Progressive Blue - Brawny Recovery

If the College Educated hit 16% unemployment, would it be different?

BruceMcF — Tue, 17 Aug 2010 23:36:16 GMT

Burning the Midnight Oil for Progressive Populism

While Matthew Yglesias tends to be susceptible to patently absurd conventional wisdom economics, he does have his moments, as back in February when he observed:

The people in all the key jobs-not just the members of congress and cabinet secretaries and FOMC members and newspaper editors, but the bulk of the people who staff those people-are virtually all college graduates. And the way America works in 2010 those people are overwhelmingly going to have friends, neighbors, and acquaintances who are also college graduates. And while the labor market outlook for college graduates is bad by the standards of recent history, it's really not catastrophic. Things look very different for people with high school diplomas.

The figures are stark, and starker when plotted as a graph:

The people I teach are mostly on that purple line trying desperately to climb down onto that green line, out of the 10% (headline) rate to the just-under-8% rate. Which may be part of why I am skeptical when Richard Florida reckons that the 'Knowledge Economy' as currently constituted, which mostly constitutes people making intellectual property claims to slice and dice existing income streams, is sufficient as a future for the American economy.

If the US is going to be importing the actual manufactured products, mostly from the Factory of the World across the Pacific, we have to have something to export that people can work on without genuinely requiring a four year college education.

Now, I don't believe in silver bullet, all-in-one miracle solutions, so none of these are intended to be silver bullets, but all of these involve work below the four year college level, in addition to the college-educated work that it generates:

Pass a Federal Law that long term fixed tariff electricity rates may take as their "avoided cost" the average annual wholesale price of power in the median of the past five years. This will allow states to pass feed-in tariffs, establishing jobs in manufacturing, installing, and maintaining wind turbines in all states that take up the offer
The same Federal Law allows for stable feed-in rates to buy back power from small scale solar and industrial cogenerated electricity, further expanding the employment that can be generated
A 10 cent a gallon tariff on imported crude oil to finance Steel Interstates, High Speed Rail, Electric Transport, Public Transport and Active Transport, with the ability to borrow ahead on the tax revenue, can generate millions of new jobs ~ many college educated, and many not requiring a four year college education

This is a point that is perhaps lost in the noise: when the Oil Industry founded and as it funds the Radical Right Wing echo chamber, including the Cato Institute, the Heritage Foundation, the Reason Foundation, among the notable opponents to Energy Independence and supporters of maintaining America's vulnerability to its greatest national security threat ...

... they are opposed to the creation of jobs for ordinary working families.

While the Republican noise machine generates outrage about a non-existent Mosque which will not look onto Ground Zero to distract attention from its own jobs policy of "prosperity is just around the corner".

People know that someone has ripped off their American Dream. Too many Democrats are beholden to the same interests that did the ripping off to stand up and say loud and clear who did the ripping off ... in this election cycle. But what that means is that we have to organize so that starting around December 2010, we are working to getting people on the ballot for State Legislatures and Congress ~ Democrats if they'll let us, independents if need be ~ who are willing to stand up and say loud and clear who is on the getting side of the Great American Rip-Off Economy.

Remember what happened when gasoline hit $4/gallon. Over the decade ahead, we will be starting to slide down from the Peak of Peak Oil, and will be looking back fondly at $4/gallon oil, unless we start doing something now to tap the jobs that are available from Working to Kick Oil.

Midnight Oil ~ Dreamworld

The Breakfast Creek Hotel is up for sale
The last square mile of terra firma gavelled in the mail
So farewell to the Norfolk Island pines
No amount of make believe can help this heart of mine
End - your dreamworld is just about to end
Fall - your dreamworld is just about to fall
Your dreamworld will fall

Sunday Train: A Dime A Gallon Tariff on Imported Oil for Energy Independent Transport

BruceMcF — Mon, 02 Aug 2010 00:27:48 GMT

Burning the Midnight Oil for Living Energy Independence

The big news from July was: Senate's energy bill: What a disappointment (LA Times Editorial):

Amid tough fights over healthcare and financial reform, Obama's push for cleaner energy ran out of gas long ago. It looked like a losing battle anyway; with Senate Republicans universally opposing a cap-and-trade program or other efforts to reduce greenhouse gases, and some Democrats in heavy manufacturing states also opposed, it may have been impossible to round up the 60 votes needed to overcome a filibuster on a Senate energy bill as strong as the one passed by the House last year. But that doesn't excuse Obama or Reid for surrendering so easily, or so completely.

So we need to do something. And the strategy to stitch together a complex, multiple part, massive sprawling suburb of an Energy Bill that would be all things to all people has failed in precisely the way its opponents intended it to fail: this is a big reason why Big Oil was so heavily invested in the fight against health care reform, to make sure that it took so much time that the Energy Bill would run into election year politics and their direct lobbying efforts and come unglued.

Treason? Well, given that we are far more exposed to a disruption of our energy imports than to any threat to be found in Afghanistan, and are far more exposed to catastrophic climate change than to any threat being secured by our bases in Japan, Germany or any of the balance from the 687,347 acres of overseas military bases ... sure.

But what to do about it?
The proposal here is to get a target that can be fought for, now, and campaigned for, in the fall: as the title says, A Dime A Gallon on Imported Oil for Energy Independence

It won't get all of the way there, of course, but with sufficient leverage it can provide an immediate economic stimulus while getting an essential start on the problem.

The basic policy behind the label is:

$0.10 tariff on imported crude oil. Crude oil, after all, is an "unscheduled" commodity under existing WTO agreements, so we are free to put any tariff on it that we wish
Four funds (two and a half cents each) for electric transport, active transport, Steel Interstates, and High Speed Rail
Spending must be on qualified projects, but money is distributed to state and local accounts on a per capita basis
For capital investment projects, account holders in the first ten years can borrow on the OMB projected revenue in the first ten years

A Dime A Gallon: How Much is That

According to the US Energy Information Administration, our annual imports of Crude Oil in 2009 (a low year, because of the recession) were 3,289,675 thousand barrels. Each barrel is 42 gallons, so that is 138,166,350 thousand gallons. Times ten cents is $13,816,635 thousand, or $13.8b.

Divide this into fourths for each project, and that is $3.45b per task. At a real interest rate of 3%, that is up to $29.4b per task or, in other words, about $95 per capita (based on a Census July 2009 figure of 307m.

This is, admittedly, not sufficient for the magnitude of the task ahead, but, unlike the status quo, its a step in the right direction.

Electric Transport Fund

The electric transport fund is divided into state-based accounts, so that, for example, if the following states borrowed the full ten years ahead (based on 2009 Census estimates):

California, 36,96m, $3.5b available;
Ohio, 11.5m, $1.1b available;
Iowa, 3m, $287m available; and
New Hampshire, 1.3m, $127m available.

So, what could this money be spent on?

Electrification of rail corridors
Purchase electric rolling stock
Electrification of bus corridors
Purchase of electric trolleybuses
Purchase of pluggable hybrid buses
Charging infrastructure in support of electric vehicles
Credits on the purchase of electric vehicles
operations of an electrified transport system (this is not capital spending, so it would be out of current revenues)

The state presents a project, its vetted for qualifying as electric transport spending, if approved, the state can direct the money in its account to the project.

Active Transport

This is an area that is often overlooked, but an important aspect of this was addressed in the PBS BluePrint America show Dangerous Crossing. Outer suburbs were, of course, established for people who could afford cars, but as suburbs have grown to account for half of US residences, there is a growing share of suburban populations can't afford or don't wish to spend on a car.

Watch the full episode. See more Need To Know.

And that leads to situations like that documented in Dangerous Crossing:

27-year-old Nimia Larcia lives in a suburban housing complex just outside of Atlanta, Georgia. She moved here from Honduras six years ago in search of a better life.
Suburban America used to be synonymous with good living, not the least of which was because its streets were so much safer than those in the city. Not anymore.
Every morning when Nimia walks from her apartment to her minimum-wage job at a jewelry store, she has to cross one of the most dangerous roads in Georgia: Buford Highway. People in cars race back and forth, many if not most exceeding the 45 mile per hour speed limit.

A system that is designed so that it kills people for crossing a street - on foot is not one that encourages existing transport systems that can be shifted toward oil-independent transport ... and, indeed, active transport to get to a public transport stop is especially dangerous in these kinds of communities:

Demand for transportation is so high here that taxis, freelance car services and private buses race down these roads competing for customers with the public transit system, often using the very same stops.
People rushing to and from buses account for one in four of the accidents here [Buford Highway].

And of course, there is demographic change:

Demographers are warning that millions of older Americans living in car dependent communities could be left isolated, unable even to get to the grocery store. Dunham-Jones is hoping the country will design its way out of these problems. Even Buford Highway, she says, could be transformed with medians, trees and buildings set closer to the road. Changes that are known to slow traffic. But outside of the ivory tower, change does not come easily. Or quickly.
Last year Georgia spent more than two billion dollars on transportation, but only a tiny fraction, less than 1 percent, went specifically to pedestrian safety.

Of course, the typical state ~~highway~~ transportation department faces a situation just like Georgia's, with roadworks having dedicated funding while pedestrian facilities do not.

So this is allocated to local communities: incorporated cities, towns and villages, and for residents in unincorporated areas, counties and reservations. Qualifying projects include:

Capital spending on sidewalks and pedestrian crossings
operating spending on sidewalks (eg snow removal) and maintenance of pedestrian crossings
Pedestrian benches and bus stops
Dedicated cycleways
Shared use bicycle boulevards
Public bicycle parking and secured storage
Recreational bike and hike trails

Steel Interstates

The Sunday Train has covered Steel Interstates several times in the past. The basic idea is to start with the Department of Defense Strategic Rail Corridor Network (STRACNET), and upgrade selected corridors to support electric heavy rail and rapid rail, including 110mph paths (whether by separate track, passing track, or time scheduling), including provision to support High Voltage Direct Current transmission line to connect renewable energy resource grids to renewable energy consumer grids.

This is a single fund, since the purpose is to establish a single network. Unlike the first two funds, this is an interest subsidy on capital funds, with the capital funds themselves paid by user and access fees paid by the various freight railroads and passenger rail operations that might make use of the corridors.

High Speed Rail

The Sunday Train has also covered High Speed Rail projects once or twice in the past.

The High Speed Rail fund is set up with state by state accounts. States such as California, Florida, and Illinois that already have Express or Emerging HSR programs already in progress can simply apply their accounts to existing projects. At the other end of the spectrum, are states that do not have projects in hand, which will be applying the state High Speed Rail account funding to project development, design, and environmental impact assessment.

The Department of Transportation is already in a position to vet whether a project qualifies for HSR funding, with the project evaluation framework established for Stimulus II HSR funding.

For the 220mph Express HSR projects, such as in California and Florida, and for the most promising approach to the 125mph Regional HSR as well, the same project can draw funding from both the HSR fund and the Electrification Fund. This increases the total that could be applied to the California Express HSR project from these account based funds to around $7b for California, and around $3.5b for Florida.

On the other hand states such as Ohio that are (or may be) pursuing the less capital intensive Emerging HSR corridors might focus the HSR funding, around $1.1b in our case, on Emerging HSR and focus the electrification funding on local electric transport.

Of course, states that do not have programs up and running would be in a position to simply draw on the current revenue in the account on project development, to put their state in a position to launch a system.

But the Politics Are ... Possble, Maybe?

As we have seen over the past year and a half, its a lot harder to stop something from being done than to get something done.

While it is nicely symbolic to be using a tariff on imported oil to be financing these things, and while it sidesteps a lot of investment in framing by the drill baby drill crowd ... it also includes a substantial wedge for the opposition. For US based oil production, what a tariff means is that $4.20 gets added to the cost of each imported barrel of crude oil. So while the projects being funded will cut oil production profits in the long term ... its an extra $4.20 per barrel in the pocket of each owner of a domestic oil well.

That's the production offshore of Louisiana, the production of the Bakkan field in North Dakota and Montana, ongoing (if declining) production in Texas ... an extra $4.20 per barrel in the short term, against the substantial reduction in oil dependency a decade from now.

Could it actually get started?

If I were designing a program from scratch hoping for a Presidential candidate to run on in the primaries and then take into the General Election, this probably would not be it. However, pragmatically, that is four to five years in the future, and we don't really have that much time to sit on our hands.

