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“You cannot have new trains – this isn’t America”
We can’t have new trains either because they cost tens of millions of dollars and go about 100 miles to nowhere – this is the legacy of Obama’s shovel-ready infrastructure money.
I bet my new self driving car will get me where I am going faster than your Democrat-ready train – it will be available for me to use faster than your Democrat-ready train.
The gas tax money would be better spend replacing traffic lights with bridges at key bottlenecks… and replacing traffic lights with smart ones that can talk directly to my vehicle. I don’t want a light showing me GREEN when it can see around the corner and someone is barreling down the highway toward the intersection with no time to stop safely- I want it to tell me to wait until the hazard passed.
Denver opened their new light-rail commuter from Union Station to Denver International Airport on April 22nd. It ONLY costs $2.2 Billion to construct 22 miles!
The LRV line extension in Charlotte out to the University is only about $1.4 billion for 8 miles. Meanwhile, NC is embracing privately owned toll lanes on existing freeways due to lack of money. There is also a proposal to develop commuter rail service to get the urban maids and nannies out to Lake Norman to take care of the families of the Bank of America executives. It’s not hard to understand why the rest of the state hates Charlotte. Transgender bathrooms is not the real issue
Amtrak diverted a significant amount of money to replace all of the electric locomotives in the NE Corridor (DC to Boston) with brand new hot rods from Siemens that have a turbo mode.
The NTSB report significantly downplayed the admission the second time the engineer was interviewed that explains 90% of the reason for the fatal crash in Philadelphia. The young man lost spatial awareness in the dark. First he was distracted by reports of rocks being thrown at trains.
He was being cautious to not hit people and went by at 70 mph instead of the permitted 80 mph. Rather than nudge the throttle forward, he applied 100% power, intending to cut it back when the train got to 80. At 100%, the boost mode kicks in – like hitting nitrous oxide.
Then something happened – what isn’t clear. He admits he ignores the speed limit signs as they are hard to see in the dark and often wrong (fact). He uses the city subway system flyover as his landmark to apply the brakes to slow from 80 to 55. The problem was the throttle was still at 100% and he was going 106 mph, not 80. Had he sized up the problem immediately, it was still too late. He might have avoided derailing, but not prevented injuries of people being thrown around. As the engine started to tip, he slammed emergency stop, which might have actually made things worse – the business class car had a higher center of gravity so it tipped first and was pulling the locomotive over with it. For safety reasons, amtrak’s cars are designed to derail together, so when the business car derailed, the rest of the cars had no choice but to follow
Amtrak’s cars are designed to survive head on collisions, not side impacts. When the business class car hit the stationary support holding up the wires, that was why people died. 60 years ago, the outcome on a similar accident was much worse.
This rail line that I take to visit NYC from NJ was established in 1825. It has been upgraded since then, but the turns are still the turns designed then when trains moved much slower. As a result, this train take 90 minutes to go the 40 some miles to NYC. (There are stops along the way as well.)
The Amtrak route is an old one as well. It runs parallel to the Deleware-Raritan canal that was build to connect NYC and Philadelphia by boats. Rather than restore the environment once the canal was replaced by trains and roads, it became one of the longest parks. Where are the environments that want to restore the environment?
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/30/nyregion/30canal.html?_r=0
Be sure to watch the second video.
Nigeria has substantial oil revenue, but none of it seems to be doing anything. The pipelines frequently blow up because squatters punch holes in the pipeline to get free oil and the pipeline explodes.
The existing narrow gauge rail lines haven’t been used for 10 years and were just recently brought back online by the Chinese. Crossings are manned by flaggers as none of the crossing gates work. I’m pretty sure that the block signals don’t work – collisions are avoided only by using schedules and going slow.
It’s pretty clear in both Nigeria and Kenya, the Chinese are having trouble training the Africans to operate and maintain the state of the art systems. It’s like hoping that illiterate goat herders in Afghanistan can be taught to fly Apache helicopters in less than 3 generations. You’ve got to build effective education systems and people have to want to learn that Euopean crap like geometry, chemistry and physics
I’ve long believed that a great way to reduce racial tensions in the United States would be to give the angriest blacks – the ones who insist the United States government is an occupying army in their neighborhood – given them a free vacation pretty much anywhere in subsaharan Africa and experience real poverty and starvation, police corruption, raw sewage in the streets, piles of rotting garbage, electricity that is only on a few hours a day, racial hatred because the are not black enough – when they get home, they’ll kneel on the ground and thank God they have cable TV, air conditioning and an EBT card
I noticed you didn’t mention Al-Jabr. 😉
Well it goes without saying that Europeans stole everything.
