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Rail Takes Back Seat as States Target Obama Stimulus for Roads
Heidi Przybyla, Bloomberg
Missouri’s plan to spend $750 million in federal money on highways and nothing on mass transit in St. Louis doesn’t square with President-elect Barack Obama’s vision for a revolutionary re-engineering of the nation’s infrastructure.
Utah would pour 87 percent of the funds it may receive in a new economic stimulus bill into new road capacity. Arizona would spend $869 million of its $1.2 billion wish list on highways.
While many states are keeping their project lists secret, plans that have surfaced show why environmentalists and some development experts say much of the stimulus spending may promote urban sprawl while scrimping on more green-friendly rail and mass transit.
“It’s a lot of more of the same,” said Robert Puentes, a metropolitan growth and development expert at the Brookings Institution in Washington who is tracking the legislation. “You build a lot of new highways, continue to decentralize” urban and suburban communities and “pull resources away from transit.”
(24 December 2008)
Need a Ride? Check Your iPhone
Anne Eisenberg, New York Times
SOON you may no longer need to stick out your thumb to catch a ride. Instead, you may get one by tapping your fingers on your iPhone.
Avego, based in Kinsale, Ireland (www.avego.com), is demonstrating an iPhone application intended to let drivers and prospective passengers connect and share rides.
When the program is available, drivers who want to offer rides will first download the app, then record their preferred route, said Sean O’Sullivan, managing director of Avego and executive chairman of Mapflow, Avego’s parent company, based in Dublin.
“You put the iPhone on the dashboard, and it records the entire trip and sends the route to our network,” he said. The system stores the route, adding it to its menu of paths and pick-up points and offering them automatically to interested riders.
… It will take a while to establish a critical mass of drivers and passengers, Mr. O’Sullivan acknowledged. But he hopes that the chance to defray expenses will change the entrenched habits of many drivers who treasure their solitude. “It will require behavior changes on the part of drivers and riders,” he said.
Although there is anecdotal data that carpooling rose during the recent spike in gasoline prices, American drivers have historically preferred solo trips.
(20 December 2008)
Ride-sharing ideas like Avego have been around for a while (for example, the “Smart Jitney” idea of Pat Murphy of Community Solutions). However, this is a unified system from an entrepeneur with previous successes (e.g. Mapflow).
From a peak oil perspective, ride-sharing could be an important strategy in dealing with sudden oil shortages. – BA
Cheap seats, danger meet on illegal Manila trolleys
Aaron Favila, Associated Press
Mode works OK until unscheduled train comes along
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The illegal trolley ride along Manila’s railway is dangerous. But it has an irresistible draw amid hard times: It’s cheap and doesn’t use oil.
For years, dozens of desperate men in Manila’s working-class district of Pandacan have used a two-mile stretch of state-owned rail that cuts through the congested community to ply their dangerous trade.
When no chugging trains are in sight, they sneak their eight-seat trolleys — small, metal-wheeled carts with benches fashioned from scrap wood — on the railway to ferry students, office workers and even policemen on short trips within Pandacan.
The power comes from brute strength.
“I use my feet, my gasoline is my sweat,” said Ryan Dejucodes, 28.
(20 December 2008)
Rail Efficiencies
Hans Noelder, The Oil Drum
… Environmental organizations and sustainability advocates routinely assert that energy consumption for passenger rail is much “greener” than driving or flying. But Tables 2.13 and 2.14 (summarized in 2.12, above) in the Department of Energy’s Transportation Energy Data Book #27 indicate that existing Amtrak intercity passenger rail is only 25% more efficient than the fleet average for cars; furthermore, Amtrak is only 19% more efficient than air travel!
… Of course the real issue vis a vis energy and CO2 is the practical potential for these transportation modes in the future, not the existing efficiencies of each as currently deployed. During the past half-century, aerospace companies (with lavish financial support from the Department of Defense) have pursued the most ambitious research and development programs by far of any “transportation” industry in the United States. Along the way, improvements in engines, aerospace materials, and aircraft designs have yielded astonishing increases in the efficiency of air transport (almost ten-fold). And even though they vigorously marketed absurdly inefficient cars in the ’60’s and then gas-guzzling SUVs and pickup trucks more recently, automobile companies also made notable investments in R&D during the same time period; consequently the energy efficiency of engines and transmissions were substantially improved. (It is the sheer size and weight of SUVs and pickup trucks which make them gas hogs, not their drive-trains.)
