First The Trains, Then The Planes, Then The Roads?

Back in August of 2009, I wrote a piece about a little known Federal program called the Essential Air Service in which the government reimburses major airlines to serve smaller rural communities.  This year it runs to the tune of nearly $200 million and still our air carriers claim that they cannot make any money.  Today, Delta Air Lines announced that it “can no longer afford” to serve 24 of the rural airports that they picked up in the merger with Northwest Airlines.

From what I can gather, it is not all about the corporate decisions to leave folks high and dry but the "style" in which these passengers desire plays a factor.  Everybody, I guess, wishes that their airport be a modern and useful airfield, with the latest in air comfort and speed, but when you cannot fill the existing seats of the propeller type planes - then you will not fill a larger regional JET.  Nor can you fly to the 29 major hubs from just Anyplace, USA and expect to get good slots in the landing pattern.

The Essential Air Service subsidies are slated to expire in 2013 unless Congress decides to extend them but in this current fiscal state I would not hold my breath on that. The current Republican strategy is to cut out anything that does not help corporations but may do some good for the common man.  The highways that we cannot maintain will have to do for these 24 cities and probably a similar number next year - and the year after.

This is also just one decision made by one airline, how many more will be coming in the days ahead?  Deregulation was supposed to free up the airline industry to be responsive to the market demands and to foster more competitive scheduling and pricing.  The Essential Air Service subsidies were to equalize the opportunities for the rural cities which could not run with the big dogs, but also could not stay on the porch.  If things continue as they have in the past five years, even the big dogs may not be running like they have been.

Many of these small cities got a big boost from the railroad systems and some of them owe it all to the railroads. These railroads brought life into a lot of places in the expanding western territories.  For years they were THE way for people to come and go for long distance travel..  The automobile and the airplane helped bring those days to an end, so what is expected when these modes are no longer economically viable?  When the rural areas no longer have air service and the states and federal government can no longer build and maintain the roads.  What will we have then?

Other countries are considering (and building) systems of high speed rail with feeder routes of more moderate speed which connect to the more rural communities there.  Somehow, that doesn't fit in with our concept of a modern world...    yet.

This Weeks Rail Thoughts

I have been kind of quiet on the subject lately, but the things that I have been reading in the past week have brought the regional rail idea more to the fore.

First off, the work that R. J. Corman Railroad is doing along side the Rupp parking lot and the intersection of W. Main St and Oliver Lewis Way is progressing smoothly. They have installed a fairly short (and steep) section of track that branches off of the main line just south of its crossing at Second St. This track then runs up a nearly 6% grade until it levels out parallel to the crest of the embankment which overlooks the rail yard.

This clearly has one sole purpose. To display some of the various rail equipment used by the Central Kentucky Lines portion of Corman rail group. They are also almost ready to place the rail under the new bridge now that the drainage and electrical line placements have been resolved. There is a location for a transformer pad and what I'm told will be a “glass house”. I am supposing that this will look similar to the architecture of the aviation facility in Nicholasville and will be used to protect some railcars (and /or people) should they establish a dinner train style operation. A Corman spokesman has continued to say that the railroad has “no formal plans for an excursion train”but all the construction, both here in Lexington and in Midway are some of the many pieces that “need to come together before an excursion train becomes reality.”

In Midway, if you don't know, the track runs right through the middle of Main St. and leaves little room for a long train to stop without blocking one of two city streets. The right of way for the railroad actually is wide enough for two parallel tracks without eliminating traffic or parking. The railroad is working with the City of Midway in building such a parallel track and doing some streetscape improvements.

Neither of these two track work projects are part of the TIGER (Transportation Investment Generating Economic Recovery) grant recently awarded for track upgrading on several of the Corman lines in a few states. One more piece of the puzzle was the wye that they re-established near Christianburg and provides a beautiful place in which to turn a train.

Corman has nearly quadrupled the amount of rail traffic on the line to Louisville in the 5 or 6 years that he has controlled it and its soon-to-be-completed upgrading will allow more freight traffic just in time for the price of fuel to make long-haul trucking cost prohibitive. The trucking industry has not made their trucks any more fuel efficient than the auto industry has cars. That said, the idea of a regional commuter rail service to Louisville, though interesting, is made just a little bit harder.

I hear of many commuters who travel from Lexington to Frankfort or Louisville daily who say that they are willing to go by rail, but I am not sure that they have thought it completely through. Many of them have found their efficient route via auto, and many of them avoid the normal rush hour snarls of downtown. If they were to go by rail and the station is downtown, then they are now a part of the traffic that they have so far avoided. There is also an added level of commute time involved which needs to be considered. For all of their talk, we are still at least ten years late in beginning to think about commuter rail service.

On the topic of High Speed Rail, it now seem clear that the Republican majority in the House is set on erasing all gains that the present administration has attempted to make. Without requiring vastly more fuel efficiency in autos and trucks and better alternatives to the fossil fuels we currently use, I think that they are wanting the country to live in the status quo. Other countries are not so conservative about it.

We cannot let the market decide about these things. Consider this. Based on extensive research Airbus committed, back in 2000, to build a massive 4 engined aircraft seating 500-800 passengers. The demand would come from the Asian market and a large part of that from China. Boeing, interestingly enough, came to a eerily similar decision. With the emergence of the Chinese market and the need for large numbers of people to travel between China's major cities and internationally, this looked like a sound decision. Now, 11 years later, one and just one southeast Asian airline has taken delivery of any of these super jumbo jets. That is one A380 out of the five ordered. Boeing has sold none of the passenger models but has orders for the freight versions What, pray tell, is the difference in the past 11 years. China's high speed rail.

