Posted on Wednesday October 21st by Jebediah Reed | 76
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- Global spending on trains, tracks and equipment will be $180 billion this year — a blessing for big companies like Siemens that have been otherwise hammered by the recession. And the worldwide HSR boom is only gathering momentum… (WSJ)
- New York City has 850 hybrid electric buses–more than any city in the world. The vehicles are catching on in other places though, despite the fact they cost twice as much as diesel buses. Their benefits: they pollute less, save fuel, and are more reliable. (NYT)
- Dallas’s transit agency really blew it this weekend–100,000 people came to town for the big Texas-Oklahoma football game, and DART promoted the new Green line as the best way to get to the stadium. Predictably, it was swamped and many fans were delayed for hours. (Dallas Morning News)
- Phoenix’s new light system, on the other hand, is having great luck catering to drunk college kids. Ridership is far above projections, and it’s probably having the carry-on benefit of keeping intoxicated students off the roads. (Yglesias)
- Ed Glaeser wrote a much commented on series a couple of months ago, arguing that high speed rail connecting Dallas and Houston would be a rotten invesment. But by tweaking his interest rate and operating cost assumptions, it turns out to be a great investment. (The Avenue)
- Some Republican politician types are trumpeting the idea that cap and trade is a “gas tax.” Which is ominous for climate policy because everybody knows it’s against the laws of god and nature to tax gasoline in America. (Streetsblog DC)
- The Boeing Dreamliner promises 20% better fuel efficiency per passenger coventional planes. But it’s two years behind schedule and $4 billion over budget. Airline companies and Boeing are both sweating at this point. (Environmental Capital)
- Summer is done, as are beach days for most us. But it’s not too late to admire some fine specimens in the obscure architectural genre of the lifeguard tower. (Some site - pic via)
October 21st, 2009 at 5:02 pm
A little while back, I wrote about the costs and benefits of building an amusement park on the moon, and I came to the conclusion that it wasn’t worth it.
But it turns out, if you tweak my interest rate and cost assumptions, its a great investment!
October 21st, 2009 at 8:31 pm
@Danny,
You could also account for there being 15 days/month of endless sunlight for energy, That would be perfect for the average vacationer. Not bad at all. Plus you would get the added benefit of being able to have the park open for the full 15 days. You could stagger your guests wake-up times and have your park at full capacity non-stop.
October 21st, 2009 at 9:10 pm
Don’t joke about that, Danny. China is already working on a moon park and it will be receiving guests by 2013. Meanwhile you haven’t even gotten past the talking stage. I remember when Americans used to *do* things
October 22nd, 2009 at 1:37 am
Dallas:
You forgot something. The moon has a rotation as well, and has day and night just the same as us.
Jebediah:
Americans still do things, but the way they do things has changed drastically. We used to have a culture of doing things that made sense…now we have a culture of doing things that score politicians the most votes. In fact, the only reason we haven’t built high speed rail in our culture is because it won’t get politicians enough votes yet.
I still prefer the days where we did things that make sense. And some day, high speed rail could make sense for a lot of America, but that day is not today. I would love for it to make sense right now, because I prefer traveling by train over planes by about a million to one. But if we do high speed rail right now, its going to wither and suffer and suck subsidies from taxpayers perpetually.
There are a few things we need to do before HSR really makes sense. We need urbanism to flourish and city densities to increase (zoning reform now!). We need to price carbon so that people are paying the true costs for its emission. We need to price roads so that cars and trucks pay for their maintenance costs completely. We need to build urban transportation networks that encourage and support intracity services.
When that happens, people will not have to think about what modal option to use for their trip to disneyland or to see grammy and pop-pop. The choice will be such an obvious no-brainer that people won’t even think that there are other options.
That is when HSR will make sense.
October 22nd, 2009 at 11:40 am
@danny
You make great points about how we need true urbanism and higher densities to support HSR. However, HSR isn’t built overnight, just as cities can’t fix the problems of sprawl overnight. If we simultaneously work on implementing better, walkable communities at the same time we work on getting more mass transit and high-speed rail built and running, by the time these projects are completed all the puzzle pieces will have fallen into place.
