I wouldn’t look at “potential” anything as a basis for comparison. How much a bus or train CAN carry is irrelevant. The imporant thing is how much they DO carry on average. Those are real world figures and not theoreticals. I don’t care how much milege my car CAN get, I care about what it really DOES as that’s what I’m paying for at the pump. See how that works? Therefore I’d use quoted figures for average ridership of each rather than total number of seats. Empty seats don’t pay for anything. Full ones do. You should only care about full ones.
I’m not trying to beat you up, I’m sure you meant it innocently, but please be careful when you talk about what other people know. I don’t know that people don’t like buses. I’d tend to agree if you said that I know that people don’t like public transit, since most people don’t use public transit there must be some of them who based their decision on a dislike. Again my theme here is that the bus is not the enemy, or at least the bus is the enemy of our enemy.
I’ve got 2 anecdotes that go both ways:
-
SEPTA had a survey which said that the route 15 riders overwhelmingly wanted buses instead of a return to streetcars. It turns out that the survey choices were between air conditioned buses and unrefurbished PCC’s with no air conditioning.
-
SEPTA was replacing late night subway service, 30 minute headway, with night owl bus over the same route with 15 minute headway. Several comments in the newspaper were from people who felt that waiting on the subway platform was safer than waiting on the street corner. I found that sentiment surprising since the anecdotes I was used to were from people who were fearful of the crime in subway stations.
When I was a kid, and talked about how I liked to go for trolley rides, all my friends would tease me. The memory from grade school was they’d always say “trolleys are slow”.
Well, let’s call it a first step. It would be certainly be helpful to know how much fuel is actually burned between point A and point B by an Amtrak train with such-and-such a consist, with so-and-so number of revenue seats. Can anybody tell us (within a factor of two, let’s say) how many gallons an F59 burns taking five California cars from Oakland to Sacramento? If we don’t know that, how are we supposed to figure the fuel burn per passenger-mile?
Train run fuel consumption may be helpful in evaluating operations and implementing fuel conservation practices. Run data also may provide a benchmark for measuring operations, yet questions such as whether to shut down engines can be found the other way around by calculating the hours spent at idle or standby fuel consumption rates.
Some railroads get locomotive information including throttle setting and braking by satellite telemetry. I don’t know if the event recorder data can be downloaded routinely or even as a sampling; or if this is necessary routinely except to monitor operating practices.
In the long run, it all boils down to the system and the sum of its parts.
Apparently I overestimated the understanding that all members of this forum should have about the up coming converging crisises our nation is about to face. I am refering to the imminent coming of world peak oil production, the imminent issue of diminishing natural resourses, and the growing national debt.
Samantha you missed my point entirely, I agree that if we throw enough money and energy into the development of an Intelligent Highway System such a thing could be built. The point I was trying to make was the fact that the implimentation of such a system would be so expensive and the logistics to make it work would be so immense that the whole idea is impractical. All of this and I have not even brought up the fact that world engergy and natural resource supplies are about to peak. I think it is interesting that you made a comparison between the the pre Wright brothers era “conventional wisdom” about powered flight and my views on the Intelligent Highway. Lots of people understood Bernoulli’s principle of lift before the first flight at Kitty Hawk, what got the Wright brothers into the history books was that they were the first ones to apply a suitably powerful gasoline engine to the engineering challenge. After the Wright brothers flew, the new “conventional wisdom” was that anything was technologically possible given enough time, money, and research. Durring the era of plentiful oil and other natural resource supplies, this assumption held up quite well. However I am sad to report that the era of “anything is possible” is almost over.
China and India are both trying to industrialize their economies just as world natural resource supplies are about to peak. With in the next 10 years, it won’t matter how much you dig, drill, blast, etc. etc., world demand for many critical resources will exceed supply. We are already seeing the consequences of this situation as the sky high prices
I do not dismiss the importance of seating capacity; but seating comprises a whole range of issues from boarding to comfort appropriate for the travel market as well as fuel economy.