In the aftermath of the abandonment of the Energy Bill, and the aftermath of the BP oil spill ... having foreign oil finance our return to the Energy Independence that we relied on from Independence through two World Wars and the height of the US economic development in the 50's and 60's is the best shot that I can see from here.

Midnight Oil ~ A River Runs Red

...
So we came and we conquered and found
Riches of commons and kings
Who strangled and wrestled the ground
But they never put back anything
Now I'm trapped like a dog in a cage
Wherever the truth is pursued
It must be the curse of the age
What's taken is never renewed

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

BruceMcF — Sun, 23 May 2010 22:36:32 GMT

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.

An abbreviated sketch of a history of HSR in Ohio

With the closure of the Penn Central 3C passenger service at the start of the 70's, and then the first oil price shock hitting soon after, advocates of offering Buckeyes transport alternatives were successful in putting a bullet train proposal on the ballot in the 1980's. However, the proposed dedicated sales tax funding was rejected by voters, and it was therefore back to the drawing board.

Under the HSR framework established by Clinton in the 90's, Ohio established the Ohio HSR Commission and began work on the Ohio Hub plan - a network of passenger rail corridors connecting the largest cities in the state and connecting with other passenger rail plans being developed to both East (the Empire Corridor via Buffalo and Keystone Corridor via Pittsburgh) and West (the Midwest Hub designed around Chicago).

Of course, "funding planning for ..." is the kind of budget crumbs that advocates of systems like had to settle for as the "all hat, no cattle" approach under Clinton passed into the "Energy Independence is the Enemy of Oil Company Profits" aggressively anti-rail approach of Bush. But those crumbs did continue to fall from the table and so planning work on the Ohio Hub was able to continue.

Then under Stimulus II (Stimulus I, you will recall, was the $250/person one-off tax rebate check that Bush was willing to sign, which was so effective in preventing the long, slow decline of the first half of 2008 from becoming a full blown ... oh, no, strike that, Stimulus I completely ineffective in preventing the developing recession from becoming a massive financial crisis and the most serious economic downturn since the end of World War II) ... when the Congressional conferees were balking at the size of the "Department of Transport to allocate" funds, the Obama Admnistration was able to get $8b allocated to High Speed Rail projects.

Ohio worked with Amtrak to turn a 1/3 down payment on the Triple-C 110mph corridor into complete project for an Amtrak-speed starter line, and was awarded $400m, which is basically the budgeted cost of the project except for "contingencies".

Meanwhile, down in Cincinnati

Cincinnati has a bit of a reputation as a place that local transit project proposals go to die. Indeed, Cincinnati had the distinction of the longest subway system that was build but never used.

However, that may be changing, with a recent local ballot initiative designed to kill the proposed Cincinnati Streetcar project going down to defeat, and then more recently an announcement that Cincinnati has assembled $86.5m for the project, with about another $40m to go. With the recent trend in Federal Department of Transport funding for local transit projects with a substantial amount of local funding, the prospects are much better that this time, the project will actually be able to go ahead.

The first part of the Streetcar Project would connect Downtown with the Over The Rhine area of Cincinnati. Over The Rhine is dominated by the type of pre-automobile-age inner suburban neighborhoods that struggle to cope with dominant automobile traffic, and indeed was part of the core market for streetcars back at the turn of the last century when Cincinnati had streetcars and was thinking of turning the old Canal alignment into a subway system.

And from the perspective of intercity rail transport, one would want to punch the air and cheer when the Streetcar has finished assembling its funding and can proceed ... except ...

... how does the 3C train get there?

They did WHAT? You have got to be kidding!

In the comments of the Transport Political story linked to above, I heard a comment that was difficult to believe:

Randy A. Simes | May 14th, 2010 at 10:15
The Riverfront Transit Center was intentionally designed to not be able to accommodate inter-city trains. The decision had something to do with ensuring freight rail didn't return to Cincinnati's riverfront, and those kind of trains use the same grade of track as freight trains. So, the Riverfront Transit Center can only accommodate commuter rail.

I tracked down a site that had collated information from Cincinnati Post articles on the subject, that suggested this was not entirely correct:

On February 12, Cincinnati and Hamilton County officials approved a design of the transit center that was only 85-feet wide.(10) The width initially eliminated the transit center from consideration as a transit hub for Amtrak's passenger rail line.
In July, Cincinnati officials learned that the transit center may be able to accommodate the larger Amtrak passenger trains from other cities, contradicting prior reports that stated the transit center was too small.(7)(8) State officials stated that the trains are small enough to fit and that utility regulators would likely issue a variance to reduce the required overhead clearances to fit in an Amtrak train.(8)
...
7. Osbourne, Kevin. "Transit hub clears hurdle in planning." Cincinnati Post 7 July 1999.
8. "Train Center." Cincinnati Post 1 July 1999. 23 Sept. 2008: 19A.
10. Peale, Cliff. "Plan squeezes inter-city trains." 13 Feb. 1999. Cincinnati Post 23 Sept. 2008: 12A.

However, the commenter at The Transport Politic indicated:

My comments are made from a direct conversation I had with the individual involved with designing the project with Parsons Brickerhoff. The topic came up to make the Riverfront Transit Center capable of holding Amtrak-style trains, but they decided not to. Height is only a concern for the "Superliners" or double-deck trains. The real issue is safety regulations that dictate extra precautions for trains of that magnitude. If the RTC were to be used for Amtrak-style trains, it would have to be majorly upgraded at more than likely a cost-prohibitive price tag.

So they built a so-called Transit Center, right near downtown and the ballpark and football stadium ... and with the streetcars now to be running directly over the top of the transit center ... which at present is mostly a bus parking lot ...

... and designed it so that it cannot be the main hub for intercity trains.

Even worse, this is the alignment that is proposed to be used for commuter rail to the east and west ... so if they had designed the Transit Center to accommodate intercity trains, the Stimulus II funding would be providing essential parts of the proposed commuter rail system as well.

Genius, I tells yah. Genius!

For more on the genius of the Cincinnati Transit Center, see The Transport Politic's 2009 piece, Cincinnati's Riverfront Transit Center Attracts Criticism.

Now, it may be that the 3C trains can be designed to qualify for a waiver to run into the Transit Center ... but there are no guarantees until a waiver is granted.

Well, What About Union Station?

Aha, but surely Cincinnati at one time had intercity trains running through at fairly high frequency, and so had a central station?

Well yes. Cincinnati got onto the Union Station bandwagon late, and only started construction in 1928. Completed in 1933, it is described in http://greatamericanstations.com/Stations/CIN/Station_view">The Great American Train Stations as, "one of America's great Art Deco rail stations."

Of course, there was not much need for a great Art Deco rail station when rail services were reduced to two trains per day after the collapse of Penn Central, and down to one train per day now. After the city taking over ownership in the 70's, it finally was redeveloped as a Museum Center (under the leadership of such Cincinnati notables as then-mayor Jerry Springer).

For a time it actually lost its status as a rail terminus, with Amtrak moving to a location closer to the waterfront and downtown, but in the 90's service was restored to CUT.

OK, so, why not use Cincinnati Union Terminal?

The CUT site was actually in the running for several rounds of alignment selection as Amtrak was identifying possible options for the various segments of the 3C starter line. It was in the final selection of options (pdf) that it was judged inferior to an alternative:

Reliability - From Columbus, Alternative 4 uses the NS Cincinnati mainline to and
beyond Sharonville. NS ownership ends at the NS Tower, several miles south of Sharonville, where the line enters CSX trackage rights. See the maps of the north segment (Figure 2-2) and the south segment (Figure 2-3) for additional detail.
NS, and predecessor Conrail, have long held trackage rights from NA south past Mitchell (Winton Place) to Colerain Avenue, one of the major interlockings near Queensgate Yard. Heavy traffic continues south to Tower A near the Museum Center. This distance, about seven miles, is one of the busiest and most significant freight routes in the country. Although owned by CSX, RailAmerica and Norfolk Southern operate the trains. In 2009, CSX reported that 70 to 80 trains per day typically use the segment from Colerain to Winton Place, where one of two routes to Hamilton diverges. From Winton Place to NA Tower, 35 to 40 trains per day operate, and almost as many on the segment north from NA Tower to Evandale (know as CP Mill by NS), where a second route to Hamilton diverges.
The segment from NA Tower to Tower A is largely grade separated, and primarily double track, with several crossovers and partial third main track. Owned by NS, this additional track was constructed with state assistance. The line experiences high levels of congestion because of trains moving at slow speeds to enter/leave yard trackage, and because of trains waiting on main trackage outside the yard for clearance to enter.
Amtrak Cardinal service currently operates a portion of this route, making a station stop at Museum Center. This train operates three times weekly during night hours, and has a poor history of on-time performance. Quick Start service would introduce six additional daily time-sensitive passenger movements.

Is there some cool oasis to rest from all this controversy

Where is the preferred alignment? This is the "Oasis" alignment, an unused freight corridor, running toward downtown from the east and ending just east of the stadium complex.

The map to the right from the Transport Politic shows the approved streetcar system in yellow (including Phase 2 to Uptown) and proposed extensions in dashed yellow. It also shows a section of the proposal commuter rail line in red, and a proposed light rail system in blue (this time the dashed blue is the underground section of the light rail system, using the longest segment of the never-used Cincinnati Subway).

As to why the light rail system was designed to be in two disconnected corridors - uhmm, you got me there.

The Oasis line is used by the red line coming in from the east, terminating a little east of the Red's ballpark ... just before the proposed commuter rail line in red and light rail line in blue connect with the proposed streetcar extension in yellow. This terminus is a block south of the transit center, so that a mile of new track connecting a little further to the east would be required to continue into the transit center.

Heading further east, the Oasis line runs by Theodore Berry park and the Boathouse Inn, which is just about where the Red line and Blue Line come together to run toward the Cincinnati Transit Center on the above map.

Access to this station would not require going through one of the busier freight rail yards in the country. It would also allow connection to the proposed metropolitan local transit lines, connecting into western Hamilton County and northern Kentucky. For multi-modal access, the terminus of the Oasis line would be superior, since it would allow connection with the proposed streetcar connection ... but the Boathouse site would be a close second, and involve less interference with pedestrian traffic closer to the ballpark. And while not in use, the track already exists, saving a substantial amount over new track to continue into the Transit Center.

There is, however, a roadblock. As reported in Cincinnati's CityBeat blog:

A second option, which was the one that helped score the federal grant, was a route that veered east from Sharonville through the city's Eastern Corridor near Lunken Airport, before ending near the Montgomery Inn Boathouse along the Ohio River.
When Adams Landing condo owners and other nearby residents objected to that plan, the project designated Lunken as the temporary stop until another could be found.

Yup, Nimby's, living in a fantasy world where car-dependency is the stable foundation for rising property values, raised a stink when they could have locked in a transport facility that would help ensure their property values for decades to come.

What To Do?

Now, the end of the Oasis Line is the best available terminus at the moment, but on the other hand if it was possible to fix the transit center, that would be a far superior intercity terminus.

Indeed, over the long term, the transit center would allow Appalachian Hub trains from Louisville to use the same rail bridge used by the Cardinal, and by turning east into the transit center rather connect directly into the end of the 3C corridor, without running into the busy rail yards to the west of Cincinnati Union Terminal.

And the $400m funding from the Federal Government is not enough to provide a dedicated passenger rail through the yards to the west of CUT, nor is it enough to reconstruct Transit Center to accomodate general intercity passenger trains - if either of those two were chosen, there would have to be an interim terminal built first, with the completion of the final terminal waiting on another round of investment.

And should a handful of property owners on the waterfront be allowed to hold the entire city up for ransom?

My idea is, I believe, a little radical, but still, could go a long way to resolving the issue: vote on it.

This is a county-wide facility, so the vote should be across all of Hamilton County.

And of course, there are multiple options, and forcing people to pick just one could easily see an option eliminated that is a second best choice of a majority, so my proposal is that the People of Hamilton County vote on their first and second preferences on two questions:

The First Question is the Designated Cincinnati 3C Station,
- Cincinnati Union Terminal ("the Museum"), with an temporary terminus at Sharonville
- The Oasis Terminal ("the Boathouse")
- The Cincinnati Transit Center via the Oasis line
The Second Question is, if Cincinnati Transit Center is designated, the Stage One terminus should be:
- Sharonville
- Highland Plaza
- Cincinnati Municipal Airport
- The Oasis Terminal

If none of the three options wins a majority, then the option coming in third is eliminated, and the second preferences of the people voting for that option are added to the two leading choices for an instant run-off.

