Falcon48Something like this could only be conceived in a state that has legalized pot.
Convicted One For all it's flaws and short comings, the highway system is, (for the most part) "open access", so taxpayers have less objection to supporting it than they would paying a king's ransom to build a system that somebody else is going to control via a farebox. Perhaps if the expanded toll road system concept gains momentum, that might change some minds?
For all it's flaws and short comings, the highway system is, (for the most part) "open access", so taxpayers have less objection to supporting it than they would paying a king's ransom to build a system that somebody else is going to control via a farebox.
Perhaps if the expanded toll road system concept gains momentum, that might change some minds?
Convicted One,
I’ve wondered about the full rollout of self-driving vehicles. An administrative state’s dream. Millions of vehicles to control.
zardoz Falcon48 Something like this could only be conceived in a state that has legalized pot. Right! Much better would be all the wonderful ideas that are forthcoming from legislatures populated with well-past-their-prime fossils who are soaked in whiskey.
Falcon48 Something like this could only be conceived in a state that has legalized pot.
Right! Much better would be all the wonderful ideas that are forthcoming from legislatures populated with well-past-their-prime fossils who are soaked in whiskey.
Last I looked, California is hardly the only state to legalize marijuana. 10 states + DC have legalized for recreational use and another 23 states allow varying medical uses.
Gramp Convicted One For all it's flaws and short comings, the highway system is, (for the most part) "open access", so taxpayers have less objection to supporting it than they would paying a king's ransom to build a system that somebody else is going to control via a farebox. Perhaps if the expanded toll road system concept gains momentum, that might change some minds? Convicted One, I’ve wondered about the full rollout of self-driving vehicles. An administrative state’s dream. Millions of vehicles to control.
Yes, I think this will be the dark side of self-driving cars. They will also be self-regulating in every imaginable way. You just register your trip plan, and then climb aboard and ride. It will be your personal mass transit. It will keep track of your mileage fee which will vary according to where you drive, the time you drive, and the purpose of your trip.
EuclidIt will keep track of your mileage fee which will vary according to where you drive, the time you drive, and the purpose of your trip.
Much the same system that has prevailed with 'road tax' in England for decades. (They had, and perhaps still have, a similar system for 'broadcast' television!)
The truly dark and alarming part is that (doubtless partly justified by 'improvements to the service') the system will take all sorts of supervisory audio, video, and metadata records as you drive, and stream them to an ever-widening pool of 'joint venture partners' and other "value stream augmentors" ... probably including your insurance company, which will helpfully remind you about every jot and tittle of the near-zero-defects maintenance regimen an autonomous vehicle really ought to have. Oh, and stream you all sorts of directed advertising and 'helpful opportunities' as you drive.
Think of it, a whole nation of inside- and outside-facing cameras accessible by people you really don't want to have information on you, or who really don't have your personal best interest at heart. What's left of real railroaders by then will be laughing to see how we like it.
Overmod Euclid It will keep track of your mileage fee which will vary according to where you drive, the time you drive, and the purpose of your trip. Much the same system that has prevailed with 'road tax' in England for decades. (They had, and perhaps still have, a similar system for 'broadcast' television!) The truly dark and alarming part is that (doubtless partly justified by 'improvements to the service') the system will take all sorts of supervisory audio, video, and metadata records as you drive, and stream them to an ever-widening pool of 'joint venture partners' and other "value stream augmentors" ... probably including your insurance company, which will helpfully remind you about every jot and tittle of the near-zero-defects maintenance regimen an autonomous vehicle really ought to have. Oh, and stream you all sorts of directed advertising and 'helpful opportunities' as you drive. Think of it, a whole nation of inside- and outside-facing cameras accessible by people you really don't want to have information on you, or who really don't have your personal best interest at heart. What's left of real railroaders by then will be laughing to see how we like it.
Euclid It will keep track of your mileage fee which will vary according to where you drive, the time you drive, and the purpose of your trip.
Thanks to Chris / CopCarSS for my avatar.
Me, I'm waiting for everyone to be microchipped. Think of the opportunities for businesses to rake it in! "Notice how those chippies have head of the line privileges? How I hate them."
