Boston spends 20 times as much on Logan Airport’s security than that of its entire public transportation system. Attacks on trains in Europe have some public advocates worried that we’re not doing enough to protect riders. (BostonChannel)
Also in Boston, commuters get an IPhone app called To-A-T, which locates stations and knows when trains and buses will arrive. This kind of move is only possible if scheduling data is released to the public. (Boston)
NYC transit chief resigns, walks away with $300,000 and a lousy attitude. “May the day come soon when New York City will have a world class transit system,” he wrote. Who was responsible for that, anyway? Oh, right… (AMNY)
Utility companies are pushing Congress to legislate on cap-and-trade, out of fear that if it doesn’t, the EPA will establish costlier rules. EPA rules would be “more arbitrary, more expensive, and more uncertain for investors,” says one industry exec. (WSJ)
Last Wednesday, a NYC bus driver struck and killed a 22-year-old man. It was the driver’s first day back on duty after a suspension for texting while driving. Apparently he used his phone “to post disparaging comments about his passengers to Facebook.” (Gothamist)
Airbus predicts that air travel will outpace HSR as the preferred method of travel between major cities. HSR requires massive public funding that airlines don’t need, and many cities do not have local transit systems to make long-distance HSR travel convenient. (Crikey)
In Spain, however, rail service is booming: for the first time, more passengers chose the high-speed link between Madrid and Barcelona than chose to fly. British officials may enlist Renfe, the Spanish rail operator, to help build out their own system. (Times)
A panel of experts weighs in on Buffett’s decision to buy out Burlington Northern. Rail development will become more important for moving freight and increasing exports, so his bet is good; Buffett’s the wisest–on par, apparently, with J.P. Morgan and Cornelius Vanderbilt. (Room For Debate)
Why go to the lumber yard when you can just build with whole trees? An architect builds houses by bending whole slim ash trees into frames and rafters; a whole tree supports 50% more weight than could the largest piece of lumber milled from it. (NYTimes)
A list! Betcha can’t guess which is America’s most toxic city. Lots of no-brainers, but also lots of surprises here. The kicker is that Las Vegas, wasteful in so many ways, is the least toxic. (GreenBiz)
New York Senator Charles Schumer is taking on a $1.5 billion wind farm planned for west Texas. The project wants $450 million in stimulus funds, some of which it’ll spend in China. Schumer finds it “disturbing” that “more than 2,000 manufacturing jobs would be created in China.” (GreenInc)
Another list! The eighteen strangest bridges. One has a 217 foot sundial, another is a giant gold snake, and a third is made of bamboo and can support 8 ton trucks! (Popular Mechanics)
Imagine if we spent as much money on infrastructure as we do on defense. That’s $680 billion: enough to build a national high-speed rail network. Cost-benefit analysis? Anyone? (Ryan Avent)
More strife in the city of Brotherly Love: a fire on a Regional Rail train (not on strike) and pickets at a still-operating bus terminal are complicating the existing mess. No talks are scheduled to end the walkout. (Philly.com)
Buried deep in the mud at the bottom of Arthur Kill, between Staten Island and New Jersey, is $26 million worth of 75 lb silver “pigs” that slid off a barge, poorly secured by drunks, in 1903. An intrepid scientist aims to recover the loot. (Hemispheres - pic via)
Would you pay $1,650 for a first-class train ticket from one end of the UK to the other? Folks of every political stripe are miffed that a complex fare structure raises rates; a rail minister says it “really takes the biscuit.”(BBC)
The Bay Bridge is open for business. Vibration tests, stressing, truck tests all good. Wait, truck tests? What’s the hourly rate for driving a heavy truck over a bridge that might collapse? (KRON)
A bus drivers’ union in Chicago says it’ll strike to protest planned layoffs of about 1,800 members, which were announced along with the $300 million CTA budget deficit. “I think you’re asking for a war,” says the union president. (ChicagoNow)
Jay Walder, New York’s transit chief, suggests in an interview that Gotham should experiment with off-peak subway fares. An economist runs some hypothetical numbers and finds that off-hours discounts might reduce the average price of a subway ride by 23%. (Streetsblog)
Pilot programs are underway in California to provide electricity consumers with “comparative home energy information”–that is, ratings that show how their consumption stacks up against their neighbors’. Funny thing though–peer pressure really works. A software maker claims that nationwide implementation could be the equivalent of taking six million cars off the road. (LA Times)
Environmentalists are challenging a Chicago firm building a wind farm in the Appalachians on the grounds that it poses a danger to the Indiana bat, an endangered species. Apparently, the turbines cause barotrauma, which “creates low-pressure zones that cause the bats’ tiny lungs to hemorrhage.” Bat experts will decide. (WaPo)
