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U.S. Stimulus Puts Bullet Trains on the Fast Track
Tim Padgett, Time
Florida, like many of America's biggest states, can be frustrating to traverse. Driving between such major cities as Miami and Tampa is a back-numbing haul; flying between them, especially at the exorbitant fares many airlines charge, often seems impractical. And as the peninsula state's population has exploded in recent years — Florida is set to pass New York as the nation's third largest state — its road and air corridors have become more gridlocked and eco-unfriendly. Which is why Floridians voted in 2000 to build a high-speed bullet-train service between Miami, Tampa and Orlando. By 2004, however, then-governor Jeb Bush, who had insisted the estimated $6 billion cost would in reality top $20 billion, had persuaded Florida voters to drop the idea.

But the bullet-train idea is back, as it is throughout the rest of the country, thanks to $13 billion for high-speed rail (HSR) that was tucked into President Obama's $787 billion economic stimulus package. The application process for bullet-train bucks ($8 billion this year and $1 billion in each of the next five years) began this week. States like Florida are vying for big chunks of it — not only as free funding for a traffic decongestant they thought they couldn't afford, but also as a high-tech pump primer for the kind of higher-wage jobs that low-wage economies like Florida's need...
(22 June 2009)

Don’t Fight The Powerful Trends Now Underway
Charles Cresson Wood, Kicking the Gasonline & Petro-Diesel Habit
... The Administration still has not come clean with the American public: it still has not told the truth about the real situation when it comes to peak oil. There is no chance that America will be able to make the transition to a post-petroleum economy in an orderly fashion if its leaders won’t even publicly admit the truth about what’s happening today. It gets worse than that. The Administration is in fact causing serious trouble with its efforts to keep the old-fashioned oil-dependent transportation system going.

The trouble comes from three major areas. The first of these involves wasting resources on unnecessary activities. The billions spent on GM and Chrysler need to instead have been spent on activities that create new transportation infrastructure, new transportation technology, and new ways of operating our transportation systems. For example, instead of trying to broker the sale of Chrysler to another company, the Administration should be supporting standardization efforts that facilitate the development of and adoption of new technology. A more specific example of this — and the author is by no means endorsing this approach — is provided by the company called Better Place. This company is pushing a standard for electric car batteries that are interchangeable. Thus an electric car could simply get a ten minute battery replacement, rather than having spend four to eight hours charging up its own battery. Long distance trips via electric vehicles would thereby become more practical and efficient, even though major new breakthroughs in battery technology have not yet arrived. In general, standardization facilitates research and development, and facilitates the introduction and adoption of new products. Standardization also facilitates buyer understanding of new technologies, which in turn accelerates the adoption of new technologies.

The second source of trouble created by the Administration is that by attempting to shore-up old transportation systems, the focus is placed on the maintenance of, and fixing of the old system, when the old system instead needs to be converted or abandoned. If we don’t admit what’s going on, if we don’t start having a public and open conversation about it, it’s exceedingly difficult to effect a transition to new technology. If we don’t create a new way of thinking about our world, that incorporates peak oil, and the peak resource constraints that we face (such as peak metals), then it’s highly unlikely that we are going to be able to responsibly manage the remains of these resources in a manner that successfully moves us in the direction of transition.

In the postponement of this important transition, in the continued focus on the old, we as a society may miss most of, if not all of, the window of opportunity to transition to a truly sustainable transportation system. With this focus on the old system, we are likely to simply keep going with the old system as long as we can, and then crash in a crisis because we cannot, at that point, go on any longer. It remains to be seen what, if any, residual assets we will have at that point in time in order to accomplish this gigantic transition to non-petroleum-based technology.

The third source of trouble is that this approach creates what the insurance industry calls a “moral hazard.” If the government gives money to dead and dying petroleum-dependent car companies, it encourages management at these rescued car companies, and other car companies for that matter as well, to act irresponsibly. By this I mean ignore the future, and fail to transition to new energy technologies. The government thereby gives managers the message that they will be bailed out if they fail to respond adequately to the peak oil crisis. The government thus allows these companies to somehow avoid the discipline of the marketplace, which would otherwise have dictated that GM and Chrysler go out of business.

Since 1979, Charles Cresson Wood has worked as a high-technology management consultant, researcher, and journalist. His work in technology risk management has included: the promotion of management awareness about new technological risks, the development of grounded and rational organizational responses to new technological risks, the management of projects that enable organizations to better deal with these risks. (Bio)
(23 June 2009)

Pump Prices Driving More to Mass Transit
Tom Jacobs, Miller-McCune Magazine
New study finds fluctuations in ridership among different cities as gasoline costs change, but will the trend toward public transit be a long journey or a short trip?

As the American Public Transportation Association triumphantly reported in March, mass transit ridership in the U.S. reached its highest level since the 1950s last year. But do those crowded buses, subways and commuter trains reflect a long-term trend, or merely a transitory reaction to the price of gasoline?

The answer appears to be both: A newly published study finds "a small but statistically significant amount of ridership fluctuation is due to changes in gasoline prices." But perhaps the most interesting findings in the report by geographer Bradley Lane of Indiana University is how the trends differ from one metropolitan area to the next.

For his study, published in the Journal of Transport Geography, Lane looked at transit ridership in nine major American cities from January 2002 to April 2008. Gasoline prices began rising dramatically in the middle of that period, in August 2005.

Lane found that in Boston, Chicago and Denver, increasing gas prices were associated with an increase in ridership. "Escalating gasoline costs appear to have reversed a trend of decreasing ridership in these cities," he reports.
(23 June 2009)
Researcher cautions transit operators against giving into the temptation to cut service to save money as fuel prices rise. -BA