If you have 70-passenger coaches and ridership for a given run averages 150 passengers; how many cars are you going to assign to the train? If 100-seat cars are contemplated to improve the theoretical fuel efficiency, how will that work in the above example? At what point does fuel efficiency override service and business is turned away? With Amtrak, average loads vary for each run; and variances in loads occur for each trip. Theoretical fuel efficiency is moot. Of course, a couple trains operate at near-capacity and approach the optimum; but the service is judged for what is achieved on the whole - currently around 46 pm/gal for the Hiawathas.
I share your concerns for the issues.
SRen
New technology is almost always beyond the reach of the market place at the time it is discovered. They key to making it affordable is acceptance and mass production, which almost always lower dramatically the cost.
The first computers were so expensive and labor intensive that only the U.S. Army and a few research centers could afford them. But the cost came down and, ultimately, they became available for the masses.
I have been a pilot and student of aviation for decades. I never read anything to suggest that the early aeronautical engineers envisioned anything like the Boeing 747. Or that airplanes would supplant trains as the preferred mode of travel, especially over long distances.
The comparison between pre-Wright understanding of flight and Intelligent Highway Systems was illustrative. It is about a vision of the possible. Many if not most of the great inventions came from people who defied the conventional wisdom. They did not root themselves in old technologies; they envisioned a new way. So it could be with Intelligent Highway Systems in select locations.
Some experts say that we are near the peak of oil production. Others say we are 40 to 60 years away. No one knows for sure.
During the Stone Age there were probably men and women who believed that the world was running out of stones. Fortunately, people with greater foresight discovered better alternatives. And they made the switch to them before the supply of stones was exhausted. The era of cheap oil is over, and we will switch to other fuels long before the world runs out of oil. Hopefully, we will do it in a rational and thoughtful manner.
The U.S. needs to invest in public transit, including rail, where it makes sense, which for the most part is in large cities and relatively short, high density corridors. But for most parts of the U.S., better alternatives exist or will be developed
Dear Samantha,
You do realize that durring prehistoric times there were not enough people living on the planet to threaten the exhaustion of any natural resources; right? I am asking you this because you keep missing my point about what the global shortage of energy and natural resource supplies is going to have on our civilization.
As I mentioned in my last post, current “Convention Wisdom” states that given enough time, reseach, and money we will be able to overcome any problem with technology. As I said before, this belief worked well when material and energy supplies were so cheap and plentiful no one had to give these basic issues a second thought.
Unfortunately the human race is moving into a new era in wich shortages for everything is going to be the norm. It is unfortunate that people such as yourself are wedded to the 100 year old conventional wisdom that states that technology will save us from all problems.
Technological advancement requires raw materials and energy. The computer industry as we know it today would not exist without oil bassed plastics and cheap fuel to ship products from locations with supper cheap labor to US markets.
The idea that our world’s energy needs will be solved with some new technological advancement is a dangerous assumption to make. Current renwable energy sources will only provide a fraction of the energy our civilization needs and even the most enthusiastic supporters of renewables admit that new technology will not be able to replace fossil fuels. Clearly the human race is going to have to go back to doing things on a smaller scale.
Part of this paradigm shift will be the realization that single occupant vehicles and the vast infrastructure needed to suport them is unsustainable. People will rely on public transportation not because they want too but because they will have too.
That being said, I am happy to hear that your neighbors purchased SMART cars, th
SRen
I got your point. You missed mine.
You might be be correct. Or you could bewrong. No one knows for sure what tomorrow will bring. I am betting your prognosis is wrong. So are a lot of other people.
Clearly, you don’t live in Texas. If you did you would know that public transit, especially rail based systems, will not work here, except in a few locales, given the layout of our cities. Dallas has the best public transit system in Texas. After an investment of billions of dollars in the light rail and the commuter rail systems, a blazing two per cent of the population uses it.
