Railroad Freight is critically congested

Obama may be bushy tailed and eager, but the frail freight system is not elastic enough to meet our needs. High Speed Passenger Rail does nothing but make the problem worse, and the US economy will be choked right back into recession. That is my interpretation of this report.

Amtrak, barely used in percentage terms, occupies 30% of the rail space in many US regions. Obama has let the HSR lobby rise at the expense of this critical rail freight problem, and Obama should know better he has been dealing with the wost of the freight congestion problems for years, Chicago.

Somebody in the Department of Transportation has not been thinking this through.

CALPers pension losses hit cities big time

California cities will pay for a long time for CALPers pension losses.

HT to Pension Watch, this story from Bakersfield will be typical.

"Bakersfield will pay about $7.5 million annually for 30 years to cover a single year's heavy losses at the giant state pension fund it contracts with, city officials estimate.

The staggering bill will be in addition to ongoing pension payments. The city will pay about $19 million to the retirement fund this fiscal year, which started July 1."

California cities have two choices, seek bankruptcy so as to void obligations, or cut back on services to pay retired city workers.

Corruption and Poor Performance for Light Rail

As told by Randal O'Toole.

Same author on Denver:

'Denver voters approved a 119-mile rail system in 2004 on the promise that it would cost $4.7 billion to build it by 2017. The current estimate is up to $7.9 billion, and the regional transit agency says the system might not be complete until 2034'

Ottawa killed a Light Rail fiasco.

Hay Group, auditor of national transit, thinks San Jose Light Rail basically sucks.

All over the West, Light Rail performs poorly and does not attract new development, does not increase ridership, and is only useful in conjunction with the car and parking.

I give Randy O'oole the floor:

"New Secretary of Transportation Norman Mineta may be one of the costliest appointments to George Bush's cabinet. A strong enthusiast of light-rail transit, as congressman from San Jose Mineta funneled hundreds of millions of dollars into that region's light-rail system.

San Jose's light rail has turned out to be an even more spectacular failure than the ones in Sacramento, Portland, and Los Angeles. Yet regions all over the country, including Houston, Seattle, and Orange County, suffer from light-rail envy and are eagerly planning new rail systems.

That Mineta remains a proponent of light rail shows that he hasn't learned the most important lesson from those cities that have already built light rail. That lesson is that this nineteenth-century technology completely fails to meet the transportation needs of twenty-first-century cities.

Does light rail improve transit? No, most cities that built light rail experienced a decline in transit's share of travel. This is partly because the expense of light rail forced transit agencies to increase fares, as Minneapolis is about to do.

Is light rail faster and more attractive to transit riders than buses? No, transit riders are sensitive to frequencies and speed, and buses can easily run on schedules more frequent and faster than light rail. Where most light rail lines average just 20 miles per hour, many express bus routes average better than 30 miles per hour.

Does light rail reduce congestion? No, it increases congestion whenever the rail lines occupy former street space and also because it is such an ineffective form of transit. Traffic growth on the freeways paralleling Portland's light-rail lines accelerated after the light rail replaced faster express bus routes.

Is light rail cost effective? No. The average light-rail line planned or under construction will cost more per mile than a four-lane freeway. Yet no light-rail system in the nation carries as many people (in passenger miles per route mile) as a single lane mile of typical urban freeway.

Nor is light rail cost-effective when compared with bus transit. One dollar spent on bus transit can provide the same benefits as $10 to $100 spent on light rail. Light rail is so expensive that most cities that have built it lacked the funds to make needed bus improvements."

Norman Mineta is a disaster.


Why are transit planners caught up in the old technology of 1920, like they want to replay the Great Depression?

The Left attacks the Oakland Connector Fiasco

The Oakland, CA airport connector program is still under continuing attack for foolishness. It is the nonsense of building guideways for a people mover, above one of the main commercial area of the city.

Urban Habitat summarizes the basic complaint. It is a bad deal for Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART), likely resulting in major cost over-runs. It is a bad deal for the Hegenberger corridor, which does not need some monster guideway running through.

