New Study Confirms That Trains Are Green, But It’s More Fun to Say it Says Something Else
Environmentalists, rail advocates, and people who know what they’re talking about are fond of arguing that rail is a more ecologically sustainable mode of transportation than driving a car or flying in an airplane. You can make this point quickly by comparing the emissions per passenger miles traveled. But, as trainophobes like to say, things don’t look as good if you take a wider view that includes the ecological impact of construction. But then I shoot back that if you take a truly comprehensive view consider land-use impacts, then rail looks unbeatable. At any rate, there’s an article in The New Scientist which takes a study that uses the arbitrary makes-trains-look-bad intermediate standard and offers up the headline “Train can be worse for climate than plane”.
The fact of the matter, however, as Ryan Avent helpfully explains is that the study merely confirms what we already know—trains are ecologically sound. The examples of scenarios in which trains can be worse for climate are absurd. The best they can come up with is that “Life-cycle energy use for light rail in San Francisco is a tad higher than that for a large airplane, and life-cycle emissions for light rail in Boston is a tad higher than that for large and medium sized airplanes.” Needless to say, though, you can’t get around Boston in a medium-sized airplane. A trip on Boston’s Green Line uses less energy that would doing the trip in a car. You could, of course, take a trip from Boston to New York in a medium sized airplane. But it would be more energy efficient to do it in a train.
77 Responses to “New Study Confirms That Trains Are Green, But It’s More Fun to Say it Says Something Else”
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June 9th, 2009 at 8:48 am
Green Line REPRESENT w00t w00t
June 9th, 2009 at 8:49 am
Light rail and heavy rail are important, but consider PRT:
A talk at google about PRT.
The soon to open ULTRa system at Heathrow.
June 9th, 2009 at 8:54 am
SUV’s can be greener than trains.
June 9th, 2009 at 8:58 am
Infrastructurist debunks this story too.
June 9th, 2009 at 9:05 am
Yup, scientists agree… the Green Line stinks.
You’d think there might be a better way to phrase that statement.
June 9th, 2009 at 9:20 am
The problem is, NY –> Boston by rail is much, much slower than flying, and not a lot cheaper. Pricing a flight and train 2 days from now, I get $151 roundtrip) for the regional train (it’s over $100 each way for the Acela). The time to travel? 4 hours each way.
Looking at Expedia, it’s 1 hour (and at best, I save 30 minutes on my arrival at the airport over arrival at the rail station). The price? $218, 2 days in advance. Further out, air is actually cheaper than rail.
The buying public won’t, in general, take a slower trip that is marginally less expensive. This is also why I’m highly skeptical of new rail lines being laid between cities in the US; there are very few routes on which it’s likely that rail will be either less expensive or faster than air travel (never mind both).
Not to mention that you need to overcome all the NIMBY objections to laying track, even if there’s an existing right of way that could be returned to passenger rail service.
I can already hear a few people saying “but the train ride will be more pleasant and you could read/work/etc”. Sure, and I’d guess that none of the people saying that have a spouse who would be less than pleased with a business trip consuming an extra 6 hours for no good reason.
June 9th, 2009 at 9:26 am
The paper simply tells us that figuring energy efficiency is much more complicated than generally discussed. I think it safe to say that Matty doesn’t disagree and so I must assume that his dungeon arises from the headline which he suggests but fails to prove is inaccurate.
And this from the same Matty who has repeatedly declared his support for hysterical exaggeration and hyperbole though of course only in support of his own theologies.
And sorry Matty but in fact the article is a bit more complex than you tell us.
Did you bother reading it before posting your jeremiad?
I suspect not.
This is just more knee jerk outrage from Matty along the lines of his Carteret Islands bullshit.
He might consider people, glass houses, that sort of thing.
And by the way, since we can be sure that The New Scientist writes headlines chiefly so as to attract readership, do you think that they might be grateful Matty for your contribution, mendacious as it is?
Believe it or not I suspect that most of your readers, unlike the ObaFuhrer, are not likely to consider policy only in the terms presented by a somewhat middlebrow magazine article.
For myself Matty’s regular brain farts on subjects about which he demonstrably knows so little are far more of a threat to reasoned discourse.
June 9th, 2009 at 9:30 am
Matthew palms a few cards here –enough to get shot in some poker games.
1) The primary point of the article was that emissions per passenger values for trains is highly dependent upon occupancy rate. Matthew needs to tell us what happens if trains are only 10 percent full versus giving us cases in which the hidden assumption is that people are packed in like sardines –or the Washington DC Metro at rush hour.
Anyone ever get much work done standing up for 40 minutes on a crowded subway next to a person with bad breath?
2) Another point is that you have to look at the full life cycle of energy production and consumption as well as infrastructure development –rather than just taking a vehicle in isolation. An electric train looks clean until you look at the coal burning plant generating the electricity.
And at the energy losses that go with long distance transmission lines.
June 9th, 2009 at 9:36 am
I use to commute around that shithole known as Washington DC — on the Beltway.
But there is one thing worst than sitting in traffic in your own automobile –privately listening to music that you selected. And that’s riding on a crowded Metro with rabble in great need of a visit to the dentist hygenist.
June 9th, 2009 at 9:41 am
James Robertson, empirically speaking, it turns out that Amtrak’s NE Corridor trains are an extraorindarily popular choice. You claim that if you, hypothetically, needed to travel between NY and Boston (which you don’t), then you claim you would take the plane rather than the train all the time. However, people actually faced with that choice will opt for the train on a regular basis, since it seems to serve their needs.
It seems that the only people who claim that the train isn’t a useful method of transport between NY and Boston are people like you– people who are never faced with the choice.
June 9th, 2009 at 9:42 am
On the subject of the DC Metro, I did a consulting job in Arlington, VA back in the 90s – and at first, I took the metro. It required a drive to the closest suburban station here in MD, followed by a connecting metro ride to the Courthouse metro stop. Door to door, it was a guaranteed 90 minutes. Driving varied a lot, from 45 minutes to 2 1/2 hours, depending on the vagaries of the highway.
However, I had a young child at home at the time, and – on average – driving was way, way faster than the metro, and my wife was entirely unhappy with me taking the train for that reason. What rail advocates tend to forget is that not everyone lives near a rail line, and not everyone is young and single. Lots of people have other commitments, and taking transit just makes those commitments harder to deal with.