This decision was basically an economic one. One 16 car-long 300 km/h train set costs roughly $80 million and seats 1050 while one Airbus A380 costs $360 million and seats 650. You can do the math.

Although the A380 is perhaps the most fuel-efficient large airliner in the sky today on a per-seat/km or seat/mile basis, figures from Airbus and Siemens show that at A380 burns nearly six times as much energy per seat/km as a modern high-speed train. The Chinese will buy from the Western world, but not if what they can build is cheaper. The Chinese have built over 6300 miles of high speed rail line in the past 10 years and the Europeans are continuing to expand their high speed routes while we worry about who will or will not benefit from building it. The answer is definitely the Chinese, they win if the build their own and the win if we don't build ours.

Some Milestones

This past week has been one for milestones, especially in transportation.

To begin with, there was the first delivery of a Nissan Leaf to a customer in Redwood City, California. The Leaf is the first mass produced electric car which is priced for the average person, around $33 thousand a pop but with state and federal rebates the final cost is about $20K. I have discussed electric autos before and I still believe that the controversy of “range anxiety” will still cause some folks to hesitate on such autos. Eighty miles on an 8 hour charge just doesn’t seem like a lot.

The new owner, a west coast tech guy, had a charging outlet installed in his garage last Friday after he was informed that he was chosen to be the initial owner. Not bad for a first car although he has some experience with electric bikes and his commute is only about twenty miles round trip.

Then came the delivery of the first Chevy Volt. This car is not totally electric since it has a gasoline engine to assist when the battery pack runs out. The Volt has an estimated range of 40 miles, about half that of the Leaf, on a full 8 hour charge and is best re-charged from a 220-volt outlet for that length of time. I somehow see that as slow cooking a roast in the oven EVERY night in addition to the regular cooking and HVAC usage. I am not sure that my KU budget can stand that.

The first owner here, came on the other side of the country - in New Jersey. In this case, the buyer is a retired airline pilot who traded in an older Prius for the Volt. After a career behind the controls of, what I consider a very inefficient travel mode, he appears to save the planet by driving more fuel efficient vehicles. The cost of the Volt runs a bit higher than the Leaf at approximately $41 thousand (or $34.5K after rebates) and charging from a regular household outlet will take much longer.

Our new owner of the Volt did interrupt his trip to Florida to fly back home so that he could take delivery, but then he left it at the dealer’s lot and flew back to Florida for the rest of his vacation. So much for his save the planet attitude.

Then we come to the 10th anniversary of America’s “high speed” rail, the Acela.

Amtrak’s attempt at high speed train travel is still going strong despite the efforts of previous administrations to gut both Acela and Amtrak. The Acela service has survived and even become quite popular as an alternative to both I-95 and flying in the Northeast Corridor. They have carried more than 3.2 million passengers in fiscal 2010 and rider-ship is up substantially in the past five years. It will be interesting to see what they figures do with increasing animosity toward TSA screenings at airports.

Acela’s passengers have generally welcomed the possibility of faster service with some hoping for similar service to Japan or Europe. In this business world, time is money and traveling from downtown to downtown by rail(particularly with real high speed rail) will be done nearly as fast as airport to airport is today. Amtrak has now captured 55 percent of the Boston-New York air-rail market now that the electrification, long delayed by the Reagan and Bush(I) White Houses, was completed in 1999.

Paul Krugman recently noted that it has become obvious that America, once the nation of builders, now cannot build those projects of heroic infrastructure any more. The average age of our “Capital Stock” (our structures, equipment and software) is rising, modestly in the Residential and Non-Residential elements but drastically in the Government items. Our highways and Interstates (Government) are decaying as are our railroads (Non-Residential) just not at the same rate. Our bridges and tunnels need replacing but we claim that it is too expensive.

I wonder where we will be on Acela's 20th anniversary.

Lets Walk Before We Run

Lexington, as well as the rest of America, still has a problem coming to grips with the idea of mass transit. We want to run before we have relearned the simple steps of walking the mass transit walk.

America began dismantling their urban rail (streetcars and interurban/regional rail) facilities right at the beginnings of a time when we needed them most, the middle of the Great Depression. Then, right after the Second World War, while Europe was rebuilding their rail infrastructure with a lot of Allied help, we started to remove our intercity passenger rail. The concept of the Interstate Highway System would soon allow interstate trucking to grow while the railroad unions, in an effort to preserve jobs, did a number on the freight rail service. Our eggs were just about all in one basket.

Europe on the other hand, took our assistance and rebuilt their streetcars, their intercity rail and by the "60s began to think of a higher speed rail system. Japan made similar decisions with similar results. In other words, they took the simple steps of fixing a broken body, learned to walk again, then running and then took off racing. A story not too different from that of Red Pollard and Seabiscuit.

The simple fact is that both Europe and Japan (and now China and others) have discovered that the answer of mass transit is in a balanced approach of all modes interconnecting to become one system. Only a handful of East Coast American cities have tried to follow this approach and most of them are facing rising fares due to failing to complete all possible connections. The Federal agency charged with assisting this complete approach has, for the past 50 years, done a poor job.