Good old boys and gals like myself will give up our pick-ups. But most of us will opt for Smart Cars or something like it as opposed to using public transit. I say most of us. I have used public transit for 39 of the 41 years that I worked for Corporate America. And I still use it whenever I can.
The electric energy needs of a typical suburban house can be met with a few hundred square feet of commercially available PV cells. PV cells are not an economical replacement for fossil fuels with current prices, but that is very likely to change within the next 10 years. The energy needed for a 40 mile commute can be generated by a couple hundred square feet of present day PV cells in the lower latitudes of the US, and battery technology is available for such a car.
For long distance travel with renewable energy sources - the Olympian Hiawatha covered a third of its journey powered largely by hydro power.
Samantha,
“People said” no one would ever take a train or subway in LA too. You’ve done better before as the Devil’s advocate.
DART says they had 10.3 million trips in May, 2008. Unless that’s a fabrication, an average of 332,000 trips a day are made by transit for a city of 1.3 million people of all ages, or 13% of the total population without getting into the number of people actually making trips or transit trips originating outside the City of Dallas.
Saying only 2% of the population uses DART Rail belies the fact that this amounts to 39,000-65,000 daily trips on average (1.5-2.5%) in a broadly defined northeast-southwest corridor and Fort Worth - Dallas commuter line. This corresponds with using the City’s population. Maybe when opened the Green Line will boost that percentage into the realm of statistical significance. To make rail relevant for the whole urban area you need more lines.
Harvey
The population of the Dallas/Fort Worth Metroplex, which is served by DART, TRE, and the T, is approximately 6.3 million people. Most people do not use public transit because they don’t live near them nor are they going where it goes. But they pay for it every time that they buy something that attracts sales tax.
As expected, a higher percentage of people who live near one of the rail or bus lines use the system if they are going where the tracks or bus routes go. And the number of riders on the three public transit systems in the Metroplex has increased significantly over the past year. But the percentage of people in the Metroplex who use public transit remains low. The North Texas Central Council of Governments reports that approximately two per cent of the Metroplex population uses public transit. Having lived in North Texas for more than 32 years, this squares with my experience.
Interestingly, approximately 40 per cent of the people who use the buses, as well as 20 per cent of those on the light rail line and 13 per cent on the TRE, are captive riders. They are low income people, for the most part, who do not have an alternative.
The opening of the Orange and Green lines will increase ridership on the light rail line. And DART will make a big to do about it. What they won’t broadcast so loudly is the fact that a significant percentage of the new riders will be coming off buses that are re-routed to connect with the new rail lines as opposed to going downtown or to another end point. Nevertheless, the lines will attract new riders, especially if gasoline stays at $4 a gallon, until they can switch to more efficient vehicles or ones that are powered by alternative fuels.
The challenge for public transit in Texas is the pattern of our cities. They are spread out for a variety of reasons and lack the density that makes public transit, especially rail, a good option
Ok, on what evidence are you and “a lot of other people” using to assume that my prognosis is wrong? I honestly hope that my prognosis wrong too, but from the facts that we are looking at it is foolish at best and wreckless at worst to bet against it.
Before we wrap up this discussion I would like to recomend an interesting book that sums up my side of this argument, it is called:
The Long Emergency
by James Howard Kunstler
Copyright 2005
printed by Atlantic Monthly Press
ISBN 0-87113-888-3
There are other books about peak oil and its consequence but this one is by far the most interesting. Of course turn about is fair play Samantha, if there are any good books you can recomend to me that support your view that future technological advancements will save us all I would like very much to read them.
Thank you
Scott
Scott:
As the immediacy of Peak Oil is an important concern to you, evidenced by your citing James Howard Kunstler, what is your opinion regarding the 2700 BTU/passenger mile energy usage of Amtrak (equivalent to 46 passenger miles per gallon)?