If the Cincinnati Union Terminal is selected, there really is no real alternative to a temporary station at Sharonville. The problem with CUT is, after all, the congestion on the rail corridors between CUT and the beginning of the main line, which really requires new dedicated high priority track to fix ... and the northern junction of I275 and I75 is the best access that can be provided if anywhere close to downtown is out of consideration.

However, if the Cincinnati Transit Center is selected, there is a range of choices for temporary station. The first is to adopt the end of the Oasis line as a temporary rather than as a permanent terminus. The second, further up the line, is to use Lunken Field, the municipal airport. The furthest up the line is the junction of I275 and I75 at Sharonville. And finally, there is a major shopping center complex at the junction of the Norwood Parkway and I71 that might be able to host a temporary terminal. Since Sharonville is on the border with Butler country, it would also avoid quibbling about a Hamilton-county-wide vote applying to a facility outside of Hamilton County.

So, only if the CTC is the designated permanent terminus, the top two of those four choices would be chosen for an instant run-off, with the second preferences of those voting for one of the other two added in to determine the temporary terminus.

The biggest advantage of a county-wide vote is that the decision, whichever it is, would have substantial political legitimacy, which would then be inherited by the 3C project as a whole. It would, for example, force the NIMBY's on the waterfront at the end of the Oasis line to make their case to the broader community, rather than just threaten to raise a stink if the project does not bow to their short-sighted and, in terms of their long term property values, ultimately misplaced opposition to the Oasis terminal.

If the Cincinnati Station choice is seen to be the "will of the people", the obstructionists lose their opportunity to use controversy over the station choice as an opportunity to raise Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt about the absolute necessity and total modesty of the Ohio Hub project and the 3C starter line to actually get started on getting the trains rolling.

One Local System to Rule Them All

Of course, one reason that intermodal is so hard in Cincinnati is all the proposals for different local transit lines all based on difference and incompatible vehicles.

But there is a solution to that problem, used in a growing number of regional cities in Germany, France, and Netherlands: what they call the "tram-train", or what is more commonly called in the US, "Rapid Streetcar".

The idea is that the access provided to downtown by a streetcar system is extended into the surrounding suburbs by providing a version of streetcar that can run in rail corridors. Now, this is harder to do in the US, because of the antiquated "slap some more steel on" approach to rail safety at the RTA, which makes it difficulty to run even upgraded streetcars on the same track as US freight trains.

On the other hand, light rail would be far cheaper to add within the corridor, where it is available - and many corridors in the Great Lakes and Midwest were laid out for four tracks - two-way local and two-way express - with only one bi-directional track in that at the moment. And it is less expensive to lay streetcar track in a rail corridor than heavy freight track.

Of course, while going through urban streets, streetcars do not operate at very high speed ... but tram-trains are now designed with a top speed of about 60mph. And while providing overhead trolley wire is cheaper than providing heavy rail catenary ... tram-trains are built with dual-power: electric overhead when running under the wires, and diesel when operating away from the electric rail network.

Looking at the above map, the proposed commuter rail system would be substantially more attractive if they offered streetcar stops through downtown, so that the eastern and western sides of the Commuter Rail corridor could be replaced by a Rapid Streetcar that runs from either side into downtown.

And looking further, there is the subway, which would be ideally suited for a Rapid Streetcar line running along the original Subway line (which was, after all, mostly above ground) ... so that the eastern Rapid Streetcar alignments could run through downtown and then into the Subway into northwest Cincinnati, avoiding the "either/or" fight between east and west that is so dangerous to transit proposals in greater Cincinnati.

Once the Streetcar project gets the green light, and the voters of the city have designated the Cincinnati terminus of the Ohio Hub ... the next step could well be finding a way to build on a system that was able to make the long awaited leap from drawing board to actual passenger service.

The Headliners: Dreamworld ~ Midnight Oil

Sunday Train: Local Electric Transport and the Energy Independence Levy

BruceMcF — Mon, 17 May 2010 01:25:23 GMT

Burning the Midnight Oil for Living Energy Independence

If we reduce our oil consumption by 5% a year over each of the next twenty years, that allows use to be free of our oil addiction if we choose to be. But as I observed last week, since 60%-70% of our oil consumption is in transport, that means that in each decade, seven out of the ten 5% reductions have to come out of transport.

I set forward three of the seven for the coming decade last week: the Steel Interstates, national funding for sustainable power local transit corridors, and a target of 5% "Active Transport" - pedestrian and cycle transport.

I have written at some length on the Steel Interstate, but this was the first airing of the rest of the proposal. I promised to go into more depth this week ... and that's what I aim to do today.
But First, One More

Three out of Seven is a bit sort of a majority, so first I want to add a couple of pencil strokes to one more of the blank stretches in the sketchbook.

Part 4: 25% of existing light vehicle passenger transport in higher efficiency private motor vehicles. Roughly three fifths of our petroleum consumption in the transport sector is by "light duty vehicles, so that is roughly 40% of our total petroleum imports. Slice off a quarter of the light vehicle passenger transport, that is 10% of our petroleum imports. Doubling the efficiency of that light vehicle passenger transport is a 5% improvement.

The follow-on in the next decade is to replace that component by electric or green, carbon negative bio-fuels (as opposed to the current energy intensive and CO2 emitting biofuels), and double or treble its role, for one or two more 5% cuts.

The primary instrument here is a four level feebate. The feebate is self-adjusting, because it is based on existing fuel efficiency levels:

A 10% excise tax on all light duty vehicles that have more than twice the existing average fuel usage (gallons per hundred miles)
A 5% excise tax on all light duty vehicles between one and two times the existing average fuel usage (gallons per hundred miles)
A 10% subsidy on all light duty vehicles that have less than half the existing average fuel usage (gallons per hundred miles)

Now, only putting the subsidy on US produced fuel efficient vehicles would fall afoul of the WTO. On the other hand, countries rebate indirect taxes all the time ... most commonly in the form of Value-Added tax rebates on exports. So, instead of limiting the subsidy to American produced automobiles, I'd focus on the direct labor cost of the American-produced lower fuel consumption automobiles:

If there is a surplus in the excuse tax funds, then where the vehicle is made in the US, the subsidy also includes a rebate up to the full value of employee and industry payroll tax contributions associated with production of that vehicle.

Direct production labor costs are about 10% of the production cost, and with payroll income tax being well over 10%, that is an extra 1% on its own. However, there are also labor costs embedded in components in a car. And further, R&D is labor intensive, and direct R&D on a vehicle would also be associated with production of that vehicle. There would have to be a rule on how much could be allocated per vehicle, and of course once the entire payroll tax payments by R&D employees has been covered, that ducks out, but it might be possible to push the subsidy on the US value added to a vehicle up by 2-3% higher.

Why Should High Income Individuals pay a Transport Levy

Actually, nobody last week asked the question why there should be a levy on earned and unearned income by people make more than 7 or 10 times median personal adult income, so this might be entered under the "not yet asked questions".

This was inspired by a twitter user at the Motley Fool, an investment news and views blog, who declared an objection to High Speed Rail being built with "his money".

In any other casino, we may call our winnings "our money" ... but most of us do not think of it as money we earned. Its money we won. However in the financial markets, the only casinos were the house puts extra money into the pot (eg, bond interest payments and stock dividends), most of the players believe that they have "earned" their winnings.

However, "ah, you won it by gambling with the future of our economy, why shouldn't you chip in a bit" is not a strong argument for directing those funds to transit in particular. And while much of the income is the result of either gambling in the financial market casinos or the rigged game of executive pay raises being granted by board members who are themselves executives somewhere else and who stand to benefit from general executive pay inflation ... and who are in many cases receiving the income as a board director because they were put their by the executives who's pay they are deciding on ... some of the income will indeed have been earned.

So no, the argument should be something that counts for large incomes even if they were earned.

And the argument is straightforward: insurance. We have just seen the worst recession since the Great Depression ... immediately on the heels of our biggest oil price shock ever. And the previous record holder for biggest post-WWII global recession by total impact was also on the heels of an oil price shock.

And whether its the decade ahead or the one after that, as demand hits up against first static and then declining supply, we are going to get more and more oil price shocks. If we are cutting our oil consumption, and on track to eliminate our oil consumption ... that allows use to insulate ourselves from the effects of the shock.

This program of weaning ourselves off of oil is many things, but it most certainly is an investment in the long term purchasing power of the US dollar. And those who are getting the most US dollars are those who get proportionally more protection.

By contrast, the funding tends to be far from proportional to income. A five cent per gallon imported petroleum gas tax is a negligible share of the income of a $1.5m/year household. A person making $8/hour gets on an electric trolley bus to go to work ... even if the person making $120/hour gets on a high speed rail service they are not going to be paying 15x as much, even though they have 15x as much income to protect.

The 5% levy allows us to get a lot more done a lot faster than we could otherwise do ... and by generating employment in the short and medium term and making our economy far more resilient in the medium and long term, the highest income households are likely to receive more than their money's worth on the program.

How Much Petroleum Can It Save

The structure of the program is to fund transport corridors for common carrier services that do not depend on petroleum for their operation. So cutting oil consumption by 5% means getting a large minority of motorists out of their cars.

What share is this? Well, I already did the arithmetic above: about 40% of our petroleum is consumed by "light duty vehicles", so 12.5% of vehicle miles of our average gas-power vehicle would be about 5% of our petroleum use.

And the Brooking Institute just issues a report on Metro America, including a chapter on one key element of our vehicle use: commuting.

This is the first decade since America lost our status as Energy Independent that we have seen an increase in transit use in commuting, but of course individuals driving cars remain the dominant means of commuting. There is only one city that has under half of its commuters driving alone to work: New York.

And New York with 368kms of rail features as the only city in the US that hit the target that NBBooks set out in his $3.195 Trillion budget to get transit rail corridors within 2.5 miles of all residents of the metro areas with half of the US population.

The next four in terms of commuters driving along to work are:

San Francisco / Oakland / Fremont, 62.4% (167kms rail)
Honolulu, 64.2%
Washington / Arlington / Alexandria, 66.3% (171kms)
Seattle / Tacoma / Bellevue, 69% (24.5kms)

Turn around to Youngstown, the next medium size city to my east, with their city bus routes that shut down before 7pm, and they have the highest reliance on individual commuters in cars in the country at 85.1%.

Why the focus on commuters driving alone? One of the points raised when any common carrier transit is brought into focus ... local trains, light rail, buses, intercity trains ... is "but think about the cost of tickets for a family of five." And if the target was to get 100% of automobile passengers into a single common carrier ... why, yes, that would be a reasonable objection.

However, a 5% reduction in national oil use from this policy does not require 100% ... it requires 12.5%. And the gap in the highest rate of commuters driving alone to work and the lowest is over 35%.

Of course, the example of Youngstown also raises another issue ... one that was raised in the discussion last week.

If You Build It ... Then You Gotta Run It

As TheOverheadWire asked last week:

Capital is Easy, Operating is Not
Bruce, you know I'm all about spending enough money to get a transit density of NYC in every major city in the United States, but as of now I'm a bit jaded. How are we going to pay for operating all these lines after we build them?

You can click through for my responses last week, but the question jostled something in my head when I was writing last week ... if we finance construction to reach a target level of coverage, what about cities that are already at that target?

And also brought to mind the Stranded at the Station report by Transportation for America and the Transportation Equity Network:

The nationwide demand for public transportation is at historic levels and growing, but funding for the day-to-day operations of these transit services is built on an unstable foundation. This report shows that without federal support, many will likely will be unable to meet the demand now and in the future.
Many transit agencies across the country have cut service, raised fares or laid off workers to deal with shrinking budgets, severely affecting the people who depend on regular, reliable service in order to access jobs, social services and education everyday. Nearly 90 percent of transit systems have had to raise fares or cut service in the past year and among the 25 largest transit operators, 10 agencies are raising fares more than 13 percent.
Americans without access to an alternative form of transportation, the majority of whom are older, African-American or Hispanic and senior populations, are being left stranded without access to lifeline services.

The fair solution to those cities who, with much justification, say, "but, we built ours without this capital grant!" is to allow the local areas ... municipalities, counties and reservations ... that have achieved the target of a stop on an oil-free dedicated transport corridor within five miles of all residents can use the funds for operations.

