 | NARP blogTRAINS: A travel choice Americans want |
Amtrak and Bicycles: Time to Think Outside Those Boxes
Wednesday, June 30, 2010
John Henry
Special Contributor
It’s hard to imagine a more environmentally friendly marriage of transportation modes than passenger trains and bicycles. Yet as America struggles to conserve energy and reduce its collective carbon footprint, Amtrak has no provision for carrying bikes on many trains and often makes it difficult to take them on others.
As a result, the nation’s intercity rail system lags far behind its counterparts in Western Europe, where cyclists have long been able to roll their bike onto trains. Amtrak also lags behind the many commuter rail and subway systems in this country that now provide easy access for two-wheelers, enabling cyclists to travel long distances without ever having to set foot in a motor vehicle.
To be sure, Amtrak, which boasts that it “strives for greener passenger rail every day through eco-smart practices and programs,” does operate some trains with European-style roll-on service for bikes. But this convenient feature is limited to state-subsidized trains in California, Oregon, Washington, Missouri, downstate Illinois, North Carolina and on the Boston-Portland, Maine, route.
Cyclists in the Northeast actually have less roll-on service than a decade ago, when Amtrak operated three state-funded trains with bike racks in baggage cars. Those trains, which serve the Adirondack region of New York State and Vermont, have run without baggage cars for several years and no longer take bikes.
According to the railroad, states have the last word about whether trains they fund, like those three Northeastern ones, should carry bikes. Fair enough. But where Amtrak has full responsibility for bike policy — that is, on the many trains on its federally subsidized long-distance and Northeast Corridor (Boston-Richmond, Va.) routes — the railroad makes life unnecessarily difficult for cyclists.
On these routes, Amtrak takes bikes as checked baggage on trains that have baggage cars, but it requires cyclists to bring their vehicle in their own container or go through the hassle of squeezing it into a box provided by the railroad for $15. (Folding bikes are permitted aboard some passenger cars as carry-on baggage.)
Preparing a regular, non-folding bike for a box can be troublesome since it entails removing the pedals and turning the handlebar; cyclists must bring their own tools. The procedure is daunting enough that Amtrak’s Web site advises: “It may be helpful to disassemble and reassemble your bike before your trip to avoid any surprises. Some parts, especially pedals, may be especially difficult to remove.”
The frustrations of using Amtrak’s checked baggage service go beyond boxing a bike. Only a limited number of trains offer checked service and when they do, it’s often unavailable at many stations.
Consult the railroad’s spring/summer 2010 timetable, for example, and you’ll see that of the 15-plus trains operating in each direction between New York and Boston every weekday, just one has a baggage car. And although that train makes 10 stops en route, only two have checked baggage service.
At least that route has a baggage car. You won’t find one on the Amtrak trains running between Washington, D.C., and Toronto, or between New York and Pittsburgh, or between Chicago and Detroit.
I learned from the railroad that has a serious shortage of good baggage cars. Amtrak hopes to add more and replace its existing ones — the newest is 49 years old — under the fleet modernization program for which it recently requested funding from Congress. Wouldn’t it be nice if those new baggage cars included racks for bikes so cyclists wouldn’t have to box them?
The encouraging news is that Amtrak seems willing to at least explore the concept. Karina Romero, the railroad’s manager of media relations, told me, “As we begin replacing our existing fleet, we will take the addition of bicycle racks into consideration.”
For cyclists like me, they can’t come soon enough.
—John Henry, a freelance writer based in New York City, takes his bicycle on subways and commuter trains in the metropolitan area.
Posted by NARP | (0) Comments
Deepwater Horizon, Energy, U.S. DOT and Trains
Thursday, June 17, 2010
Quoting again from the June 11 Philip Stephens column in Financial Times, “The reason the Deepwater Horizon rig is there is because the US consumes a quarter of world oil production even though it has only one-twentieth of the population.”
A major reason that the US has such high per capita energy consumption is our high reliance on automobiles and aviation. The world has an average of 107 motorcars per 1,000 inhabitants, but the U.S. has 765 cars per 1,000 people. That compares with 516 in Europe (15 nations), 188 in the Russian Federation, 14 in China and 11 in India.
Simply raising CAFÉ (miles per gallon) standards does not address the “external” energy costs of the automobile—including pedestrian-unfriendly development and widely-spaced buildings which themselves consume energy inefficiently.