The closest the United States ever got to actual HSR during the period in question was some possibly-apocryphal high speed on grossly inadequate track with grossly inadequate equipment, probably peaking in the immediate postwar years up to the imposition of the ICC order post-Naperville that reimposed the ATS/ATC limits of the Esch Act strictly. Even 125mph was a wild dream, only achieved in brief fits and starts if at all.
Orders of magnitude more capital required to do the actual thing than any American private railroad would consider putting into its infrastructure under contemporary taxing and regulation. (Or, probably, otherwise). The idea of medium-speed (100mph running, as with the Hiawathas) was most of what 'serious' passenger operations would get to.
It's an interesting question as to what would happen if the government had 're-nationalized' the railroads in WWII, with some sort of extended compensation based probably on tax relief and deductions on freight operations, and probably establishment of something like Kneiling's 'iron ocean' for private operations. A further likely precondition would be a 'strategic defense railroad' scheme to match the Interstate program, possibly funded by the same fuel tax system that established the Highway Trust Fund.
Of course it wouold have been expensively built out to the wrong standards, and then expensively rebuilt with concrete ties and then again when the concrete ties of that era 'failed to thrive'. And equipped extensively with the wrong type of catenary in electrified sections, although I may be too pessimistic. I doubt any practicable scheme the government could arrange, even in the absence of Cold War defense spending to get out of the wqke of the Depression, could have improved 'enough' passenger railroading around the country to replace the airplane and large personal automobile as travel alternatives ... as fast as it would have been practical to run Pullman trains fast. Note the relative failure of passive tilt to thrive here, over the years, and the basic impossibility of making an active-tilt system with standards-compliant buff and draft standards. So no 'adaptive reuse' of ridiculously-curved-for-HSR rights of way above what even ridiculous (and freight-unfriendly) supedrelevation could allow. And I haven't even started on the grade-crossing problems, few of which could be solved in that era shy of full grade separation.
It may help the sense of indignation, if only a bit, to reflect on how inadequate even the Interstate construction budgets would have been in preserving the level of passenger service prevailing even as late as the middle Fifties. (And to note that the airport at Cut Bank, that swallowed so much money that could have gone directly for railroad improvements, is closed and gone for lack of traffic...)
Yes, it would have been grand to see a fleet of Budd HSR trains. Exactly what these would have been with '50s technology, though, is not exactly a pleasant thing to contemplate. What runs very nicely at 100mph is in many ways grossly inadequate for 125mph; solutions wildly successful for 125mph (e.g. the British developments leading up to the HST) are grossly inadequate for 150mph, and the step from there to even entry-level HSR at metric-converted 186mph is at least as steep. Note that a severe issue is the damage inadequate truck systems pose to any contemporary track structure that needs to remain freight compatible.
I think what you'd get by no later than the 1960s would be a colossal boondoggle, now of entitled vs. disenfranchised communities looking at what might reach toward billions of dollars of essentially lost money for maintenance and equipment designed to be even worse overripe technical tomatoes than Metroliners -- just begging for political 'reassignment' to things with greater clout with voters or organizing blocs.
York1 This discussion has really gone off the deep end, and for that I'm sorry. I posted my comments about why I thought HSR in our country was not something to be pursued. You guys obviously disagree. That's fine. And GMO foods, farm size, and hick farmers poisoning the air, land, and water really have nothing to do with it.
This discussion has really gone off the deep end, and for that I'm sorry. I posted my comments about why I thought HSR in our country was not something to be pursued. You guys obviously disagree. That's fine.
And GMO foods, farm size, and hick farmers poisoning the air, land, and water really have nothing to do with it.
You triggered the individuals on here that keep their Saul Alinsky playbook handy for every bloody controversial subject.
JOHN PRIVARAI'm not sure how the Europeans managed to keep the highway engineers from decimating their cities and destroying the peasant’s hovels, tho.
I'm tempted to say that various Europeans, and the Eighth Air Force mentioned in another thread here, did a far better job of pre-decimating cities and destroying far more than hovels -- we had an amusing argument a few months ago on whether this assisted development of high-speed rail in cities so 'affected' (the conclusion being it did not).