June 9th, 2009 at 9:44 am
James Robertson, the “train travel isn’t much cheaper than air travel” argument isn’t really on point. The argument is that train travel pollutes less than air travel, so we should want to promote it. Your arguments show that we don’t promote it effectively enough.
In fact, part of the reason that train travel isn’t much cheaper than air travel is that we haven’t made any effort to price in the externalities of travel. If cap-and-trade were passed, the gap between the cost of train travel and air travel would probably grow. And that would be a good thing, because air travel pollutes more.
My experiences with air travel also leave me pretty well unconvinced by the convenience argument. The last flight I took was supposed to be from Burlington to Newark. I got to BTV airport a couple hours early and found that they had canceled my flight and I would have to take an earlier-scheduled flight to JFK. If I’d arrived there only one hour early I would’ve been SOL. As it was, that flight was delayed anyway, and oh yes, it also took me to the wrong freaking state. Of course the only reason I could take that flight at all was the extensive light rail in the NY/NJ metro area (AirTrain to LIRR to PATH).
The train may get delayed sometime, but I’m pretty sure it won’t get diverted to the wrong destination. Anyway, I wouldn’t feel good about taking an airplane to something time-critical (in this case I was flying in the day before my conference, which is effectively consuming extra time for no good reason).
Anyway, it’s a mistake to treat the current conditions of air and rail travel as set in stone. They’re the result of policy decisions.
June 9th, 2009 at 9:44 am
Of course, the fix is to exterminate state legislatures. The Philly Main Line is a much more pleasant place to live than is Washington DC and its suburbs. Because here they mix employment centers , shopping and residential areas into integrated mixes and they build roads well in advance of when they will be needed. And they have trains as well as highways.
Plus local government is handled at a micro level — small townships instead of the large county governments of Virginia. Which makes officials accessible and accountable.
Prince Williams County and Fairfax County outside Washington DC , in contrast , are hopeless shitholes because the Virginia Legislature in Richmond sucks up the taxes from that area and use the money to fund the rest of the state .
So that people can drive on nice, uncrowded bucolic highways through areas with median incomes of $12,000 per year or so.
That’s how the throughly corrupt “Virginia Gentlemen” of the Byrd machine ran the state for decades.
Someone might look into how billionaire Til Hazel made his fortune in Fairfax real estate — including how many Fairfax County supervisors went to prison. Ask Senator John Warner to explain it to you.
June 9th, 2009 at 9:48 am
What rail advocates tend to forget is that not everyone lives near a rail line
Again, you’re treating the existing realities as set is stone. What rail advocates know is that the more rail lines you build, the more people will live near a rail line. Otherwise there wouldn’t be much point in being a rail advocate.
June 9th, 2009 at 9:51 am
On the subject of the DC Metro, I did a consulting job in Arlington, VA back in the 90s – and at first, I took the metro.
Not only that, but according to the study, using the DC metro to travel between MD and VA had more lifecycle energy costs than flying.
Sounds absurd? Yes, but that’s the sort of absurd argument that people arguing against rail are making, and that’s why we generally dismiss them. And that’s why you have to completely avoid the topic in order to grind your personal axes. James, could you stop taking it so damn personally just because you are stuck in Columbia? No one gives a shit. The rest of us are confronting inadequate attention of our own transportation needs. We have little interest in the fact that these issues are probably not important to your personal experience. This constant bleating from you sounds like whining for attention.
June 9th, 2009 at 9:52 am
The key diffrence between highspeed trains and airtravel is that high speed trains are powered by electricity, while planes are powered by jetfuel – The TGV uses a fairly chunk of power, – it cannot be otherwise for a mode of transport that fast, but this doesnt mean it pollutes very much, instead it has a miniscule carbon footprint, because french electricity production is extremely clean. – The train is essentially nuclear powered.
June 9th, 2009 at 9:52 am
Uh oh, I was on a train this one time and there was a stinky guy! Trains suck! What the hell, people? Who here has never been on a plane next to a screaming baby? Who hasn’t been in a car when somebody farted? Y’all are a bunch of Howard Hugheses.
Something to keep in mind the next time you are on the Beltway and traffic is flowing; the only reason it’s remotely possible to drive on that road is because of the Metro trains and buses. I was in the SF bay area back when BART when on strike a few years ago. People had complained about traffic prior to that, how if BART is so great how come there are still traffic jams? Once BART went on strike we learned what a traffic jam really is.
June 9th, 2009 at 9:53 am
@Don Williams:
I don’t know if I would call that the primary point, but they do have a section related to per passenger variance in emissions. I was, I admit, a little surprised to see that from their analysis that a car with every seat filled (even the bitch seat?) could beat low occupancy light rail (Figure 3)… but not by a whole lot. To me that mainly says we could get more benefit than commonly acknowledged with car pooling… but it doesn’t say much about trains, since their ridership variance is pretty small.
June 9th, 2009 at 9:56 am
Its stunning to me that you can publish a peer-reviewed paper in which you claim to do
and yet neglect the fact that any lifecycle energy analysis has to include getting to the transport device. To get to my car I walked to my driveway (energy cost about zero). To get to the SF Muni (when I lived in SF) I walked down the block to the corner of Church and 27th (energy cost zero, downhill all the way). But to get to the airport I drive 20 miles in traffic. So every airport trip is also two car trips (or four if its a drop off) or perhaps a subway run.
The authors main take-away message regarding train efficiency is that the easiest way to improve efficiency is to reduce the concrete in the infrastructure and similar, not focus on MPG-like measures. What is implicit here is that trains are so efficient with running fuel that it will be hard to improve efficiency dramatically by focusing on running costs.
side issue: most passenger rail in the US is used for freight as well, usually freight first. In the authors’ study this was not accounted for. The examples they chose to study, SF Muni, MBTA green line, Caltrain, are solely passenger (not sure about Caltrain, there might still be some freight using the same infrastructure). If the energy cost of the infrastructure were distributed to freight, the rail efficiency would improve significantly (as would roadway and air, but probably by less).
And why study the green line and SF Muni? These are very much similar systems. Why not red line and green line or red line and sf muni? Maybe its just data availability?
