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TRAINS: A travel choice Americans want

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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

Posted by NARP

Tags: garrison keillor, marketing,

Flag Stops: Emerging Trends

Thursday, November 12, 2009

Real-estate experts acknowledge a shift is afoot, Amtrak raises expectations, and even more advances on the other side of the Atlantic.

  • The well-regarded annual Emerging Trends in Real Estate report for 2010, after a survey of over 900 industry experts, determined that outer-fringe suburban developments “have no staying power” and that all the smart money is being invested in transit oriented development and housing that is convenient to non-auto transportation, job centers and 24-hour amenities—showing once again that the kind of lifestyle that is most in demand can only be sustained by a strong passenger train network.
  • An Amtrak spokesman tells the Train Riders Association of California (TRAC) that Amtrak will make a “dramatic and bold” announcement on new equipment purchases in January, reports NARP Council member Jim Loomis. We should expect nothing less.
  • European countries are leaping even farther ahead of the US on the passenger rail front, writes Arthur Frommer in the Cape Cod Times. New high-speed lines are being built from Amsterdam to Brussels, Florence to Bologna (Italy), and Helsinki to St. Petersburg. Frommer also highlights changing demographics that contradict the low-U.S.-population-density argument, and plugs NARP’s vision for America’s future mobility. Meanwhile, British cities are organizing a push for escalated high-speed rail development.

  • The Transport Politic sizes up the implications of the results of last Tuesday’s elections in New Jersey, Virginia, Cincinnati, Chicago’s Indiana suburbs, Atlanta, Charlotte, Miami, New York City and Seattle on rail and transit interests.

  • Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood talks up rail at a major transportation policy symposium, saying “this Administration will not leave the future of railroads in this country to chance,” adding that he wants passenger and freight trains to be just as relevant to the US economy in the future as they were in the 1800s.
  • Once again, Ryan Avent says it well: “If you think there’s no substitute for the automobile, then the decline of the auto industry looks like running headlong off a cliff. But in reality, there is something just fine on the other side of the transition: a world in which people drive less and don’t mind it.”

  • The Midwest High Speed Rail Blog highlights two ways that passenger railroads are, and should be, generating more interest in train travel: by transporting popular sports teams and taking advantage of movie tie-ins.

  • A head-to-head comparison between living in Almeria, Spain (a country where trains have the lion’s share of the intercity air-rail market), and Milwaukee: in the former you see people out and about; in the latter you see an overabundance of “access roads, parking lots, highways and bridges.”
  • LCL: Light rail may be on its way to Monterey County, connecting it with regional rail in the San Francisco Bay area. * * * Take a ride in the cab of a Eurostar high-speed train from Paris to London, in 12 parts on YouTube. * * * Speakers at Wisconsin’s “Freight Rail Day” offer lobbying advice.

    • —Malcolm Kenton

    Posted by Malcolm Kenton

    Tags: amtrak, development, equipment, europe, future, high-speed rail, housing, marketing, passenger rail, population density, procurement, ray lahood, real estate, ryan avent, smart growth, suburbs, survey, transit-oriented, trends,

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