The U.S. Department of Transportation, which one would assume, should coordinate all the transportation facilities across the nation(pedestrian, bicycle, auto, trucking, rail and aviation) into one system, funded at the State and local level and by private industry, instead has become the primary provider of funding amid massive political wrangling. It used to be, in the days of the "rugged individualist", that roads and railroads were built by the people who wanted to get somewhere. Now these "creative class" folks are waiting for someone else to build their roads for them. The idea of going the route of private toll roads (a free market system) is abhorrent to most people now that freeways and the lure of the open road has been let out of the bag.

Most people in America, outside of the larger east coast cities, can not remember the days of regularly scheduled passenger train traffic of more than twice a day. I can recall the two daily trips of the George Washington, C&O's remaining service to Lexington, from about 1963 until the creation of Amtrak. One in the morning and one in the evening, with never more than 3 cars and barely any one boarding here in town. There used to be much more traffic than that and there can be again.

I am not here to downplay the need for High Speed Rail but I do want to emphasize that HSR alone is not the cure-all of our transit woes. Let us take the baby steps of local transit and regional service before we cry about not getting a HSR connection

America's Idea Of High Speed Rail

HNTB is a well known, employee owned, architecture and engineering consulting firm specializing in sports venues but also working in road/bridges, aviation and light rail. They also prepare and distribute, on line, a publication called THINK, and in that preparation conduct many opinion surveys. One of their latest concerns High Speed Rail.

New America THINKS survey results from HNTB Corporation illustrate transit and passenger rail remain top of mind after the Obama administration’s $8 billion high-speed rail grant announcement last month.

Nearly nine in ten (88 percent) Americans are currently open to high-speed rail travel for long-distance travel within the United States. While this is a strong majority, that support is down slightly from the 94 percent America THINKS recorded in March 2009.

This is much higher than I thought it would be and if I were a pessimist, I would swear that these were rosy liberal government projections. Don't get me wrong, I have been pushing (and dreaming of) High Speed Rail since the '70s, unfortunately, the federal money that could have (or should have) been spent on it was mandated for highways.

While general interest may have slowed, there’s still a great deal of support for passenger rail enhancements overall. More than four in five (83 percent) Americans agree public transit and high-speed rail infrastructure should receive a larger share of federal funding than they do now.

I guess my next question would have to be, Does congress know this? Then I realize that Congress doesn't care. There are no lobbyists from major corporations beating down their doors, throwing cash at them for their votes. Major corporations, the big three automakers and the large energy companies all realize that their fortunes could turn on a decision to increase mass transit opportunities in America.

Our American automakers at one time made what appeared to be obscene profits but in recent years have lost billions. Our trucking industry, at one point appeared to be choking the life out of America's freight railroads. The large oil companies are still raking in huge profits due to the world's unquenchable thirst for oil despite a demonstrated decline in availability. Even if you don't suscribe to the concept of Peak Oil, it is becoming clear that the way that thing were were simply not sustainable.

The American airline industry is imploding from similar problems of sustainability. The terror threats have only exacerbated the continuing delays encountered by the traveling public. An aging air control system and declining on-time performance figures posted by the airlines are making some people think twice about flying as a travel option. With a possible lack of available fuel (or at least much more expensive fuel) and few viable alternatives, airlines may be a dying industry except for coast-to-coast or overseas flights.

This may coincide with another study requested by the Metropolitan Transportation Commission in California about the effects of High Speed Rail on the Bay Area. SH&E, a Virginia-based aviation firm has concluded that the three Bay Area airport could see a loss of 6 million passengers by 2035. That assumes that the system would be operational by 2020 AND that the airline industry will still be operating.

It is well documented that in Europe(particularly Spain) and China that the bullet trains have seriously eroded the airline industry's clientele. In America, even Amtrak's Acela service- a limited medium speed service- from New York to Washington has garnered approximately 62% of the traveling public between those two cities.

Lexington, of course, has been left out of any consideration for High Speed Rail, medium speed rail, commuter rail, regional rail or any other mode of mass transit in, around, or beyond the limited bus service that we have.

I tell you, we are going to have to start really thinking locally and begin to do some of these things for ourselves. Congress will only do it for those corporations who offer leverage. The idea of "government of the people, by the people and for the people" began to die shortly after Abraham Lincoln declared that it "should not perish from this earth". If we want it back, then we will have to take it back.

I wish us luck.

Thoughts For A Friday Afternoon

“A commonly quoted statistic from the Small Business Administration (SBA) is that 65% of all new jobs are created by small businesses” so says an opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal. It also gives the general definition of a small business as “any business employing 500 people or fewer.” Although I wonder if that includes subsidiaries of large multi-nationals whose start-up costs are covered while an entrepreneur’s are not.

The author goes on to reveal that “99.7% of all companies in America meet the SBA's definition of small business”, again, what portion of that are the multi-national subsidiaries mentioned earlier.

His logical conclusion was that “the remaining 0.3% of American companies—big business—create 35% of all new jobs in this country”. We have now run the gamut from any business (regardless of any financial connections) through all companies in the nation to only American companies. Not just apples and oranges, but sliced and diced fruit.

It appears from this that any job creation bill from Congress should focus on our big businesses, those with the ability to properly accomplish this task. After all the SBA says that 56% of all start-ups fail in the first few years.

