CNBC Looks at New Intercity and High Speed Rail Grants

Thursday, January 28, 2010

In a report broadcast today, CNBC’s Brian Shactman gave a brief overview of President Obama’s intercity and high speed rail program. While briefly acknowledging the national scope of the effort, Shactman was quick to focus on the three states that will receive the lion’s share of the money—California, Florida, and Illinois.

This focus is perhaps inevitable, and I think it shows the wisdom in the Administration’s choice to spread the $8 billion around the country instead of throwing it all into one or two corridors. $8 billion is not nearly enough money to build even a single high speed rail line—and the spokesman for the California High Speed Rail Authority admits that their line won’t see significant construction until 2012. An incremental ramp-up to high and higher speed passenger trains will allow people (and media sources) around the country to see new jobs, steady decreases in trip times, and steady improvements in on time performance. And this will give transportation officials something to point to when preparing requests for the second round of funding.

The fact that the CNBC anchor introduces the piece by asking “is [high speed rail] a magic economic bullet?” tells a lot about the kind of yardstick the media are using to judge this program. But it is important for rail and transit advocates to keep this in mind, because these are the people who will be telling the general public whether these projects are successes or failures—and CNBC anchor Erin Burnett’s alluded-to labeling of the program as “rail to nowhere” gives a sense how eager some commentators are to write American passenger trains off.

See the video below.

-Sean Jeans-Gail
Communications Director
NARP

Posted by NARP

Tags: cahsra, high speed rail, media, obama
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Flag Stops: Informed Decisionmaking (Or Lack Thereof)

Friday, January 15, 2010

Many reasons cited for car ownership drop, a way to show that conventional intercity trains actually do make money, Schwarzenegger’s missteps, and more.

The number of cars owned by Americans dropped by 4 million in 2009, even given the less-than-ideal state of alternative transportation. The recession and the “cash for clunkers” program contributed to the trend, but weren’t the only factors. “Increased urbanization, gas prices, traffic and congestion, automobile saturation and even concerns regarding climate change” were also cited in an Earth Policy Institute report. The benefits of less driving will grow as intra- and intercity rail, in particular, become more attractive.

A privately-commissioned financial impact study finds that the proposed Northern Flyer train, which would connect Amtrak’s Heartland Flyer with the Southwest Chief by running between Oklahoma City and Newton, Kansas, would generate $3.20 in regional economic benefit for every $1.00 of capital and operations cost. The train’s backers are taking the laudable approach of quantifying all its external benefits in dollar terms and adding them to the overall calculus, producing a much truer reflection of its economic impact than a mere comparison of revenue from passenger fares to both capital and operating costs.

An air-travel-weary young guest newspaper columnist from Eugene, Oregon, tries taking the train to Colorado. “When I fly, I tend to lose things: my bags, my wallet, my temper, my dignity, etc,” he writes. “Traveling with Amtrak is all about gains—friendships and experiences, mostly.” His trip would have been a lot more direct if the Pioneer was back in service.

If you were the governor of a state facing a record budget gap and a worsening transportation problem compounded by a booming population, would you be quick to recommend cutting gas taxes that pay for public transportation? Well, California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger wants to do just that [PDF]. Luckily, voters may get a chance to preserve transit funding in November.

Amtrak is offering 100 bonus points (the equivalent of frequent flier miles) to current Amtrak Guest Rewards (AGR) members who are Facebook “fans” of the railroad—and 750 bonus points to non-AGR members who join AGR. Go to Amtrak’s Facebook page and scroll down for the link.

LCL: CNN Tech shows how worldwide recognition of train’s lower environmental footprint is a key factor in the mode’s resurgence—particularly in China and Europe, but also in the US. * * * A new military complex in the Washington suburbs won’t be transit accessible—giving traffic planners headaches that could have been avoided with forethought. * * * A Yale history professor ponders how modernizing the US passenger rail network would enhance our global competitiveness.

