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Student Action and Rail Advocacy: The Next Generation
Tuesday, March 25, 2008
This week, college students organized through California Student PIRG are traversing the state on a High Speed Rail Spring Break to heighten awareness and build support for California’s HSR plans. A $9 billion ballot initiative to fund initial construction is expected to be on the General Election ballot in November. These students are answering a higher sense of purpose through their efforts:
“I’m spending my spring break on a road trip, but not to Cabo,” said Jenn Engstrom, a second-year student at University of California at Berkeley.
Gambit Ramos, an organizer staff member from University of California, Irvine, came with his red bicycle, bearing a sticker reading, “I’d rather be riding high-speed rail.”
“This is a truly grassroots effort that will bring California into the 21st Century,” said city Supervisor Aaron Peskin.
But young people don’t have to wait until college to make a difference, as the students of Crawfordsville High School in Indiana demonstrated.
For any teenager who is interested in becoming a more informed and empowered advocate for trains and transit in general, here’s a wonderful opportunity that doesn’t come every day: The American Public Transportation Association is hosting Teening Up for a Greener World: A Youth Summit to Advance Public Transportation. The three-day summit will take place June 22-24 at Catholic University in Washington, DC, and will include seminars, tours, and a day on Capitol Hill. APTA will underwrite 100% of the travel, program, and living expenses for program participants. There are 50 spots available for high school juniors and seniors 18 years old and younger. We strongly encourage all interested teenagers to apply! Applications can be printed from the web site and are due by April 25.
Rail advocacy has been a personal journey for me. It started at the age of 9, when I wrote a letter to Los Angeles Mayor Richard Riordan asking him what he would do under public ownership of the abandoned Southern Pacific Burbank Branch (which is now the Metro Orange Line). To the mayor’s credit, he responded and personally signed the letter! My awareness of the importance of transportation issues grew, and at the age of 14 I joined NARP and a state organization.
If your interest in promoting trains started at a young age, how did you first get involved? Do you have any thoughts on how to build a rail advocacy movement that the next generation of the traveling public can sustain?
—Matthew Melzer
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Transit Helps Fight Climate Change
Thursday, March 20, 2008
Art Guzzetti of the American Public Transportation Association gave the shortest presentation at a recent Washington conference, but one with the most relevance to public transit advocates.
He asked, “How much oil does transit save?”
Answer: the equivalent of 300,000 gas station fill-ups daily, or 34 supertankers leaving the Middle East 11 days (34 in a year), or total U.S. imports from Kuwait in a year. But that’s just direct savings. Multiply by a factor of three to reflect indirect benefits, such as the more energy-efficient, denser real estate development that transit enables.
“By how much does transit reduce carbon emissions?” Transit directly saves 6.9 million metric tons annually. Taking into account indirect savings, this number jumps to 37 million metric tons.
He also noted that, in a typical household, just one person switching their commute from automobile to transit would reduce the carbon footprint of that household by 10%. And if that household is able to get by with one less car overall, the carbon footprint of that household will be reduced 30%. There are few household choices that have an impact of this magnitude.
The conference was the “First Transportation Convention,” held March 5-7 in Washington, DC. The conference was organized by the City of Irving, Texas, “as an extension of the annual Transportation Summit held in August” in Texas.
—Ross Capon
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Advertising you can’t buy!
Thursday, March 06, 2008
Garrison Keillor, host of the weekly, nationwide radio show A Prairie Home Companion, began his Saturday, February 23 broadcast from Winona State University with a monologue that included a huge boost for train travel. You can listen to his exact words at the program page.
Here’s what I remember. After half-joking that southeastern Minnesota is the place you would take folks if you wanted them to believe Minnesota is a scenic state, he said he had come down from St. Paul on the train Friday morning. He said it’s a wonderful experience, getting on at 8 AM, going to the dining car, rolling along the Mississippi and having breakfast with nice strangers—in this case, a Lutheran minister and his wife from Rockford, IL.
—Ross Capon
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Railroads and our National Parks
Tuesday, March 04, 2008
Amy Jewel at Triplepundit has penned a fantastic, brief history illustrating the role that railroads had in securing the establishment of the National Park Service. While she rightly pointed out that Amtrak remains a key (and environmentally friendly) link to many National Parks, Amtrak and the NPS continue to promote awareness of the importance of National Parks and their connection to railroads through the Trails & Rails narrative guide program.
—Matthew Melzer