June 9th, 2009 at 9:59 am
I have to travel to NY from the DC area periodically. People who claim that air travel is faster and less expensive tend not to factor in externalities such as the time it takes to reach the airport (and to reach one’s destination from the airport) and today’s security checks that make it necessary to arrive an hour ahead of departure; and how much it costs to get to and from the airport.
June 9th, 2009 at 10:06 am
Tyro, I’m not “stuck” in Columbia – I live here by choice. The schools are better than most places near rail (locally), and the housing was more affordable by a lot when we bought here. I don’t commute to work at all; I drive less than 5k miles per year. I don’t have an axe to grind on inter-city rail other than this: a desire to not see my tax dollars sunk into an expensive hobby horse.
As to the person who wants me to ignore the current built reality, that’s not really possible. If we could reset from about, say, 1920 forward, things might be different. But they aren’t – we have millions and millions of people living in cul-de-sac filled suburbs, and that’s just the way it is. Those people aren’t going to relocate to the cities, because the schools there suck a lot, and nothing is happening to fix that problem – and I see no real desire on anyone’s part to even try.
Given that, the current built reality is going to make inter-city rail a very difficult sell, because of the expense, NIMBY problems, and general lack of utility for most people.
There’s another problem, too: in case you hadn’t noticed, it’s not 1950 anymore, and we don’t have huge factories employing thousands of people in single locations. Jobs tend to be strung out all over, and that trend is only going to accelerate. You simply aren’t going to see a return to a large manufacturing base (and the large number of factory working commuters all going to a single spot with it). The case for rail is probably going to get worse with time, not better.
June 9th, 2009 at 10:11 am
Tom – From the DC/Baltimore area to NYC, yes – rail is generally faster than air, given where the rail stations are and where the airports are. That’s not true if you take NYC to Boston though, and completely not true for DC to Boston. The corridor from DC to NYC is a great rail asset, which makes people think that similar things elsewhere might also be good assets. In the abstract, that’s probably the case (say the great lakes region).
However, it gets less and less true when you consider the existing built environment, the NIMBY problems that arise with any large scale construction, and so on. Not to mention that the NYC DC corridor tends to get a lot of traffic due to the combination of political and financial power in those two locations; that’s not true between, any combination of midwestern cities.
June 9th, 2009 at 10:26 am
At this point, we actually know an awful lot about the conditions under which trains can compete successfully with airplanes and cars, and thus we can build diversion models for specific cases and proposals. I suggest we rely on that approach, as opposed to relying on James Robertson’s intuition.
June 9th, 2009 at 10:30 am
DTM – if that’s true, why aren’t businessmen and venture capitalists – always anxious to make a buck – flocking to rail as the next big thing? Maybe they know something you don’t.
June 9th, 2009 at 10:31 am
Shorter James Robertson:
We have a stupid built environment. Let’s throw up our hands and keep building it that way.
June 9th, 2009 at 10:40 am
DTM – if that’s true, why aren’t businessmen and venture capitalists – always anxious to make a buck – flocking to rail as the next big thing? Maybe they know something you don’t.
Hopefully we all understand that infrastructure markets, maybe especially rail and “new urbanist” models, have a lot of external benefits and market failures that require public intervention. I’d guess there’ll be a lot of flocking once some funding actually seems forthcoming. So what’s your point?
June 9th, 2009 at 10:42 am
Re JW at 18: “To me that mainly says we could get more benefit than commonly acknowledged with car pooling… but it doesn’t say much about trains, since their ridership variance is pretty small.”
————
Actually, Train ridership variance is significant during the day — compare peak rush hour times to train cars in the mid-morning and mid-afternoon and at night
June 9th, 2009 at 10:42 am
That’s Cleveland Circle, if I’m not mistaken, and I’m pretty sure that’s my old orthodontist’s building behind the trolley (which is transferring from the D-line Reservoir switchyard to the C-line). Not that anyone cares.
June 9th, 2009 at 10:45 am
Re Thomas at 16: “The TGV uses a fairly chunk of power, – it cannot be otherwise for a mode of transport that fast, but this doesnt mean it pollutes very much, instead it has a miniscule carbon footprint, because french electricity production is extremely clean. – The train is essentially nuclear powered.”
————–
I actually favor nuclear power over the alternatives –but ask Senator leader Harry Reid what he thinks of the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste disposal project. That has been a football for what –over 20 years? Meanwhile the waste piles up at Nuke plants around the USA.
June 9th, 2009 at 10:51 am
Shorter James Robertson:
We have a stupid built environment. Let’s throw up our hands and keep building it that way.
It’s even more narcissistic than that: “I live in a stupid-built environment! What about me? Let me tell you what I think about your city!”
It’s the height of typical right-wing arrogance from James Robertson that he drones on about the efficiency of travel between two places he doesn’t even live using transporation options that he wouldn’t use and expects us to take him seriously. It’s the typical right-wing believe that the ability to hold down a job and owns a home entitles one to have one’s worthless opinions taken seriously on matters one knows nothing about and has no interest in learning.
Seriously, James– when did you live or work in NY or Boston and have a need to travel regularly between the two cities? Would that be never? Then kindly STFU expect to ask us to tell you about what it’s like so that maybe you might learn something and move beyond your parochial limited life that you lead before lecturing us on your worthless opinions.
June 9th, 2009 at 10:51 am
DTM – if that’s true, why aren’t businessmen and venture capitalists – always anxious to make a buck – flocking to rail as the next big thing? Maybe they know something you don’t.
Because passenger revenues alone are insufficient to pay for an entire train system from scratch. Which, of course, is also true for airplanes and automobiles.
Incidentally, HSR, at least, tends to operate at a profit. What that means is that the public could fund the buildout of HSR infrastructure, then auction it out to private parties for operation–potentially even on a competing basis. Which is more or less what we do with airplanes.
June 9th, 2009 at 10:52 am
Plus 30 years ago –when President Jimmy Carter was wearing his sweater in winter cause the nasty Arabs cut our oil imports — the environmental groups convinced America that Jane Fonda must be an expert on nuclear physics because she had such nice tits:
http://history.sandiego.edu/gen/filmnotes/images/chinasyndrome01.JPEG
June 9th, 2009 at 10:55 am
Did you have to use a picture of the green line? I used to live about 1.5 miles from grad school, but would regularly get there faster by walking rather than taking the dreaded “B” line, which has a stop about every 100 yards. I don’t know how people could stand taking it.