One of the significant decisions that I think precluded American-style automobile development in many European countries is the intentional high price of motor fuel. This skewed vehicle development toward smaller and lower-powered cars, already something of an early postwar priority, and kept operating cost for the used-car market relatively high. Without a wide base of individual car owners who want cheap high-speed access 'anywhere they want to go' including presumably their work or any urban travel, there's relatively little ability for someone like a European Bob Moses to go crazy with the concrete linguini.
To my knowledge, the Europeans did not develop the 'insolent chariots' model of buying new cars every year as a social convention, although I certainly think quite a few people tried.
Ultimately, though, I think the difference comes down to density and social patterns: it was easier for 'social-democratic' governments to maintain mass-transit systems and not complex roads accomplishing the same purpose. In order to prioritize such a thing in the United States almost inconceivable amounts of money would have been required even had the necessary infrastructure (largely interurbans) been preserved as a basis, and it is difficult to imagine how the far more inconceivable amount necessary to modernize all these miles periodically would be. In the meantime even the advantages of buses instead of 'traction' on all the routes that proved more economical (and convenient!) to operate that way are no longer financially sufficient in most communities, and they operate requiring what are essentially supply-balancing-demand subsidy allocation.
But the great argument here is about HSR, and there I think the argument has repeatedly been established that sufficient traffic over very long distances, combined with rational-expectations increased construction costs and various kinds of institutionalized NIMBYism, make it even more impossible at any era of American history than widespread electrification -- which at greater American scale would have been a dramatic prioritized project for a 'nationalized' railroad service in the first place.
On the other hand, we need to consider a world in which the economics of long-distance aircraft no longer apply, either. I happen to agree with the argument that Cold War military developments highly subsidized development of turbine passenger aircraft, but this would surely be even more pronounced and direct in a prospective world in which government 'priority' in a large network of expensive high-speed railroads was assumed.
You'd also have to eliminate all the Holiday Inns, service stations, and other businesses that developed around the personal automobile as a means of travel. The closest many people come to understanding this is traveling on some of the later Interstates, for example I-49 south of Shreveport in the first years after its opening, where you might go many miles without finding any convenient services. Demand-driven development filled these things in, starting with motor courts, 'roadfood' and the like, and all this could be factored into the cumulative synergistic value of having a car that could access free good roads. Much of this, too, appears to have been far less present in Europe -- I really don't know the extent to which the 'Drei an der Tankstelle' image in film actually translated into social practice in the prewar years, and I think there will be practical analyses of the extent to which it was tried in various areas and time periods 'across the pond' from the general time of the Wirtschaftswunder on.
Keep in mind that Europe had to import most of its oil, and thus European governments had an incentive to limit the use of oil though high taxes. The US was self-sufficient in oil up to the mid-1950's.
Europe except for coal and wood has been shafted for easy access to fuel pretty much its entire exsistance. Except for the Romanian oil fields there really isn't any oil in continential Europe. Even the German's were making artifical oil in WW2 to feed their war machine. Here in the USA we could survive today without OPEC and importing oil with our current production that has been discovered in the last decade and with modern technology. Let alone our natural gas production that we actually have enough to export to Europe. Then throw in coal reserves in the Powder River that are enough at current use to last 4 centuries plus other reserves across the nation and you can see why we are the Energy powerhouse in the World. Also another reason why there is no HSR in this nation is very simple the trains in Europe for the most part are government owned and operated with some exceptions. Here in the USA they are private companies aka run by corparations that got out of having passenger trains almost 50 years ago for a reason they lost money. Even in the best times hauling mail for the US Government the passenger train long haul as fast as we ran them was a break even proposition.
Even if the US railroads/government had built "HSR" in 1950, it would have been obsolete/obsolescent by now. Population patterns have changed drastically since then. In 1950, only 28 of the largest 100 cities were west of the Mississippi River. Now, you only have to get to #48 to get 28 west of the Big Miss. Phoenix in 1950 was number 98, two below New Bedford, MA, now it's #5. How times have changed...
