) but the price increases as easily pumped oil is depleted.
(Sorry for any spelling problems. I'm a terrible speller and my Chrome spell checker is malfunctioning.)
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stevenearlsalmony Posted 10:07 pm
28 Nov 2008
"Blitz" lines are a sign of the times. These 'lines' are designed to evince rampaging greed. How many other ploys can you think of that surreptitiously exploit human avarice?
Here and now we behold the chimera, the "paint horse and its pin-striped-suited rider, named GREED" being followed closely by a pale horse ridden by Death.
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stevenearlsalmony Posted 3:42 am
29 Nov 2008
Please speak loudly and clearly because many too many leading opinion-makers in the human family are refusing to connect the dots and turning away from what come somehow be real.
If a culture treats the unbridled accumulation of possessions and filthy lucre as virtuous behaviors, not as vices, then the "paint horse and its pin-stripe-suited rider, GREED," are free to run wild, just as occurred in Valley Stream, New York on Black Friday.
Steven Earl Salmony
AWAREness Campaign on The Human Population,
established 2001
hppt://sustainabilitysoutheast.org/index.php
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Sam Wells Posted 4:13 am
29 Nov 2008
Before my internet cuts out again, I did have some questions about hi-speed rail and "mag-lev" technologies that seem to require massive amounts of power. Anyone looked into that in the context of greenhouse gases? -sam
Onward through the fog
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Bob Wallace Posted 4:32 am
29 Nov 2008
At this point 80% - 90% of Americans think global climate change real.
A majority thinks that we need to get working on the problem.
You might wish to give this article a read. I'm betting on the attitudes measured in this poll that there is going to be a lot less resistance to fixes than one might guess.
http://www.gallup.com/poll/27298/Americans-Assess-What-Th ...
Sure, resistance from some big businesses. But remember that big corporations didn't buy as much access to the White House as normal this time around....
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Jon Rynn Posted 6:20 am
29 Nov 2008
Yes, there are emissions involved in building these systems. According to the IPCC, if my memory serves, metal-making, chemical-making, and paper-making are the big offenders. You should note that the actual operation of industrial machinery is minimally "emmissive". But even the big offenders use mostly if not totally electric sources; steel I'm pretty sure about, paper might use natural gas for heating, but I'm not sure.
So most of the manufacturing system (if not almost all, except for feedstocks) is convertable to being virtually emission free (and of course, work needs to be done on pollution, although I think with strict enough regulations that wouldn't be a big problem).
Bob, that's a nice vision of an electrified transportation system. There was some discussion in Alan Drake's post at theoildrum.com about freight trains, that the big efficiency is moving truck traffic to trains, even if the trains are diesel. So electrification could be a secondary process there, I think. And I think small trucks, loading up from railheads, should be electric, as you suggest. J.H. Crawford, in "the carless city", proposes some fancy method of moving freight within a city by rail, but that sounds like a stretch to me.
Kunstler thinks that "megacities" won't make it either, although he's not very clear on what level that means. He makes mistakes, like saying elevators won't work so tall buildings will be out, which is nonsense because elevators run on electricity. If we get to the point where civilization is falling apart, cities might get bigger because they are more efficient and easier to police. So yes, Kunstler makes some mistakes -- but I love his writing style, I hate to admit, and his particular point of view yields useful insights from time to time.
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Bob Wallace Posted 10:14 am
29 Nov 2008
UPS is already investigating the electric route for their business. They've leased 42 three wheeled electric Zap truck for short range delivery in Petaluma.
http://www.autobloggreen.com/2007/11/13/ups-leases-42-all ...
Ordered 200 hybrid delivery vans for the US which are projected to save 40% in fuel costs.
http://ecotechdaily.com/2008/05/16/ups-adds-200-hybrid-el ...
And purchased six all electric vans with 150 miles range for use in England.
(link broken, but a copy is living in the Google cache)
Rail, to me, is a medium/long distance transportation system. For shorter distances roads are just fine and we can get around with BEVs, carry our power with us.
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stevenearlsalmony Posted 9:44 pm
29 Nov 2008
A culture that defines its very raison d'etre by endless accumulation of material possessions; by the unbounded acquisition of more money, money, money, money; by recklessly overconsuming and relentlessly hoarding limited resources, demonstrably declares to all the world that greed is good.
Are we not members of a culture that worships consumerism? Are the products of greed nothing more or less than the objects of our idolatry?
Are the pin-striped suits, fleet of cars, chauffeur, private jets, McMansions, distant hideaways, secret handshakes and exclusive clubs...... all signatures of success in a culture borne of the 'goodness' of greed?
Consider for a moment what greed has wrought.
Steven Earl Salmony
AWAREness Campaign on The Human Population,
established 2001
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