I have a cunning plan… which would never work because I’m sure there are huge political interests who would rather waste money to look Green than spend it wisely.
But here it is.
Let us say that all the money which is supposed to go fo Obama’s new HSR plan is spent, instead, on air travel service. Airline security required - to move people faster with greater security. (Yes, it can be done, and nations like Israel show it has already been done. And not by banning shampoo bottles and nailclippers.) For kicks, we’ll require legally certain service obligations of airlines if they cancel, redirect, or delay flights, and end this tired nonsense that pulling away from the gate is the “departure” time.
So far, the optimistic suggestions I have seen of Obama’s plan are 200 billion, but which I suspect use grossly generous assumptions. Of course, people seem to think you can use HSR as a commuter, but… well, only if you are commuting from a very long way away. Not many people commute from the next major city over, and by definition it ain’t HSR if you’re making stops for commuters.
OK, for $200 billion, divied up for every man, woman, and child, comes to an allowance of 667 dollars.
Now, for that much money, you can basically give everyone a couple plane tickets every year. You can drastically expand major aviation facilities and build several major new airports. (You ought to be able to get the stupid TSA to do their jobs properly and stop rifling through people’s underwear at random, and they’re half the delay at airports anyway.)
Now, let’s be honest here… wouldn’t that be a heck of a lot more efficient at spending the money?
Seems to me a better way to spend money like this would be to identify the top ten or top twenty traffic bottlenecks in America and fix them, the idea being to concentrate the money where the need is demonstrably the greatest, rather than a huge project which (although I like the idea of it) runs the major risk of ultimately proving to be a huge waste of time and effort.
Woo-hoo, monster sentence!
And here I was hoping to hear a proposal for heavy-lifter cargo blimps. Less infrastructure, about equal speed, and it’d get most of the trucks off the road.
I don’t think there’s enough land available in northern and southern California to support the airport expansion projects that would be needed for this to work. Unless you put the new airports way out in the boondocks.
Can you cite where the 200 billion number comes from? I’ve heard of eight for improvements from the stimulus plan and another five over the next five years.
Also, I assume the 200 billion, if the number is real, is for creation of infrastructure and building. It wouldn’t be a continuing cost. So by your logic you could buy people a plane ticket once, or have high speed rail infrastructure built that would last over a long time.
Also your numbers above assume that nothing is spent on the upgrades you’re calling for to the air traffic system. Yes, by doling out 200 billion you could give away a bunch of airplane tickets, but you wouldn’t make any improvement to our national air infrastructure.
Your policy appears to have a bunch of holes and be poorly thought out.
I live in the Central Valley. previously in the Bay Area, and travel to LA and Bay Area frequently. So I am on the route for the only such plan with funding (not that I expect to live long enough to see it).
Local political entities dream that there will be an economic boon from having the train pass through at 200 mph. With one stop. :rolleyes:
Like people are going to move to Hanford and take that train to commute to a job 1.5 hours to within a few blocks (walking distance) of the LA or San Jose station. Hanford is not going to become another Tracy, because driving or train from Tracy can get you all over most of the Bay Area (or East Bay at least) and arguably into Sacramento sphere of influence.
But Hanford? There is no there there, nor will there be there there. Maybe a new Starbucks and a cell phone waiting area. Beyond that, nothing.
I’m not so sure about Israel being a good example of better security in the way you’re suggesting.
From what I understand, they’re able to use more stringent security measures because they are a pretty small country with relatively few flights going in and out compared to the U.S. Just fewer people to screen, I believe.
And how is this supposed to help anything? The current airliners run on petroleum-based fuels, and so will the new ones you’re proposing. And you won’t be able to get air travel any faster or cheaper than it is now, unless you have the sense to gut the current TSA clown setup. Why invest in air travel, when we can invest in something objectively better, instead?
Instead of having these things called trains where people move at 200 mph, while standing, and never having to go through security… you could have these things called planes that move at 600 mph and could also let you stand and not go through any security. Crazy.
Now, given that any realistic proposal would reduce fossil fuel reliance and not eliminate such - here would be my priorities:
Focus first of all on freight - a massive proportion of not only interstate highway congestion but also traffic tie ups within cities are caused by trucks. The focus should be a massive modernization of freight rail with freight terminals being made convenient to other transportation nodes and end users, congestion pricing for downtown areas with trucks priced high or even banned during workdays, the use of smaller vehicles for delivery, and private innovations like the one being looked into by UPS, which was researching a hydraulic hybrid truck.