Meanwhile, passenger rail locomotives and rolling stock in our nation changed very little even as ridership plummeted (until recently) and domestic engineering activity all but ground to a halt. Thus we must ask how efficient our passenger trains could be if they were constructed with aerospace materials, up-to-date engineering, etc. What if hybrid drives and regenerative braking were widely deployed? What if more trains were electrified? What if the expansion of electrified rail were coordinated with upgrading the national electrical grid? Having languished for so long, surely our passenger railroads are ripe for major improvements!
And there are sound reasons to believe that investing in rail technologies rather than airplanes or automobiles is likely to produce the biggest efficiency gains overall.
This is a guest post by Hans Noelder, a mechanical engineer and cofounder of the Madison Wisconsin Peak Oil Group. This is a link to Hans’ blog, where this originally was posted.
(26 December 2008)
When it’s time to clear roadways, Seattle holds the salt
Kathy Mulady and Robert McClure, Seattle Post-Intelligencer
But some say environmental focus can miss the bigger problems
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Workers have dropped 8,500 tons of sand on city streets to try to make roads more passable during this most recent snowstorm — that’s more than has been used in the past three years in total.
What they haven’t used is rock salt, a good but some say environmentally unfriendly way to clear the roads of snow and ice.
… Road salt does pose environmental threats, scientists say. But that has to be measured against the damage done by auto accidents.
A 2005 study focusing on the Northeast, where massive amounts of road salt are applied annually, found that some streams were one-quarter as salty as sea water, and were killing animals and fish. A second study that year found that the use of rock salt to melt street ice had increased a hundredfold nationally since 1940.
(24 December 2008)
A dramatically better story than the one that appeared in the rival Seattle Times:
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/localnews/2008551284_snowcleanup23…
The Post-Intelligencer article presents a complex picture, whereas the Seattle Times article has an Archie Bunker-ish tone to it. The Times story contains no serious attempt to understand WHY the Seattle authorities decided against salt. A few minutes using Google would identify a host of issues.
Giving the whole picture is especially important when people are stressed and upset. (I’m sure I would be upset if I were trying to drive on Seattle’s icy roads right now.)
Using salt on roads is the archetypal environmental story.
Though it’s complicated, we quickly become fixated on the inconvenience to humans. We lose interest when it comes to investigating damage to ecosystems. We’re apt to be satisfied with intuition and anecdotal evidence, even though science tells us that these are clearly insufficient.
I would be curious about the effects on groundwater and plants. As a gardener, I’m acutely aware of salt’s toxicity. Salting the earth was a scorched earth policy in ancient times.
The subject cries out for good in-depth coverage.
Background article from “Chicago Wilderness”
http://www.chicagowildernessmag.org/issues/winter2004/salt.html
Technical quotes from Environmental Science & Technology journal
(Long-Term Sodium Chloride Retention in a Rural Watershed: Legacy Effects of Road Salt on Streamwater Concentration)
“We estimate that salt used for deicing accounted for 91% of the sodium chloride input to the watershed…”
“Increases in summer concentrations indicate that chloride was retained in the groundwater or soils. There is ample evidence that sodium and chloride can be retained in watersheds for significant lengths of time.”
“Potential Effects. Increasing sodium concentrations in drinking water reservoirs pose a serious human health concern (4). Additionally, ecosystem effects of rising sodium chloride can be significant but many environmental questions remain unanswered. High concentrations of sodium and chloride are often found in surface and groundwater close to roads (34), and in urban areas concentrations can exceed 3000 mg/L (8, 35), which can exceed tolerance for freshwater life (36). Ecosystem functions can be altered at lower concentrations than lethal levels (3, 34).”
“Determination of critical levels of sodium or chloride perhaps should not only include consideration of lethal levels, but also effects on biodiversity and ecosystem function, especially when endangered species are affected or invasiveness of unwanted species is enhanced. Salinity
is increasing in rivers and lakes nationwide (8, 12), and continued monitoring will be important to understand its effects. ”
-BA