For sake of argument, lets assume that every automobile is occupied by only one person. Is it your opinion that if everyone switched to a 46 MPG transportation conveyance, be it an Amtrak ride or a ride in a hybrid vehicle that this would save us from the consequence of Peak Oil or the Long Emergency?
Or do you believe that the fuel efficiency of Amtrak could be much better than 46 passenger miles per gallon by more people riding it or by technological changes such as streamlined lightweight trains? Or are you advocating widespread electrification of railroad lines and the required increased production electricity by coal or nuclear? France famously has the TGV as well as 80 percent nuclear electricity – is this a viable path for the US?
Based on either a historical precedent or the experience of our European and Asian trading partners, what percentage of automobiles passenger miles do you believe can be substituted by transit and trains? If part of the effect of trains is to facilitate higher living densities, what reduction in overall passenger miles do you see by that effect?
In terms of taking action to deal with the Long Emergency and believing in technological fixes, Amory Lovins of the Rocky Mountain Institute believes the problem is real, and he is promoting a technological fix – he believes that a lightweight carbon fiber hybrid automobile could achieve 200 MPG: so far he has conducted computer simulations, and I understand he is working on a prototype car. I don’t have ready access to a copy of The Long Emergency so I will ask you – does James Howard Kunstler have ideas on the correct response to Peak Oil in the transportation sector, and what does he see as the breakdown in passenger
Samantha,
First of all, rerouting busses to act as feeders to the light rail lines is exactly what needs to be done to make mass transit more attractive to more people. I find it bizarre that you are sugesting that this is some sort of “smoke and mirrors” gambit to make transit’s numbers look good.
Secondly I am happy to see that you are conceding to the fact that as gas becomes more expensive people will switch to mass transit. Unfortunately you are still stuck on the idea that fuel efficient cars and alternative fuels are going to be a permenant solution.
Hear are some facts that we can not get away from:
- Fuel efficent cars will still need the highway infrastructure that our current fuel guzlers need.
- The highway infrastructure (wich includes freeways, city streets, county roads, ect.) are falling apart faster than we can fix them.
- Much of our road infrastructure already lacks capacity to meet today’s demands much less future growth.
- The cost of rebuilding and expandin
SRen
I did not say that rerouting buses was smoke and mirrors. It is one of several tactics to get more people to ride the light rail trains and, therefore, help justify the cost. But many people, because they don’t understand how the system works, are led to believe that the increase in public transit ridership, following the opening of a light rail line, is attributable solely to the light rail line, when this is not the case.
Interestingly, when the first two DART lines were opened, some people, who rode the bus from their neighborhood to downtown, found their commute time was increased because of the rerouting of the bus and the required transfer to the train.
DART’s light rail ridership has been increasing steadily. May 2008 saw an increase of nine per cent over May 2007. But system wide ridership in 2007 was less than ridership in 2006.
The use of words like bizarre, ridiculous, etc. do little to promote discussion. Moreover, email and forum etiquette equates the use of bold letters, all caps, and color, especially red, with shouting.
Clearly, maintaining our roadways in Texas, as well as building new ones, is challenging. To say that they are falling apart is a stretch. Actually, except for those in the center of some of our cities, they are in pretty good shape.
Since we don’t know what alternative fuels may be developed over the next decade or two, it is impossible to say how expensive they will be. They could be very expensive, or they could be relatively inexpensive.
The pattern of cities in Texas does not lend itself to wide spread use of rail for public transit. The populations density is too low. Our cities were built around the automobile. This is why, except in a few instances, buses, as well as improveed auto and highway technology, is the wave of the future in Texas. However, where existing rail facilities can be used, I
SRen,
One book a trend does not make. All kinds of people get their views published. Some of them are creditable; some of them are not.
As I have said repeatedly, I don’t know what the future will bring. However, I don’t think that Armageddon is just around the corner. Neither do most of the people with whom I worked or with whom I interact at the University of Texas.