"It's about time". "It's about growth".
Received this from Texas Central yesterday:
https://www.texascentral.com/ridership/?utm_source=Master+List&utm_campaign=009b5b72da-WeeklyEmail_2018_1_5_COPY_01&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_e3e1b03971-009b5b72da-146842247
GrampReceived this from Texas Central yesterday:
Before commenting, another important reference is New">https://www.lek.com/insights/ei/high-speed-rail-profitability]New Routes to Profitabiliity in High-Speed Rail Be careful to note a couple of things: 1) Exactly how many people who are traveling will be willing to spend the amount for a HSR trip to save 'an hour' alone? 2) blending 'probably' and 'definitely' in a percentage assessment of passengers is a bit like the weaselry in blended synthetic oil composition -- it could be 50% synthetic or 1% in the blend; do you trust a pitchman to tell the marks the actual number if it interferes with the pitch? I do think it needs to be built without depending on faith 'they will come' once it has been. I also understand why its promoters will be leaving no stone unturned when it comes to effective propaganda to get it built. However, rational discussion probably hinges in part on working the seeds of truth out of the overripe pulp of press releases...
Be careful to note a couple of things:
1) Exactly how many people who are traveling will be willing to spend the amount for a HSR trip to save 'an hour' alone?
2) blending 'probably' and 'definitely' in a percentage assessment of passengers is a bit like the weaselry in blended synthetic oil composition -- it could be 50% synthetic or 1% in the blend; do you trust a pitchman to tell the marks the actual number if it interferes with the pitch?
I do think it needs to be built without depending on faith 'they will come' once it has been. I also understand why its promoters will be leaving no stone unturned when it comes to effective propaganda to get it built. However, rational discussion probably hinges in part on working the seeds of truth out of the overripe pulp of press releases...
Before commenting, another important reference is New Routes to Profitabiliity in High-Speed Rail - https://www.lek.com/insights/ei/high-speed-rail-profitability (Kalmbach is playing with the code again and embedded URL tags aren't working)
I do think it needs to be built without depending on faith 'they will come' once it has been. I also understand why its promoters will be leaving no stone unturned when it comes to effective propaganda to get it built. However, rational discussion probably hinges in part on working the seeds of manipulation out of the already-overripe pulp of press releases...
Shadow the Cats owner Europe except for coal and wood has been shafted for easy access to fuel pretty much its entire exsistance. Except for the Romanian oil fields there really isn't any oil in continential Europe. Even the German's were making artifical oil in WW2 to feed their war machine. Here in the USA we could survive today without OPEC and importing oil with our current production that has been discovered in the last decade and with modern technology. Let alone our natural gas production that we actually have enough to export to Europe. Then throw in coal reserves in the Powder River that are enough at current use to last 4 centuries plus other reserves across the nation and you can see why we are the Energy powerhouse in the World. Also another reason why there is no HSR in this nation is very simple the trains in Europe for the most part are government owned and operated with some exceptions. Here in the USA they are private companies aka run by corparations that got out of having passenger trains almost 50 years ago for a reason they lost money. Even in the best times hauling mail for the US Government the passenger train long haul as fast as we ran them was a break even proposition.
The Germans have enough respect for actual science to move away from coal, even though they have huge reserves. If you are a AGCC denier, then you are part of the problem.
charlie hebdo Shadow the Cats owner Europe except for coal and wood has been shafted for easy access to fuel pretty much its entire existence... The Germans have enough respect for actual science to move away from coal, even though they have huge reserves. If you are a AGCC denier, then you are part of the problem.
Shadow the Cats owner Europe except for coal and wood has been shafted for easy access to fuel pretty much its entire existence...
Europe except for coal and wood has been shafted for easy access to fuel pretty much its entire existence...
With respect, you have completely missed her point.