Specifically, the fraction of residents within five miles of a qualifying stop or station is the fraction of funds that can be used for operations. A free grant for operations would be a quite abrupt change in Federal policy ... so the proposal I am making is that these are 50:50 matching funds for state or local subsidies to operations of qualifying services.

What's a Qualifying Service? Why Not Just Say Electric Train?

Now, the name of the series is "Sunday Train" ... what is all this waffling about "qualifying services"? And "common carrier blah blah blah"?

I think quite a lot of these will be Electric Trains. Given a capital grant to build the things, as a per person share of an ongoing stream of capital funding, and a 50:50 match required to tap the funds for operations ... there is a strong incentive to focus on the investments that lead to a lower incremental cost per seat mile of running each service.

However ... this is not about train sets in the basement, its about transport. If a particular route will not generate the patronage to justify a light rail service, then it is preferable to provide a successful trolley bus than a failed light rail service.

There's also a difference between large cities and smaller towns and rural areas. The focus of NNBooks budget was the largest metro areas, but the idea here is an accounts based system where the most local government representing every resident has a crack at putting up a project that can qualify.

So while I have been saying "within 5 miles", that is the proposal for urban and suburban residents. A station or stop within 10 miles of a resident of a rural area qualifies as serving that resident.

And while I have been saying local transit, broadening the focus to include all Americans also means broadening the focus there as well. Municipalities, counties and reservations either outside metropolitan areas, or in metropolitan areas of less than 1m, can devote funds to qualifying interurban services, in proportion to the residents served either directly or by transfer from other qualifying services.

The main thing about a qualifying service is:

It must be powered by sustainable, renewable domestic power
- If powered by electric power, this includes being able to assure sufficient supply of sustainable renewable domestic power
It must be a common carrier service on a dedicated transport corridor
It must have a viable business plan and committed operating funds to operate at least every half hour from 7am to 7pm, and at least once an hour for sixteen hours of the day
- If the quality of service falls short of this, the funding that it qualifies for is reduced in direct proportion
It must have a regular scheduled stop or station within five miles travel on public right of way of the residents that are served
5% of a localities funding in a single year can be applied to planning and environmental impact analyses of prospective qualifying systems
or else a direct cost of operating a qualifying service where there is an equal or greater contribution for state and local authorities.

Oh, and if a municipality, county or reservation does not have a qualifying use for the funds, it goes back into the pool to be redistributed to those who have a use for the funds. The "per person" allocation is an opportunity, but first and foremost we gotta start building Living Energy Independent transportation systems. If there is a surplus that cannot be used in a given year, it is rolled over into the account funding for the next year.

Employment Impact

Now, in general, before the Stimulus, I'd have expected the employment impact of the capital works to be similar to the employment impact of road works ... as Smart Growth America reports, direct job creation of 10,493 full time equivalent months of employment per billion dollars spending.

So based on that, the employment impact of about $150b in capital spending per year would be 131,000 jobs annually. Work by the Economic Policy Institute shows slightly more indirect job creation than direct job creation in transportation projects, so the total employment impact is about 260,000 jobs.

However, the ARRA requires detailed accounting of jobs retained and jobs created as a result of each contract let out by each state that spends ARRA funds. And the results of that shifts the results, with transit spending under ARRA resulting in direct job creation of 19,299 "job-months" per billion dollars. That scales the above figure up to 241,000 direct jobs, or about 480,000 total jobs.

However, this is not just a capital grant: for areas that already have qualifying systems, and for an increasing number of areas once the systems are built, this also funds operations. And operations are more labor intensive than capital work, so the direct and indirect job impact could easily rise to the neighborhood of 1m jobs annually.

In addition to this is the employment impact of the oil that we are not importing. 5% of our present oil consumption of about 19.5m barrels a day at around $75/barrel would be about $26b per year, or roughly $40 GDP impact with a multiplier of about 1.5. With about one person employed per $100,000GDP, that would be another 400m in employment.

An important potential employment impact, is the impact on the economy of being able to ride out an oil price shock without being thrown into recession. There is no way to tell how many recessions we are going to encounter in the decade ahead if we don't begin getting off of oil, but we lost 8.2m in the Panic of 2008. A 5% stake in ducking another recession of that magnitude would be another 400,000 in employment.

So, once the projects get going, employment impacts of about 490,000, rising over the next two decades to somewhere around 1.4m as the funding shifts from capital works to operating subsidies and we begin to feel the impact on our oil consumption of taking full advantage of the corridors being developed.

The Headliners: Midnight Oil ~ Read About It

The rich get richer, the poor get the picture
The bombs never hit you when you're down so low
Some got pollution, some revolution
There must be some solution but I just don't know
The bosses want decisions, the workers need ambitions
There won't be no collisions when they move so slow
Nothing ever happens, nothing really matters
No one ever tells me so what am I to know

Sunday Train: Working on the Railroad for Energy Independence

BruceMcF — Mon, 10 May 2010 14:46:33 GMT

Burning the Midnight Oil for Living Energy Independence

Well how the frack d'ya like me now?

I'm not going to say "toldya so", since many who will be reading this diary said much the same during the "Drill, Baby, Drill" absurdity in 2008 ... but the undersea oil volcano underlines, boldfaces and highlights in red the basic facts of the situation that we face:

Our country produces about twice as much crude oil per person as the world average
Our country consumes about five times as much crude oil per person as the world average
And we have been producing oil a long time, have passed our peak of domestic oil production, and aint ever getting back to it.

And, anyway, we already tried Drill, Baby, Drill. Its played itself out already.

Obviously, the direction to go to insulate ourselves from oil price shocks and the recessions they cause is to cut our consumption. Which means, in part, Train, Baby, Train.
So, what is it about trains, anyway?

I would admit that I have a big model train set in the basement - except its not mine, its my stepfather's. For me, trains are transport, a way to get from Point A to Point B. Indeed, the mode of transport that has a special place in my heart over and above their functional utility is not trains so much as bikes (and living in NE Ohio, I must hasten to explain "Bikes like Schwinn's are Bikes, not Bikes like Harley's are Bikes").

No, this is why trains. We consume 28% of our energy in the transportation sector. If we are going to reduce our oil consumption by 5% a year each year for the next 20 years, that means we have to consume the consumption of petroleum by transport by 5% a year, each year for the next 20 years.

We also have to get off mineral coal, but it turns out that trains can contribute to that as well.

My focus here, today, is how to use the process of breaking our oil addiction as a means of providing the jobs that our economy needs, and does not and will not otherwise have, over the next decade.

Of course, when we focus on oil, transport is even more important. To get more specific, according to the government numbers, transport consumes about 2/3 of our petroleum. We produce about 40% of our oil consumption, and even if we cut our oil consumption by 5% a year ... by the time we have cut 60% of our present oil consumption in 12 years time, we will be producing less oil than we are producing now.

And once we get to the point where we are getting the majority of our transportation energy from sources other than oil, we can start looking to the future. One of the bright, glaring points about "Drill, Baby, Drill", why Drill, Baby, Drill represented the complete abandonment of Republican pretensions about being the grown ups in the room, is that when you pump out and burn oil, its just gone, never to come back.

After all the Republican pretensions I remember hearing ever since being a kid in the 60's and 70's about the Republicans being the party of "responsibility" - their approach to our non-renewable natural resources is "Burn It All As Fast As Possible and the Devil take the Hindmost!".

So, to cut our oil consumption by 5% a year over the decade ahead ... which will still leave us an oil importer, but take us off the front line for being the demand reduction via recession in future oil price shocks ... we need 7 of those 5% reductions to come from transport. And each and every one means more work over the coming decade.

I'll look at three of the seven, today.

1. The Steel Interstate

I described the Steel Interstate approach to Electrified, Rapid Freight Rail a couple of months ago, and then polished up the network map a bit the following week.

So, broad brush strokes here:

15,000miles+ of STRACNET corridors electrified with rail improvements that allow scheduled slots for 100mph Rapid Freight Rail
Built primarily in existing freight rail rights of way by distinct government owned, not for profit "Line Development Banks"
Those using the infrastructure pay Access and User fees that cover up-front capital costs
Interest costs covered by a $0.01/gallon tax on imported petroleum, rising to $0.05/gallon over five years

This is based on the full scale plan offered by Alan Drake and studied by the Millenium Institute, and projected to be able cut our petroleum consumption by about 7%. And of course, the "first half" will result in more than half of that, provided it provides a rough grid that covers the bulk of the long-haul transport markets in the country ... so I'll slate this in as the first of the seven transport "5%/year" projects.

Note that the way I have sketched it out, the Access and User fees are ongoing, on a simple formula, and that a Line Development Bank has completed its line, it would be chartered to devote any capital surplus to the funding of energy-independence transport within its broader service area. So on the back of that funding, the Steel Interstate proposal is also one of the seven required 5% reductions in the second decade of our Freedom from Oil in Twenty Years program.

2. Local Electric Transport

Back in March of 2009, NBBooks wrote $3.195 trillion ~~TRILLION~~ for urban RAIL transit.

Where this is derived from is a target for rail transit density:

Building 50,757 kilometers of new rail transit lines, at a cost of $3.195 trillion. is based on building urban rail mass transit systems to the same service density found in New York City, in the next 38 largest urban areas. I began by assuming a desideratum of having a rail transit line no more than 2.5 miles from any point in an urban area. That is, if you took a square of urban area five miles on each side, we want to have a rail transit line running directly across the middle of that square. Slice that 25 square mile area into one mile strips, and you get one mile of rail transit line for every five square miles of urban area, or a density of 0.2 mile of rail transit line for every square mile. Converting square miles to square kilometers, and miles to kilometers, what we are looking for is a density of 0.124 mi {sic.=km} of rail transit line for every square kilometer of urban area.

This is a fine density for densely populated areas, but I am of the view that moving to a sustainable settlement system from our current system that is dominated by sprawl-suburban settlement (in terms of representing half or more of all residential population, just as over half of the nation's residents at the previous turn of the century lived in urban rather than suburban areas) will require both rebuilding residential population in core urban areas and establishing urban density walkable neighborhoods along dedicated transport corridors running through suburban areas.

This "clustered network city" approach of suburban transit villages connected to urban centers would seem to permit a looser rail network complemented by a mix of local transport access - by foot, bike, neighborhood electric vehicle, battery/trolleywire trolley bus, etc. So I ease this back to a rail transit line no more than 5 miles from any point in the urban area. That is then, above, a 10 mile square line with a line running down the middle, or a density of 0.1 miles of rail transit line for every square mile ... or 0.62 km line per sq. km.

However, taking the rest of NBBook's estimates, that is $1.6T (trillion with a T). Spread across ten years, $160b/year ... about 1% of our national economy.

How to finance that? Most directly, impose a 5% payroll levy on earned and unearned income received by those making over 7 times median income, roughly $280,000.

In order to achieve broad based oil independence, this would be allocated on a per capita basis to municipalities, counties and reservations, which they could annually allocate for construction or improvement of dedicated transport corridors and dedicated support facilities for electric common carrier transport. Since not all municipalities or counties cannot allocate their share, the annual surplus would be re-allocated to those able to invest their original share.

Is this a 5% piece? I think it likely will be, but I will have to look into that more closely. In any event, it is a piece that will be generating 3.75m jobs per year, every year for a decade.

3. Personal Transport

The third piece I would offer today is Personal, or "Active" Transport: Walking and Cycling.

The objection might be raised that this is not a rail project ... but in reality, it is the flip side of the local rail project above. A bike is a fine thing to ride for a couple of miles, but a ten mile ride is not a commute for a regular transport cyclist.

So the focus of increasing Active Transport sufficiently to save 5% of our petroleum imports is the establishment of a walkable zone around stops along the dedicated transport corridors, with a mandatory easement to allow three story, mixed used and stacked townhouse development within a quarter mile of the stop on the corridor.

Given the capital-efficiency of these modes of local transport, the funding can piggy-back onto the above system as well: for all funds drawn from the municipal, country and reservation accounts in support of dedicated transport corridors, 1% must be allocated to qualifying projects in support of Active Transport.

OK, so those are my three ...

... what are yours?

The Headliners: Midnight Oil with Truganini!

There's a road train going nowhere / roads are cut, lines are down ...

Sunday Train: Working on the Railroad - Why Krugman is Wrong

BruceMcF — Mon, 12 Apr 2010 01:08:28 GMT

Burning the Midnight Oil for Living Energy Independence

In his inimitable "twisting mainstream economics in as progressive direction as he can accomplish" style, Paul Krugman has made a splash among those following the challenge of our headlong and reckless pursuit of Climate Chaos with a column on the cost of policies to put the brakes on that reckless gamble.