Admittedly, the C, D, and E lines are not so bad.
June 9th, 2009 at 10:58 am
@Don Williams:
That’s true… but I was talking about the emissions’ sensitivity to variance in ridership that’s in the study. While Boston’s Green Line seems to be the most sensitive to off peak ridership as far as life cycle emissions… the other forms of rail transport were not. Running the BART mostly empty (or other Metro lines presumably) doesn’t really hurt very much relative to cars or planes or what-have-you… “life cycle” or no.
June 9th, 2009 at 10:59 am
Almost makes me miss Mixner. He may have been obstinate and innumerate, but at least he wasn’t just trying to score cheap tangential political points about Jane Fonda and (gasp!) environmentalists.
June 9th, 2009 at 11:06 am
Re Jack at 25 characterizes James Robertson as arguing:
“We have a stupid built environment. Let’s throw up our hands and keep building it that way.”
————
Well, what’s stupid is failing to realize that half of the Washington DC area –Northern Virginia — was built by ONE man. For his PERSONAL profit — which meant sticking the rabble with high property taxes to pay for infrastructure, not giving a hairy rat’s ass for quality of life, massive traffic jams, water supply or environmental issues, and bribing ..er.. lobbying the Virginia legislature to overturn any attempts by the Fairfax County supervisors to manage growth.
And that said man then retired to a bucolic estate of over a thousand acres in Faquier County where he sued Dominion Power when it tried to run a power line too near his estate.
That is why all this political discussion is as fucking divorced from reality as a pack of flea-bitten Irish monks arguing in the Middle Ages over how many angels can fit on the head of a pin.
A nice Italian engineer named Pareto long ago demonstrated why all of you are full of shit: a few people have most of the money –and hence make the decisions.
June 9th, 2009 at 11:17 am
And then there are those of us who live right next to tracks who would love to take a train to work, but can’t because they don’t run frequently enough (and are running more and more infrequently as the chainsaw is taken to state and local services here in CA).
Building more tracks won’t help if they’re administered as they are in Southern California.
June 9th, 2009 at 11:20 am
Almost makes me miss Mixner. He may have been obstinate and innumerate, but at least he wasn’t just trying to score cheap tangential political points about Jane Fonda and (gasp!) environmentalists.
Yeah, unfortunately Don Williams is the gaseous form of crank: he will expand to fill all available space, including that left behind by Mixner and his army of sock puppets.
Just be glad he isn’t trying to turn this into a swine flu thread.
June 9th, 2009 at 11:34 am
Well, what’s stupid is failing to realize that half of the Washington DC area –Northern Virginia — was built by ONE man. For his PERSONAL profit — which meant…
I don’t get this at all.
On the one hand, the first step in reform is to understand why things are the way they are, so understanding the history of Northern Va is useful. But how are people failing to realize that? All we’re “failing to realize” is your weird contrary-to-evidence conceit that future change is impossible, and not worth even trying.
This kind of comment could easily be constructive if you wanted it to be. But it isn’t – it starts off with some possibly useful historical perspective, but then degenerates into some bitter, cranky conclusion about how some guy in Faquier County and his rich white buddies in the Illuminati are still running everything, so the rest of us might as well give up now.
That’s boring. Maybe even counterproductive. If you really don’t think it’s possible to ever accomplish anything, even incrementally, maybe commenting on political blogs isn’t really your cup of tea.
June 9th, 2009 at 11:37 am
I don’t have an axe to grind on inter-city rail other than this: a desire to not see my tax dollars sunk into an expensive hobby horse.
As ever, spending on rail is spending, and spending on highways is utterly invisible. By the way, I have a name (it’s Matt Weiner), and I don’t think we should ignore the current built environment, just not treat it as immutable. See the difference? Personally, I think that when automobile users bear a little bit more of the costs of their lifestyle, at the margin people will be more likely to move to places where they can use mass transit, and that this will lead to a variety of positive feedback loops. People who don’t want to live near a rail line don’t have to, but there’s no particular reason we should be subsidizing their lifestyle to the extent we do.
SN is right that another problem is that train service isn’t frequent enough. But that’s a policy question too.
June 9th, 2009 at 11:37 am
Re jack at 35: “at least he wasn’t just trying to score cheap tangential political points about Jane Fonda and (gasp!) environmentalists.”
—————
Nah. A cheap easy political point would be to note that after 40 million legal immigrants –and another 12 million or so illegal one — the professional environmentalists have shown about as much integrity and loyalty to their cause that Hanoi Jane showed for the USA during that visit to Vietnam.
But maybe I’m wrong — how about we ask the wildlife?
June 9th, 2009 at 11:40 am
I don’t know anyone in Boston who would be more likely to fly into New York than take the train. Looking at a couple weeks out, you can get an Acela Express for $158 round trip compared to $159 round trip on Jet Blue. Amtrak takes about 3 hours, 30 minutes while Jet Blue takes 1 hour and 15 minutes. But this ignores a very important point. Unless you live in East Boston, Logan Airport is going to be a good deal further to get to than Boston’s South Station or Back Bay Station. And then in New York, Penn Station is vastly more centrally located than JFK. That’s not even factoring in the cost of getting from JFK into Manhattan. You’re probably looking at another 90-120 minutes of travel time getting to and from airports. Well, there goes that supposed time savings. If you figure you’ll want to arrive much earlier for airline travel, the train becomes a much better option.
Its besides the point, though, because I’m fairly certain Green Line street cars don’t go out to New York, so its not an apt comparison on these terms. Oh, and for the record, that is an E Line car entering Heath Street.
June 9th, 2009 at 11:49 am
Nah. A cheap easy political point would be to note that after 40 million legal immigrants –and another 12 million or so illegal one — the professional environmentalists have shown about as much integrity and loyalty to their cause that Hanoi Jane showed for the USA during that visit to Vietnam.
But maybe I’m wrong — how about we ask the wildlife?
