Incidentally, driving this high rate of carpool participation is a unique Washington area innovation called informal carpooling or slugging - which frees people from the schedules of others and makes it much easier to participate in carpooling.
The catch is that you are either getting into a stranger’s car or letting them into yours - one would think this would be unsafe, yet it is actually safer than public transportation here.
Local and state governments have encouraged this trend by providing commuter lots as meeting areas for slugging - beyond this they have wisely left the practice alone.
My only problem is that, as suggested in my earlier post, I’d add improving local transit as an option. That includes both buses and taxis in most cities. Back where I lived in Australia, the local supermarket had a taxi rank at the front, so that people without cars could wheel their trolley filled with the week’s shopping to a taxi, and take a taxi home. I haven’t seen a supermarket in the part of Columbus, Ohio, that has that: the only option to travel to do your shopping is to drive, or to walk if you live close enough.
I have no problem with your priorities in the main.
I would like to recast the discussion however. The proposal suggested in the op is obviously a lousy one, for the reasons mentioned already and others, but it suffers most from not having a clear sense of what the problems are that we are trying to solve. Perhaps we should try first to articulate what those problems are?
[ol]
[li]Transporting people and goods in and out of where they need to go, or where we want them to be able to go, in a time and cost efficient manner. This means long distances, moderate distances and daily commuting distances - which occasionally overlap and/or interfere in their needs and demands. The current highway infrastructure handles those demands poorly in many metropolitan regions and rail is also not currently up to the task.[/li][li]Decreased emission of greenhouse gases including CO2.[/li][li]Less energy dependence.[/li][/ol]Your list of priorities is a reasonable list to address all of those problems in a moderately comprehensive manner. Improved rail, including the improvements funded under the current proposal and perhaps some moderate investments in higher speed commuter rail in select corridors can be part of that solution, but needs to kept within the context of the problems we want to solve and your priority list.
Geez, I was thinking it would just drop off the radar and be another lost thread. Well, at least it got some people’s attention, an that’s the important thing. The bit about plane tickets were a little facetious; it was mostly for comparison.
Y’know, I hadn’t thought about airships for heavy lifting. I like that thought, because building airship terminals would be pretty cheap, and you can easily do it near interstate junctions but outside major cities. They can fly low enough to rarely be a hindrance to other air traffice. And I do think that if rail is uprgaded, it should be heavy rail for freight.
The TSA must be changed: my reference to Israel’s security was about their practices. They don’t try to stop any and all dangerous items (because damn near anything can be dangerous), but rather to stop the serious ones and to especially stop dangerous people. They watch airports very closely, but they are on the lookout for people who are dangerous. And they have a very good track record. However, do that, and ease airport congestion in others ways, and we should be able to easily move people about the country. Heck, it’d probably cost less for much mroe effect.
I don’t consider energy independance to be an issue, not "fossil fuel use and abuse, because both can be solved pretty easily; it’s that people ultimately dont’ want to solve it. They’d prefer to muck about with their personal piddly non-solution because few politicians, or for that matter environmentalist groups, understand the practical trade offs. Nuclear power just wins hands down so badly it’s not even funny, but the word nuclear just invokes terror. But it’s by far the most effective, even over solar.
While I don’t think electric cars are going to completely take over (too many practical problems), hydrogen fuel cell technology can be done right now alongside it and can integrate into our existing infrastructure. Combine that with nuke plants around urban areas, and Wind farms or Solar in scurb areas we don’t need for anything else*.
*I am personally rather dubious about the practical long-term potential for wind and especially solar. if you can do it, go ahead, but I don’t think it’s really going to be a winner.
James Fallows proposed a decentralized, small-plane, midsize-town-to-midsize-town model for air travel back in 2001. AFAIK, nobody in a position to do anything has picked up on the idea.
Well, the same James Fallows noted in this blog post that many of those notions are being rolled into the FAAs NextGen air traffic control system, which replaces ground based radar tracking with a system designed around the GPS network.
