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California formally petitions for zero-emissions locomotives
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<p>tldr: California being California, Californians being Californians, Californian ranting about it all...</p> <p>I'm not familiar with the economics of rail, but I am a native Californian, so I'm not surprised. The entire state is heading squarely towards electric transportation, even though we haven't exactly addressed how we're going to generate that much electricity in an ecologically-friendly manner. The essential goal of this initiative, though, like the recent LA Metro expansions, is to reduce overall emissions from freeway traffic. Commuter lines do not yet compete with the freeways, at least from a public interest standpoint.</p> <p>Urban rail systems like LA Metro and BART are fairly competitive within their service areas, but even so they remain heavily reliant on a variety of bus modes and commuter systems like Caltrain and Metrolink which are still strengthening their competitiveness against commuter bus lines and freeway commuting; this is especially the case in Southern California. Metrolink stations are generally as much as half the distance to common destinations (usually one or two valleys over) and the entrenchedness of driving means that we will almost always choose to do so for even further trips. Metrolink's recent fare reductions to make it more cost-competitive are not well-known, and for single-valley hops (Antelope to Santa Clarita, Santa Clarita to San Fernando, etc) commuter buses are still quite popular with individuals who are already utilizing local buses run by the same agencies. These outlying suburbs being generally higher-income with regards to commuters, the TAP Card being more convenient makes it competitive despite the significantly higher cost of a monthly commuter pass over Metrolink's monthly.</p> <p>For single trips, I can give an example: it's $1 to get to the transit center if you cannot ride directly to one of the Metrolink stations, another $1 in that case; Metrolink is at least $3 if you're only going one station down, at most $15~ to get to Union Station, from any point on the line, including riding even further down Metrolink, you get free fare on Metro Rail and basically any local bus in the entire metropolitan area, but not express or commuter; from the transit center the commuter bus will be another $2.50, then Metro Bus (commuter buses from here run to Warner Center, UCLA, and a pair of Metro stations) is another $1.75. What this means is that in the Greater Los Angeles Metro, which is the vast majority of Southern California by both area and population, public transit is very clearly delineated between buses for local and short (up to about 40mi) trips, Metrolink for longer commutes and trips paralleling but not competing with commuter bus lines in the outer suburbs, Metro Rail fulfilling this same longer commute role in the metro proper, Amtrak California lines primarily targeting anyone with two places of residence. The same, to my understanding, is largely true of the San Diego and Bay metro areas, but with more well-developed light rail services instead of the LA metro's vast bus networks.</p> <p>The reason for these buses being the hills and somewhat poorly planned nature of the coagulation of the metro, also being the reason why most of us prefer to drive. One of the primary motivators for ridesharing and utilization of public transit, then, is environmental conscientiousness; this meaning that, in the face of what is now a nearly universal adoption of Compressed Natural Gas buses, rail lines will need to either convert to LNG or pure electric power to be politically and popularly competitive. It doesn't matter to the average Californian that Tier IV is already highly efficient, it matters that we can buy cars that say "hybrid" or "electric" and that our buses say "CNG" or "hybrid electric." A good advertising agency could probably come up with a wonderful branding for Tier IV locomotives and make it just as popular, but they haven't. Until then, zero-emissions is another thing that some Californians will push for until it eventually becomes profitable and universal, while almost everybody else in the country just thinks it's a nice idea. For some reason we seem to produce the loudest idealists and the quietest realists (nobody ever really talks about the swaths of California which remain staunchly conservative and house a lot of the national aerospace industry.)</p>
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