The current Senate jobs bill, which Sen. Reid says he wants to simplify over this next weekend, is estimated to cost $52 billion and the House version from December was $155 billion. The Senate bill relies on tax breaks and construction projects while the House’s one was construction and state aid packages. That is a lot of our money but it pales in comparison to the funds already held by big business.

Bloomberg is reporting that “A majority of companies in the Standard & Poor’s 500 stock index increased cash to a combined $1.18 trillion while simultaneously reducing spending, keeping a jobs recovery on hold.” These are S&P’s, not the Blue Chip, big boys. 256 of these companies added about 4 times the House bill’s cost to their cash reserves in the past year. Does the Senate need to give more incentives when they have socked away nearly the National Debt?

Where did these companies get this money? Why we gave it to them. We the consumer and we the government. We gave it to them for products sold and for services rendered, since every business need to make some profit. That works out to about $1,600 per person that we gave them last year alone and just over $3,800 in all. $1,600 is just under double my Federal Income withholding for last year. And this is not the big guys. This is also money that is NOT going for job creation.

This is money that is not going for investment in alternative energy exploration (a job creator), or high speed rail, or re-localization of agriculture, or recreating our ability make things for ourselves, all good job creators. This money is also not just setting around doing nothing, it has become the plaything of our financial institutions and we saw what they did with such playthings in the past years.

Job creation is not something that the Federal government should pay for.

Can We Get Started Sometime Soon?

Some Americans are so impatient. Nothing can come soon enough for them. We now have a federal administration which is keen on the advancement of mass transit and high speed rail and now we can't wait for such a system to arrive in all the small towns across the country. Lexington is one of those cities.

Lexington and Kentucky have not been in the forefront of innovation or execution of transportation by any stretch of the imagination. We have had to wait our turn for the latest thing to come down the pike.

Lexington was not the first city in Kentucky to have rail travel. This is probably due to the lack of population that would require such transportation and the lack of funds necessary to maintain a railroad. Many other cities were connected by rail before Lexington finally got in on the act. We are in similar shape today in relation to high speed rail and, by most accounts, even any type of regional rail. Mass transit is beneath most of the supposed well to do in Lexington, whether it be bus or rail.

The local proponents of mass transit, currently ours is a less than stellar bus system, can only dream of light rail and/or a regional commuter system. There are just not enough riders interested in such a scheme. Those of us who would propose such an idea are considered a radical fringe by some and crazy by others. Yet there are a growing number of us, right here in Lexington.

Like I said, we now have an administration unlike any that we have seen in the past 20 years. A Transportation Secretary who is trying to expand Amtrak and not kill it. A President who is not nominating board members that wish to shut down the only passenger rail left in America. A Vice President who actually regularly rides mass transit, when possible(and not to a photo op). We have a Senatorial Candidate with a regional rail plan. We even have a Federal commitment of funding for more transit projects over the next several years.

So why is all the national focus on High Speed Rail? Why are there calls for stylish terminal facilities to enhance the riders experience. Shouldn't America get to a brisk walk before we learn to run. We are starting to act like the socialite who dresses in the fanciest warm-up gear, just so that they can be seen being chauffeured to and from the gym without actually working out. Kentucky just needs to get going on pushing some sort of passenger rail.

I have touted Dr. Mongiardo's rail plan here before and I had hoped that he would come and explain it further. I now am told that he did come to Lexington, to a conference of Transportation professionals, back in January. I wish that he had made his presentation to a general audience rather than to an assembly which appears to most of us as being drug toward the future instead of leading the charge. I think that he would have found a much more receptive crowd to his plan, from people who want to use it instead of make a career off of it, from people who want to get somewhere on it instead of get rich off of it.

I don't want to sound impatient, but I do want to get started. Just some sort of a start.

Examples Of Good And Bad Interstate Use Or Reuse

I am continually amazed at the seemingly thought out opinion pieces that with one sentence can eliminate all credibility built in the rest of the work. One recent op-ed in the New York Times was penned by such a writer, Karrie Jacobs.

Ms. Jacobs feels that the U.S. should take a look at re-purpose the Interstate Highway system, mainly to transport things other than fossil fueled vehicles. On its face this sound all well and good, until you look a little deeper. Placing America's electrical grid under the existing pavement of the Interstates would probably take as much federal dollars as building a new system from scratch. Not counting the logistical problems of heat build up or the regular maintenance requirements of the equipment, the excavation of the subsurface would be very expensive. Secondly, these Interstates do not always go to places that would require electrical service, such as facilities that cannot be placed near usual transportation routes.

What kills it for me is the assertion of her "most obvious" alternative.

The most obvious use for the Interstate’s corridors is rail transportation. If we are going to spend billions rehabbing the highways, shouldn’t we, at the same time, invest in adjacent rail lines like the 800-mile high-speed rail system voters approved last year in California

As I have written before, the current vision of High Speed Rail in America would be considered only medium speed in the rest of the world and the Interstate system was designed for automobile speeds of 90+ at best. Any reuse of the Interstate by rail, high speed or otherwise, would have to take this into consideration. The curves are designed much too tightly for high speed rail and the hills are at too steep a grade for just about any rail and the current interchanges are not suitable for transitioning from one line to another without sacrificing way too much time in doing so.