Any transportation plan should look at transportation nodes and address connectivity between them and within them. This might seem intuitive, but isn’t done much now. For instance, many airports are served only by rental car companies, hotel shuttles, and maybe cabs. Frankly, an airport served by all of these would be well set up by American standards. This has to change in the world we’re in.
At the minimum, bus service to the airport, whether public or private, ought to be an option and rail should seriously be considered. In a downtown area new services like Zipcar and bike rental services make both commuting and urban carfree living easier and need to be encouraged and expanded.
For longer distance travel, we need to have more options, not fewer. The explosion of bus service in the Northeast, Midwest, and the West Coast driven by the Chinatown lines and followed by other low cost operators is a good thing - it means more choice and an attractive alternative to both the train and plane. There is even a company, LimoLiner, connecting New York, Boston and Hartford - their bus has WiFi, meeting spaces, comfortable seats, and reasonable prices. It is a great alternative to both Amtrak and the airlines for this corridor.
Regulatory barriers to these services should be investigated and if they are too high they need to be dropped. New York, for instance, was not happy about the Chinatown lines because they weren’t using the bus terminal and were loading and unloading people on the street. The obvious solution is to get a Chinatown terminal or just allow them to do their thing within reason, but we shouldn’t regulate a low cost transportation alternative out of existence - especially a fuel efficient one that objectively takes cars off of the Interstate.
It’s not just planes versus trains. It’s the overdependence on automobile transport. For example, my wife and I live in the largest city in the state, and we own two cars, because we each need a car to get to work. If just one of us could take a bus to work, we would only need one car. My drive to work takes 7-10 minutes; I can walk it in 70 minutes, if I have to; but going by bus would take 2 hours, even though there are bus routes near both home and work, because I’d have to change buses downtown! There’s even a school bus route that would work for me to go to work, but not for the journey home, but of course school buses are only for school students.
In about 90% of the US, every adult needs a car to go to work, go shopping, or to go out at the weekend. That proportion needs to be reduced by improving local transportation.
If a free ride home was assured in an emergency, if you had a ZipCar near the office as an option, and if there was a shower in the office, would biking be an option for you? Sounds like only about a half-hour trip.
I haven’t ridden bikes much, I wouldn’t feel safe on the roads round here (since there are no bike lanes), and I’d have to ride up a hill on the way home. On the other hand, I could ride on footpaths (sidewalks), since there are very few pedestrians round here. But a bike would not be an option when there’s any snow on the ground, so we’d still need two cars in the winter.
Roads are safe to ride on, I ride happily in downtowns of cities where there is the heaviest traffic in the world. it can be done safely, but it is a learned skill that takes practice. The first time you drove a car it seemed impossible to manage too, didn’t it?
Bikes work in the snow. If cars can manage it, so can bikes.
riding on sidewalks is the most dangerous place to be (not because of pedestrians ironically) but because when they cross driveways and roads, drivers are not looking for you there and so you violate the number one bike safety rule - be predictable to drivers!
But if riding a bike in snow is your only reason for having a second car, can’t you just rent one when snow is predicted, and even if it doesn’t snow, you’d save thousands of dollars a year in car expenses!
I think you’re getting off track here. Bicycles aren’t an answer for everyone. People have health problems, live on hills, can’t shower at work, need to take heavy things too work, need to drop off kids, work too far away, don’t like cycling, or don’t know how.
If the area doesn’t have bike lanes I wouldn’t want to take a bike into a city either.
And as for renting a second car when snow is predicted, jezus christ man. Let’s try to keep into the realm of reasonable here. Saying something on an internet message board and actually doing it are two different things. Renting cars for snow use isn’t a real solution.
Right, the realm of reasonable. Well my community has a reputation for cultural conservatism, especially within the Washington DC metro area - yet has the region’s highest carpooling rate, commuter rail, decent commuter bus service and many miles of bike lanes.
Backing this up is a service that guarantees a free ride home for a family emergency or unexpected overtime - the exact justification many people use to keep them in their cars and out of other transportation options.