In 2007 (the most recent figures available), automobiles averaged 28% more energy consumed per passenger-mile than Amtrak. Domestic airlines averaged 19% more than Amtrak. If the nation had invested adequately in passenger trains, Amtrak’s showing would have been even better.
Secretary LaHood deserves credit for the fact that the draft U.S. DOT Strategic Plan FY 2010-FY2015 [PDF] says most of the right things. Here are some quotes from the Executive Summary, starting with its first sentence: “President Barack Obama supports a transformative U.S. transportation policy that improves public health and safety, fosters livable communities, ensures that transportation assets are maintained in a state of good repair, supports the Nation’s long-term economic competitiveness, and works to achieve environmental sustainability…In addition to the sustainable development patterns associated with livable communities, DOT will also promote the substitution of carbon intensive travel on congested highways and airways for use of more energy efficient transportation systems, including rail, water, and pipelines where feasible.”
We need the White House to connect those dots more frequently!
—Ross Capon
Posted by NARP | (0) Comments
Bringing Trains into the “Energy Mix”
Monday, June 14, 2010
In a Washington Post Business section column yesterday, economic policy expert Ezra Klein drives home a truth that is unwelcome to many Americans: gasoline in the U.S. is actually too cheap because prices do not account for the societal and environmental costs associated with its use. The Gulf oil disaster is one of the more visible externalities (to use the economist’s term) of the oil market.
Klein quotes Ian Perry of the think tank Resources for the Future: “We’re pretty much stuck with our dependency on oil. We don’t have any substitutes. Even if we hugely increase the price on oil, we’d only have limited impact on it. People need to drive and get to work.” Therein lies the flaw in the thinking of those who look at Big Oil as the only problem: it’s not just oil that we are over-dependent on—the U.S. cannot maintain its addiction to driving.
To simply switch to a cleaner, greener fuel source while continuing to consume energy at our present rates would be impossible—we can’t generate that much energy from renewables within a workable time frame. We need to get serious about using less energy, and there’s no getting around the gross ineffeciency inherent in a transportation system that is so unilaterally oriented towards motor vehicles. As Dr. Wolfgang Meyer, who studied the question of “green fuels,” concludes, the amount of infrastructure needed to power the current U.S. auto fleet on renewables is off-the-charts impossible.
A world-class passenger train system—intercity trains connected with local and regional transit supporting walkable, bikeable communities—can move Americans quickly and comfortably using a small fraction of the energy that our mobility currently consumes. Trains must be a key component of the “clean-energy future” President Obama is advocating. We must take every opportunity to remind our elected officials to make it so.
—Malcolm Kenton
Posted by Malcolm Kenton | (0) Comments
An Oily Warning
Friday, June 11, 2010
As oil keeps billowing into the Gulf of Mexico, the nation’s attention is focused on yet another of the significant consequences of our overdependence on fossil fuels and overreliance on inefficient technologies. While we hope that the gusher can be safely plugged or diverted as quickly as possible, we have to recognize that every crisis presents an opportunity to shift our society onto a course that will minimize the chances of such devastation occurring again. The spill is a wake-up call that what’s at stake when it comes to transportation policy is the quality of our lives, and those of the ecosystems on which we depend.
Financial Times columnist Philip Stephens says President Obama must use this opportunity “to shape a new conversation about the unavoidable links between oil spills, climate change and sustainable economic growth.” “If the world’s richest nation and biggest oil consumer is not ready to curb the greenhouse emissions that cause global warming,” he cautions, “no one else, least of all China, is going to make the switch to a low carbon economy.”
As the Senate prepares to take up a major energy and climate change measure, the way for which was paved by yesterday’s vote, we need to remind Senators that the revenue generated by a carbon levy on transportation fuels ought to support the development of the most efficient, Earth-friendly form of motorized transport—passenger trains. Revenues from the transportation system should go towards programs like TIGER that use competitive bidding to steer federal dollars to where they can have the most impact in enhancing the quality, while shrinking the carbon footprint, of the US transportation system—along with direct investment in passenger rail, both through the states and through Amtrak.
The longer we wait before taking serious steps towards a saner transportation system, the more the economic, social and environmental price tag of the status quo goes up.
—Malcolm Kenton