Hat tip to A Siegal, who nailed a critical failing of Krugman's analysis:

Krugman falls into the trap of discussing the costs of dealing with climate change ... a robust cost/benefits analysis would ... result in a very serious statement as to the "huge risks and costs of inaction vs the very serious benefits of action".

In particular, it is a common failing of mainstream economics to assume an economy that naturally tends to full employment, so that policies that boost employment are a cost, when in the real world they are a benefit.
The Problem of Intellectual Silos

As A Siegel says earlier in his essay:

While high quality in their own way, the CBO (and many other institutions) operates with a set of constraints that lead them to do stovepiped analysis that is overly pessimistic.

The link here is to an earlier piece by A Siegel, from June of 2009, "CBO's good news re Climate Legislation is significantly understated". The undercounting of benefits is systematic, in that it is clear that benefits exist which the CBO does not even try to estimate when evaluating the economic impact of policies to reduce CO2 emission. Consider all the things that the CBO simply omits, as if their economic impact is zero, although we know that they are in fact benefits:

Very simply, if anything, the CBO scoring is overly negative since it doesn't consider systems-of-systems implications.
Job creation and, therefore, lowered governmental services demand: not in the calculation. (Trading imported oil for jobs building up an electrified rail network, for example ...)
Economic implications of climate change - and the avoided costs due to reduced pollution: not included.
Health care benefits (to federal budget and otherwise) due to reduced fossil fuel pollution: not included.
Increased productivity due to better health and better working conditions: not included.
The analysis didn't even include the bill's strong energy efficiency provisions, which are direct cost savers.

What Does This Have to Do With Trains?

This is the Sunday Train, so I am not writing to focus on the full range of beneficial public investments that can reduce the obscene energy gluttony of the US economy, but rather to focus on the contributions that rail can make.

The Christmas after the election, I wrote a series of three diaries, written as if they were addressed to Vice President-elect "Amtrak Joe" Biden:

A key part of the third part of the series that I have not stressed recently is:

What About Sustainable Power?
It could be claimed that the electrification of STRACNET is from "60% to 95% sustainable", based on energy saving over diesel rail freight and diesel road freight. However, we can go further than that.
The US DoE publication, 20% Wind Energy by 2030 discusses the requirements of generating 20% of the nation's electricity by harvesting wind power. Chapter 4 (pdf) of the report covers "Transmission and Integration into the U.S. Electric System".
One common misconception about large scale roll-out of wind-power is the idea that somehow the variability of each wind turbine must be balanced, using some form of energy storage, to create a manageable system. However, at 20% energy penetration, this would be a massively wasteful approach:
Some suggest that hydropower capacity, or energy storage in the form of pumped hydro or compressed air, should be dedicated to supply backup or firming and shaping services to wind plants. Given an ideally integrated grid, this capacity would not be necessary because the pooling of resources across an electric system eliminates the need to provide costly backup capacity for individual resources. Again, it is the net system load that needs to be balanced, not an individual load or generation source in isolation. Attempting to balance an individual load or generation source is a suboptimal solution to the power system operations problem because it introduces unnecessary extra capacity and an associated increase in cost. Hydro capacity and energy storage are valuable resources that should be used to balance the system, not just the wind capacity. (pp. 80-1)

The greater the number of wind turbines operating in a given area, the less their aggregate production variability. (p. 89)

Similarly, as more wind turbines are installed across larger geographic areas, the aggregated wind generation becomes more predictable and less variable. The benefits of geographical diversity can be seen in Figure 4-8, which shows the change in wind plant hourly capacity factor over one year for four different levels of wind plant aggregation. This figure shows the operational capacity factor of wind turbines aggregated over successively larger areas-first over southwest Minnesota, then across southwest and southeast Minnesota, then across the entire state, and finally across both Minnesota and central North Dakota. There is a decrease in the number of occurrences of very high and very low hourly capacity factors in the tails of the distribution as the degree of aggregation increases. A considerable benefit is also realized across a broad mid-range of capacity factors from 20% to 80% (EnerNex 2006). (p. 90)

There are, therefore, two distinct transmission requirements for Wind Power. The first is the problem of "Stranded Wind", where a major wind resource area has far more wind resource than local electricity demand. The second is the problem of interconnecting consuming grids to permit load balancing across a wider area.
One of the problems, of course, is:
Local opposition to proposed transmission lines is often a major challenge to transmission expansion. An AC transmission line typically benefits all users along its path by increasing reliability, allowing for new generation and associated economic development, and providing access to lower-cost resources. Local owners, however, do not always value such benefits and frequently have other concerns that must be addressed. (p. 99)

Which points to the third piece of the plan. Rail lines tend to go to places where people live. And, being ground transportation, transcontinental rail lines have to pass through areas where no so many people live.
And if we are electrifying STRACNET, that means that there will be capital works proceeding all along those rail corridors, bringing project management and work crews all along the rail lines being constructed.
And unlike many property owners, the owner of the right of way would have a direct stake in the provision of transmission corridors, since the railway will be an electricity consumer, once the railway line has been electrified.
Now, railways rights of way do not not always provide the straight as an arrow alignment that would be preferred for a transmission line. However, they do provide one owner to negotiate with, rather than hundreds or thousands, which owner will also be an electricity consumer, and substantial opportunities to share construction and project management costs.
So the third piece of this puzzle is the public rail electrification authority offering the air space over rail right of way for use in providing the Electricity Superhighways that are part of the expansion of wind generation capacity in the US.

Without exports, and even with the conservative target in the the wind power component alone can employ 180,000 people directly, nearly 300,000 including immediate indirect employment impacts and 500,000 when considering the full employment multiplier.

But that is also stovepiped. Omitted are the Keynesian multiplier benefit of reducing our energy imports. Also omitted are the potential direct, indirect and Keynesian employment benefits of establishing an export industry for wind turbines ... making up the massive ground that we conceded under Reagan since we led the industry in the 1970's.

Now, half a million in employment is not an answer on its own ... but nothing is ever an answer on its own. Indeed, searching for "silver bullet" solutions that solve all problems is part of the problem, rather than part of the solution.

One-fifth of our electricity supply for one form of renewable power by 2030 would be, on our present energy mix, about one-fifteenth of our total useful power consumption. There are two ways to increase this portion:

Increase the Numerator - that is, provide a larger share of power from sustainable, renewable energy sources; and
Shrink the Denominator - that is, do the things we do in a way that consumes less energy.

The Employment Impacts of Not Doing Something

We normally think of "not doing something" as being the zero baseline - not doing something consumes no labor. But that assumes that "doing something" generates employment. What if "doing something" kills employment? Then "not doing" that thing would be an employment generator.

And of course, using imported energy is an employment killer. It increases our import spending, which makes our trade deficit worse, which acts as a drag on total demand for US production, which kills employment.

Looking at the bottom of the Energy Flow Chart, our Transport sector is where the job killing is most heavily concentrated. 25.6 quads of petroleum energy consumed, 0.1 quad of biomass/other (mostly ethanol), 0.7 quads of natural gas, and 0.2 quads of electricity, so basically 96% of our energy in transport comes from petroleum, which means that over half of the energy we consume in transport is job killing energy.

Of course, with 60% energy saving in converting diesel trains to electric, and 90%+ energy saving in shifting diesel truckload freight to electric train, there is a net reduction in CO2 emission even if the power is provided by coal. However, a much stronger impact in reducing CO2 emissions can be provided if the new electrical energy required is provided by expanding sustainable, renewable power sources. Indeed, the Line Development Banks can, for example, be chartered to acquire sustainable, renewable power whenever it is available.

These impacts - direct CO2 reduction and Keynesian job creation through reduction of our addiction to spending money on energy imports - are by no means limited to the Steel Interstate. Passenger Express HSR projects like the California HSR project offer the opportunity to shift especially intensive short-haul air travel to ground travel at up to 220mph power by non-emitting sustainable, renewable power sources. Electric local rail offers similar benefit, replacing passenger car transport consuming petroleum as well as valuable farmlands eaten up by the sprawl created by the massive spatial demands for roadways and parking ... and electrification also reduce the operating cost of the rail system, improving the financial viability of hard pressed local transit systems.

But Can We Afford It? Deficit Errorism on the March

The question that is raised by the defenders of the petroleum industry is whether we can afford the cost of any of these projects. The is the same petroleum industry which benefits from the same oil addiction that kills employment and has actively fought against the energy self-sufficiency that was once a cornerstone of what was once national security, a cornerstone of national security which Reagan and followers crumpled up and tossed into the dustbin of history ...

It is, however, the status quo that we cannot afford.

Consider the genuine economic costs of any project. They are labor employed, equipment employed, and natural resources. We have been a less-than-full employment economy ever since Reagan entered the White House determined to ensure the slack labor markets that are the breeding ground for union. The idea that we cannot "afford" the labor resources required to retrofit our transport system in particular or our economy in general to be more energy efficient, and the labor resources required to shift our energy consumption to sustainable renewable sources, is absurd.

So, what about equipment? Equipment is like the economy's muscle ... use it, or lose it. If we are short of the capacity to produce wind turbines, for example, there is nothing that is going to be gain by not installing wind turbines. Quite the opposite: start a steady, reliable, long term program of installing wind turbines, and that will give manufacturers the incentive to invest in manufacturing capacity in the United States.

The same applies to high speed freight and passenger rail equipment. We do not manufacture it because we do not use it. The way to establish (or, to a certain extent, re-establish) the industry is to start buying the products.

So the real bottleneck is the natural resource demand. And the focus of the win-win projects that provide the benefits that the CBO type analyses overlook are efficiency gains and harvesting domestic sustainable resource presently going untapped. These projects are not net consumers of natural resources - they either free up natural resources presently being wasted, or generate new natural resources to replace resources presently being imported.

The suggestion that we cannot afford these projects as an economy is quite literally insane. It is confusing the map, the system of flows of government-chartered money, for the terrain of actual resources that have to be used to build these projects.

The Headliners: Midnight Oil / Blue Sky Mine

My gut is wrenched out
   it is crunched up and broken
A life that is led
   is no more than a token
Who'll strike the flint upon the stone
   and tell me why
If I yell out at night
   there's a reply of bruised silence
The screen is no comfort
   I can't speak my sentence
They blew the lights at heaven's gate
   and I don't know why
But if I work all day at the blue sky mine
(There'll be food on the table tonight)
Still I walk up and down on the blue sky mine
(There'll be pay in your pocket tonight)

Sunday Train: King of the Mountain, Part 1

BruceMcF — Mon, 05 Apr 2010 00:21:03 GMT

Burning the Midnight Oil for Living Energy Independence

I noted near the beginning of the Appalachian Hub series about the special advantages offered by rail electrification for this project.

Now that I have sketched out a process by which a national Steel Interstate network of corridors can, in fact, be built in this coming decade, this is probably a good time to come back and take a look at the challenges that are faced when putting the Steel Interstates through hilly and mountainous terrain.

Of course, if rail electrification was a particular benefit in mountainous terrain, one would expect to see it in places like, say, Switzerland.
Picture of a Swiss electric freight west of the Albula tunnel
Trans-Alpine Freight and Swiss Rail

When tuning in to news from Switzerland, the big story are so-called "base tunnels". These are tunnels that cut through "the base of a mountain". The Lotschberg Base Tunnel, featured in World's Most Spectacular Tunnels, cuts through the mountain a 1,312 feet lower than the tunnel that it replaces ... that is about a quarter of a mile lower.

Just as the original investments in Japan and France in capital-intensive HSR passenger lines, what is driving this investment in base tunnels is the capacity limits of the present rail routes. As AlpTransit's description (pdf) of the Gothard Base Tunnel Project puts it:

Construction of base tunnels under the Gotthard and Ceneri creates an ultramodern flat rail link whose highest point at 550 metres above sea level is no higher than the city of Berne. This is much lower than the highest point of the existing route through the mountains at 1150 metres. Gradients will be no steeper than where the railway crosses the Jura mountains through the Hauenstein tunnel (Basel - Olten) or the Bözberg tunnel (Basel - Brugg). The route through Switzerland becomes flatter and 40 km shorter. Italy and Germany come much closer together.
Freight trains travelling on the flat route can be longer and pull up to twice today's weight - 4000 tonnes instead of 2000 tonnes. They will be up to twice as fast, too: the fastest freight trains will have a top speed of 160 km/h. Trains like this cannot be used on existing Alpine routes because of the steep gradients and tight curves. When the flat route is complete, it will be possible to transport an equal volume of freight with fewer locomotives and personnel, and less energy.