An expected side benefit of this is making smaller regional airports more attractive to airlines - as planes can fly to them more directly and won’t have to be managed in air corridors so rigidly as is the case now.
Airships are too slow ever to compete with airplanes for passenger service. Every once in a while, however, somebody declares the coming new Age of the Airship for freight shipping. Like nuclear fusion it seems always a few years in the future. Still, it might happen yet. One recent invention is a sort of combination airship/airplane – i.e., it is not quite lighter-than-air and has wings for additional lift. The advantage, apparently, is that this makes it easier to handle on the ground, i.e., it’s not so buoyant that a breeze will toss it around. See several other recent designs here.(Popular Mechanics, of course, is the go-to place for this kind of thing.)
No we couldn’t. Well- I suppose we could, but we won’t.
not_alice- While more convenient stops in the valley would be nice, it defeats the purpose of high-speed rail. HSR needs to get people from one population center to another population center, and when the line in question goes from Los Angeles to San Francisco/Oakland, there’s no incentive to stop in the Central Valley because it’s just not the destination SF and LA are. One stop in the valley is practical, but once Stockton, Modesto, Merced, Fresno, Bakersfield, and Santa Clarita all decide they want a stop, people traveling SF-LA can drive faster and more comfortably (Harris Ranch notwithstanding) and the whole thing becomes moot.
As for “nor will there be there there,” there was very little there there in the first place, and as systems like BART have shown, if there’s a good transit system available, people want to be near it. I admit I have no idea how well the idea scales up, but I see no reason the CV station wouldn’t invigorate an area. There would certainly be more than a cell phone lot, as Amtrak or another intravalley service would have a hub near the HSR station.
I will give you that of all the options, Hanford is an… odd choice. (As are the two parallel routes on Obama’s map, one on the coast, one through the valley, which is overkill and I think would encourage more stations, slowing the whole thing down.)
My heart in in the Bay Area, I will be back long before this train ever gets built. In fact, if you know of any jobs for me …
Still, every region is going to have a bias and a need for pork.
I have ridden Japanese Shinkansen a few times between Tokyo and Hiroshima, it seems similar terrain all the way. So the history of pork and new towns to spring up seems relevant.
While a Bay Area person at heart, I am kind of a lurker in the Central Vealley here observing how the locals work. In particular, the politics of water and an economy that is not set up to benefit from growth when the wider economy grows is a big deal here.
You gather from your posts that you have been in the Bay Area a good long time. so you probably remember when places like Tracy and Gilroy were way the fuck out in farm country. Now they are barely even on the edge of suburbia anymore.
In the regional planning going on in the Central Valley, of which hsr is a big part, there is an awareness that those cities and others liked them benefitted and escaped dependence on ag and water. It can’t be stated outright by politicians, but it is the undercurrent of thinking.
I think people realize that there will only be so many stops, not many. Whatever development there is to be will be around the rail, so people are jockeying for that.
I have in mind passing through intermediate shinkansen stops that were little more then bus platforms so I think the development is limited, but right now, any potential development is seen as a plus in the Valley because there is little opportunity otherwise.
I’d say Hanford is actually a good location - midway between Fresno and Bakersfield, within 45 minutes of the population centers of hanford/lemoore, visalia (15 minutes), tulare(20 minutes) and porterville (45 minutes).
It is on the west side of 99, which has worse water issues, and more open space to have the gentle curves needed in the track. may also be existing rail corridors there.
alternatives would be:
visalia (can’t do it downtown, there is some dev now right at 99/198 interchange that could be possible, but then you have highway crossings to make)
fresno (already gets lion’s share of development, airport is good idea but not practical location)
west of tulare (similar to hanford, but no real town there now, dev would start from scratch) Ironically, close to Internatinal Ag Center on 99 would be a good spot and would tie together Bay Area green innovation with the Cebit of Ag shows each year in February, but I haven’t seen this addressed.
bakersfield airport (right at 99, could be a good location, but then after Fresno, bakersfield already gets the next largest share of dev)
anywhere on the west valley (too unpopulated and far from population centers, and worst water issues, no towns to benefit)
For Bay Area commute possibilities, then Los Banos area is ideal as it is just over the mountain pass and already a population center.