This is an idea that will not work without way too much effort for the good that it will do.

In contrast, the city of Providence R.I. is well along with their project to relocate Interstate 195 from downtown to the outskirts of the city. In doing so they will free up 39 acres of prime downtown land, 20 of which will be sold to developers and a reconnected street grid will aide the inner city neighborhoods.

Providence is just one of the many urban areas that have decided to remove their massive expressways, once thought of as necessary for the survival of downtowns and now considered hindrances to continued urban growth. Lexington's lack of a downtown freeway has usually been blamed for our traffic troubles. I, for one, am thankful that we will not be following other cities in this pattern.

Failing To Build Is Building To Fail

We in America are poised, again, to fail.

The opportunity is rearing its head and I wonder if we can jump at the chance to show our collective stupidity, again. The current rage in Washington, if not in parts of the rest of the country, is the stimulus money designated for High Speed Rail(HSR). $ 8 Billion for HSR and that is promised to be the starting level. Even more stimulus money is planned for rebuilding our other rail facilities. Yet nobody is talking about revamping our automobile industry to include the HSR vehicles. And somebody else is watching.

German engineering giant Siemens and their national railway operator Deutsche Bahn, already well ahead of America's companies, are hungrily watching to see how much they can profit from our stimulus package. Will our tax money pay for returning their workers to full employment? Both GM and Chrysler are being bailed out by the US taxpayers yet the only transportation modes being considered for these companies is automobiles and trucks. Where is the evidence of American ingenuity and expertise in the rail industry, why firmly planted in the dismantling of the passenger rail system back in the '60s.

This past month the "Cash for Clunkers" program boosted auto sales for Ford, Toyota and Honda yet did little for GM and Chrysler (see link here). And just who are the majority owners of these fine losers? The American people, of course. We need to pay ourselves first and invest in an American controlled transportation manufacturer. That will take a change in just what we manufacture.

We are going to need a quantity of light-rail vehicles, as well as a larger quantity of heavier rail vehicles and a good number of High Speed Rail trainsets. I see no reason that these vehicles cannot be produced right here in the good old USA. By the folks that built the trains that connected the East coast with the West. We can employ our own engineers to design our rail facilities(NASA probably has a few dozen capable of the job). We have people who can design and build the tracks, as well as maintain them, right in our back yard. So, how long are we going to stand in our own way of getting the job done?

There is currently only ONE producer of streetcars in America, The Oregon Iron Works, and they aren't even in the transportation business. They do dams and bridges and things. Shouldn't we have our transportation people designing these things?

The "Cash for Clunkers" program was to designed to make the individual auto more efficient, a streetcar system can make our entire city more efficient and a High Speed Rail system can make the whole country more efficient.

One last question. Does anyone know the total value of the aircraft owned by the aviation industry, both in service and those mothballed out in the desert? I would love to know the answer.

Are You Paying For Someone Else's Airport?

I learn something new every day but today's new facts are startling. The Federal government pays(subsidizes) airlines to fly to many smaller airfields that cannot support regular air traffic. And this is how the "free enterprise" system is supposed to work?

This whole subject came up from a link on Overhead Wire to a story in the New York Times on small cities helping to pay for their air service. There was mention of a program that I did not know existed, the Essential Air Service program. This program was put in place during the deregulation of the airlines in 1978, so that smaller communities which had air service would not lose it due to corporate decisions.

The original program was set up to last 10 years, more than enough time to plan for and fund some alternatives to air travel for these smaller cities. The program has been extended and modified over the years with some airports being removed from the list of subsidized fields and, remarkably, others added to the list. The airport in Owensboro, Ky. was added sometime around 2000, perhaps due to the efforts of 2 Republican senators and a Republican congressman, and is subsidized to the tune of approximately $1.5 million a year. Recently, a new airport was opened in Somerset, Ky., another Republican stronghold, but it has not made the list -yet.

The timing of this program, coming just 10 years after the creation of AMTRAK(or the dismantling of America's passenger rail service) leads me to wonder-just where is the Essential Rail Service program for those cities who lost passenger rail service? And what about those cities who lost ALL rail service because of a heavily subsidized highway system given to the trucking industry?

Forty years of disproportional funding of transportation infrastructure leaning more toward highways than rail(or air) has left us well behind the rest of the world in terms of a balanced transportation system. Thirty years of funding airlines serving sparsely populated regions could have been spent on implementing a High Speed Rail ground work(like the Europeans and the Japanese) to the point the we too could be knocking on the door of 300 mph train travel.

The NY Times article focused on the smaller cities which don't appear on the EAS list, yet are seeing a loss of air service and the local community's efforts to maintain air services. These cities are too large for government subsidy and too small for economic air travel. They would be perfect for a regional rail connection to the HSR system currently proposed. The Europeans do it all the time, why can't we.

How many of these small communities will have the Federal government foot the bill for an airport and enough funding to get things started, priming the pump as it were, and then expect the same or increased funding to tide them over the rough spots. And how many rough spots will there be in the future? Airlines are the least efficient of all the mass transportation systems available today and I wonder how much longer they will be around.

With a new transportation bill pending(and maybe held up for a while) in Congress maybe now is the time to reconsider legislation of Essential Air Services and just how essential some of it is. Should these communities be weaned off the Federal dole and let their airports fend for themselves, a la the route that the Bush administration wished to do to AMTRAK? Should these airports let the free market decide(without outside manipulations) and if they aren't used adequately then they should fold? That is the Republican, is it not?

