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TRAINS: A travel choice Americans want

Getting in a Holiday Spirit, “Train-Style”

Thursday, November 30, 2006

The time of year has again come and gone, a bright spot in this life, where I get to directly serve the natural constituency of NARP—the passengers.

For about 17 years now, I have been privileged to serve as a Washington Union Station volunteer guide during the Thanksgiving travel weekend. I select the busiest shifts, 6:00-9:00 p.m. Wednesday and 12:00-3:00 p.m. Sunday. This is a chance to put our “inherent” knowledge to work for the good of people; both passengers and their loved ones.

Americans are a little spoiled, you know, as in the ice cream store, ignoring the flavors list while asking the attendant to recite the list and then ordering vanilla. They are also accustomed to indifferent service in even upscale venues.

That makes it all the more enjoyable to receive multiple heartfelt thanks when you help a parent unite with their homecoming student or direct a teenager to their grandmother who was coming from Philadelpia but “the trains are only coming from Boston and New York.” Yes, this is hard on the feet, but strengthening to the heart.

Happy holidays to all rail advocates and passengers worldwide.

—Jim Churchill, NARP Vice President

Ed Note—This year, for the first time in over ten years of living in Washington, I stayed in town until Thursday morning and joined Jim at Union Station on Wednesday evening. I echo his sediments 100%—Dave Johnson

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Crawfordsville Students Receive Another Honor!

Wednesday, November 15, 2006

The students from Crawfordsville High School have received another award for their work! This time, they are the 2006 Amtrak Champion of the Rails award winner.

Above, left to right, Dr. Helen Hudson, Natalie Davis, Paul Utterback, Mathew Kelsey, and Dr. Kathleen Steele accept the Amtrak “Champion of the Rails” Award from Amtrak President and CEO Alex Kummant during the October 18 Amtrak Employee Awards banquet.

The Crawfordsville students have received many honors, including the Indiana High Speed Rail Association’s Golden Spike and NARP’s Youth Rail Passenger Citizenship Award.

The project continues, with a new crop of students continuing the efforts of last year’s class. We can all learn a great deal from what the students at Crawfordsville have accomplished!

—Dave Johnson

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Check Your Airline Bags at the Train Station

Tuesday, November 14, 2006

Last month I had to travel to the NARP Board of Directors meeting in Austin, Texas from my home in Hollywood, California.While I prefer to travel by train across our country, sometimes I have to fly. This time, however, I was a able to use LAX’s unique (in America) intermodal connection from Union Station to the airport.

I took the Metro Rail from Hollywood to Union Station with my bags. At Union Station “FlyAway” buses to and from the airport depart every half-hour, 24 hours-a-day. The buses travel mostly on dedicated carpool lanes to the airport. This service started in March and it has been a success.

Just this past September, a new enhancement was added to the program. You can now check your bags at Union Station right onto the plane! Even your boarding pass can be printed there. You go right from the bus at Union Station through to the airport and right to your gate, with no hassles at the airport ticket window or with the gate agent.
Seamless connections like this between different types of travel modes (cars to trains via park-and-rides, for example) are called “intermodal”. Instead of fighting traffic on the I-405 to get to LAX, people can take Metro Rail or Bus, Metrolink commuter rail, or Amtrak. While these kinds of airport-train connections have been common in Europe for a long time, they are fairly rare in America. In fact, only a few airports (see list) in America are connected to intercity rail or rail transit.

Clearly our policy makers need to start thinking “intermodal” and not just about parking cars!

—Dennis Lytton
NARP Board Member, Los Angeles, California.

Ed Note: A similar service is available in Las Vegas at the Convention Center and is proposed for Chicago. NARP strongly support such intermodal convenience and would like to see this concept expanded to all air-rail facilities, such as BWI-Thurgood Marshall Airport, Newark-Liberty International Airport, Milwaukee-Mitchell Field, and Burbank-Bob Hope Airport.

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Election Update

Friday, November 10, 2006

Two things have occurred since Ross wrote Wednesday’s blog entry:

1) Senator Conrad Burns (R-MT) did lose his re-election bid.

2) The Democrats did take control of the United States Senate.

Although leadership elections have not yet been held, it is likely that the following Members will become chairs of committees relevant to Amtrak:

House Appropriations: David Obey (D-WI)
Appropriations Transportation Subcommittee: John Olver (D-MA)
House Transportation and Infrastructure: Jim Oberstar (D-MN)

Senate Appropriations: Robert Byrd (D-WV)
Appropriations Transportation Subcommittee: Patty Murray (D-WA)
Senate Commerce: Daniel Inouye (D-HI)

To repeat what Ross said, while the overall climate for passenger rail will be more positive, funding will be harder than ever to come by.