As amusing as her video is, it is factually challenged. The light rail in Addis Ababa in Ethiopia was built by the Chinese also. What the Chinese are building in Nigeria is a brand new standard gauge modern railroad. Those pictures are of the rehabbing of the narrow gauge railroad to start to build public support for the new railroad. A very long time ago, I did a long piece on the railroad in Ghana after Kenyan Barack Obama visited to learn about slavery and learned nothing.
This is going on all over Africa – the Chinese rebuilding the colonial era narrow gauge systems with modern standard gauge railroads – funded by debt that will enslave future Africans in perpetuity. They will yearn for the good old days when the Europeans ran their countries. The Chinese have no innate sense of guilt for being Chinese.
The Chinese are also building roads, bridges, and superhighways. In Ghana, they were upgrading 2 lane roads to 3 lane roads (and repaving). Most of the inter-city buses are Chinese now, the smaller vehicles, less so. This top-ranked company chooses KIA buses instead. https://www.facebook.com/190053309015/photos/a.432684379015.228524.190053309015/10152839814814016/?type=3&theater
In the Ivory Coast,they are building the latest toll road (with a $100 million loan where Chinese firms are the general contractor). The last toll road was built by Tunisians, and the latest toll bridge over the lagoon in Abidjan was built by a rich French guy that also owns a super popular, but cheap cell phone network in France (like Carlos Slim). This network does not automatically set up the APN for data for SIM cards, and friends and family have bought the cards and never been able to get the data they paid for to work (and I was unable to help them set the APN correctly over the phone).
The Chinese are getting more and more projects.
On the Brazilian-American front, they have a Burger King in Abidjan now.
This is a good mix of what it´s like to drive around the city. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vHpqw0kvkHQ
Another part of my random trip around the world is countries in the former Soviet Union are buying Chinese made trolley buses to replace the worn out Russian ones. As countries try to cut down CO2 emissions, electric Trolley buses make more sense.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mXxFQy5vo5U
Down in Brazil, they have built so much solar power, the auction price at times has gone to zero – the country has two totally independent power grids and the supply and demand frequently are in different places. They need a 3300 mile transmission line to integrate the two systems. As baattery storage improves, storing large quantities of wind and solar power makes huge sense.
A power company in the Midwest US announced it will be shuttering two nuclear plants rather than trying to extend their operating life
http://motherboard.vice.com/read/a-bunch-of-nuclear-power-plants-are-closing-and-its-because-of-fracking
Damn that fracking!
Just another tangent – while burning natural gas to make electricity creates CO2 (half that of coal), since it is centrally consumed, sequestration is much easier. If you really believe CO2 is killing the planet (I don’t) then electric cars make much more sense than natural gas powered vehicles.
As the fracking technology for natural gas spreads, owning oil wells will make less and less sense. Saudi Arabia is in a panic for a reason. Nigerians may be riding narrow gauge trains for a long time if at all.
Someone might eventually see an opportunity in using bacteria to convert oil to natural gas, the opposite of what people have always tried to do. Coal to methane perhaps?
You don’t need batteries in wet environments like Venezuela where solar could be used to pump water up and over the hydroelectric dam so it could be used to create electricity a second time.
Those are not mutually exclusive options
http://www.reuters.com/article/us-venezuela-energy-idUSKCN0XA1WL
http://www.alternative-energy-news.info/floating-solar-panels/
Didn’t Brazil unload Burger King? They no longer need the rainforests to grow hamburgers – it’s OK to build massive solar energy farms instead. Silver is the new green
A few random thoughts about the video
– it reminds me quite a bit of Boston
– one of my pet annoyances about the United States is our compulsion to erect stop signs on every corner and overuse of traffic signals. One of my annoyances driving in Detroit (at least in the 1980s) was on a street like Grand River, there was literally a traffic signal with very long cycles for every side street, making it take forever to get anywhere. During power outages, I’ve gone through 4 lane by four lane busy intersections with no traffic control and it just works. People turn off their radios and pay attention
– jaywalking should not be illegal… I don’t know where that idea started
– American drivers have very bad situational awareness of what is around them
– urban planning is overrated – I like the part of Charlotte that “just happened”, which totally mystifies my progressive relatives who demand everything needs a rule and a government agency to enforce it
Quite the libertarian you are! lol
I spend some time working in downtown St Louis and understand some of the inner city anger. I’d arrive at the airport Sunday night and try to drive to my hotel downtown or to do some shopping downtown. Bad idea.
At 10 pm, there were no cars on the street, but I had to stop at almost every intersection and wait a long time for the light to turn green. At the very least, they should flash yellow in one direction. Baring any capital expenditures, let me treat it as a stop sign and go when there is on one to be seen for miles in any direction. I got frustrated and angry as a short term visitor. If I lived there, I would go nuts.