If you look at why compound locomotives succeeded in France while they were largely ignored, or failed, here, and then why electrification was pushed so dramatically (and manipulatively) there to Chapelon's detriment, you will see evidence of the relative 'fuel starvation' in European practice. Here in the United States in the time from the late '40s through the mid-'60s that we were discussing, fuel was cheap and available and hence the alternatives of large private-car operation and transport-aircraft operation were preferred to what was increasingly tired old Pullman sloggery and then money-losing mandated service. In those days the academic concern, if expressed, had to do with prospective global cooling more than AGW; in fact, I remember one of the first 'warming' discussions started with a perfectly sanguine assessment (it was, in fact, the thing that first convinced me of the possibility of AGW in the first place, in the early '70s) that if fuel burning continued to increase at the rate typical of the 1960s, by 2050 or so the peak summer temperatures in the American midwest would be in the 140-degree-F range and as a consequence the bulk of North American grain production would shift to the Canadian Shield ... OK, ADM, get your checkbook out for seemingly-worthless muskeg ASAP...)
The Germans also have enough disregard for actual engineering to shut down their nuclear efforts for little better than political mountebankery reasons, despite the fact that their neighbor France makes the trick work reliably even with fehlern like Chooz B in the history. It will be interesting to see whether or not the Germans understand that current approaches to 'renewable solar' have a (rather short!) fixed working lifespan before expensive servicing or replacement. (Of course I'm all in favor of renewables if that's the way governments want to allocate both their expenditures and incentives, more power to them pun intended, but not with thorium-cycle levels of flackery and directed ignorance of key issues.)
But let's keep this on the historical level as the original discussion was framed.
Several years back I asked former frequent poster Juniatha why the Germans converted some of their steam locomotives to oil-firing when Germany had such reserves of coal. Her answer was German coal is good, but it's not great, oil firing produced greater BTU's and more efficiency in the locomotive. Interesting.
As far as German technical expertise and know-how is concerned even they don't get it right all the time. They pursued hydrogen as a fuel a while back and then gave it up with a shock when they saw how much it cost to produce it.
And as Overmod said, don't forget the German political stew that's constantly bubbling. Throw that into the mix and energy policy's certainly going to be effected in an effort to keep everyone happy. An impossibility as far as I'm concerned.
Flintlock76As far as German technical expertise and know-how is concerned even they don't get it right all the time. They pursued hydrogen as a fuel a while back and then gave it up with a shock when they saw how much it cost to produce it.
Ahem ... cough, cough, Coradia iLINT...
Overmod I should have specified, I was referring to hydrogen as an automobile fuel, as in pulling up to the "gas" pump and saying "Fill 'er up Fritz!" That was a bust as far as I know. I wasn't referring to fuel cells. Flintlock76 As far as German technical expertise and know-how is concerned even they don't get it right all the time. They pursued hydrogen as a fuel a while back and then gave it up with a shock when they saw how much it cost to produce it. Ahem ... cough, cough, Coradia iLINT...
I should have specified, I was referring to hydrogen as an automobile fuel, as in pulling up to the "gas" pump and saying "Fill 'er up Fritz!"
That was a bust as far as I know. I wasn't referring to fuel cells.
Flintlock76 As far as German technical expertise and know-how is concerned even they don't get it right all the time. They pursued hydrogen as a fuel a while back and then gave it up with a shock when they saw how much it cost to produce it.
What the hell happened to my post with a quote? It's not supposed to be a sea of blue!
Clambake strikes again! I don't like clambakes anyway, when I'm in the mood for shellfish give me mussels in marinara!
Flintlock76I should have specified, I was referring to hydrogen as an automobile fuel, as in pulling up to the "gas" pump and saying "Fill 'er up Fritz!" That was a bust as far as I know. I wasn't referring to fuel cells.
You could figure out most of the potential for hydrogen carrier fuel in ordinary automobiles by BMW converting a 12-cylinder 7-series as the poster child. Even with trained minions operating the cryogenics, it wouldn't be long before the inevitable invisible-flame surprise.