More Thoughts on Yesterday's Post

I left something out of yesterday's entry on High Speed Rail and its possibilities in the state of Kentucky. Our Transportation Cabinet planners and the ones from Wisconsin must have attended the same classes.

The Wisconsin Transportation people are advocating an airport location for the site of a HSR extension/enhancement strictly on the basis of the amount of available parking. Yes, that's right automobile parking. Can these people get an auto-centric society out of their heads?

The beauty of the European mass transportation "system" is that it is seamless. Home to downtown, downtown to downtown, downtown to business/recreation and back again, all without using a personal automobile. Why does it work so well?

Frequency and speed. Multiple trips a day between cities at high speed(+110) and from downtown to downtown would make a personal auto for out-of-town travel unnecessary. It would remove the need for gas, parking and the inevitable traffic jam delays that we now see on our inter-city trips via Interstates.

Central location of stations. Transportation from where the people are to where they want to be. Why do we go out to the airport, park the car, fly to a destination, rent a car/hire a taxi, go into town and do business? And then repeat in reverse to come back home. Why not just cut out a few of those expense laden steps? You may also notice that I left out the time waster of TSA screenings.

Integration of systems. The European model is a co-ordination of multiple systems(or sub-systems) that are coordinated into one well functioning transportation system. We, as Americans, should not try to implement just one or two of these. We will doom ourselves to failure by leaving out, what may appears to be a small element, which binds the whole together.

Granted, the planning for this AMTRAK station in Wisconsin started in 2000, about the same time as the Kentucky study, but conditions do change and their(and our) thinking must change with them.

What High Speed Rail Can Do To Regional Air Travel

Back in March I posted about an old document on Kentucky's high speed rail thoughts of 1999. In that post I linked to a projection that Spain's short haul air travel would be affected.

Today I have a link to some more recent facts. People are getting around Spain in more comfort and more ease by train than by plane, and leaving a smaller carbon footprint.

High-speed trains pulled by aerodynamic engines with noses shaped like a duck-billed platypus are grounding aircraft across Spain. The year-old Barcelona-Madrid line has already taken 46% of the traffic – stealing most of it from fuel-guzzling, carbon-emitting aircraft. As the high-speed rail network spreads a web of tracks across Spain over the next decade, it threatens to relegate domestic air travel to a distant second place.

46% This is the kind of results that the US should be experiencing today, if they had started planning for high speed rail(or any kind of rail) following the gas crisis of the '70s.

From England we get a report that their new Secretary of Transport, Lord Adonis is advocating the end of domestic air travel and even the short flights to European destinations. The comments come as air passengers are having to contend with the scrapping of hundreds of flights a week by airlines and fact that domestic flights have been in steady decline in recent years, with the number of passengers dropping from 26.1 million in 2005 to 24.3 million last year.

How about Germany? Even there we see a sharp reduction in domestic air travel.

Germany's high-speed rail network has put pain to short-haul flights between several cities. Once, there were hundreds of flights a day transferring tens of thousands of passengers between Berlin and Hamburg, Frankfurt and Cologne, Frankfurt and Stuttgart, Bremen and Cologne. All have been closed down due to cheaper and faster rail travel.

Is it any wonder that President Obama and Transportation Secretary La Hood are talking about America's need to join the High Speed Rail community? Of the industrialized nations, only one has fewer planned HSR miles than the US. The tiny island nation of Taiwan. These industrialized nations are also charging ahead with expansion and funding that roughly equals what we spend in federal money on highways.

I won't even speak about the fact that their (Obama and La Hood) idea of HSR is less than half the speed of the those who are really doing something.


I also want to thank The Overhead Wire and Broken Sidewalk for the links. I had a record day for visitors.

Passenger Rail in the 2035 MTP

Today I would like to take a look at the recently adopted 2035 Metropolitan Transportation Plan for Lexington and the MPO. My particular focus will be on one or two of my pet peeves, anything concerning rail.

Beginning in Chapter 3 the plan details an assessment of the present state of the transportation system and I am unaware of the reasoning behind the order of their sequencing. Obviously, the surface road network is of first priority as it has been since the '40s or before. This is followed by, and I don't know why, school transportation and taxi/limousine services. Passenger rail, which is next, does come before a practically, insignificant water transportation element(the Valley View ferry). Aviation, freight(road and rail) and transit(Lextran) make up the last items in the assessment. This order does not seem to fit any currently perceived hierarchy of transportation thought.

The initial paragraph of the passenger rail section states the AMTRAK operates the Kentucky Cardinal service from Louisville to Chicago daily while the highlighted link shows that the service was discontinued over 6 years ago. There is then a detailed(?) breakdown of the three closest AMTRAK stations, Cincinnati, Maysville and Louisville. The information given is apparently from a six+ year old schedule as the times and frequency data does not agree with the AMTRAK website and nowhere is it clarified that there is only ONE train a day(in alternating directions). The Louisville information, besides being old, does not show that the connection is made by motor coach and all the departure times for all stations are for service to Chicago. I have taken this route to Washington and on to New York(and back) in the past two years and can personally testify that there are very few empty seats.