Cities like Portland, Austin, and Denver might be lauded for their transit systems, art scenes and bicycle cultures, but the urban policies that foster those climates might depend on populations being homogeneous. The author summarizes it as “White Flight writ large.” (New Geography)
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)
The production and use of energy in the US creates about $120 billion each year in health and environmental costs. About half of that is directly attributable to motor vehicles and their pollution. Interestingly, electric vehicles scored a bit worse than gas-powered rigs. (Nat’l Academy of Sciences)
The bad news: More than half of teens text while they’re driving. The good news: 62 percent of teens support making said activity illegal. The takeaway: Teens are dumb but also smart. (Wireless Week)
The gents who made all that money creating the Freakonomics empire are being destroyed over the global warming chapter in their new book. Nobel winner Paul Krugman is now part of the beat-down crew, calling them out for screwing up a reference to a major economist’s work on climate. (PK’s blog)
Japan’s post-war economy has always relied heavily on massive public works spending – particularly so since the 1990s. The new government is trying to pare back the country’s construction budget. But as one rural dam project illustrates, that can be a thorny business. (NYT)
Putin went to Beijing and signed an agreement that would have China build a high speed railway system in Russia. It should be noted though that Russia already has more world-class high speed rail lines (one) than the US does (zero). (Alibaba) See video after the jump
Ray LaHood, the transportation secretary of this great land, praised a plan to create a multi-modal transport hub in a defunct passenger rail station in the Twin Cities. “There are very few places around the country that are doing this,” he said. “But it’s what the people want.” (Forbes)
The rich NIMBYs in Palo Alto are up in arms about the proposed California High Speed Rail project and, with an election coming up, city council candidates are playing to those passions. Let’s hire lobbyists to get the project derailed, says one. (Mercury News)
Pat Quinn, the man who filled Blago’s blue suede shoes as the governor of Illinois, is a strong supporter of high speed rail, describing it as “a mission for America.” He also said that NIMBYs shouldn’t be allowed to block a proposed HSR link between Chicago and St Louis. (Tribune)
When California’s HSR system finally gets around to connecting LA and San Diego, will it be routed through the lovely Inland Empire? Or will it simply follow I-15 south from Ontario to Murrietta? Decisions, decisions… (Desert Sun)
A planned passenger and freight rail network linking six Persian Gulf states will cost $60 billion, according to a new estimate. The UAE, Saudi Arabia, Oman, Kuwait, Qatar and Bahrain will share the cost. Construction is set to begin next year or 2011. (Gulf News)
A Dallas blogger asks a good question: Stockholm has a high speed link between downtown and the airport that cuts the trip to 20 minutes–why aren’t we talking about local HSR connections in the US? (Morning News)
According to the White House, the stimulus package has directly created (”or saved”) 30,000 jobs in the private sector — that is, with companies that have actually received gubmint checks made of stimulus money. Our thoughts? Yawn. Stimulus job figures have thus far been so unreliable as to border on meaningless. (CNN Money)
Santa Monica is jacking up parking rates on it’s most coveted streetside parking spaces. Right now too many people are cruising for prime, cheap spots. How do you know if they’re priced right? About 15 percent are empty at any given time. (LAT)
Every year the natural gas industry allows more than 3 trillion cubic feet of methane to leak into the atmosphere. This despite the fact methane is 25x more powerful as a greenhouse gas than CO2. The leaks show up clearly on infrared cameras though, and smart companies are starting to fix their wells. (NYT - pic via, below)
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All across the US west, towns are bumping up against the fact that lawns require huge amounts of water. A massive new spawly suburb near Denver is trying a novel strategy: allowing grass only as a landscape accent around desert plants. They hope to reduce per home annual use from 200,000 to 72,000 gallons. (WSJ)
New York City has been enduring a heated mini-debate over the past few days about whether jay walkers should be ticketed. Mayor Mike weighs in at last: policepeople have “plenty to do,” he says, and the city will continue to defer to the common sense of peds. (Gothamist)
Californians are proving very adept at conserving water. Los Angeles trimmed consumption by 20% over the past year. Other communities have done even more. One unfortunate side effect: water utilities are being forced to lay off workers because of lower revenue. (Green Inc.)
