Tag: passenger rail

Burning the Midnight Oil for Living Energy Independence

Freakonomist Eric Morris finishes up his tag-team attack with Ed Glaeser on the HSR policy with a post that confesses to the hack jobs both are doing on HSR policy – but works hard to spin the confession into a defense of the hackery.

Eric Morris’s efforts have been clearly the weaker of the two, to the point where Ryan Avent, who wrote blog posts to pick apart the analytical flaws of Ed Glaeser’s four part series as well as the first posts by Eric Morris, responded to Eric Morris’ last effort via twitter:

@ryanavent: Eric Morris closes HSR series by referring readers to Randal O’Toole. You know, in case you thought he and Glaeser were aiming for an honest critique

The main takeway point from below?

So the bait and switch is as follows. By overstating the costs and understating the benefits of Express HSR, “it costs too much”, or is only useful in a very few special cases, and therefore we cannot afford its “transformative benefits”. And by ignoring the fact that the benefit of investing in Emerging HSR is greater than the cost, and focusing on dismissing the quality of the benefits, the Emerging HSR is “unworthy” of investment because it is not “transformative” enough.

Burning the Midnight Oil for Living Energy Independence

I’ve seen this before … indeed, it was mentioned recently in some discussion threads of Libertarians Against Choice … the effort to play divide and conquer by arguing “if it doesn’t go 220mph, it isn’t worth doing”.

John Hilkevitch of the Chicago Tribune asked last Monday Are 110mph trains on the right track? (secondary link – I’m having trouble with the primary), establishing at the outset the false frame that 110mph and 220mph trains are two different “tracks” and we have to choose between them.

This is, of course, nonsense. Indeed, the first generation of bullet trains were 125mph trains, which is the second tier of the three-tier Department of Transport system.

However, there may be more going on here than just the run of the mill “make stuff up based on my uninformed reaction without finding out the facts” that seems to dominate the op-ed pages.

Crossposted from The Hillbilly Report, crossposted to Agent Orange

Burning the Midnight Oil for Living Energy Independence

Ryan Avent has provided high quality debunking of many of the flaws of Ed Glaeser’s ongoing analysis of Cost and Benefits of HSR. His current piece, Ed Glaeser’s Rail Fail, does not let us down.

Hell, I decided I’d read Ryan Avent’s piece first, before reading Glaeser, so I would not get riled up and start a long rant, only to find that Ryan has explained it more clearly … and to more total readers, to boot.

But I got riled up anyway. Ed Glaeser in the most recent piece comes out with a blatant lie, and one that’ll trap almost all casual readers.

Perhaps there is a recipe for being “provocative” when you do not, after all, want to depart from the economic mainstream – despite the radical incapacities that have come to prominence in the last year – and do not want to upset powerful vested interests.

If I was trying to use Eric Morris’ “Freakonomics Blog” piece for the NYTimes, High-Speed Rail and CO2, to work the recipe out, my guess would be:

• Pick a challenge to the status quo as your target
• Pick a sexy public issue as your line of attack
• Narrow the frame to bias the case in favor of the status quo
• cherry pick information sources that are biased toward your desired conclusions
• mis-state as much of the rest of the evidence as required to bring your conclusion home
  

So let’s see this recipe at work as Eric Morris does a hack piece trying to argue that HSR funding is bad for CO2 emissions.

H/T to Rafeal at the California HSR Blog for bringing this piece to my attention.

Burning the Midnight Oil for Living Energy Independence

Dan Walters in the Sacramento Bee asks:

Is this the time to launch construction of a high-speed railroad line between Northern and Southern California that will cost at least $40 billion, much of it from bonds to be repaid from a state budget that’s already gushing red ink?

Yes, say its fervent advocates, contending that a bullet train, similar to those in Europe and Japan, will reduce air and auto congestion, reduce greenhouse gases and generate many billions of dollars in economic benefits.

Dan Walters then throws all the complaints about the California HSR project he can find into a big pot, and stirs. Underneath the individual “points”, lies the main New Hooverist thesis … in hard times, we cannot afford to invest in the future.

Crosspost links collected at: Burning the Midnight Oil for Living Energy Independence

In Part 1, the testimony representing the Transbay Joint Power Authority, managing the Transbay project, resulted in such a pile of red herring left behind that it seemed that there was something fishy going on.

What that something fishy seemed to be was whether the Transbay Terminal “train box” was suited for serving as the main northern terminus for both California High Speed Rail (HSR) services and for Caltrain services.

But … what if the Transbay Terminal is not the terminus of the HSR services?

In that case, the problem turns from physical limits … to legal requirements that the design has to meet. A garbled version of that is showing up in the newspapers … join me beyond the fold as I try to ungarble the story.

Burning the Midnight Oil for Living Energy Independence

This is “part 2” of A Train Station Grows at Transbay … Hopefully not a Bonsai (pt. 1)

In Part 1, an effort was made to try to fit 8 High Speed Rail (HSR) trains per hour (tph), plus up to 8 Caltrain tph, into the proposed “train box” design for the Transbay terminal, which has 3 island platforms with a total of 6 platform tracks.

And the result is an ugly kludge that quite possibly cannot physically fit, and certainly would put a cramp on the operations of Caltrain. Since the 1999 San Francisco Proposition H made it a local ordnance for the Transbay Terminal to serve both High Speed Rail and Caltrain services, a design which is incapable of genuinely serving both certainly violates the spirit, if not the letter, of San Francisco law.

… Hopefully its not a Bonsai

Burning the Midnight Oil for Living Energy Independence

I was able to get an interesting look into the proposed future of Intercity Travel in the Bay at the Transbay Terminal (TBT) in San Francisco.

Senate Info Heairing on High Speed Rail in California

Note that I am not trying to give “objective reporting” on this issue but rather to give vent to my reaction to watching the hearing online … see The Troubling Discord Between Transbay and High Speed Rail Authorities for a less hot under the collar reaction.

One piece of information is that in California, when one public authority has the funding for sufficient staff and another doesn’t, and it comes to a fight, it is considered fair game for the staffed up authority to toss up spin and red herrings and biased analyses, confident that the other authority does not have the capacity to answer promptly.

Burning the Midnight Oil for Energy Independence (crosspost links at the blog)

There is this big emphasis on “shovel ready projects” in the Stimulus Bill … but now that the details are coming out, we can see that in transport, its just a load of horseshit used as an excuse for supporting business as usual.

The headline numbers are $30b highway spending, $10b for public transport and rail:

• Transit Capital Assistance, $15.9b in shovel ready projects, $6b in funding
  
• Amtrak, more than $10b in capital backlog, $0.8b in funding
  
• Fixed Guideway Infrastructure Investment, $50b capital backlog, $2b in funding
  
• Capital Investment Grants, $2.4b in already approved projects, $1b in funding
  

I got a “shovel-ready” project for you … shoveling out the bullshit from the Bush Administration Department of Transport and replacing the pandering to the oil companies with a concern for America’s Economic Future.

I have had a number of “I’d Like For Christmas” essays over the past three weeks … now its your turn.

To say you’d like Pedestrian/Cyclists transport infrastructure in the Infrastructure Stimulus Package, sign the Rails to Trails Infrastructure Petition and share it with your friends (as I’m doing here).

To say you’d like Rail and other Public Transport infrastructure investment, sign the Transportation for America Petition and pass it along.

To say you’d like a Green Stimulus Package, sign the Sierra Club Green Stimulus Package Petition and pass it along.

My Christmas List, below the fold.