This assessment does not include any estimations of current usage or demand nor does it contain any AMTRAK projections or on-time statistics. I don't see how any proposals could be set forth in the form of recommendations using this inventory of data.

Chapter 6 of the document contains the plan recommendations for each plan element. Their listed order is: Highway (of course) both short and long range, Transit(Lextran), Mobility(primarily rideshare/carpool/vanpool and awareness of transit/bike/ped/telecommuting), Bicycling/pedestrian, and other transportation modes.

At this point transportation by air is placed before rail despite ongoing consolidations in the airline industry and the demonstrated willingness of the new administration to push passenger rail, especially high speed rail. This new commitment to HSR(High Speed Rail) is mentioned yet any and all leading of the effort is left to the state Transportation Cabinet. What with the mayors of Louisville, Cincinnati and Nashville each touting regional rail in their areas, Lexington's mayor and Council are very quiet about the subject in public.

The one type of urban mass transit that is being discussed is, as most of should know I am not in favor of, the Automated Guideway Transit or AGT. These highly automated, elevated transit pods do enable a higher level of flexibility than the traditional streetcar model, but may not be able to be used in the case of failure of the automation system. The elevated guideways would alter the streetscape and the look of the downtown and may not fit with the proposed Downtown Master Plan, which though not adopted yet, is still in the minds of many urban citizens. An AGT wold certainly make Lexington a bit more unique, but the more traditionally minded Lexingtonians and others in Central Kenucky may be a roadblock. The AGT, although it may be next to last in the priority if recommendations, does have an impressive amount of information for something with so little publicity.

What you may have noticed over the foregoing paragraphs is the the mostly Federally funded, local MPO agency has little or no control over the planning efforts of Lextran, the Airport, Amtrak or, as I may get into later, the freight hauling modes of rail and trucking. As the umbrella transportation planning agency through which the Federal dollars should flow, there is little that they can do to influence how, where and when the funds will be disbursed.

I have not scrutinized the rest of the plan, nor do I intend to, as I dont want to get into which of the highway projects should get priority over another when I feel that they both could obtain the same results with a different mode as the solution.

Feel free to let me know if you believe some other solution is better.

High Speed Rail... Ten Years after

I came into possession of a document that I thought would not have been produced. An Examination of I-75, I-64 & I-71 High Speed Rail Corridors. Wow, was all I could say.

The Kentucky Transportation Cabinet...I mean KENTUCKY's...Transportation Cabinet asked for a study on High Speed Rail. Ten years ago. How many people knew this existed? How well was this publicized? Ten years ago did anybody care?

Ten years ago, when the SUV was just coming into it's own and gas was fairly cheap, no state transportation agencies were seriously studying High Speed Rail. Forget the fact that the Europeans had basically created it and the Japanese had perfected it, Americans had no need for it. The Americans had gas(we liberated Kuwait for it), we had autos (GM & Ford saw to that)and we had the Interstates(Congress and the the 1956 Highway Revenue Act took care of that). The airlines had been deregulated two decades before and fare were about 9% lower than 1978, even though nine of the MAJOR airlines had been sent into bankruptcy. We Americans had everything we needed to move about the country-time, money and modal options galore. We, as a whole, were not thinking about rail in any form, commuter, regional, standard or High Speed.

For just those reasons, I believe the premise of the above study is flawed. The methodology is sound but the assumptions and the associated data may have directed the conclusions toward a less than accurate assessment of the travel demand projections between the three cities..Lexington, Louisville and Covington

The first flaw that I see is the intent to connect the airports of the these major urban areas. Two of the airports are greatly removed from the population cores and any existing rail facilities. If the desire is to build a seamless multi-modal transportation system, why add to the expense by starting at the least integrated modes terminals?

Secondly the search for comparisons of city pairs connected by existing rail that would be of similar size led to only two previously studied areas, Detroit/Chicago and North Carolina's Piedmont Corridor.

Thirdly, I think that they limited their ridership estimates to the trips between the three cities although the did generate their numbers as a percentage of the air passengers of the three cities. It was recently reported that in Spain the HSR trains will beat the airlines and this analysis was estimating the demand to get to a different airport for a longer distance trip.

I, for one, would desire to take HSR not just to Cincinnati for the day but on to Washington for the weekend, much like the short plane trip to connect on by air. A short hop to Cincinnati by plane would not only involve airfare, but cab fare or car rental fee, into downtown and back. A train should take you from downtown to downtown and connect with the urban mass transit node there. I took a trip to Washington D.C. in the early '90's where I flew into Reagan, switched to the Metro, changed trains in Farragut Center, exited the Metro, walked across the street to the hotel, signed in and changed clothes, back across the street and a train to Union Station, hopped a MARC train to Baltimore for a ballgame(opening season in Camden Yards), back to D.C., the Metro to the hotel. All with a minimum of effort and cost, plus the idea that I had never been to D.C. before.

This study needs to be redone, and this time the estimates of ridership should include the desired destinations of a 600 mile radius as an initial "order of magnitude". I don't want anyone to get me wrong, I am glad that they were thinking ahead but their thinking was clouded by the highway first mentality of most transportation planners today.

Europe's view of good transit

On the heels of my last post comes a first hand report from the publisher of Destination:Freedom the weekly newsletter of National Corridors Initiative, Inc., a national rail advocacy group. Jim RePass’s lead article details the discrepancies between the U.S. and European modes of inter-city travel, and how the gap in service is widening despite all our rhetoric of wanting something better.

