Night Train: Transporting a Lame Duck with the Oil Independence Tariff

by BruceMcF

Burning the Midnight Oil for Living Energy Independence

We are in the Lame Duck Period. We have real unemployment rates of approximately 14% (counting headline unemployment, marginally attached, and involuntary unemployment as roughly 50% employed, 50% unemployed), and if the economy still sucks this bad in November in two years times, all manner of absurdly idiotic reactions could be elicited from an angry electorate by skillful corporate marketers.

And if the the Republicans are willing to sabotage the security on loose nuclear bomb making material for political gain, surely they will sabotage the economy, as they have been doing.

And with transportation from the Recovery Act creating 630,000 direct and indirect jobs ~ a larger share of jobs than share of funding ... attacking transport funding is a critical step in sabotaging the economy.

So, an idea on what can be done about it.

continued at Daily Kos....

Rural Passenger Rail: Let a hundred Empire Builders bloom!

by RuralRoute

Yesterday we had freezing rain, this morning brought a dusting of snow. US Highway 14 received a bit of attention from MNDOT, resulting in a wet strip in the center in spots. The right hand ruts are iced up again though, and in spots the road is totally ice and snow covered. Thus on my 5 mile drive to get internet access at the Tyler library, 50 miles per hour was the fastest I drove. For the last couple days traffic along Minnesota Highway 23, viewable from my front window, has slowed to a crawl at times. The only drivers doing the 60 miles per hour speed limit are newbies to the frozen north and fools.The forecast for the next few days is for more snow... making the drive to visit the relatives for thanksgiving a frightening experience.

But the traffic on the parallel BNSF railway tracks has been moving at normal pace, in fact often outpacing the traffic on MN 23. A couple miles to the north, it's business as usual on CP's DM&E line as trainloads of grain, ethanol, and whatever move at a steady 40 MPH. But sadly, neither railroad carries authorized passengers on these lines... And those open coal and grain cars look like a pretty cold ride!

continued at Daily Kos....

Night Train: Losing HSR Battles while Winning the Transport War

by BruceMcF

Burning the Midnight Oil for Living Energy Independence

Last week I raised the certainty that Kasich will return $375m of Ohio's $400m grant for laying the 110mph 3C corridor track and running 79mph trains on them ... and the likelihood that Wisconsin's Governor-elect Jobs Walkabout will return all or most of Wisconsin's $810m for the Milwaukee to Madison Emerging HSR corridor.

Thing is, even if the opponents of HSR killed two (or, see inside, three): they had to kill them all. Every HSR line that gets finished will undermine their case, and raise intra-regional and inter-regional jealousies as a force ensuring that HSR funding is provided at the Federal level and matching funds are raised at the state level.

continued at Daily Kos....

The Night Train: The Path for Ohio High Speed Rail

by BruceMcF

Burning the Midnight Oil for Living Energy Independence

One of the consequences of the 2010 General Elections was the election of RepubliCorp Governors in Ohio and Wisconsin who politically neutralized the success of sitting Democratic state administrations in landing $400m and $800m High Speed Rail funding by demonizing the High Speed projects that were funded.

What that means for Wisconsin seems likely to be cancellation of the project but its certainly worth pushing back (and see below for further).

Ohio was completing the final Design this year, so never committed to the Build funds, so while Kasich is handing ~8,000 jobs to another state, there's no immediate budget impact to hit him with. Indeed, given the new make-up of the state board that would have to approve taking the Build money, after demonizing the "Quickstart", Kasich couldn't take the money now if he wanted to.

So where next for Ohio High Speed Rail?

continued at Daily Kos....

Sunday Train: Northeastern HSR Alignments & The Move to Tuesdays

by BruceMcF

Burning the Midnight Oil for Living Energy Independence

This is a fairly short Sunday Train, but I thought I better get something posted, so I had somewhere to put this scheduling announcement:

• Due to a new prep on Monday Morning this coming Fall term, the Sunday Train is temporarily moving to Tuesday Evenings until the end of year Holidays, starting next week (19 October)

The actual Sunday Train portion is about one element of the Amtrak proposal for a High Speed Rail corridor for the Northeast: the alignment. At the preliminary proposal stage, an alignment must be selected for study so that preliminary cost and patronage estimates can be performed. However, if the decision is made to go ahead, a range of alignments will be (and, indeed, must be) studied.

So tonight I take a brief look at the alignment options from the report.

continued at Daily Kos....