Amtrak’s Northeast Corridor is profitable. There are a lot of major cities along the route, there are a lot of commuter rail and mass transit agencies feeding into it, and it’s prices and trip times are competitive with air flights. If we take some of highest priority cities along the national high speed rail plan, and right now both push for HSR and better mass transit and TOD within these cities, they’ll be ready by the time the ribbon on HSR is cut.
October 22nd, 2009 at 1:29 pm
Can someone please explain to me why Republicans are so opposed to change of any kind? Supporting some of these new measures and ideas taking hold across the country might win more voters on the premise that they actually give a shit about something, OMG the frustration.
For the Republican types….
We import 65 % of our oil from countries that generally hate us but put up with us to get our money for the oil. At any given moment we have a noose around our collective necks and they have the other end of the rope, good example thereof was when oil hit $ 147 a barrel, when Americans cringed at the sight of the orange light on the dashboard and then the best solution you come up with is Drill-baby-Drill?
I drive an ‘07 Sebring and filling up went from $ 28 to $ 70. I had the transport choices of driving my car or…..OH wait I didn’t have a choice. Drill baby drill doesn’t get me jack. Give me an alternative, get a few busses and run a loop route or something. Tax Emissions, tax gas, do what you have to to get us of the oil binge.
You need a collective bitch slap.
October 22nd, 2009 at 2:53 pm
I have a question. While I’m completely supportive of the idea that urbanism in the 21st century needs to be more dense, I’m wondering . . . what happens to small towns? I was involved in a symposium a few years back where one of the participants (a landscape architect) was insistent that small towns should be allowed to die in favor of big cities. At the same time, he was arguing that we need to design the city according to social justice principles. It seemed to me that he was talking out of both sides of his mouth. On the one hand, cities need to be structured more fairly, and really to do that under capitalism, you’ve got to have the tax base and economies of scale that more people will bring. But on the other hand, we should be allowing small towns to die because they no longer make any sense. Where’s the social justice in that? Where’s the fairness to families who have lived in these places for generations and have been part of the organic development of the very things that new urbanism is supposed to celebrate?
In this day of telecommuting, it struck me that small towns might serve as an alternative model–especially if these places could be encouraged to go green . . . and to serve as hubs for regional mass transit systems that would still allow people to connect physically to the city. The response I received was that I was a racist for even saying this because small towns were known incubators of conservative politics and these politics were out to thwart high-density living. This confused me even more. I’m a Dem. Been one all of my life. But I live in a small town. My next door neighbors are African American. And I cherish the sense of community that has been forged between the people who live around me.
Am I as full of crap as I was made to feel and should I be putting a for sale sign out front of our house, so some hapless sod who doesn’t know which the way the wind is blowing will buy it before its value is completely gone? What do you think?
October 22nd, 2009 at 4:30 pm
@danny,
No, the Moon’s rotation is synchronized with it’s revolution. It completes ~ one revolution/rotation every 28 days. So like I said, Your Lunar Amusement park would get two solid weeks of sunshine, and then two solid weeks of night time.
October 22nd, 2009 at 4:36 pm
@Geodoctress,
What happens to small towns is that they get their economy back. If people can’t afford to drive 15 miles+ to the local Wal-Mart for Milk and eggs every day, then they will have to look closer to home for their goods and services. This will begin to rebuild the and reinvest in the economies of Small Town America. The Automobile was the single worst decision America ever made. America’s addiction to the car has destroyed environments, economies, towns, businesses, and has torn the nations social structure apart.
And yes, I said all of that with a very straight face.
October 22nd, 2009 at 5:48 pm
Second Dallas. Small towns can be sustainable if they are just that — SMALL TOWNS. Compact, self-contained, rather than sending out metastatic commercial tendrils four miles out along every arterial road.
October 22nd, 2009 at 5:50 pm
Dallas,
Doh!!
Okay, I’m an idiot.
October 22nd, 2009 at 10:29 pm
That lunar dusk would be so depressing, I bet most people would want to leave early rather than watch the sun slowly disappear for three days.
@Geodoctress,
Small towns existed long before the automobile. As mentioned above, they’ll change, getting denser, but they’ll still be there. However, the towns which survive and thrive are the ones which are near transportation, either rivers or railways. Currently, connecting roadways prop up towns which are actually very isolated - this would no longer be the case with a move away from the automobile (which is pretty much the same thing as increasing density, since one follows the other).
October 24th, 2009 at 11:06 am
Houston needs HSR! Urgently!