This isn’t even coherent. I have absolutely no idea what it means. What do immigrants and environmentalists (”professional” or otherwise) have to do with each other?
Newflash: most of us can’t hear your crank dog whistles. Make logical, evidence-backed arguments or go away.
June 9th, 2009 at 12:34 pm
Re jack at 43: “Newflash: most of us can’t hear your crank dog whistles. Make logical, evidence-backed arguments or go away.”
——-
I can’t help it if your lack of intelligence means you can’t see the link between environmental degradation and massive population growth — the futility of a Sierra Club making ineffectual gestures while being tied to a Party committed to massive immigation.
Nor can I help it if you are ignorant. The past 50 year history of Northern Virginia totally refutes your basic premise that the voters have any say whatsoever in the planning that shapes their environment.
June 9th, 2009 at 12:47 pm
You almost gotta love it. Light rail in the city isn’t as energy efficient as a jumbo jet. At least, not if you ignore the costs of building the airport.
But why stop there? A jumbo jet isn’t as energy efficient as a supertanker. Super tankers for everyone! Oh sure, we might need to widen a few streets and fill them with water, but think of the money we’d save!
Sadly, this is all too typical for The new Scientist, which routinely discovers that smoking marijuana will make you into an addict who will have a psychotic breakdown and spend your days weaving crazy art nouveau spider webs instead of the regular orderly spider webs your cubicle owner paid you to weave.
In reality, of course, airlines in Europe are buying big shares of the HSR routes and discontinuing their short-hop services, because they make more money by doing that. The California HSR project plans to sell about 40% of the bonds to airlines who see a good business deal- but of course, that can’t happen until ‘big government’ has resuscitated big business from the latest entirely predictable failure of the ‘free enterprise’ model.
As for our resident trolls, looks like they’re just phonin’ it in this morning. Maybe they’re out proving that bumblebees can’t fly or something.
June 9th, 2009 at 12:48 pm
I can’t help it if your lack of intelligence means you can’t see the link between environmental degradation and massive population growth — the futility of a Sierra Club making ineffectual gestures while being tied to a Party committed to massive immigation.
Population growth and environmental degradation aren’t as closely tied as you seem to think, especially if the growth is in center cities rather than suburbs. I’d say there are many far more consequential things the Sierra Club can fight for before it has to worry about making border fences a priority – nevermind your fallacy of assuming that environmentalists only cares about what goes on on this side of the border. An impoverished third world isn’t great for the environment either.
And of course if you mean population growth, you should say that, not immigration. The latter just makes you sound like a bigot.
Nor can I help it if you are ignorant. The past 50 year history of Northern Virginia totally refutes your basic premise that the voters have any say whatsoever in the planning that shapes their environment.
How so, pray tell?
I’m eager to hear all about how you have controlled for demographic changes, intra-regional and national political and policy trends, and devised a method of perfectly predicting the future from the past.
June 9th, 2009 at 1:06 pm
Jack,
What you fail to understand is that Mexico has no environment or wildlife. If those brown illegals would stay where they belong there would be no environmental damage. See, population growth only counts if it happens here. Or something.
Try to keep up!
June 9th, 2009 at 1:18 pm
Anyone ever get much work done standing up for 40 minutes on a crowded subway next to a person with bad breath?
A pickpocket?
June 9th, 2009 at 1:18 pm
Tyro,
I travel on a regular basis – to NYC a fair amount, and to Boston as well. To NYC, I nearly always take rail. To Boston, I wouldn’t even consider it. What many of you don’t seem to want to grapple with is time, and how it’s a valuable commodity to people going from A to B.
June 9th, 2009 at 1:30 pm
What many of you don’t seem to want to grapple with is time, and how it’s a valuable commodity to people going from A to B.
Umm. I see several people on this thread quite explicitly grappling with time.
And as they’ve pointed out, the existing train service generally wins out – timewise! – from DC-NYC or NYC-Boston.
I think we can all concede that going all the way from DC-Boston makes rail iffier vs. air, but then, even Acela isn’t HSR. More like HAHSR (half-assed high speed rail).
June 9th, 2009 at 1:40 pm
1) Re Jack at 46: “And of course if you mean population growth, you should say that, not immigration. The latter just makes you sound like a bigot.”
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No, it merely reflects the fact that the vast increase in US population over the past 40 years has come almost entirely from immigration, since our fertility rate is close to the replacement level. An ignorant person, of course, does not know that. Nor does he know of Teddy Kennedy’s role in bringing about that result –or Teddy’s lie as he did so.
Personally, I consider a bigot to be someone whose loyalty to people in a foreign country leads him to promote their interests over the interests of his fellow countrymen who happen not to be of the same race or ethnic group.
2) Re Jack at 46: “Population growth and environmental degradation aren’t as closely tied as you seem to think, especially if the growth is in center cities rather than suburbs.”
It is when you are talking about the US high-consumption lifestyle. Millions of animals grow up and die in overcrowded, inhumane factory farms to sustain those urban populations. Enormous amounts of pollution flow from those urban populations. Enormous amounts of landscape are mined to support those urban population. I won’t discuss the Sierra Club further because it is such a self-evident, hypocritical fraud.
3) Re Jack at 46: “An impoverished third world isn’t great for the environment either.”
Well, factually it is. The globe can not support US levels of consumption for 6 billion people. Just wait until those billions in China and India start driving cars. But ignorant people don’t realize that.
Note that I do NOT think we should be privileged over other countries. But , in my opinion, we are doing an extremely shitty job even managing our own problems — it is asinine to pretend we can manage other countries as well. The environment of Mexico is the concern of Mexicans –it is not my concern. They just shouldn’t try to export their problems to us, however.
June 9th, 2009 at 1:43 pm
But maybe it’s nuclear, or solar, instead. Or hydroelectric. You can’t run a plane on hydroelectricity – you can’t run a passenger plane on anything but fossil fuels. Running an electric train without fossil fuels is a problem we’ve already solved a dozen times over.
The article is full of such disingenuous comparisons. It’s really nonsense.
June 9th, 2009 at 1:54 pm
No, it merely reflects the fact that the vast increase in US population over the past 40 years has come almost entirely from immigration, since our fertility rate is close to the replacement level. An ignorant person, of course, does not know that. Nor does he know of Teddy Kennedy’s role in bringing about that result –or Teddy’s lie as he did so.
