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

Posted by NARP

Tags: apta, california high-speed rail, crawfordsville, grassroots advocacy, student advocacy,

NARP Endorses CAHSR, Guestblogs the CAHSR Blog

Friday, July 18, 2008

NARP Board Member Dennis Lytton and I will be guestblogging on the CAHSR Blog over the next couple weeks as its primary author is out of town. The timing is auspicious; last week, NARP’s Executive Committee approved a resolution endorsing California’s High Speed Rail project and Proposition 1, the ballot measure that will provide $9 billion in initial construction funding and $950 million to improve existing intercity and commuter train service. I will be working with citizen activists in California to help promote Prop 1 in the coming months.

You can read my first post here.

—Matthew Melzer

Posted by NARP

Tags: california high-speed rail, california proposition 1, grassroots advocacy,

NARP Pushes CAHSR and Prop 1A, and So Can You

Monday, September 29, 2008

NARP is working actively to promote California Proposition 1A, the Safe, Reliable High-Speed Passenger Train Bond Act for the 21st Century, which will appear on the November 4 ballot to provide $9 billion in bonds to start construction of the CAHSR project, and $995 million to bolster existing conventional passenger train services. I will be in the state next month to work with our Directors and allies on the ground to educate voters about the ballot measure. We will distribute two-sided informational cards (pictured below), brilliantly designed with the volunteer labor of NARP member Alfred Twu of Berkeley. (Thank you, Alfred!) It is co-branded with the web site for the grassroots Students for CAHSR.

If you’re in California and would like to assist, please consider downloading the high-resolution .pdf of the card design (1.1 MB) and professionally printing it to distribute in your community. NARP is only able to sponsor a limited print run, and we would greatly appreciate your contribution. You may also click on the image below to download.

For more information about the CAHSR project and Prop 1A, please see the following resources:

As you can see, there is a tremendous groundswell of online support for Prop 1A. The Facebook group mentioned above has nearly 39,000 members! We need to work hard in the coming weeks to translate this enthusiasm into votes, and push back hard against baseless attacks from opponents (as Robert Cruickshank does so well every day on the CAHSR Blog).

What will you do to support CAHSR and Prop 1A? Let us know in the comments.

—Matthew Melzer

Posted by NARP

Tags: california high-speed rail, california proposition 1, california proposition 1a, grassroots advocacy,

Flag Stops: Awareness-Raising Edition

Thursday, July 16, 2009

Vermonters organize to lure riders, an express bus service goes under, airlines are still in trouble, gas prices race upwards, and other dispatches from across our infrastructurally-challenged country.

After winning the fight to save Amtrak’s Ethan Allen Express from budget cuts, grassroots volunteers are coming together in Rutland, Vermont, in hopes of attracting more riders to the train. Friends of Rutland Rail has been formed to raise awareness about the service, coordinate volunteer train hosts (modeled after successful host programs in Maine and North Carolina), and make the Rutland station more inviting. TrainRiders/Northeast hopes to foster the coalescing of similar groups in several Vermont towns served by Amtrak’s Vermonter.

NARP Council member Kenneth Joseph’s testimony to Congress urging the reinstatement of the Three Rivers has generated discussion (see comments) about the implications of last week’s announcement [PDF] that the Pittsburgh-Harrisburg Steel City Flyer express business-class bus service will come to an end. Part of what doomed the service, which was designed to connect with Amtrak’s frequent Keystone service at Harrisburg, is the inability of buses to drop passengers at the Amtrak station due to the exclusive contract between the City of Harrisburg (which owns the station) and bus operator Capitol Trailways. Other factors include the inflexibility of many corporations’ auto-friendly travel policies as well as that trains are generally more desirable than buses. NARP believes that faster, more frequent train service along the Pittsburgh-Philadelphia corridor, beginning with the reinstatement of the Three Rivers will be more successful in luring both business and leisure travelers from their cars.

A new study by the Center for Clean Air Policy reconfirms the key role better transportation choices play in cutting air pollution and greenhouse gas emissions. The paper [PDF] concludes “comprehensive application of smart growth best practices and improved transportation choices could significantly reduce transportation emissions at a net cost savings to society.” The provision of alternative forms of mobility and the improved planning of cities and towns would shave ten percent off the number of miles Americans drive at a net cost savings to society through avoided infrastructure costs, savings in fuel and insurance charges, and higher tax revenues from more valuable land development. NARP hopes that this timely report, prepared with the help of our friends at Transportation for America, will be read widely on Capitol Hill as the reauthorization bill is debated.

The recession, higher fares, service cuts and concerns about the H1N1 flu are driving declines in passenger air travel. In May, total passenger load on US airlines fell 9.5 percent and passenger revenue fell 26 percent, accompanying a 22 percent dip in air cargo traffic. These revenue drops, combined with cost hikes in labor and fuel, add up to an ongoing lack of profitability in the US airline industry.This week, US Airways Group said that it will cut 600 jobs this fall, including airport ticket and gate agents and baggage handlers, because of the economy. Though Amtrak ridership weathered the recession longer than most, it is also down, with May ridership and passenger-miles down 10% and passenger revenues down 13% from a year earlier.

At the same time, gas prices are once again on the rise, at the quickest rate since September 2005. This time, more expensive gas is a primary factor causing the Consumer Price Index to go up. If people had more travel choices, perhaps every gas price hike wouldn’t make such a big dent in people’s pocketbooks.

The director of IBM’s Global Rail Innovation Center in Beijing suggests that the US’s position of playing catch-up to the rest of the developed world in the passenger rail department may actually help us by providing many models of success and failure from which the American rail industry can learn. A valid point. Of course, the same could have been said twenty years ago…

LCL: A northeast Indiana columnist applauds the Midwest’s high-speed rail plans while a City Council member in Vicennes, IN, rebuts our loyal nemesis, CATO’s Randal O’Toole; the editors of the Illinois capital’s daily paper say that it’s fine to dream big about bullet trains, but boosting existing trains to 110 mph is more realistic and cost-effective in lean times; and a travel writer extols the National Park Service’s Trails and Rails program, which provides interpretive narration for many scenic and historic route segments.

—Malcolm Kenton

Posted by NARP

Tags: air pollution, airlines, express bus, gasoline prices, grassroots advocacy, greenhouse gases, high-speed rail, pennsylvania, revenue, ridership, trains, vermont,

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