Sunday Train: 1:36 NYC/Boston, 1:23 NYC/DC, $117b, 30yrs

by BruceMcF

Burning the Midnight Oil for Living Energy Independence

As The Transport Politic reported earlier this week: Amtrak Unveils Ambitious Northeast Corridor Plan, But It Would Take 30 Years to be Realized

After months of sitting on the sidelines as states and regional agencies promoted major new high-speed rail investments, Amtrak has finally announced what it hopes to achieve over the next thirty years: A brand-new, 426-mile, two-track corridor running from Boston to Washington, bringing true [Express] high-speed rail to the Northeast Corridor for the first time.

Some questions and answers, over the fold.

continued at Daily Kos....

Sunday Train: HSR Plan A and Plan B Thinking

by BruceMcF

Burning the Midnight Oil for Living Energy Independence

This last week, I have been staring at The Transport Politic post, Republican Wave Could Spell Trouble for High-Speed Rail Projects from Coast to Coast.

Living in Ohio, that is doubly true: first, adding the impact of the recession on top of the impact of sixteen years of Kasich/Portman style policies is, ironically, the best opportunity for those who helped cause the mess to gain political power from it.

So, is there a Plan B?

continued at Daily Kos....

Sunday Train: Sustaining Our Suburbs

by BruceMcF

Burning the Midnight Oil for Living Energy Independence

As Dean Baker reported on the (bookmark worthy) Real World Economics Review Blog, new home sales figures for July are out, and they are exactly as would have been expected when the Mortgage Brokers Association reported a slump in mortgage applications in May.

The stronger figures earlier in this year, in other words, included more than a normal rebound from a recession:

People who might have bought in the second half of 2010 or even 2011 instead bought their home before the tax credit expired. Now that the credit has expired, there is less demand than ever, leaving the market open for another plunge in prices. The support the tax credit gave to the housing market was only temporary

This does not mean that all policy response is futile: what it does mean is that the policy response must address the problem we are experiencing, not the problem we wish we were experiencing.

continued at Daily Kos....

Sunday Train: Richard Florida and the End of the Automobile Age

by BruceMcF

Burning the Midnight Oil for Living Energy Independence

This week in The New Republic, Richard Florida presented his vision of High Speed Rail as the central strategic point of leverage in an economic "reset" to get us out of the doldrums resulting from the failure of the 20th century growth model to deliver ongoing, sustained growth any more ... though the way he frame it is:

As dismal as housing prices continue to be, they have yet to hit bottom in some places. Unemployment remains frozen at an overall level of nine-plus percent, and job creation has been anemic. If the crisis belonged to George W. Bush, the recovery has been Obama’s—and it has been a fragile and tentative one at best. Along with billions of dollars in stimulus payments, the president has spent down most of his political capital. So what is his next step?

So ... what is the next step?

continued at Daily Kos...

Sunday Train: Kasich says Outsource Ohio HSR jobs to California

by BruceMcF

Burning the Midnight Oil for Living Energy Independence

... or Virginia or Illinois or upstate New York or North Carolina or Washington and Oregon or ...

... well, any other state except Ohio. Outsourcing Ohio's HSR jobs to other states is a central plank of John Kasich's run to become Governor of Ohio.

Of course, we don't expect people from places like Lehman Brothers to flat out say something like that: instead, they give a plausible sounding sound bite which then falls apart the minute you think about it. Their hope, it seems, is that nobody thinks about it.

So too with Kasich's plan to hand Ohio's $400m in HSR Stimulus Funds back to the Federal Government for another state to use ... he hides his plan behind a red herring.

continued at Daily Kos...

Thursday Night Express: High Speed Rail, Rapid Streetcars, and Democracy

by BruceMcF

Burning the Midnight Oil for Living Energy Independence Welcome to the Thursday Night Express. This is a new service joining the Sunday Train. In Sunday Train, I try to dig into some information related to energy independent transport and share what details I can find. And of course, some people have time to ride the Sunday Train, and some people do not have the time to spare. The Thursday Evening Express is an experiment that will pick three specific topics, primarily from the previous Sunday Train, and present three short arguments in two to three paragraphs.

continued at Daily Kos....

Sunday Train: Getting Ohio's 3C Line Into Cincinnati

by BruceMcF

Burning the Midnight Oil for Living Energy Independence While EnergyFreedom Transport is an issue that has been brought back onto the "front burner" (so to speak) ... ... there has been ongoing work on this front ever since the supply-drive oil price shocks of the 70's and 80's. Ohio won $400m in competitive HSR funding from Stimulus II, to do the first work toward a 110mph Triple-C corridor, supporting a starter Amtrak-speed service at first and then building toward a 110mph. But it aint 3 C's without Cincinnati, and getting into Cincinnati is tricky.

continued at Daily Kos....