-Dave Johnson

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Quick Morning-After Look at the Political Landscape

Wednesday, November 08, 2006

A Democratic House presents new opportunities and challenges. While control of the agenda will rest in more positive hands—including Rep. Jim Oberstar (D-MN) as probable chairman of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee—funding likely will remain tough. Rep. Nancy Pelosi, the presumed next Speaker, has said Democrats would focus aggressively on improving fiscal discipline to rein back budget deficits. While she has always been supportive of Amtrak, her web site highlights these issues: Iraq, The Economy, Education, The Environment, Health Care and Social Security, with no mention of public transportation.

Two other cautionary notes to keep in mind:

—The loss of many Republican supporters of passenger rail could complicate bipartisan efforts [Senators Chafee (RI), DeWine (OH), Santorum (PA)]. The Montana race is undecided; a Burns loss without Democrats getting a clear majority could be particularly problematic for long-distance trains, since he is a senior member of the appropriations committee and a friend of the transportation subcommittee chairman (Bond, R-MO). In the House, Reps. Johnson (CT), Fitzpatrick (PA), Sweeney and Kelly (NY), were not re-elected.

—The highway trust fund heading into deficit status within two years represents a potential further obstacle to getting stable funding for passenger rail. Indeed, DOT Secretary Mary Peters said in an interview last month “that Americans shouldn’t expect the federal government to pick up as much of the cost of making needed improvements in the nation’s highway and surface transportation systems as it has in previous decades.”
In any event, there are lots of new relationships for us to build, and a strong case for passenger rail in general which dovetails well with continuing news about global warming and the energy situation—including today’s Washington Post op ed column by UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan and a new report yesterday from the International Energy Agency. The IEA says the world is on course for going “from crisis to crisis” which may mean “skyrocketing prices or more frequent blackouts; can mean more supply disruptions, more meteorological catastrophes—or all these at the same time.” Part of our job is to keep reminding our leaders that rail is relevant to this, as NARP noted in our November 3 release.

—Ross Capon

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Celebrations of More Train Service!

Friday, November 03, 2006

It is refreshing to get to celebrate more train service instead of constantly fighting efforts to cut it. I had the privilege of representing NARP at the inaugural runs of the Illinois service expansion and the Keystone Service improvements. I’ve posted photos on the main NARP website.

Click here for photos from Illinois; Click here for photos from the Keystone service.

Determination, political will, and public demand led the way for these service improvements. Now hopefully more politicians will get the message!

-Dave Johnson

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Aviation Fuel Consumption Coming Onto Radar Screen

Thursday, November 02, 2006

Pollution from commercial aviation gradually is becoming an issue. The Lex Column in Financial Times (UK) said October 31 that “air travel causes at least 3% of global carbon dioxide emissions, according to the UN. Although this is tiny compared with transport as a whole, which contributes a quarter of emissions, it is growing fast. The European Union estimates that, by 2012, the absolute increase in EU15 aviation pollution will counteract about a quarter of the emissions reductions required under Kyoto.”

The New York Times on October 30 ran an Eric Pfanner story, “New Culprit in Climate Change? Try Airlines.” The report includes this: “Eco-campaigners say air travel is one of the fastest-growing producers of emissions linked to global warming. But flying has been somewhat sheltered from their ire until recently—perhaps because of its popularity with consumers, businesspeople and environmental activists alike.”

And this: “With Al Gore’s film ‘An Inconvenient Truth’ focusing attention on climate, some politicians see an opening to start a public discussion on the environmental impact of flying. In Britain, for example, Conservative Party leader David Cameron recently said he favored a tax on short-haul flights as a way to curb the growth of emissions…Eurostar, which runs the high-speed train service linking London to Paris and Brussels via the Channel Tunnel, has started running ads in travel trade publications asserting that a journey produces only one-tenth the carbon dioxide emissions of a comparable flight. Some of the ads include a drawing of an airplane in the form of a burning cigarette.”

This week’s study chaired by Sir Michael Stern, former World Bank chief economist, should add to the “opening” referred to above.

Here in the US, even Amtrak in its 2003 condition (still with lots of express freight adding to energy consumption) consumed 18% less energy per passenger-mile than commercial aviation and 17% less than automobiles, according to Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Imagine how much better those numbers could be if the US even modestly improved its commitment to passenger rail. (A passenger-mile is one passenger transported one mile; use of passenger-mile figures thus takes into account actual load factors, unlike “seat-miles”.)

—Ross Capon

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Back at the Blog

It’s been a busy several weeks here at NARP: several inaugural train trips, our bi-annual board meeting, and lots of other events. So we apologize for a lack of updates to this blog. We’ll get back in the groove, so check back for updates.

-Dave Johnson

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