Just as with the Japanese and French investment in Passenger HSR, it is important to put this investment in context. This is not a result of the failures of the existing Swiss electric freight rail system - it is a result of its success. That is, the growth in interstate freight transport is pushing up against the capacity limits of the Swiss system because the Swiss rail system was effective in capturing a substantial share of freight.

This figure from sheet 5 of the Gothard Tunnel pdf makes the point in no uncertain terms. The original Swiss electric freight system has carried a majority of the Trans-alpine freight that passes through Switzerland, while in France and Austria, the majority of freight has been passing by road.

And when digging further into the description of the Base Tunnel makes it clear the benefit that the Swiss have obtained from electric rail.

Why Electrification in Mountain Rail Corridors?

Bear in mind that a normal maximum gradient in many US mainline rail corridors is 1%, or "10 per thousand", when considering the following description of the route being replaced:

The ramps of the present-day railways through the Gotthard and Ceneri have gradients of up to 26 per thousand. The flatness and straightness of the base route - maximum gradient 12.5 per thousand overground and 8.0 per thousand in the base tunnels - allow productive deployment of long, heavy trains through elimination of time-consuming shunting operations. Today, a heavy freight train travelling north-south over the Gotthard and Ceneri mountain routes requires a pushing locomotive because of the steep gradients. The goal of freight trains hauling more than 2000 tonnes travelling through Switzerland without stopping at Erstfeld or Bellinzona, and without midtrain or pushing locomotives, can only be accomplished when both the Gotthard and Ceneri base tunnels are completed.

Consider that: a gradient of 2.5% and "only" being able to move 2,200tons of freight at 50mph.

As the Wikipedia machine notes, the secret to this success in the mountains lies in the higher power-weight ratio of electric locomotives:

The high power of electric locomotives gives them the ability to pull freight at higher speed over gradients, in mixed traffic conditions this increases capacity when the time between trains can be decreased. The higher power of electric locomotives and a electrification can also be a cheaper alternative to a new and less steep railway if trains weights are to be increased on a system.

Putting the Advantages to Work

Of course, one way to cope with mountainous terrain is to avoid it. In the proposed Steel Interstate system, line one, the Liberty Line from New England to California, runs along the Shenandoah River Valley, the original "highway to the west", mostly avoiding the type of terrain that the Swiss would consider to be Mountains. To the west, it runs through the lower land of southern New Mexico and Arizona, a similarly easy route through the western cordillera, and then runs up the Central Valley to bring most of California within its catchment.

The roughest terrain that this corridor needs to tackle is the alignment west and north of Chattanooga, where the existing STRACNET corridor does a sweeping S-curve to avoid the rougher terrain where the Interstate has simply been blasted through. This is a key point where the Line Development Bank will have to carefully analyze the alternative alignments, and could well opt for taking the Rapid Freight Rail corridor out of the conventional freight rail corridor, where the Rapid Freight Rail path gains time by operating at a steeper gradient than the conventional rail corridor. That is, operating at 60mph over half the distance may well be a faster path than operating at 100mph along the heavy freight alignment.

Unlike the Swiss freight system, the electrified heavy freight paths will not have to contend with constantly shuttling aside to make way for passenger trains, since the passenger trains will be on the Rapid Rail Paths, whether those are provided by dividing up the time of day that different trains run on a track, by providing separated track in the same right of way, or by providing a Rapid Freight bypass on its own Right of Way.

Once the Chattanooga to Nashville, alignment is determined, that also solves the only stretch of rough terrain that the Heartland Alignment faces, while the Gulf and Atlantic Line only ever runs to, but never through, rough terrain.

In other words, other than the Chattanooga/Nashville alignment, all of the challenging terrain has been focused on the National Line:

Harrisburg to Pittsburgh, within the territory tof the Appalachian Hub;
east of Salt Lake City and east of Sacramento, on the line to Oakland;
the northeastern and northwestern Oregon corridors on the line to Portland; and
the Southern Oregon / Northern Californian corridor between the Pacific Northwest and the California Central Valley

Indeed, it has been suggested to me that this is a line that should not exist at all. So in a couple of weeks, in King of the Mountain Part II, I'll take up the focus on the need for a genuinely national network, and the flexibility that the institution of the Line Development Bank gives us in pursuing a genuinely national network, focusing on the proposed Steel Interstate system both with and without the National Line.

The Headliners: Midnight Oil / King of the Mountain

Walking through the high dry grass,
   pushing my way through slow
Yellow belly black snake,
   sleeping on a red rock
Waiting for the stranger to go
Sugar train stops at the crossing,
   cane cockies cursing below
Bad storm coming, better run
   to the top of the mountain
Mountain in the shadow of light,
   rain in the valley below

The Job Free Recovery Continues

BruceMcF — Sat, 03 Apr 2010 00:10:35 GMT

Burning the Midnight Oil for a Brawny Recovery

The March Jobs Report has come, and though there appears to have been some employment growth in the rose colored glasses retailing sector, in most other sectors, the headline is that the Job Free Recovery continues.

There are three main numbers to focus on when looking at the monthly employment report:

employment
the headline unemployment rate, seasonally adjusted
the broad ("U6") unemployment rate, seasonally adjusted

... so let's have a look at them.
The report employment figure showed employment growth of 162,000. Is that good news? Bad news?

Well, its news to the extent that "the normal average season growth in employment" means that the string of job losses have come to an end. The headline unemployment rate was unchanged at 9.7%, while the broad unemployment rate increased from 16.8% to 16.9%, both seasonally adjusted.

When trying to work out what's going on with the business cycle, we look at seasonally adjusted figures, and that is part of why the headline unemployment rate is constant. The raw figure is down by 0.2% ... but that's on average what is normal in moving from February to March.

The uptick in the seasonally adjusted broad unemployment rate is explained directly in the summary:

The number of persons working part time for economic reasons (sometimes referred to as involuntary part-time workers) increased to 9.1 million in March. These individuals were working part time because their hours had been cut back or because they were unable to find a full-time job. (See table A-8.)

So while employment increased, some of that was part-time work held by people who want full time work. Just as we would expect this early in a recovery, many businesses do not feel that they have to hire people full time when there is a wide choice of perfectly good workers who can be had with no commitment on their part.

How long would it take to get to full employment at this rate?

I saw someone "tweet" that at this rate, it would take a year to get the unemployment rate down by 1%. However, actually, since this increase in employment is very close to the seasonally expected increase, employment could grow "like this" for years without bringing the unemployment rate down by 1%.

"Like this" would, after all, be increases in employment in months where that's normal, and reductions in employment in months where that's normal.

This is why we need a Brawny Recovery: a recovery where we roll up our sleeves and get down to the work of catching up on thirty years of postponed investment in infrastructure, and thirty years of postponed establishment of a New Energy Economy to address the fact that we have an oil-addicted economy.

And there is no way to describe it other than oil addiction. After all, we are still a major oil producer. We produce about twice the world average, per person. However, we consume five times the world average.

Something to demand immediately

Something that can and should be done immediately is for the Federal Government to make up transit system budgets that are directly due to reductions in state and local sales tax receipts.

Of course, this needs to be in proportion to the downturn in tax receipts for given tax rates. We have to avoid setting up a system that encourages and rewards state and local governments that treat a budget crisis as an opportunity to throw the bus under a bus ... as in California, where the Governor seems determined to kill off public transport as a favor to his big oil contributors.

However, it should be backdated. This is something we should have been doing since September 2008, at the latest ... it is, indeed, something we should do for any recession. During a recession, farebox revenues decline, because people that have lost their job no longer have their daily commute. But the cost of operating the services remain fairly stable, and the need to have access to the services often increases. When at the same time dedicated or general fund tax receipts at the state and local level decline due to the recession, transport and transit authorities get hit with a double whammy.

There are lots of things that are a rightful part of a Brawny Recovery: electrification of local public transport corridors, establishment of Electricity Superhighways, establishment of a nationwide electric freight rail system, investment in energy efficiency upgrades to both public and private buildings ...

... but one that can have very rapid impacts is helping local transport cope with the fact that this recovery, like the two before it, look like it will take about a year before genuine employment growth starts to show up.

Not only will this help keep people in useful employment, but it will also ensure that the most vulnerable are not locked out of participating with the real employment growth, when it really does start to appear.

Sunday Train: Heritage Opposes Freedom to Choose High Speed Rail

BruceMcF — Sun, 21 Mar 2010 21:43:55 GMT

Burning the Midnight Oil for Living Energy Independence

I'm shocked, shocked I say, that a belief tank partly funded by Big Oil and Union Busters would issue a piece attacking High Speed Rail. But they did, claiming that there is a "Coming High Speed Rail Financial Disaster".

Less shocking is that the argument in the piece is tissue-thin, relying on shell games and appeal to stereotype in lieu of evidence.

Of course, just because its an empty argument does not mean its a pointless one. When you are trying to prevent solutions to problems, FUD ... Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt ... can sometimes be as effective as genuine argument.

Well, I hope someone out there is able to frame great counter-arguments that are useful in cracking into Dr. Utt's (Economics) target audience of those with short attention spans and limited access to information. What I can offer here is raw material for those counter-arguments.
Attack what you can, even if its not the policy on offer

The first red flag that the Heritage piece does not intend a serious consideration of current US Department of Transportation High Speed Rail policy is when the author blithely announces:

Although there is no fixed rule as to what constitutes HSR, a common definition is a rail line that operates at an average speed of at least 125 miles per hour (mph).

If talking about bullet trains alone, this number is low - the very first bullet trains half a century ago were going at these speeds, but there have been a lot of improvements since then. If talking about appreciably faster than what is available at present through the United States ... its high.

What "at least 125mph" means is the speed where a rail corridor has to be completely grade separated. That's why the Express HSR corridors are not built to be a little bit above 125mph: there is a substantial capital cost to cross over that hurdle, and once crossed, substantial benefit to operating at 170mph, 190mph, or 220mph.

As regular readers of the Sunday Train may be aware, outside the Northeast Corridor, the common maximum speed on US rail mainlines is 79mph. If it sounds odd that the speed limit is set exactly one mph below a normal US "count by 5's" speed limit ...
... as James McCommons recounts in "Waiting on a Train", over half a century ago, the Federal Railroad Authority mandated that all railway corridors supporting traffic at 80mph or higher must provide Positive Train Control signal systems for safety. These are systems that can automatically stop trains if a train is going into a track that is already occupied, or if the engineer is incapacitated.

And the railways mostly responded by setting speed limits of 79mph in their corridors. So while the US has the biggest and brawniest trains with massive heavy freight loads compared to most nations worldwide ... by international standards, that's big and brawny and slow.

In nations that already had regular Interurban Express services running 90mph~100mph, the improvements in technology that allow these trains to maintain that speed when going around curves were incremental improvements. "High Speed" was going substantially faster than that.

And so the first Japanese bullet trains in the 1960's went 125mph, and the first French TGV's in the 1980's went 168mph, with the second generation at 186mph ... and the most recent generation of bullet trains is reaching 220mph around the world.

Now, I'm sure Dr. Utt (Economics) knows perfectly well that the High Speed Rail policy that he is pretending to critique involves all three classes of speed that are higher than conventional US passenger rail. He is just setting the bar to create the frame for the very weakest part of his argument, when he considers the 110mph and 125mph classes of Higher Speed Rail.

To sustain these speeds over long routes requires a substantial investment in a secure and exclusive roadbed built to precise standards and tolerances, using equipment that meets the same high standards. As a result, an HSR line costs much more to build and operate than an ordinary passenger rail line. It is believed that only two HSR lines in the world earn enough revenue to cover operating and capital costs: Paris-Lyon and Tokyo-Osaka

Of course, as I've discussed before, "enough [passenger] revenue to cover operating and capital costs" really means, The standard means, "pay all operating and capital costs by a fraction of the economic benefit, with everyone else benefiting getting a free ride."

And if we were to apply that same standard to the status quo, Interstate Highways ... Interstate Highways cannot even cover their maintenance alone out of gas taxes paid by traffic on the highways, but have always required cross-subsidy by gas taxes paid to drive on city streets. And now, even that cross-subsidy is not enough, and the shortfall is now being made up out of the General Fund.