I worked for the electric utility industry for decades. This is the world that I know best. We faced and face many challenges. But from the Edison Electric Institute to my company’s first line supervisors, which includes hundreds of engineers, technicians, IT people, etc., everyone that I knew and know believes that we can overcome the many problems that beset the industry. And technology will be the enabler. The same applies to the other problems that are and will be a challenge.
When someone claims that there is only one scenario for the future, I am suspect. No one knows the future; they can only put together likely scenarios of how things might be.
“The Art of the Long View” by Peter Schwartz and “The Fifth Discipline” by Peter Senge are excellent introductions to scenario planning and systems thinking, which are important models for developing and assessing scenarios.
[quote user=“Paul Milenkovic”]
Scott:
As the immediacy of Peak Oil is an important concern to you, evidenced by your citing James Howard Kunstler, what is your opinion regarding the 2700 BTU/passenger mile energy usage of Amtrak (equivalent to 46 passenger miles per gallon)?
For sake of argument, lets assume that every automobile is occupied by only one person. Is it your opinion that if everyone switched to a 46 MPG transportation conveyance, be it an Amtrak ride or a ride in a hybrid vehicle that this would save us from the consequence of Peak Oil or the Long Emergency?
Or do you believe that the fuel efficiency of Amtrak could be much better than 46 passenger miles per gallon by more people riding it or by technological changes such as streamlined lightweight trains? Or are you advocating widespread electrification of railroad lines and the required increased production electricity by coal or nuclear? France famously has the TGV as well as 80 percent nuclear electricity – is this a viable path for the US?
Based on either a historical precedent or the experience of our European and Asian trading partners, what percentage of automobiles passenger miles do you believe can be substituted by transit and trains? If part of the effect of trains is to facilitate higher living densities, what reduction in overall passenger miles do you see by that effect?
In terms of taking action to deal with the Long Emergency and believing in technological fixes, Amory Lovins of the Rocky Mountain Institute believes the problem is real, and he is promoting a technological fix – he believes that a lightweight carbon fiber hybrid automobile could achieve 200 MPG: so far he has conducted computer simulations, and I understand he is working on a prototype car. I don’t have ready access to a copy of The Long Emergency so I will ask you – does James Howard Kunstler have ideas on the correct response to Peak Oil in the transportation sector, and what does he see
What James Howard Kunstler expresses is a valid point of view, that there are signs that we are at Peak Oil and the downslope of the peak will result in wrenching changes. I have concerns regarding Mr. Kunstler, however, from the standpoint of the passenger train advocacy community embracing his way of getting that message out. To sum up the airlines in the words “they are toast” seems like a rather flippant and colloquial way of expressing an opinion on a serious subject.
Following up on connections between Mr. Kunstler and rail advocacy, the Midwest High Speed Rail Association had featured him as a keynote speaker, and I did a Google on him to learn more of his perspective. I came across his Web site, which was filled with much stronger words than “they are toast.” He seemed very angry with the current Presidential Adminstration, largely, I gather, because that Adminstration hasn’t embraced his vision of Peak Oil, and Mr. Kunstler expressed his anger with words I should not and shall not repeat here on this forum. There are many reasons for expressing difference of opinion, grievance, and protest with the current Adminstration, but there are avenues of expression that are decent and honorable and others that are not, and in my opinion, Mr. Kunstler needs to temper the zeal for his cause with some civility. I e-mailed MHSRA about the wisdom of having Mr. Kunstler point and center of rail advocacy by featuring him as a speaker given his Web site, and in response, there was some (metaphorical) restless shuffling of feet.
I contrasted James Howard Kunstler’s approach to Peak Oil with that of Amory Lovins. I see Mr. Kunstler as being mainly about words, some of them angry words, others of them words that shall not appear here; I see Mr. Lovins as being about concepts, computer simulations, building of energy-saving prototypes. Were I to have any influence over the passenger train advocacy community, I would much pref
Hi Paul,
I’m dead beat tired today so I’ll have to get back to you on Friday.
Sorry
Scott