By Frank on October 3, 2008
The Amtrak Bill has cleared both houses, been through conference committee, and is finally ready to hit the President’s desk, where he’ll sign it.
A separate appropriations bill will actually provide the cash. There’s lots of good stuff in there, for Amtrak nationally and for the Cascades corridor in particular.
Posted in tacoma
By Frank on October 1, 2008
WSDOT’s own Pt. Defiance bypass project got the biggest share of $30M in federal grants that were doled out today. The project is “underfunded by as much as $14.9M” before the grant came out, so presumably this will help close that gap and further savings can be found to make up the rest.
Virginia also got a few million to improve service between DC and Richmond.
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By Frank on September 28, 2008
The prolfieration of low-cost bus service between cities in the Northeast is either total genius, or a stunning indictment of our rail infrastructure (I think you know where I stand). The fact that rail service between DC, NY and Boston continues to be too slow, expensive and unreliable for regular use is very sad. And this is Amtrak’s best route!
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By Frank on September 24, 2008
Matt and I were talking about that Amtrak bill I blogged about this Summer. Turns out it’s still winding it’s way through Congress. It’s passed the House and Senate with veto-proof margins, but it still needs to go to conference committee and get signed by the President.
Posted in tacoma
By Frank on September 16, 2008
This is what I like to hear:
Across the aisle, a Newark-bound passenger Chrissy Dumbert took in the commotion and observed, “This is the craziest train ride I’ve ever been on.”
In the next car, Biden told another passenger that “If we get elected, it will be the most train-friendly administration ever.”
Like I said…
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By Frank on September 5, 2008
SeaPort Air claims it’s the first “green” airline, since it buys offsets for the small, fuel-effiicient turbo props it flies between Seattle and Portland.
The original “green” way to get to Portand, Amtrak Cascades, saw July ridership on the Seattle-Portland route increase 26 percent over last year.
SeaPort Air, which operates out of Boeing Field, claims 90 minutes from “downtown to downtown.” Prices start at $99 each way. Amtrak Cascades currently takes about 3.5 hours, with a goal of getting it down to 2.5 sometime in the future.
Posted in marginal service, tacoma
By Frank on September 4, 2008
Sometimes it’s hard to be a supporter of “19th-century choo-choo trains.” You read enough goofy op-eds and nasty blog comments, and you start to wonder, “am I crazy to think that improving America’s rail infrastructure would be a smart way to reduce our dependence on fossil fuels and create more livable communities?” After all, in just the last few years, Seattle voted to kill both the Monorail Project and Sound Transit 2.
But slowly, finally, things seem to be looking up. Global warming, $4 gas, and increasing traffic and airport congestion have made our pundits and politicians slowly realize that something needs to change. Even better, they’re making the realization that solving these problems will require a holistic approach, involving not only new and improved transit systems, but better neighborhood planning as well.
I don’t want to get ahead of myself, but it occured to me today that we may wake up on the morning of November 5 to a world in which:
All in all, not too shabby.
Posted in orcacard, Port, tacoma
By Frank on August 13, 2008
There’s an interview with Alex Kummant, Amtrak’s CEO, in the New York Observer. The Observer has a conservative bent, but rail transit in New York is like National Health Care in Britain — even the conservatives don’t question its existence.
Kummant seems like a sensible guy (see this 2006 profile in the NY Times), one who’s not interested in privatizing the system or even breaking off the NE Corridor.
In fact, Kummant downplays the idea of spending tens of billions on a 2-hour DC-to-NY HSR in the Northeast Corridor (where Amtrak already has 60 percent of the air-rail traffic), and instead suggests spreading that out over the system:
That’s right. You cannot have commuters on [a high-speed NE Corridor line]. Again, we run 750,000 commuters a day on our line. You can’t have any freight trains–we run 50 freight trains a day. You have to have completely different curvatures. You have to have different tunnels. And, again, wonderful, great, they’re vision statements; but, at the end of the day, you have to spend tens and tens of billions of dollars to do that. Then you have to ask yourself, ‘Is that really where you would put that capital?’
We continue to hear about, ‘Gee, how much more could be done?’ Fine. Maybe you can capture the other 40 percent [share of intercity Northeast air-rail commuters]. But I would argue you could capture that if we had new equipment; you could expand our capacity with new equipment; you could, again, drive the connectivity of the stations; you could make much higher-quality stations that basically drive connectivity with local operations. And I have little doubt that you could pick up another 20 points in share.
On the other hand, he suggests that HSR between Phoenix and LA is inevitable in his lifetime, which seems pretty aggressive (in a good way). He also uses the inevitability of such a line as a reason why we can’t abandon long-haul routes. Why dismantle the tracks, the stations, and the infrastructure on those long-haul lines if HSR (or pseudo-HSR) is just a couple of decades away?
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By Frank on August 4, 2008
France’s state-owned rail agency is going gangbusters:
[T]he new SNCF chairman sees rail stations, mainly in the regions, becoming new transport (and commercial) hubs not just for trains but for buses and trams – “all those places where people don’t want to bring their cars.”
SNCF executives believe rail can take market leadership from air and road on journeys up to four hours long and point to the success of Eurostar (part owned by the group) in increasing traffic so far this year by around a fifth on the back of shorter journey times between London and Brussels/Paris. You can even get to Marseille from Paris in little more than three hours.
Pepy is, therefore, unfazed by the recent move by Air France-KLM to join forces with French freight operator Veolia and launch its own TGV services to, say, Charles de Gaulle airport. “SNCF is not going to be an airline-style operator as we need to operate regional and local services as well.”
This comes via Savage via AutoblogGreen, who both focus on SNCF’s $1.7B profit in 2007. While that’s certainly encouraging, I’d caution against focusing too much on those numbers. SNCF runs both freight and passenger service in France, as a government monopoly. I’m pretty sure that if the US congress decided to nationalize BNSF, Union Pacific and the rest and roll them up into a huge ball with Amtrak, the resulting agency would be profitable.
Still, it goes to show that if you invest consistently in rail infrastructure, you can expand it pretty rapidly when demand rises. On the other hand, if you let it decay for 40 years and then try to throw a hail mary at the last minute, it’s going to be pretty difficult to achieve anything significant.
Posted in HOV Lanes, tacoma, taxes
By Frank on June 23, 2008
“Investment in Amtrak’s infrastructure has been in decline,” says the reporter from CBS news in this clip. The passive voice! As if the investment just sorta naturally started declining on its own!
Of course, here in the real world, there was nothing natural about it. The Bush administration and the Republican-controlled congress starved Amtrak of funds for seven years. Very intentionally. Why is that so hard to say?
CBS does its viewers a real disservice by failing to point this stuff out, regardless of which President or party is responsible. Politics and democracy only work if people believe that things are the way they are because of the decisions made by elected officials.
Otherwise, why bother voting if these things just happen magically and people are helpless to stop them?
(via)
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