So its (1) an absurd standard and (2) an absurd standard that High Speed Rail comes closer to meeting than the Interstate Highway status quo.

The cost of alternative Interstate Highway spending is no mere theoretical comparison. The only two 150mph+ Express HSR systems funded in February were in California and Florida, both in areas projected to have growing population and demand for intercity transport, and both of which present a choice between spending less money to provide transport capacity with High Speed Rail, and more money to provide transport capacity with long distance highways and investment in airport expansions.

So one freedom the Heritage Foundation is fighting against is the freedom to spend public capital subsidies in a cost-effective way.

Deficit Errorism Strikes at Rail Projects!

In addition to the high costs that the HSR program will impose on taxpayers during a period of economic hardship and slow recovery,

When applications made for funding, those applications include a cost and benefit analysis that does indeed claim that the total economic benefit exceeds the total cost. Yet Dr. Utt (Economics) has not to this point even pretended to dispute these claims. He simply jumps from "not profitable for a private business to pursue" to "a net cost to taxpayers".

That logical leap is lubricated by bullshit. If the projects yield economic benefits that are substantially greater than the costs, there is no net "cost imposed on taxpayers". Construction of those HSR corridors would impose:

job opportunities on unemployed and underemployed workers, and
demand for the product of supplier businesses

... but not net costs on future taxpayers. Instead, the investment in more capital efficient transport more easily powered by domestic sustainable energy yields a net benefit for future taxpayers.

And of course, if there is a particular corridor where the cost of an Express HSR corridor is not justified by the full economic benefit, build a less expensive system ... because Express HSR is just one option.

What there's no argument to make, hope for an ignorant audience

Of course, after criticizing Express HSR for being too expensive, without bothering trying to prove the point, the next step is to argue that the much less expensive Regional HSR projects are no good either. But I wonder how you could attack Regional HSR for being so much cheaper per mile than Express HSR, after resting your whole argument on the high cost per mile of Express HSR? I wonder ...

One has to wonder what exactly motivated the FRA review team to endorse the proposed $1.1 billion investment in the Kansas City-St. Louis-Chicago route, which would allow customers to reach their destinations 10 percent faster than they could by driving between Chicago and St. Louis.

Actually, no, nobody has to wonder. After existing improvements in bottlenecks with freight, even according to SubsidyScope's attack on Amtrak, the Chicago/St. Louis corridor recovers 80% of its operating costs from operating revenues at Amtrak speeds.

And that is a service that is slower than driving, which means there are trips that are day trips when driving but overnight trips by train.

It puzzling why a fellow economist would have to "wonder" why more people will make a choice when more people gain the freedom to make that choice. Indeed, on the demand side, its the growing freedom to choose that defines the three tiers of High Speed Rail:

Become time-competitive with driving, and people who would rather spend their trip doing something other than driving, have the freedom to make that choose.
Become faster than driving, and some people who wanted something faster than driving, especially for inner urban, outer suburban, and rural destinations without a convenient airport, will start choosing the train for the speed.
Become time-competitive with flying, and some people will choose the train for the greater comfort and the smaller portion of the trip spent waiting for the trip to start.

Given the willingness that Dr. Utt (Economics) has to engage in misleading framing and deceptive shell game arguments, when he has to resort to simply bluffing by "wondering why" for a question with a perfectly obvious and straightforward answer, he must be on very weak ground indeed.

And then cross-reference to fellow HSR deniers

However extravagant this commitment to jazzed-up 19th century technology may be, the ultimate costs of bringing HSR to the 13 corridors already approved by the FRA will be staggering. California received a $2.3 billion grant toward an HSR rail system with an official cost of $50.2 billion (in 2006 dollars), but independent analysts contend that it will more likely cost $81.4 billion.[6]

There's another shell game here:

shell one is the actual policy
shell two is the talking point that 110mph diesel and 125mph electric tilt trains, first successfully put into service in the 1950's and not gaining wide use until after active tilt was mastered in the 1980's is "1800's technology"
shell three is putting the cost of the California system immediately after the reference to the 110mph and 125mph speed classes ... even though California is a 220mph speed service.

But note the description of a cost quote from what is described as an "independent source". Is it a peer reviewed academic paper? A genuinely independent third party that takes no position on HSR pro or con? No, of course not, its the output of another partly Big Oil funded belief tank, the "Reason" Foundation:

[6]Wendell Cox and Joseph Vranich, "The California High Speed Rail Proposal: A Due Diligence Report," Reason Foundation Policy Study No. 370, September 2008, at http://reason.org/files/1b544e... (March 11, 2010).

... by Wendell Cox, who makes much of his living as being the "transport expert" who can be relied upon to deliver the pro-road-lobby conclusion.

Dr. Utt is lying about the independence of that source. Its the output of a belief tank that opposes High Speed Rail. That's not an independent source.

Dr. Utt then surveys the "overseas experience" while conveniently avoiding the fact that every system that he talks about, even the over-priced, badly managed UK investment in HSR, dogged by the politically imposed burden of "public private partnerships", generate operating surpluses. The bedrock foundation of this survey is the demand that everyone else who benefits from a transport service must be given a free ride on the back of passenger fares.

After all this time with shell game arguments, misleading frames, and "one wonders" questions where even a misleading argument must not be available, Dr. Utt saves the lie for very near the end. Blink and you would miss it ... especially for those who believe the lie to be true:

Most taxpayers will continue to travel by more cost-effective and largely self-financed modes, such as cars and airplanes.

Of course, the "self-finance" claim for roads is patent nonsense. Interstate Highways have always been cross-subsidized by people driving on city streets that receive no federal gas tax money, by zoning requirements to provide "free parking", and by a host of other explicit and hidden public subsidies. Unlike High Speed Rail, which can cover its own operating costs, intercity transport by road has been provided both capital and operating subsidy ever since the Interstate Highway System was first established.

None of this is surprising

It we cast our eye back across American Economic History, a watershed event that can be used to divide the Fordist period the followed WWII from the Second Gilded Age that started to gain full speed under Ronald Reagan is American Peak Oil ... and even more specifically, March, 1971, when the Texas Railroad Commission removed the quota on oil production.

When oil prices in the US were regulated through production quotas to remain relatively stable in dollar terms, which means falling prices when corrected through inflation, the interests of Big Oil were lined up with strong income growth. The side-effect that this provides a favorable economic setting for organizing workforces was, for capital-intensive corporations such as big oil, a regrettable but tolerable evil.

When the balance of pricing power passed from an elected Commission in the US to the major oil exporting nations, the interests of oil companies and the economic interests of the United States began to diverge. An over-valued US$ provides US-headquartered transnationals with added economic power when pursuing the rights to exploit non-renewable natural resources overseas. Depressed economic conditions in low-income countries are more appealing than rapid economic development.

When any industry has interests that diverge strongly from the national interest, it becomes useful to invest in propaganda mills to help promote argument frames and talking points that are favorable to their interest and help obscure the national interest.

Each of these propaganda mills are, of course, organizations that chase funding from various foundations and corporations ... so when a single right wing propaganda mill adopts a particular position, it would well be a matter of personal conviction by a group of propagandists wihin the mill. But when the Heritage Foundation, Reason Foundation, Cato Institute all take up the case (see Libertarians Against Choice: The Attack on Obama's HSR Policy and the Midwest HSR Association's HSR Fact versus Fiction) ... well, coming up with arguments that serve the interests of those who pay their bills is the common job of all three.

And so this last week, my "HSR" search tag caught mention after mention of the newest Heritage Institute "argument" against the present High Speed Rail policy.

Your Mission, if you Choose to Accept It ...

So, given what is clearly an effort at deceptive propaganda posing as a serious argument, your mission, if you choose to accept it, is to propose simple, clear, fact based responses to this kind of nonsense. While you ponder that, I'll pass the stage on to the headliners.

Midnight Oil: Truganini

Sunday Train: Taking the Train to the Airport

BruceMcF — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 00:10:55 GMT

Burning the Midnight Oil for Living Energy Independence

Disclaimer: Nothing said here should be taken to imply that airport/train connections are the primary transport task for either light rail, mass transit, conventional intercity rail, or high speed intercity rail. In other words, the focus of an essay in a regular weekly series on one particular topic does not imply anything along the lines of "most important thing".

However, recently, I keep running into the issue of taking the train to the airport. I read an recent article in an air travel industry publication that focused on the airport connections associated with the projects funded in the $8b HSR funding. I read an older piece about the proposed intermodal station in Chicago that would allow our Ohio trains to get to O'Hare. And the proposal to terminate the California HSR at the redesigned Lindbergh Field came up as part of the discussion at the California HSR blog.

So with the Super Bowl coming up to distract things, I succumbed to what was clearly fate, and am going to discuss taking the train to the airport.

The Green Dimension

It is, I hope, widely understood that the carbon footprint of flying is very high. What might not be as widely understood is that the shorter routes tend to be the least efficient routes. On a short flight, the extra fuel-consumption of take-off and landing is shared out among fewer route miles.

And further, aircraft are less efficient flying through the denser air closer to the surface, and more efficient when they reach "cruising altitude". And of course, when flying from, say, Atlanta to Charlotte NC, or Columbus OH to Chicago, you spend the bulk of the flight either climbing to cruising altitude or descending from it.

And under present conditions, HSR demand focuses on trips of one to three hours, which are all short-haul flights in terms of flying. So not only can HSR be powered by sustainably generated electricity (either from the outset for 220mph Express HSR, or as part of ongoing upgrades, for 110mph Emerging HSR) ... but the flights they will replace are those that have a higher carbon footprint per route mile than the average for flying.

Now, whether we will still be flying in 2050, to what extent, and for what types of journeys ... we have to take whatever steps we can to cut our carbon footprint as soon as we can in order to get to 2050 more or less intact. And the above suggests that one early strategy is to make it possible to take a longer flight to an airport and then complete the journey by HSR.

Airports Aint Just Airports

Of course, for this strategy, it makes a difference what kind of airport it is. This is critical to the discussion of the Lindbergh Field Intermodal Transit Center (pdf) option in San Diego, which arises in some of the commentary on the California HSR blog post, How Will HSR Get to Downtown San Diego?.

While the ITC is a very interesting proposal in terms of providing direct Trolley, Coaster and Amtrak Pacific Surfliner stops at the airport - Lindbergh Field is between one and two miles from downtown, and the existing Amtrak Pacific Surfliner terminus at Santa Fe is a much stronger location for the downtown San Diego HSR station. It is located on one Trolley line that runs to the border, adjcent to the trolley line to Petco field as well as one of the main downtown bus transfer centers. It is much more convenient to the Convention center and two blocks from the Coronado ferry.

And with respect to the plane/train transfer scenario, San Diego airport is not a main hub airport, nor is its location promising for development into a main hub airport. So for plane/train transfers involving both San Diego and California HSR, the majority of transfers will be somewhere else in the state, with the trip either starting or ending at the San Diego HSR station.

So, while the Intermodal Transit Center is interesting as one transitional design for reducing vehicle miles traveled to the San Diego Airport - its the local rail connections that are critical for that impact. For the High Speed Rail, where San Diego is likely to have one suburban and one downtown station, Lindbergh Field seems to be too close to downtown to be the suburban station and seems to be too far from the key intra-state and interstate transport destinations in San Diego to be the downtown station.

OK, so what about O'Hare

O'Hare airport in Chicago is a clear contrasting example. This is a major western Great Lakes / eastern Midest transport hub. Any HSR network in this region would receive a benefit from connecting to O'Hare.

For existing Michigan and Indiana trains, and proposed Ohio Hub trains, the obstacle to getting to the airport is not the existence of an airport station - but rather that fact that O'Hare is on the western side of the Great Chicago Divide.

Most people are aware of the importance of Chicago status as a central rail hub in Chicago's emergence as a major American city. Perhaps fewer are aware of the way that Chicago developed as a rail hub. This was in the late 1800's, when large numbers of ofttimes shady characters were trying to make their fortune by building a railroad. The end result of the chaotic process was a system of lines running from Chicago to the east, and a system of lines running from Chicago to the west, with very little interconnection between the two systems.

And of course, the reason that the Midwest Hub and Ohio Hub systems can be built out so much more quickly with so many more miles per dollar than the California HSR system is because they are starting out as 110mph Emerging HSR systems, built in existing rail corridors. So they stand to inherit the east/west divide.