It looks like there might be more carnage on the way for the labor force of SoCal water utilities: The City of LA has just approved a waterless urinal for widespread use. Urine just filters through a little cartridge, releasing a pleasant lemony scent–no need to flush it away with precious H2O. (TreeHugger - pic via)
We’re all kind of tired of handing over untold billions to Saudi Arabia for oil to power our inefficient transportation system, right? Well, now the Kingdom wants us to pay them billions for not pumping oil. Otherwise they’ll hold out on any global warming agreement. (Green Inc.)
“High speed rail is not competition for cars,” declared Ray LaHood yesterday, speaking at a Masonic Temple in Detroit (see, Masons really do run the world). He was offering the reassurance, just in case someone, somewhere actually thought the country’s nascent interest in choo-choos posed any kind of threat to the, ahem, Big 3. (Crains Detroit)
Toronto’s real estate market remains stronger than in cities like NYC, as evidenced by the success of a trio of new eco-friendly office towers in the financial district. When completed in the next few months, they’ll provide 3 million sq ft of new office space–with approximately 2/3rds of that pre-leased. (Sqaure Feet blog)
Earlier this week we ran a link to a WSJ opinion piece by David Owen. The argument in four words or less: “Congestion pricing isn’t green.” The item has drawn a volley of (well-founded, we think) criticism. The critics, in seven words or less: “What you say, sir, makes no sense.” (Streetsblog DC, Yglesias)
Taking to heart the message of a recent book (we interviewed the author!), a conservative argues that his ideological brothers-in-arms are kinda stupid for not embracing mass transit. After all, it’s not like our freeway network is the result of free market forces. (Daily Politics)
A Brooklyn writer finds that social media like Facebook isn’t making us all into pathetic homebodies: “When it comes to technology and cities, today’s thrilling development - “thrilling”, that is, if you like real cities and corporeal people - is that social networking is enhancing urban places.” Then he tells a story about eating an ice cream cone. (Wired UK)
Google Maps is getting more multi-modal all the time: Perhaps on their own or perhaps in response to a robust lobbying campaign, the folks from Mountain View are adding a “Bike There” feature to supplement the current directions for driving, walking or taking public transport. (Some blog)
Photo: Globe and Mail — a Google employee doing fancy things on a bike.