—Malcolm Kenton

Posted by Malcolm Kenton

Tags: amtrak, automobiles, budget, california, car ownership, cars, congestion, energy, financial, green, passenger train, profitability, recession, traffic, train
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New Jersey Paper Speaks Out Against Dead End ARC Alignment

Thursday, January 07, 2010

North New Jersey’s The Record ran a piece by Editorial page editor Alfred Doblin on December 21 of last year which offers a refreshing corrective to New Jersey Transit’s new interstate rail tunnels, planned to run under the Hudson River.

It’s no secret that NARP—along with a number of other groups, including the Lackawanna Coalition and the New Jersey chapter of the Sierra Club—has been a vocal opponent of this project, also known as the Access to the Region’s Core (ARC). Not because there is not a need for the tunnels. Rather, it is because the need to expand the rail capacity of the region is so dire; the New York City region remains one of the nation’s most congested train, automotive, and air transit hubs, and solutions are desperately needed. And with more than $9 billion in Metropolitan Transit Authority, New Jersey state, and federal funds needed to bring this project to completion, the stakes are too high to settle for not-good-enough.

Doblin does an excellent job of explaining why the ARC, as presently conceived, is not the solution (bold added):

The new tunnel under the river makes sense. Bringing more New Jersey commuters into Manhattan makes sense. Building a deep-tunnel train station a block from Pennsylvania Station and just footsteps from an existing PATH station makes no sense to the commuters who – well, commute.
...
New Jersey commuters will end up where they always have. NJ Transit cannot take its trains to Grand Central because it would have to bore below a massive tunnel supplying water to Manhattan. Until an additional water tunnel is operational, there will be no NJ Transit trains to Grand Central. This should be the deal-breaker for the project as planned. It makes little sense to expend billions and billions of dollars for a less-than-perfect solution.
...
The Hudson River tunnel project is monumental. But if it isn’t done right, it’s a monument to excess. The advocates for building it now, regardless of where it terminates, are not the everyday people who have to travel back and forth on the trains. Exactly where are the thousands of new commuters going to go after they arrive at 34th Street? Can all those new commuters be absorbed into the existing subway infrastructure at 34th Street? Not likely. It should be Grand Central or bust.

NJ Transit continues to award contracts—two and counting so far, adding up to hundreds of millions of dollars—and the window to correct the flaw of the deep cavern terminal is closing. Transit advocates will have to hope that Governor-elect Chris Christie is paying attention to the voices of reason.

—Sean Jeans-Gail

Learn more about NARP’s proposed fix for the ARC project.

Posted by NARP

Tags: arc, hudson river, mta, new jersey, new york, nj transit
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V.P. Biden: Amtrak is “powerful and indespensible” vehicle for the future

Wednesday, January 06, 2010

Vice President Joe Biden penned the following column for publication in the January/February 2010 issue of Arrive, Amtrak’s on-board magazine geared towards Northeast Corridor travelers. It is reprinted in the Huffington Post.

Why America Needs Trains

One of the Capitol Hill newspapers estimated that I’ve taken more than 7,000 round trips on Amtrak over the course of my career. But the one I made on Jan. 17, 2009 was a bit different. When I got there, there were 8,000 people standing in the freezing cold. And I wasn’t racing to reach the 7:46 a.m. Metroliner (later, the Acela) that I had taken thousands of times before.

I was meeting up with the train that would carry President Obama and me to our inauguration.

That day, Gregg Weaver, a conductor who started riding Amtrak the same year I did—1972—introduced me to the crowd. As Gregg spoke, it struck me that over the years, Amtrak provided me with more than a way to get to Washington to serve the people of Delaware every morning and a way to get home to my family each night. It has provided me another family entirely—a community of dedicated professionals who have shared the milestones in my life, and who have allowed me to share the milestones in theirs.

And it has provided me with one thing more, an understanding of—and a respect for—the role of rail travel in our society and our economy.

Though I don’t get to ride the train nearly as much anymore, those were the lessons I brought with me on that final trip to Washington as a United States Senator.