If there could be 3 stations, I’d put them at Los Banos, Hanford, and Bakersfield Airport. OTTOMH, these would be about 75 miles apart.
Pick 2? I’d drop Los Banos.
Pick 1? I’d drop Bakersfield, but I would listen long and hard about links to the air system growing there to alleviate pressure on LA Basin airports.
If it goes to hanford though, I don’t expect the station would ever be more then a whistle stop with people driving from elsewhere. Msybe there would be a small reantal car need there and soe small condos and a grocery store. Maybe some travel tours by bus to yosemite or other Sierra spots would originate there. Which brings chain hotels and restaraunts I suppose. Existing housing can handle the workers needed for that. Oh yeah there is an Indian Casino near there too I think so bus trips to that. That’s about it.
But I’d use it for trips to Bay Area or LA - 45 minutes and then a fast train instead of 4-5 our drive? No brainer.
Will Porterville benefit from that? Not except for those tour buses passing through to Sierra National Park and Monument. They won’t stop there though. Maybe the Porterville Indian Casino will get some bus traffic, but it is not the best choice by far already if you are going to go as far as Hanford, you have much better casinos near there and in Fresno.
Well, I didn’t mean passenger services. I was totally thinking freight. To my eye, freight is probably the more important issue over passenger service.
Ease road freight and make that less troublesome, and both traffic and pollution go way down. Even if people drive more as a result, the overall effect wil likely be cleaner air and easier roads. Plus prices go down and profits go up.
Israel may be much smaller, but as a result, we have only one major airport. And while It’s certainly no JFK, trafic can get pretty heavy, especially during holiday season. Remember.
No, what Israel has that the U.S. doesn’t is a huge pool of twentysomething military veterans working their way though college to serve as the backbone of its airport security. IIRC, you have to have served as an infantry NCO or officer to get a job in security at Ben-Gurion International. The U.S., with its relatively small, professional military, simply can’t come up with enough highly-trained, highly-motivated personnel.
The TSA could be fixed, even without having super-dedicated people. A lot of the problem seems to be that hiring quality is nonexistent, and that the bureaucrats in charge of policy have no clue.
I live in Boca Raton, i.e. God’s Waiting Room ™, where the public transportation is a fucking joke and it’s impossible to get to a lot of places without a car. Yeah, I know not every city can be like Taipei or New York and Florida geography can’t support an underground rail system, but I wish buses ran more than one per hour and the routes weren’t so unintuitive or didn’t change every other month.
Major ones, sure. Many servicing smaller cities and so forth, well, they may not run a bus out that far at all. Many airports service county regions, not just cities.
Are we talking about airports served by scheduled passenger flights here? There are plenty of smaller airports that have general aviation traffic and accept charter flights; I’d be surprised if they had dedicated public transit services. A bus that passes by on the way to somewhere else, sure (think Buttonville airport in the Toronto area, for example; York Region Transit route 85 (PDF map) along 16th Ave. passes by the front gate, west of Woodbine). On the other hand, Brampton airport, also general aviation and charters, but well north of the City of Brampton, has no such service.
I’m not sure how green air travel can ever be, although I’m sure it can become much better in that regard. But however more efficient you make the engines, however more effectively you streamline the operation, you still end up with a lot of planes on short to medium haul runs, like between L.A. and the Bay Area, that we could eliminate with HSR.
So generally speaking I’m in favor of any kind of rail improvement, including HSR. My only beef with the proposal is that it will divert funds and attention from the improvement and expansion of conventional rail systems, right-of-way improvements, and so on.
I don’t think I’ve ever come across an airport that was not serviced by a bus to the nearest population centre.