Bart has an 1880 mindset trying to upgrade to a 1950 infrastructure. My suggestion to the Oakland City council is to come out in a full assault on this nonsense.

The correct answer, of course, is to automate lanes along Hegenberger road, inside the airport, and on to Bart. Work with PATH, in Berkely, or the Mineta center in San Jose. These two technical groups, with proper public auditing, can move traffic, cargo and people all around the airport/Bart corridor. Using technology, we can lower the total transportation costs by at least a third for all businesses along Hegenberger. Some jobs lost, but thousands gained.

If you are from the Bay Area, California I suggest you follow the link above, and support a reconsideration of the proposal.

Bombardier guided trams suck

According to this critical review of their use in Nancy Fr.

I agree, they use a mechanical guide, how dumb is that? They designed the thing in 2001, they could have called any of a half dozen technology vendors to get optical guidance from the lane markings.

Anyway, that is my job, locate dense transit planners before they get all "animal spirited" about some proprietary, half designed transit gimmicks.

Do not invest in Bombardier, they are off my investment list until I see evidence that they use digital technology.

Yet in 2004 we have this:

"Irisbus has supplied ten Civis guided vehicles to operate in Las Vegas, the gambling capital of the world. The fleet entered operation for the first time on the famous 'Strip' under the eyes of the city authorities and representatives of the State of Nevada.
Fitted with Siemens Transportation Systems' state-of-the-art optical guidance equipment the Civis has become an integral feature of the Las Vegas landscape and is running on the first exclusive Bus Rapid Transit right-of-way, set up by the local organizing authority Regional Transportation Commission."

So I have IrisBus in my investment list, Bombadier out.

Here, you can read about UC Berkely and their expanded trials with magnetic guidance systems for BRT. Magnetic guidance has the advantage of working in snow or rain, unlike optical.

The New Auto Trams

The New AutoTrams

From this science article. These multi-carriage configuration contain visual guidance for lane following.

"The advantages of a train and a bus are united in the AutoTram: It has the transportation capacity of a streetcar and the versatility of a bus. Fraunhofer researchers (Germany) have cooperated with Hübner GmbH to devise a new concept for a modular vehicle that, depending on the volume of passengers, can either be operated as a single bus or assembled to form a uni-directional or bi-directional high-capacity vehicle."

This is what we want for BRT.

Measuring the global yield curve

This post by David Weil talks about real world measurement of GDP from outer space. If it works then we have the global monetary standard.

Technology and the HOV lanes.

The problem is how to merge existing auto technology with digitally assisted lanes? The demand for command control means a forward technology conversion for autos. Obstacle detection, lane following, and communications.

Conversion kits come with a price tag up to $2,000; and will be available for newer cars only. Since the new technology lanes have more traffic variety, total congestion goes down, more traffic is managed for efficiency.

So, this add-on industry will thrive for ten years, longer, as the cost of conversion drops. Freight will be a large buyer, allowing freight companies to lower their initial costs of digital assist.

The HOV lanes know have complete knowledge, the system is closed to non-certified traffic.

I add this company and this market to the pile of investments in the industry. I am also looking at automatic loading and unloading vendors, robot arms, efficient pick up.

Checking historical data

Shiller's Historical inflation

How does one come up with very old data? Use historical newspapers and other reported indexes at the time. Data collected in 1890 had greater error than data collected in 1925, because of increased technology. Or, more plainly, how did Shiller filter for local (temporarl) volatility? We must to deduce anything in the variance change.

Political calculates that the change in volatility from 1890 to 1925 as follows:

"We find, through simple visual inspection, that the Federal Reserve has indeed had a powerful effect upon the volatility we observe in the rate of inflation in the United States."

The problem is that a lot of industries had lower inventory volatility by using newer technology.

Tube Freight

A fun idea.

We have tubes, or we can simulate them with existing tracks. What we need is light weight, local, automated freight on the rails, to interface with semi-automated street operations. Ultra simple cargo exchange between steel and rubber wheeled makes for great utility of interleaving light weight freight during underutilized rail periods.