However, it is no secret that this is a problem, and so there are efforts underway to address these problems. One of these efforts is the West Loop Transportation Center

An appealing aspect of this proposal is that it means the downtown Chicago HSR station will be connected directly to Chicago Union Station and the Olgivie Transportation Center.

The Chicago / Michigan corridor would be a primary beneficiary among those receiving funding from the $8b appropriated in Stimulus II, but later stages of the Midwest Hub to both Indianapolis and northern Indiana would also benefit from this through access ... and of course the Ohio Hub, which was funded for its core seed corridor at conventional Amtrak speed, plans to connect to Chicago, first via the Michigan corridor, and then via the Indiana corridors.

And a whole collection of potential airport connections ...

Some airport HSR connections are stations directly integrated into an airport terminal complex ... others are HSR connections with local rail that has an airport station ... others are connected to airports by less direct means.

For those choosing between an air/air transfer and an air/train transfer, the HSR station integrated into the airport terminal is obviously the ideal. However, for many people living in rural and outer suburban areas that the HSR passes through, the greater ease of access and quality of service at the regional HSR station will offset an additional transfer to connect to a hub airport.

On the other hand, we are talking about fewer than half of the passengers on a High Speed Rail service - so while an airport station is always an option to consider, going too far out of the way in order to stop at the airport is not automatically the correct choice.

And of course, while in some cases the die has been cast, either by the legacy of airport location choices and availability of transport corridors, in other cases, the decision has not been finalized yet.

Defending Aviation's Market Share

How do we fund airport stations? You might think that since there is an Aviation Trust Fund that we regularly dip into for capital improvements, and since an airport HSR station is an obvious improvement in terms of offering transport alternatives to air passengers, that one way to fund the airport station itself, and in particular the extra capital cost of integrating into the passenger terminal rather than having a station "in the vicinity of" the airport, could apply for funding as a capital improvement to the airport.

Except the ideal is an intermodal through station, the HSR accesses the airport terminal, and where local transport accesses both the airport terminal and the HSR station. Which runs smack dab into the FAA regulations (pdf):

To be AIP and PFC eligible, the airport ground access transportation project must meet the following conditions: (1) The road or facility may only extend to the nearest public highway or facility of sufficient capacity to accommodate airport traffic; (2) the access road or facility must be located on the airport or within a right-of-way acquired by the public agency; and (3) the access road or facility must exclusively serve airport traffic.

There's nothing in the first two that interferes with applying for these funds to cover the incremental capital cost of integrating the HSR station with an airport terminal: the problem is, of course, the third section. This is why so many light rail and other rail projects that go to airports terminate at the airport, since that is the easiest way to guarantee that the infrastructure on the airport property never, ever commits the unpardonable efficiency of serving multiple transport needs at the same time.

Indeed, if you press the point - and as far as I understand it, the FAA does indeed press the point - any through rail corridor must be automatically ineligible, since the passengers that are taking the train through and not using the airport station are automatically receiving service from the road that is not "exclusively for the airport".

This is a national policy that could well be changed. Whether it could be changed by executive order, or requires new Congressional language, I do not know - I am not, after all, a lawyer, not even in the sense of playing on on the Internet - but whichever it is, that is a change that ought to be pursued.

The thing about this regulation is that it doesn't matter how much of the use of the facility is to serve the airport, nor what the cost efficiency of the system is in terms of serving passengers to and from the airport ... the simple fact that another use may be made of the facility is used to rule the project ineligible, so the usefulness and cost-effectiveness of the service to air passengers is never assessed.

A preferable limit for through rail services would be to the incremental capital cost of providing service to a passenger station directly integrated with an airport passenger terminal, restricted to infrastructure located on the airport property itself.

As argued above regarding Lindbergh Field in San Diego, an airport station is not automatically the preferred location for an HSR station. However, with the opportunities to engage in air/train transfers, and the existing ground transport connections to the airport, it is often an option worth considering.

However, because of the space hunger of airport runways, there is often an incremental capital cost in connecting an HSR corridor directly with an airport via an airport terminal station. Where the airport station turns out to be a cost effective way of providing improved transport connections to the airport, the decision should be made in terms of how effectively it serves to provide transport to and from the airports, and the efficiency of also providing additional service to others should not automatically rule it out.

Midnight Oil's Beds are Burning / Various Artists

Sunday Train: Going to Disneyland, Disneyworld, and Other Adventures

BruceMcF — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 00:13:54 GMT

Burning the Midnight Oil for Living Energy Independence

Huh, seems me that whatever the state of my various concerns, the agenda of the Sunday Train has been taken over by the White House ... funny how announcing the recipients of a total of $8b will do that.

The Transport Politic (aka Yonah Freeman and the TTP commentariat) has a very complete rundown. The allotments over $200m are:

California, $2,344m
Florida: $1,250m
Illinois: $1,236m
Wisconsin: $822m
Washington: $590m
North Carolina: $545m
Ohio: $400m

So, what's the money for? Join me below the fold.
So, what's the money for?

I'll start with the big ticket items.

California, $2,344m. This includes $1,850m for the California HSR Stage 1 from San Francisco to Anaheim via San Jose, Fresno, Bakersfield, and the LA Basin. This is, in essence, enough to prime the pump for the California project.

California has the advantage of $9b in bonding authority already passed in November 2008, but that bonding authority has strings attached. One of those string is that for any given segment, all funding has to be in place before bonds can be sold, bonds cannot fund more than half the cost of a given segment, and to avoid monkey business in the definition of "segment", it has to have a vetted plan for running services without state operating subsidies.

This ARRA funding will allow the California HSR authority to work through 2010 and its projected start of the segment design and build process in 2011 without having to sell bonds up front. Then if an application for additional Federal funds requires matching funds, it will be possible to bring one or more of the defined segments in line for receiving state bond support, which will provide the matching funds.

Obviously, how fast those funds flow will determine how close the CAHSRA can stay to its project timeline ... but with the ARRA funding to prime the pump, California is well placed to proceed with the project at whatever pace that funding flows permit.

And the flip side of the ARRA announcement is a substantial group of states with a stake in having enough HSR funding so that they are not forced to go toe-to-toe with California's substantial application advantages. Any "transparent process", which are codewords for cost-benefit analysis based decisions, will give heavy weight to California for Express HSR. Just as the Northeast Corridor has a close to ideal population distribution for conventional rail, and the Great Lakes / Eastern Midwest a close to an ideal population distribution for 110mph/125mph Emerging/Regional HSR, California has close to an ideal population distribution for Express HSR.

In addition to the Stage 1 corridor funding, the ARRA funding includes $400m for building the shell of a bus terminal into the foundations of the Transbay Terminal bus station in San Francisco. This is a project that is reputedly "ready to go", although of course the actual design of the TBT train box leaves quite a bit to be desired. Never one to quit working before the whistle, I am hoping that the availability of $400m can be used to persuade the Transbay Joint Power Authority to build a less heavily bottlenecked design for trains entering and leaving this undergound train station.

Finally, while Stage 1 does not go to Vegas (despite what the Replicants were saying this time last year) ... it does go to Disneyland. Which sets the stage for the next allocation.

Florida: $1,250m. This is entirely for Express HSR track from Tampa to Orlando. This is a line that has been criticized for not connecting the two downtowns of the two cities. On the other hand, it does go to Disneyworld, and as an on-again, off-again project that kept getting squashed by lack of local funding, the Florida State Legislature was led to believe that their hopes of HSR funding required a commitment to support complementary local rail service. Support for SunRail passed, and so Florida got their Disneyworld train.

If there is ongoing federal funding available, I expect that sooner or later Florida will bite the bullet and sort out an extension of the service - even if not an extension of the corridor - to allow downtown to downtown service. After all, in France, one of the early pioneers in High Speed Rail, its common for the Express HSR services to only run on Express HSR corridors between major metropolitan areas, and to run into and through major metro areas on express electric urban lines.

Illinois: $1,236m. The main project here is $1,102m to upgrade parts of the Chicago / St. Louis corridor to 110mph service, cutting end-to-end travel time to four hours, and bringing substantial new populations along the corridor within three hours or less of either Chicago or St. Louis or both. Further improvement of this corridor on the same basis can bring the end-to-end time down to three hours.

The second main project is $133m for line and station improvements between Chicago and Michigan, including two suburban and one downtown station for Detroit. This is a line that, like the Chicago / St. Louis, has already has a series of smaller incremental improvements.

Wisconsin: $822m. The bulk of this is $810m to establish a Milwaukee-Madison corridor service. This will extend the already well patronized successful Chicago / Milwaukee corridor, and indeed further build patronage on that corridor, since Madison / Chicago is a substantial transport market in its own right along this corridor.

Washington: $590m. This is mostly for bypass tracks for the Cascade Corridor between Oregon and Washington, with some services continuing to Vancouver. I believe there is also some provision for new rolling stock to support additional Vancouver services.

North Carolina: $545m. The bulk of this is $520m to bring the Raleigh/Charlotte corridor up to 90mph, as a first step to eventually bringing it up to 110mph as part of the Southeast HSR Corridor.

Ohio: $400m. This is all dedicated to establishing the conventional rail starter service for the Triple C route from Cleveland to Columbus and Cincinnati to Columbus. This was a route abandoned in 1971 when Penn Central went bust, and when Columbus was well under half a million in population. However, with the growth of Columbus in the decades since, Columbus is now the second most populous metro area and the corridor the most densely populated corridor in the country without regular rail service.

In terms of HSR, establishing this service is a starter on establishing the 110mph version of the Triple C, which with two hour services to Columbus from either end is when the corridor is projected to be capable of generating a substantial operating surplus. It may take a series of upgrades, to get there, but each upgrade will cut trip speeds and improve patronage on the corridor, trimming the required subsidy until it finally goes away.

Oh, and clever politics too

I've already noted the political intelligence of giving California enough to prime their pump. California Senators and Congressmen will, of course, be pushing for enough further HSR funding to assure that California's HSR system can be constructed more or less on scheduled. And of course, rivals can either try to fight that big House caucus ... or work out a way to ensure there is enough to go around. The politics leans toward the "enough to go around" outcome.

For Florida, people from all over the country go to Disneyworld. In not too long a time from now, many of them will be catching the train from an airport station to Disneyworld, and some of them using the HSR train again for one or another daytrip. This addresses the "if only you had ever been to Europe/Japan and experienced this thing ..." problem.

And of course, Florida is a famous Presidential swing state. Work on the corridor will be progressing before election day in 2012.

Illinois is not a famous Presidential swing state, but after California is one of the prime examples of states that have invested both capital and operating subsidies into improving Amtrak corridor services in its state, and even if the President and Secretary of Transport were not a Democrat and Republican, respectively, from Illinois, it would be wise politics to reward that behavior with the flagship Emerging HSR corridor. Of course, on the SubsidyScope numbers, even at conventional rail speed, its also the leading Great Lakes / Midwestern regional corridor in operating cost ratio, so its also the safest bet in terms of generating a comfortable operating surplus once raised to 110mph.

Washington (and Oregon, but the bulk of the corridor is in Washington, and that's where the highest priority bottlenecks lie) may not lean as strongly Democratic in Presidential politics as Illinois, but is also an example of rewarding those states that have invested into corridor improvements, as in inducement to additional states to follow the same course.

North Carolina is an example of a state that we didn't expect to be a swing state in Presidential politics, but then in 2008, it swung. And North Carolina is right on the boundary line between states that have been making genuine investments in improved rail service, and the states to its immediate south and west that have been paying lip service at most.

And of course, Ohio is a Presidential swing state in the Florida league. Further, the Ohio Triple-C will be in operation before election day, 2012.

In terms of the politics of rewarding states for supporting rail, Ohio is like Florida in the first half of "new friends are silver, old friends are gold" ... after a very tight fight in the Ohio state legislature, the operating subsidies required by the conventional speed Triple-C service were passed by the Republican State Senate. That was when before Strickland's approval rating was battered by the recession, and unless that subsidy offer was taken up by the DoT, there was every chance that it would not be repeated.

On the other hand, once the service is up and running, the call to apply for federal funds to speed segments of the corridor up to 110mph will be much harder to resist than it was to fight against the idea of starting the service up in the first place. So there is every reason to hope for 110mph service to be in place in Ohio sometime before election day, 2016.

And now, the headliners ...
Midnight Oil: The Power and the Passion