The US electrical grid exists in three major, separate pieces. A proposed $1 billion substation in Clovis, NM, would change that — using state-of-the art technology (superconductors!) to tie the grids together and allow solar and wind energy to find a national market. (WSJ)
The “bridge in a backpack” is looking like it might spark a revolution in highway bridge building. The first example–a two-lane, 34-foot span in Maine–saved the government lots of money and is holding up well. A second one was built in only 9 days. Meanwhile the inventor has his eye on much bigger projects. (NYT)
Streetlights consume 2 percent of America’s energy. Irving, TX, is using $2m in stimulus funds to install solar lamps. The project will save the city $760,000 in the first year alone. (Dallas Morning News)
What’s this–a list on the Internet? Why, yes. Travel + Leisure names the world’s 15 ugliest buildings. They aren’t ranked but our favorite (for ugliness) is this picnic basket building in Ohio. Also shamed: The Experience Music Project in Seattle and some ugly thing in Portland, OR. Pics after the jump. (T+L)
In Oregon, a dam on the Rogue River has been demolished by bulldozers, allowing the waterway to flow free for the first time through the area since 1921. Dam removal has been gathering momentum out west. (LAT)
Ray LaHood is in Detroit to cheer a $7 million stimulus project that will create a passenger terminal and public dock. It will make Motor City the “Midwest cruise ship capital,” he says. Which is quite a name to live up to. (AP)
Some writer-guy from New York really, really hates bike lanes. Why? We’re really not sure. But it seems to have something to do with yellow bracelets and cupcake shops and “faux piazzas.” Okay, mister! (NYT - City Room)
“Traffic jams, if they’re managed well, can actually be good for the environment. They maintain a level of frustration that turns drivers into subway riders or pedestrians.” Therefore congestion pricing isn’t necessarily that green. So argues a piece in the Wall Street Journal.
John Kerry and Lindsey Graham offer a bi-partisan proposal from climate change legislation. More nuclear, they say. But also they want the US to be “the Saudi Arabia of clean coal.” (Ugh.) And also trade tariffs on stuff from countries that pollute a lot, like China. (NYT)
That big chemical company Dow is making solar shingles. Yay? Indeed: Yay! You can just nail them straight onto your house and they’re 10-40% cheaper than non-shingle solar “solutions.” Dow estimates a $5b market in the things within 5 years. (Env Capital)
From Michigan, a plan to turn underused rural roads into “green highways”: “The idea is to retrofit roadways with charging stations and tailor routes to low-speed, limited-distance electric and muscle-powered vehicles, including EVs, hybrids, bicycles, scooters, horses and Segways.” Think of it as “slow travel.” (Time)
Amtrak’s ridership over the past year has been 27.2 million. That’s off 1.5 million from a year ago–mainly a result of a decline in business travel due to recession–but still the second highest ever. On time performance was 80 percent for the kind-of-pathetic-but-still-doing-the-best-they-can state rail company. (AP)
What do the young people these days think about cars? “Meh,” is the answer. New market research shows Americans in their teens and 20s don’t see cars as particularly interesting or necessary. Chinese kids, on the other hand, are still wild for ‘em. (LA Times)
Little discussed in the Olympic matter: Brazil is building a $9 billion high speed rail link between Rio and Sao Paolo. Chicago, meanwhile, has a transit system that’s falling apart, with trains limited to 6 mph on some stretches of track. (Oregonian)
According to a new report from Brookings, air travel is high concentrated in a small number of metropolitan centers. That means heavy delays in those places. But half of all flights are less than 500 miles and many of those passengers could be better served by high speed rail–if we had a network… (Tampa Bay Biz/ Brookingspdf)
As we mentioned earlier this week, the $8 billion in stimulus funds for high speed rail drew applications from states for more than $50 billion. Announcements of winners will come “this winter,” according the DOT. (AP)
Disney is on board with high speed rail in Florida. The company is even offering to contribute 50 acres of land for a station. The company’s backing potentially could add millions of riders to the system. (Orlando Sentinel)
Phoenix is getting mad about being left out of the nation’s HSR plans. “If you don’t have a line on the map, you’re nowhere,” says one local official. Meanwhile, the Brookings report showed Phoenix to LA is the 3rd busiest short-hop corridor in the country. (AZ Republic)