What BMW did famously establish (and it has implications for companies like Tesla going forward) is that the 'first best use' of a fuel cell on an automobile is to supply the "parasitic loads" -- all of them -- on an advanced motor vehicle, especially one with a large amount of critical 'vehetronics' that are electrically controlled or driven. Cryohydrogen has an advantage in that no complex reformer is required to fuel the requisite-size (about 5kW as I recall in the prototype) unit, and the vehicle can be happily inhabited with all systems running even in a closed garage or adjacent to NIMBY neighbors. Then (as with the SPV2000) all the power of a conventional hybrid drivetrain can be directed to the road wheels at any time needed, with the formal combustion engine actually shut down (subject to being kept prewarmed) as much of the time as possible -- this adds dramatically to most real-world measures of fuel consumption and hence grams of emission.
Of course this still doesn't justify pretending to make hydrogen the main-engine fuel. Unless the current secret agenda to make particulates from GDI engines as nastily regulated as the counterparts from DI diesel engines ... and I am concerned that science will actually establish precisely the basis for it ... succeeds in making liquid fuels that are cost-effective to distribute in the current supply chain.
Of course this still doesn't justify pretending to make hydrogen the main-engine fuel. Unless the current secret agenda to make particulates from GDI engines as nastily regulated as the counterparts from DI diesel engines ... and I am concerned that science will actually establish precisely the basis for it ... succeeds in effectively demonizing any liquid fuels that are cost-effective to distribute in the current supply chain.
charlie hebdo The Germans have enough respect for actual science to move away from coal, even though they have huge reserves. If you are a AGCC denier, then you are part of the problem.
While there isn't much true scientific debate about the interactions of CO2 and LWIR (long wave infra-red), there is subbstantial uncertainty (and thus debate) about how much warming will be caused by a given increase in atmospheric CO2. A straight gray body analysis suggests ~1C for a doubling in CO2, while 4.5C projection assumes a series of feedbacks that are open to debate.
Other aspect of CO2 induced warming is that it will show up more as an increase in minimum temperatures as opposed to increases in maximum temperatures. The radiative forcing from CO2 is small compared to radiant energy from the sun, but is more significant at night.
As a final comment, Mars has about 25X the CO2 for a given surface area than the earth does now and is a pretty cold place (albeit further from the sun). If CO2 was a potent a greenhouse gas as some think it is (most important greenhouse gas on earth is water vapor). FWIW, I know Venus is hot, but it has oceans worth of CO2 in its atmosphere.
What people are forgetting is how automobile-centric Western Europe is.
Last time I looked into the breakdown of intercity travel, Amtrak was at .1 percent of total intercity passenger miles, motorcoach buses at 1 percent (a large portion of that may be charters and not scheduled Greyhound or Megabus), airlines at 10 percent, with the remaining nearly 90 percent being personal cars and light-duty trucks.
In Western Europe, the breakdown was 20 percent public modes with a full 80 percent private autos. The 20 percent public/common carrier slice was divided nearly equally between trains, airlines, motorcoach buses and yes, boats of various kinds. For the people saying motorcoach buses are no substitute for a train, the Europeans patronize each of these modes at a multiple of motorcoach service in the US and a high multiple of Amtrak. For people saying airline transport is wasteful or unpleasant, it is a large, growing segment in Europe.
As to the subsidies, yes the US funding level of Amtrak is just crumbs. The Europeans, however, spend public money on the scale of the US Federal Highway Trust fund to support trains, yes, a 50 times greater level of service than Amtrak but also for about 50 times the money, still only supporting a 5 percent slice of their intercity passenger mile demand.
As to the recurrent arguments "if we just had the will, we could have European-style high speed trains", the State of California, which by itself would be one of the world's top economies were it an independent country, has had the political will to build an HSR.
Its prospects don't look very bright right now, not for reasons having anything to do with the advantages or disadvantages of a train, as such, but for reasons having to do with having turned our nation's backs to the Edmund G "Pat" Brown or Robert Moses steamroller approach to large projects. We value people's rights more than we value having an HSR -- this is what Thomas Friedman's famous admiration of China was all about. China is an authoritarian country (Friedman was admiring the Chinese for this) where things can still get steamrolled, and they have many miles of HSR.
If GM "killed the electric car", what am I doing standing next to an EV-1, a half a block from the WSOR tracks?
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