I think most people, including myself, are aware of that.
But population growth is population growth. To distinguish between immigration and birth is to make some kind of moral distinction between the two – in other words: bigotry.
It is when you are talking about the US high-consumption lifestyle. Millions of animals grow up and die in overcrowded, inhumane factory farms to sustain those urban populations. Enormous amounts of pollution flow from those urban populations. Enormous amounts of landscape are mined to support those urban population.
Those sound like big problems. Maybe environmental groups ought to be fighting to fix those things… Oh. I forgot. It would obviously be more productive for them to join up with the Minutemen and go patrol the Arizona desert looking for ‘illegal aliens’.
Also, you’re using the word ‘urban’ in a funny way. Per capita, urban populations use less resources than suburban or exurban ones. And they can use even less with the right policies.
Well, factually it is. The globe can not support US levels of consumption for 6 billion people. Just wait until those billions in China and India start driving cars. But ignorant people don’t realize that.
It’s true that third world populations use far few resources on a per-capita basis than first world ones. But that doesn’t mean the solution is to wall those populations in. The solution is to encourage them to develop in an environmentally responsible way. Maybe by setting a good example. And by…environmental advocacy.
And of course, it’s very difficult to see how lobbying to prevent immigration to the US would particularly reduce the number of Chinese people who want to buy cars.
June 9th, 2009 at 1:56 pm
Re Jack at 46: “How so, pray tell?”
—————
In the last 40 years, the people of Fairfax County ELECTED Boards of Supervisors who tried to manage growth –only to have the acts of those representatives overthrown by conservative Virginia judges, by bribery, and by lobbying in Richmond.
a) The archives of the Washington Post have the stories but I don’t feel like paying for them. However, this article notes the rezoning scandal in the 1960s in Fairfax County in which
” three sitting or former supervisors and five developers were convicted on corruption charges. As a result, “lame duck” officials were barred from ramming through a series of last minute rezonings, which can cause enormously lucrative spikes in land value, as they prepare to leave office.”
Ref: http://www.examiner.com/a-971609~Old_corruption_reform_could_mean_headache_for_Fairfax_County_board__citizens.html
What the article does not mention is that although the supervisors went to jail, the rezonings were not undone.
b) Decades later, the Fairfax Board of Supervisors passed a control growth measure. Only to have a state delegate from WESTERN Virginia –who obviously had been ..er..persuaded .. to have more concern about Til Hazel’s views than the interests of Northern Virginia — pass a law in Richmond to overturn the Fairfax Supervisors’ acts.
See
c) I was in the group that fought in 1988 with Annie Synder to keep part of the Mananass Battlefield from being turned into a shopping mall by Til Hazel. I and my neighbors also carried a zoning lawsuit to the Virginia Supreme Court because the Prince William County Supervisors –lobbied by one of their former members — had met in secret against state law to increase the density on a housing tract next to us out near Haymarket.
The only way the people of Northern Virginia will ever have a say in fixing that miserable shithole is by overthrowing the government of Virginian and rewritting the state Constitution. No lesser measures will serve. Richmond has been a fucking whoreshouse since before the Civil War.
June 9th, 2009 at 1:57 pm
Nor does he know of Teddy Kennedy’s role in bringing about that result –or Teddy’s lie as he did so.
(I should add that this wasn’t meant to included with the things I’m aware of above.
But I also couldn’t care less.)
June 9th, 2009 at 2:10 pm
In the last 40 years, the people of Fairfax County ELECTED Boards of Supervisors who tried to manage growth –only to have the acts of those representatives overthrown by conservative Virginia judges, by bribery, and by lobbying in Richmond.
You point to a corruption problem 40 or 50 years ago. Which was remedied with criminal convictions, as well as some procedural reforms. And those procedural reforms apparently mean that the County Supervisors have to work extra hard before a deadline.
OMG! Land use change is teh impossible!
I was in the group that fought in 1988 with Annie Synder to keep part of the Mananass Battlefield from being turned into a shopping mall by Til Hazel. I and my neighbors also carried a zoning lawsuit to the Virginia Supreme Court because the Prince William County Supervisors –lobbied by one of their former members — had met in secret against state law to increase the density on a housing tract next to us out near Haymarket.
And no doubt there’s some ongoing corruption. That’s an additional barrier to policy changes. But it means keep fighting. Not lay down and die.
Incidentally, I don’t know the details of “increase density on a housing tract”, but I’ll remind you that density is generally GOOD.
(Sometimes even corrupt governments can make the changes we’d like to see on transit and zoning issues – though obviously that’s not altogether desirable – especially because they might make changes we don’t want on other issues.)
The only way the people of Northern Virginia will ever have a say in fixing that miserable shithole is by overthrowing the government of Virginian and rewritting the state Constitution. No lesser measures will serve. Richmond has been a fucking whoreshouse since before the Civil War.
There you go. A path to reform.
June 9th, 2009 at 2:12 pm
James, no dipshit, you were talking about the trip between New York to Boston, which you rarely if ever make because you don’t live in either and thus don’t travel between the too. You’d be better served soliciting the opinions of people who actually have had that experience and do need to examine the tradeoffs between flying and taking the train rather than regaling us with your uninformed, worthless opinions which only your more ignorant friends care about.
So kindly stop mouthing off about your worthless opinions– clearly people who aren’t you who do live/work in Boston and NY and do travel between the two areas do make different decisions than you think they would make? Why? Because they actually have experiences and aren’t ignorant jackasses with an exaggerated sense of their own judgment.
What the hell gave you the idea that your opinion was worth a damn on this matter? You think that people who do travel by train btw New York and Boston are just dumber than you? That’s a lot of presumptuousness.
June 9th, 2009 at 2:15 pm
The only way the people of Northern Virginia will ever have a say in fixing that miserable shithole is by overthrowing the government of Virginian and rewritting the state Constitution. No lesser measures will serve. Richmond has been a fucking whoreshouse since before the Civil War.
There you go. A path to reform.
Less snarkily: I think that if out-of-touch Richmond is the primary problem, it may ease as more, and more urbanized, population builds in NoVa, and the region becomes more and more important economically. Virginia politics is clearly shifting.