One long-running debate in HSRland is whether Rochester, Minnesota–home of the renowned Mayo Clinic–will be a stop on the Twin Cities-to-Chicago route. It ought to be, says a new study by the MN DOT, because it would be a major ridership generator. (Post Bulletin)
What can the project to build a maglev link between Anaheim and Vegas do for you? Well, watch this upbeat new commercial and find out! Apparently it’s airing in Southern California now? Local confirmation in comments, plz… (CA-NV Super Speed Train)
In Paraguay, bulldozers are destroying the home territory of one of the last uncontacted tribes in the world. A Brazilian company, Yaguarete Pora S.A., is clearing the land so bovines can eat grass there. The government is doing nothing. If anything like hell exists, clearly all these people belong there, no parole. (Survival International)
Sheldon Whitehouse, a Democratic senator from Rhode Island, wants a second stimulus package and wants it to be “100 percent infrastructure.” He wonders, “We’ve got to fix [our decaying infrastructure] – why don’t we do it now?” Well, for one thing, because the Obama administration isn’t on board… (Politico)
The respected UK Energy Research Counsel says that peak oil is likely coming in the next decade — meaning that double-digit gas pricesmight not be too far away. Meaning that Americans might have to make a lot changes in how we live, and quickly. ( Guardian)
Statistics show that texting while driving is very dangerous. But motorists don’t consider it to be among their 5 most hazardous distractions. For men #1 is road rage. For women it’s kids in the car (followed by the application of make-up). (Chicago Tribune)
The vacancy rate at American strip malls now stands at the highest level in 17 years. “It is daunting to observe this acceleration in decline in what has traditionally been regarded as a stable property type,” said an expert. (Reuters)
This week Mike Bloomberg announced a contest for designing mobile apps to make America’s largest city more transparent. It goes hand-in-hand with the city “Data Dump.” Great in theory, but the execution has been pretty shoddy, says a critic. The prizes make no sense and data dump has been a huge disappointment. (Planetizen)
Avenue Q tells us the internet is for porn. But we know better: The internet is for lists! Ever wonder what the 10 greatest streets in America are? Well, now you can find out. Spoiler: Number one is in Alaska. (APA)
Countries around the world are embracing massive high speed rail investment as a way to stimulate their economies out of recession. And it seems to be working. The US, by contrast, is spending only a token amount. (FT — and alt link)
Chicago is looking ahead to 2040 and seeing nearly 3 million new residents — and realizing they can’t build enough new highway capacity to support current driving habits. The answer? More transit and maximizing existing roads. (Sun Times)
Among its many other ill effects (pun intended), air pollution seems to cause appendicitis, according to a new study by Canadian scientists. They crunched the numbers and found a lot of cases on days with bad smog. (TreeHugger)
Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood is going gaga for the new commuter bike station in Washington DC: “It is attractive; it is green; it provides what bicycling commuters need. And it is a model of the sustainable, livable mobility this nation needs now.” (City Paper)
Since the ’50s, most technologies have advanced significantly — but why don’t we have faster jets? Well, the R&D has mostly gone toward greater fuel efficiency. That seems to be what the economic gods want most in the air travel industry. (Matt Yglesias)
You’ve seen those “Smarter Planet” ads running all the time on your teevee — well, today IBM announced deals to smarten up the Long Island Railroad, DC’s WMATA, and San Fran’s BART. They’re selling the agencies software to help track rail equipment and make the systems safer. Certainly a timely purchase for WMATA… (AP)
Geoff Manaugh over at BLDGBLOG unearths a strange and charming little poem about sewage treatment plants: “Rainwater gross as gravy is filtered from / Its coarse detritus at the intake and piped / To the sedimentation plant like an Egyptian nightmare.” And so on. (BLDGBLOG)
There are some people who think all of our transportation problems will be answered by “pods”–that is, little cars that travel around a city on tracks. Personalize public transport, if you will. Other people think it’s a totally moronic idea. The Globe explores the issue. (Boston Globe)