The Europeans have retained, maintained and enhanced their systems despite having two world wars ruin great swaths of their continent, while we Americans have driven ourselves to excess in city size, auto size and waistline size, in our relative peace and isolation at home of the last 80 years.

Europeans have the ability to travel from city to city at high speed, from city to village or station to residence at moderate speed or,best of all, they can travel from house in city A to house in city B without walking much more than a quarter mile the entire trip. And Americans think that they have the best standard of living. We Americans can do better. We Americans must do better. We Americans may already be too late to the party.

Reconnecting Lexington to the real world

I have, for the past week, been looking at where this country is heading with transit and by this I mean real mass transit, fixed-guideway, rails in the street mass transit. A recently released report from reconnecting America, called Jumpstarting the Transit Space Race has an excellent breakdown of the situation for the country as a whole and I want to consider how that relates to Lexington and the region.

Rising gas prices have prompted many around the country and in Lexington to use transit more and the ridership figures for Lextran reflect this very well. Auto use has actually declined 3% in the second quarter of 2008 while transit ridership increased 5.2% nationally.

One other statistic that has been rising is the number of transit projects authorized. In 1998 Congress passed TEA-21, the six-year funding bill for surface transportation projects and in that bill 221 were for transit. In 2004, Congress passed the SAFETEA-LU, and the transit projects in that bill rose to 331, a roughly 50% increase. Since then at least 64 new projects have been identified in the so called "transit space race" by many of the progressive metropolitan cities of the U.S. Lexington and Central Kentucky are quietly absent from this list. Lexington and its surrounding communities have not mentioned some sort of rail transit to connect them, even though there used to be a very popular interurban system in place.

There are now so many transit projects proposed that it is estimated that the total investment required would be equal to the entire SAFETEA-LU bill, highway and transit combined. A staggering $248 billion and that is just the new stuff. In order to modernize the existing systems to the new 21st century standards, billions more will be needed. Congressman DeFazio of Oregon has stated that "We're loving our transit systems to death". Well, I can say that in Lexington, on the leadership level, we are NOT. Lexington's Council and the "movers and shakers" don't take a hands off approach to transit, they seem to hold it well beyond arms length. Now I'm not talking about buses, what I mean is a real honest-to-goodness streetcar system.

Nobody in Lexington wants to say a word about one of those. Cities like Cincinnati, Louisville, Nashville, Indianapolis, Columbus and a good deal of the cities visited on CommerceLexington trips have talked about, mentioned, proposed and planned these kinds of systems. Many are funding their systems as we talk (or not talk) about ours. With all the complaining about high fuel prices(although they have fallen lately they will go back up) not one person in leadership position has called for a streetcar system to be reinstated. With all the talk of dependence on foreign oil no one speaks of an electric powered streetcar system. When the Planning Commission was told that their latest Comprehensive Plan lacked any mention of real solutions for traffic or transportation for the masses of the future, they ignored the comment and went on their merry way.

Nationally only a small portion of transits 20% of the $248 billion of SAFETEA-LU is spent on fixed-guideway systems, the majority is spent on buses and maintenance. At this current level of funding, all of the currently proposed projects would take 77 years to complete. Lexington, by not acknowledging that they have a need, have put themselves well beyond that time frame.

The report goes on to compare the U.S. to the rest of the world in terms of transit and how we trail India, England, China, Western Europe and even Canada. Denver and Houston have recently won support for entire transit systems from their voters. Actually, voters approved 70% of the transit measures on the ballots from 2000 to 2005. Lexington approved a Lextran taxing measure, but that just leaves us with diesel powered fuel guzzlers and not an efficient one at that. When first class U.S. cities are lacking in transit systems and the needed funding and Lexington is so far behind them, how can Lexington dream of being considered a "world class" city?

Lexington has invited the world to come visit in 2010 for the World Equestrian Games. A world where they understand transit systems and the need to get around the country without a personal vehicle and still be there on time. A world which realizes the distances from Louisville and Cincinnati are but a short train ride. A world who, given the current state of the global economy, may decide to stay home when they find out the transportation situation in Kentucky. We can only pray that this is not one of Lexington's very expensive decisions to become a global city.

Two recent polls, one by the National Association of Realtor and the AARP, have revealed that 23% of Americans believe that road building is a good way to combat congestion, 75% believe public transportation and better land use decisions would be better. The AARP found that many over 50 years of age want to drive less but don't have any alternative.

A lot of what happens in the transit in the next few years will depend on the election this fall. The next President and Congress will decide the fates of transportation and transit for the future generations of Americans. Congress recently passed and last week President Bush signed the Rail Safety bill which increases AMTRAK's funding to twice what they have been receiving. The next Congress could do even better for intercity rail. Reconnect America's CEO has called for a "transit building program not unlike the Interstate Highway building program". I would liken it more to a WPA type program, to build whats needed for America and create jobs for those who need them.

On the local level, we need to begin to identify the transit needs of the community for when, not if, fuel prices get out of reach for those who live too far from their work. Relying on that same fuel for transit will not solve the problem, only prolong the inevitable end. City leaders need to look to the future and other cities, and maybe, just a little bit into the past for the solutions for Lexington's transit problems.

And yes, the problems are there even if you don't see them yet.