It may also be worth looking into forming greater regional ties with DC and MD, even a real regional government.
June 9th, 2009 at 2:22 pm
Actually, Northern Virgina should just secede –form the 51st state. See http://www.washingtonian.com/print/articles/6/174/9947.html
June 9th, 2009 at 2:35 pm
The biggest lie is still the opening true/false:
By looking at the life-cycle average, this statement completely misses the point. Modern commercial airliners are very fuel efficient once they reach a cruising altitude and speed. But an airplane traveling across Boston never reaches a cruising altitude, and would thus be terribly inefficient (in addition to being impractical for reasons others have noted already).
Airlines lose money on the shorter trips (e.g. from Altanta to my small town in Alabama). However, the government has heavily subsidized air and automobile travel at the expense of other transit priorities. We have a national interstate highway network, but almost nobody drives from NY to California. (Indeed, most automobile trips are very short, even the average car vacation trip is less than 50 miles each way).
The broader point is this: we need a mix of infrastructure. It’s better for our security to not be so dependent on one type of travel. It’s better for the environment to seek out more efficient modes of travel. And it’s better for consumers if there is a bigger menu of options.
June 9th, 2009 at 2:38 pm
The problem is, NY –> Boston by rail is much, much slower than flying, and not a lot cheaper. Pricing a flight and train 2 days from now, I get $151 roundtrip) for the regional train (it’s over $100 each way for the Acela). The time to travel? 4 hours each way. Looking at Expedia, it’s 1 hour (and at best, I save 30 minutes on my arrival at the airport over arrival at the rail station). The price? $218, 2 days in advance. Further out, air is actually cheaper than rail.
You’re not factoring in all costs. From my office in NY it costs me $0 and about 20 minutes to get to Penn Station, and I only have to get there about five minutes before my train leaves. It costs me a $40 cabride and about a half-hour (and maybe more) to get to LaGuardia, however.
Then when I arrive in Boston, it costs me $0 and three minutes to walk across the street to my Back Bay hotel, but an additional $20 and about twenty plus minutes (more with traffic) to take a cab from Logan. Double those numbers for the trip home, and you’ve tacked on about over $120 to the cost by air, plus significant additional travel time to and from the airport (and you’re also not required to get to the train station an hour ahead of time and have to go through security). If I check baggage that’s even more.
June 9th, 2009 at 3:10 pm
Actually, Northern Virgina should just secede –form the 51st state.
No disagreement here. I’d redraw a lot of other state borders too.
How to actually do it is another matter. West Virginia took advantage of a somewhat unique historical moment.
June 9th, 2009 at 3:13 pm
I think all the objections would be completely eliminated if the Acela were upgraded to true HSR, certainly this has been the experience in the UK. BA from London offers only token services to Paris and Brussels, because unless you live next to Heathrow or Gatwick, there is no question of not using the Eurostar – even though it has security checks because of the Channel Tunnel.
A further upgrade to the Eurostar trains so that they travel at 220mph instead of 186mph will probably see the airlines throw in the towel completely as has happened in France with routes like Paris to Lyon where the Air France website directs you to the train.
But, I have another point to make which is about quality of life. Like many people, I hate airports and getting to them, so if I have to go from London to Marseille, I’ll take the train and change at Lille – a plane might get me there a bit quicker, but it will be a lot more stressful. And yes, for business, the fact that you can actually work on trains with free Wifi is a bonus.
June 9th, 2009 at 3:22 pm
Tyro,
Believe it or not, I have taken the NYC — Boston run more than once – there have been times I’ve had business trips involving both places the same week. The train makes very little sense from NYC to Boston (even now that it’s full electrified), since it’s a 4 hour haul. Air is one hour. Even with cabs and airport waits, the plan wins by a fair amount.
DC area to NYC is a different matter entirely – the distance falls within the range of reasonable rail travel at the speeds the Amtrak trains run.
June 9th, 2009 at 4:00 pm
The train makes very little sense from NYC to Boston (even now that it’s full electrified), since it’s a 4 hour haul. Air is one hour.
As has been explained above, air is not one hour. The Acela train is three and a half hours from the center of NY to the center of Boston. While the actual time in flight from NY to Boston may be one hour, there’s also the half-hour to get from Midtown to LaGuardia, the one hour you have to be there before your flight, and the half-hour to get from Logan to central Boston, and you’ve got a total of three hours at best (and not counting delays in take-off or landing, or how much you have to pay for taxi trips on top of it).
June 9th, 2009 at 4:19 pm
Don – First, from the standpoint of immediate population change, immigration is a zero-sum game, since every immigrant is also an emigre.
However, since economically more well-off families tend to have fewer children than poorer families, and people generally come to the United States because they believe they will become more economically well-off, it’s quite possible that the immigrants to the U.S. have fewer children than they would have had they not immigrated. So in the long term, there are fewer people on the planet – though more in the U.S. – than there would have been without immigration to the U.S.
Finally, it could be a net benefit to the environment to have people leave a country with few environmental regulations for one with more, since they probably will be responsible for less environmental degradation in their new country. (And by “net benefit,” I definitely mean “not as bad”…)
Which suggests that it’s neither irrational nor hypocritical that American environmentalists don’t oppose immigration.
June 9th, 2009 at 4:30 pm
Re pianoguy at 66: “Finally, it could be a net benefit to the environment to have people leave a country with few environmental regulations for one with more, since they probably will be responsible for less environmental degradation in their new country.”
————-
Oh, give me a break. The USA EXPORTS MASSIVE amounts of pollution — why do you think US companies relocate overseas? Why US Auto makers moved to Mexico. Why we import so much from CHina?
An immigrant who moves to high-comsumption USA does not reduce his pollution –he simply increases it outside the USA by adding to the demand for US import of products which are produced in foreign countries under conditions of high pollution. Take a look something at what it takes to create one of those nice “clean” Dell laptops.
June 9th, 2009 at 4:36 pm
Of course, it is possible that environmentalists are maybe not hypocritical and irrational –maybe they are just extremely ignorant of the systems on which they unthinkingly depend for survival. In which case, why listen to them for policy recommendations?
The Sierra Club seems happy so long as no one takes a shit in Big Sur or Yosemite — and remains indifferent to that big ,brown, 100 miles-in-diameter-and-expanding disaster to their south.