Maybe we’ll get a big new transportation bill after all this year? That’s the implication of Bloomberg report today. You’ll recall the House leadership has been pushing that way, while the Senate and the White House have been angling for an 18 month extension. To be continued. (Streetsblog DC)
Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood had tough words for Florida: “Get your act together,” he said, warning that the legislature needs to approve the SunRail commuter rail system if the state is going to get its high speed rail plan funded by the federal government. (Sayfie Review)
At this site, we’ve long held the view that oil prices will determine our transportation future. Merrill Lynch (they still exist?) thinks the black stuff is going to $100 next year. And another piece of the puzzle: Exxon’s CEO says we’ve passed peak gasoline demand in the US. (Business Insider)
Norfolk Sourthern now has an emissions free locomotive. Which sounds pretty good and maybe is, but the thing uses 1,100 batteries and is just a switching locomotive–i.e. one that just mucks around a rail yard. Small steps, small steps. (UPI)
Building America’s Future–that group founded by the three musketeers of infrastructure, Bloomberg, Rendell, and Schwarzenegger–has a new president, former Clinton official Marcia Hale. We’re big fans of BAF and offer our congrats on the choice. (Infrastructure Investor)
An abandoned old railroad bridge over the mighty Hudson River has been converted into a pedestrian bridge. The structure is “a muscular lattice of trusses and struts on giant footings, a survivor from a long-gone era before bridge mediocrities like the Tappan Zee.” Um… wow? (NYT)
A hippie artist type has is arting up sidewalk cracks in NYC, to enliven and humanize the harsh urban environment (or something like that). Honestly, we don’t understand what the hell he’s talking about in this interview, but we rather like what he’s done. (Good)
This is Heads Up Driving week, which means: put down the cell phone already if you’re behind the wheel. Not that that transition is easy — one columnist finds it’s as tough quitting smoking. (Houston Chronicle)
The old transportation bill expired last Wednesday night. Congress passed a stop-gap one-month extension, but the longer term plan isn’t yet clear. With the expiration states stand to lose $8.7 billion in federal funds, potentially costing thousands of jobs. (T4A blog)
On Friday morning local politicians and various types who think petroleum powered transportation is not the be-all and end-all of human existence gathered to cut a ribbon at Washington’s fancy new Bike Transit Center. It’s at Union Station, which means it’s “multi-modal.” Also, it kind of looks like a helmet. (DCist - click for pics)
The LA/Long Beach ports are the busiest in the nation. They were creating a major air pollution hazard. But strict new rules to clean up the cargo trucks coming and going from the facilities have cut diesel emissions by 70% in just two years. (LA Times)
Last week, Canadian train-maker Bombardier inked a $4 billion deal to sell 80 Zefiro trains to China. The Zefiro goes 230 miles per hour. All the trains will be running by 2014. (Bloomberg)
California should get “an outsized share” of the federal high speed rail funds, says an LA Times editorial. “Given the scale of the [project's] ambitions, it’s going to need every advantage it can get.” (LAT)
Rock guy David Byrne wrote a much-noted new book about tooling around various cities on his bicyle. Byrne talked two-wheelin’ with a radio interviewer and suggested that cities in Texas are kind of screwed up ’cause nobody is ever outside their cars in public. (NPR)
Is getting the Olympics a curse? Did Chicago dodge a bullet? On one hand, cities that host the games generally lose money. But if they build new transit and great public spaces–as Atlanta did–maybe it’s worth it… (NYT - Room For Debate)
A rash of mysterious water main breaks in LA has caused localized flooding and even a street cave in. City engineers are wondering if recent water restrictions are to blame. (NYT)
States stand to lose $9 billion in federal funds when the current transportation bill expires… tomorrow. California has $800 million on the line. If the money isn’t restored, projects will have to be shut down. (WSJ)
An op-ed in the NY Times calls for peace between cyclists and pedestrians, who today share a narrow walkway on the Brooklyn Bridge. Ban bikes on the walkway, but create new bike lanes on the roadway, says the author. “The liveability revolution has begun,” he declares. (NYT)
Hydrogen cars–those things that will never exist in useful form–can now go faster than ever. Recently one went 300 mph in the desert. Very, very exciting stuff. (Inhabitat)