I began making the 110-mile commute shortly after I was sworn in as a Senator. It was the only way that I could have been a Senator at all. I had to be able to get home to spend evenings with my two sons after we lost their mother and sister in an auto accident a month earlier.

Since then, on those many trips down to Washington, I got into a routine. From Wilmington to Baltimore I’d read the papers and make phone calls. At Baltimore, I’d start preparing for that day’s hearings, amending my opening statement or going through the list of witnesses. And by the time I arrived in D.C., I’d be ready to jump right in.

Getting home was sometimes a sprint, too. One year, on my birthday, my daughter had planned a party for me. She really wanted to give me a gift and blow out candles. Senator Bob Dole was the Majority Leader at the time, and we were voting that night. I told him that I really had to be home for my daughter, which meant that I needed to catch the 5:54 p.m. train. Senator Dole backed up the votes until 9 p.m. I boarded the train and, in Wilmington, my daughter was standing there on the middle platform. She and my wife sang “Happy Birthday,” I blew out the candle, took a piece of cake, opened her gift, gave her a kiss, and caught the 7:23 p.m. going south—and managed to be there for the 9 p.m. vote.

Amtrak doesn’t just carry us from one place to another—it makes things possible that otherwise wouldn’t be. For 36 years, I was able to make most of those birthday parties, to get home to read bedtime stories, to cheer for my children at their soccer games. Simply put, Amtrak gave me—and countless other Americans—more time with my family. That’s worth immeasurably more to me than the fare printed on the ticket.

When I took the train every night—and I still do whenever possible—I always noticed the lights on in the houses flickering in the passing neighborhoods, dotting the landscape speeding by my window. Moms and dads were at their kitchen table, talking after they put their kids to bed. Like Americans everywhere, they were asking questions as profound as they are ordinary: Should Mom move in with us now that Dad is gone? How are we going to pay the heating bills? Did you hear the company may be cutting our health care? Now that we owe more on the house than it’s worth, how are we going to send the kids to college? How are we going be able to retire?

I would look out the window and hear their questions, feel their pain. And every time I made that trip, it would inspire me to get up the next day, head back down to Washington, and give them the answers they’re looking for. Those moments looking out the window and seeing the lights on, they told me things that the briefing folders in front of me never could. They gave color and meaning to the problems I’ve spent my career trying to solve. They reminded me why I made that trip back and forth 7,000 times.

But my support for rail travel goes beyond the emotional connection. With delays at our airports and congestion on our roads becoming increasingly ubiquitous, volatile fuel prices, increased environmental awareness, and a need for transportation links between growing communities, rail travel is more important to America than ever before.

Support for Amtrak must be strong—not because it is a cherished American institution, which it is—but because it is a powerful and indispensable way to carry us all into a leaner, cleaner, greener 21st century.

Consider that if you shut down Amtrak’s Northeast Corridor, it is estimated that to compensate for the loss, you’d have to add seven new lanes of highway to Interstate 95. When you consider that it costs an average of $30 million for one linear mile of one lane of highway, you see what a sound investment rail travel is. And that’s before you factor in the environmental benefits of keeping millions and millions of cars off the road.

In 1830, the first steam-engine locomotive, the Tom Thumb, graced America’s railways. Its first run was a rickety 13-mile trek from Baltimore to Ellicott Mills, Md., but it became much more than that. It marked the beginning of a new journey, heading straight into a better, more imaginative American future.

We are on a similar journey now. We are at the dawn of a new age, where the very best ideas of today will shape our tomorrow, where renewable clean energy and new transportation systems and more efficient technology will revolutionize American life the way the Tom Thumb did some 180 years ago.

On Jan. 20, 2009, pulling out of the Wilmington train station, embarking on that same short trip I made thousands of times before, I thought again about the journey America was about to take as a nation. And I saw our future the same way I always did: looking out Amtrak’s windows.

Posted by Malcolm Kenton

Tags: acela, amtrak, biden, future, green, obama, passenger, senate, train, vice president
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