June 9th, 2009 at 4:51 pm
Finally, it could be a net benefit to the environment to have people leave a country with few environmental regulations for one with more, since they probably will be responsible for less environmental degradation in their new country. (And by “net benefit,” I definitely mean “not as bad”…)
That’s an excellent point about birthrates.
I do think Don’s probably more or less right about the impact of an individual immigrant being higher in the richer country though – a relatively poor individual from Bangladesh or El Salvador who comes to the US will probably increase their own energy, water, land and pollution footprint quite a bit. (Though it might be that this income is less than what the average for the two countries might suggest, since many immigrants are probably somewhat above average well-off in their home countries, and perhaps somewhat below average impact in the new country. It’s also likely mitigated a great deal by the birthrate effect.)
Which suggests that it’s neither irrational nor hypocritical that American environmentalists don’t oppose immigration.
I think this is true REGARDLESS of whether third-to-first-world immigration is a net environmental loss or not.
I think environmentalists mostly believe that preventing the free(-ish) movement of people would be morally wrong, and this outweighs whatever (likely small, if any) environmental benefit that would be gained by supporting draconian immigration restrictions.
There is nothing requiring that environmentalists pursue that goal totally ruthlessly or single-mindedly. Environmentalists and advocacy groups don’t pursue campaigns of assassination, blackmail, or bombing to further their goals either (not the moral ones, anyway). This doesn’t make them hypocrites.
Basically, Don Williams wants to condemn environmentalists for being consistently liberal and moral. (I.e., not hating immigrants enough.)
June 9th, 2009 at 4:54 pm
re: Don @ 67: Of course you’re right about the US exporting pollution. But we also have regulations on air pollution etc. that many countries lack. So it’s not at all certain that immigrants to the US do not, overall, reduce their pollution. I don’t know, and neither do you. This is why I hedged that statement with an “it could be.”
June 9th, 2009 at 5:24 pm
As has been explained above, air is not one hour. The Acela train is three and a half hours from the center of NY to the center of Boston. While the actual time in flight from NY to Boston may be one hour, there’s also the half-hour to get from Midtown to LaGuardia, the one hour you have to be there before your flight, and the half-hour to get from Logan to central Boston, and you’ve got a total of three hours at best (and not counting delays in take-off or landing, or how much you have to pay for taxi trips on top of it).
To add to my point above, what’s also going unconsidered is that unlike rail, air travel has achieved its maximum time efficiency — given the necessity of locating airports at the edges of metropolitan centers, and of having to undergo lengthy security and boarding procedures, then a flight from NY to Boston is never going to be any less than three hours, minimum. But while the current travel time for the Acela is 3.5 hours from NY to Boston, it’s actually possible to make that a lot shorter — with better tracks it could go down to 2.5 hours (and with even better trains down to about 2). For short distances it will be possible to have a rail system that can far outpace air travel in terms of door to door speed.
June 9th, 2009 at 5:25 pm
To #61 – in Boston, the subway system runs through Logan – it’s a 5 minute walk to it. Admittedly, the situation in NYC is far less ideal at the major airports (other than Newark, where you can hop a train into the city quickly)
June 9th, 2009 at 5:40 pm
To #61 – in Boston, the subway system runs through Logan
James, you have to be kidding me, or you’re being blatantly dishonest, if you’re comparing the Silver Line connection to South Station or the shuttle buses to the Blue Line as amenities that means “the subway system runs through logan.”
I mean, wow James. Just… wow. That’s some mighty silly spin there.
June 9th, 2009 at 6:16 pm
It’s also spin to say you can “hop a train into the city quickly” from Newark. You first have to take the airport rail to either Amtrak or NJTransit and then switch to those trains to get into Manhattan. Here’s what a random travel site estimates for the time: “Depending on the amount of luggage and the time of day you arrive – plan on at least 1 to 1.5 hours into the city. Could be less but that would be a lucky break.”
Read more: http://new-york-travel.suite101.com/article.cfm/newark_to_manhattan_in_minutes#ixzz0HyQbx5TH&C
June 10th, 2009 at 1:50 am
Wow, reading threads like this it becomes clearer every day the United States is simply not capable of accomplishing even the smallest of tasks.
Can we build a high speed rail connection between New York City and Boston? Maybe. It is gonna be tough. It is, after all, a major project. The politics of it are brutal. But, if all the stars align perfectly it is conceivable that in ten years time we will have an extremely slow high speed train connecting the two great cities! How exciting!
China, on the other hand, is laying down 13,000 kilometers of high speed rail and maglev lines -all in a ten year time frame. 51,000 kilometers of interstate highways will be built by the year 2020 -making China’s interstate network much larger than the United States. 32 Chinese cities are building extensive subway systems, 10 of these subway systems will likely be world’s 10 largest by 2020.
When someone suggests to me that we are world’s lone superpower I am no longer going to laugh at this person and call them crazy. From now on I am going to heap scorn on them.
June 10th, 2009 at 4:01 am
Someone observed that rather then going from Boston to Newton by “medium size jet”, we should opt for a large ship. Well, it would not be most unusual ship route:
Allegheny Mountains, 1835: “Here, high in the mountains, the air is cool, despite the season, and a feeling of wilderness pervades. As you round a bend in the road you notice the sound of heavy machinery–wheels turning, engines cranking, ropes straining. You see a cloud of dark smoke belching from an unseen smokestack somewhere on the hillside to your right. Then, through a break in the trees, you glimpse the front section of a boat slowly moving up the steep slope of the mountain! There cannot possibly be a river or canal in such a location. What is more, the boat appears to be moving up a steep grade under its own power. Clearly, an unusual event in America’s transportation history is under way…”
Mind you, these folks were using BIOFUEL.
June 10th, 2009 at 11:17 am
Believe it or not, back in the 70s a rightwinger actually published a book ‘proving’ that the railways were not needed, that the country could (and would) have been developed by canals in the normal course of business, and thus, the government subsidies to develop the railroads had all been unnecessary and a distortion of market economics.
You might think this is all too stupid to prop up anything other than table legs, but I still run into references to this guy today. Beauty is only skin deep, but stupid cuts clear to the bone.