What would the Burj Dubai, the world’s tallest building, look like if it was plunked down in middle of Manhattan? Well, a big ugly too-tall building in the middle of Manhattan, actually. See above. (Ethan Bee via Kottke)
So, um, how do wash the windows on a hideous skyscraper in the middle of the desert with lots of sandstorms and stuff? Brave guys with water canons do it, dangling from the side of the structure. Video after the jump. (Youtube via Gizmodo)
Our weekly Friday round-up of HSR news from around the world:
This winter, 220-mph trains will start plying the rails in Russia, linking Moscow and St. Petersburg. The locomotive-less creation by Siemens is the culmination of a Soviet era dream of bullet train service. It also stands as a prime option for California’s HSR system. (NYT - Pictured)
After a triumphant victory at the polls, California’s HSR authority has been “flat-footed” and has ceded the debate to NIMBYs and critics, says the Sacramento Bee. The authority is finding that building the thing is “far more difficult than selling the dream of the sleek, fast trains.” (Sac Bee)
Where will San Fran’s fancy new HSR terminal be sited? For years, plans have focused on the Transbay Terminal at First and Mission. But the state HSR authority is now “exploring alternatives.” It is legally obliged to do that, says the chairman. (SF Chron)
Next year, Spain is due to overtake France and Japan as the world leader in HSR system mileage. AVE now transports 40,000 passengers a day and more or less killed air service between Madrid and Barcelona, long a great cash cow for airlines. (BBC)
Next door, Portugal’s plans for a connecting HSR network will likely be thwarted if the opposition candidate wins next week’s national elections. She describes it as “a luxury” in a bad economic environment. (Bloomberg)
In their transportation spending bills the House and Senate provided $4 billion and $1.2 billion respectively for passenger rail. So which will it be? NY’s senator Chuck Schumer is urging his colleagues to go with the higher figure. (WTEN)
Taiwan’s vaunted HSR system, mostly in private hands, went bust this month and was taken over by the government. Now they’ve decided to delay construction of three new stations in order to keep costs in check. (eTaiwan News)
Doubters Corner: Taiwan stands as a warning for California and other ambitious HSR projects in the US, warns one critic–planners were expecting 275,000 daily riders and had recently been getting something like 90,000. It is, in any case, a very expensive way to reduce carbon emissions. (Heartland Institute)
The leaders of the world’s two biggest carbon emitting countries both talked about global warming yesterday. But Hu Jintao talked about the importance of nuclear power–which almost certainly has to play a major role in a low-carbon economy–while Obama omitted all mention of it. (Env. Capital)
The current transportation bill expires at the end of the month. The House was planning to vote on a three-month extension today, but did not–the Senate, it seems, has wants the extension to be a good bit longer than 3 months. To be continued. (The Trucker)
A new poll finds New Yorkers don’t like the idea of building a new airport in the metro area. Which isn’t surprising considering it would probably cost, like, as much as the Cold War. Here’s an idea: take a fraction of that hypothetical budget and dramatically upgrade passenger rail network in the northeast. (RPA)
Yeah, the eco-sensitive companies like HP are getting all the attention in Newsweek’s new ranking of America’s greenest businesses. But what about the firms that are really trashing the joint? Green Sheet runs down the worst of the worst: The Dirty 15. (Biz Insider)
Design writer Allison Arief says the “Pavement to Parks” program (think, instant parks on wasted urban asphalt) is a great model at a time when “cities are short on cash but long on ingenuity.” Time Square-style improvised parks don’t rival Olmstead but “make up for it in spirit and sustainability.” (NYT)
Back when exurban Vegas real estate was booming (double-headed showers and palm tree-shaped pools for all!) yearly auto sales were about 17 million units in the US. After Goldman Sachs stole all our money though, that number fell to 9m. Ford’s CEO is expecting it wind up at 11m for full year ‘09. (Truth About Cars)
The Boston Globe is asking a timely question: What to do with all those half-finished buildings? Their panel of architects came up with some very fancy answers, including turning a stalled office tower into a “temporary vertical algae bio-reactor.” Whatever the hell that is. (Globe) (Image via)