Don’t get me started on Saint Louis. As the city grew, rather than annexing, tiny little municipalities grew up – each needing their own police and fire departments, differing speed limits, different parking regulations, different zoning, park systems, etc. I grew up in a place like that in the South suburbs of Pittsburgh. The borough was roughly one square mile and we needed our own police department, fire department, 2 elementary schools and one high school, a huge public swimming pool (unless you were black), a garbage dump with city employees picking up the garbage, an assessor and tax department, street department, snow plows… And a population around 12,000, almost all in single family homes on postage stamp size lots built in the 1920s
The northeast is the worst for that. NJ even has school districts with no schools and other school districts with no students as a result. Each has to paid people to negotiate with neighboring school districts at taxpayer expense. As a result, NJ has the highest property and income taxes. Earlier this year, a hedge fund manager changed his address to his Florida home and NJ panics about the state budget. I am 100% serious.
Most of the no income tax states do things on the county level – it is so much more efficient. CT went the other way and abolished country government and their taxes have continued to rise… GE just moved from CT to MA, for example.
And in summation, Donald Trump is refighting the last war. Getting mad at Carrier and threatening them will accomplish absolutely nothing.
It may get him elected. He is courting the blue collar union vote that normally votes Dem.
If Donald Trump put his hand on the shoulder of a female reporter like the railway guy, what would happen?
The real issue is typified by the recent San Jose incidents were people walking down the street were sucker punched in the head from behind, women pelted in the face with eggs and the American flag burned by people waving Mexican flags.
All of it seems ok though because none of it was done by Cory Lewandowsky. Why are there no RICO charges and asset forfeiture ?
Certain suburbs like Garden City have a bunch of unneeded side street traffic lights to this day. Detroit has actually removed a lot of those lights to save on replacement and maintenance costs.
The Brazilians still own Burger King, but they moved it to a Canadian company when they also bought Tim Hortons, pride of the north.
Over the time I lived in Michigan, I heard or developed theories about why that happened… From the least sinister to the most…
– people with poor driving skills couldn’t get out of side streets
– merchants wanted traffic to stop and notice their stores
– the boulevards are uncrossable by pedestrians (fact!)
– to force people (especially trucks) to use the freeways
– to slow cars so police could eyeball the occupants
– to keep city workers employed
– to allow criminals to look for easy prey
After the streetcar tracks were pulled up, there was no safe area in the middle of the street. You could be the most healthy athletic young person – you aren’t crossing 8 (10?) lanes of traffic safely without a landing zone in the middle. Ferndale converted the center area into parking and a green space and u-turn areas instead of paving it over to make more lanes. I’ve seen the same in other cities, including Charlotte. A green area running down the middle of a wide old urban street is a pretty reliable indication the street had been a streetcar route.
“Uber” in Lagos
https://youtu.be/GkFdU3KsaRc
1000 Nairas is about $5
Part of what has ripped the social fabric of the United States is TV and especially Hollywood teaching people for decades that they need to be scared of strangers. Most Americans would freak out at the idea of hopping into a van with half a dozen people we have never met. Give us our “safe” $billion LRV lines run by reliable union members running back and forth empty 14 hours a day, going to and from places nobody wants to go
“future” of Lagos
https://youtu.be/B_HGHj5kTM4
Ferndale erected this statue of a cop directing traffic in a cupola exactly where you describe. https://www.pinterest.com/pin/513973376199760025/
Around 1987, I rented a small office in Pleasant Ridge. At the time, there was still about two feet of exposed streetcar tracks where they crossed the sidewalk. That has since been corrected. The Woodward Avenue line’s main purpose in the later years was to take people out to the fairgrounds near 8 mile. Woodward South of 6 Mile was narrower because it was built much earlier. It will be interesting to see if the new LRV lives up to Dan Gilbert’s expectations
Detroit Street Railway was one of the last to buy the post war PCC streetcars, and one of the first to abandon them.
http://www.crainsdetroit.com/article/20080818/SUB/808150304/detroit-had-light-rail-until-the-1950s
As you know, Woodward Avenue runs right past the former GM world headquarters building. I’m sure that annoyed the executives every day driving home to Bloomfield Hills
http://reuther.wayne.edu/node/4339
http://www.detroittransithistory.info/DSR/RailMap-1941.html
http://www.detroittransithistory.info/PCC/ThePCCera.html
The PCC streetcars were sold to Mexico City where they were used for another 30 years. Traction motors last forever. Once in a very long time you have to rewind the coils, but they last forever. That’s especially true if you don’t have road salt. However, no air conditioning in Mecico is pretty brutal
I beg to differ on that. Mexico City is dry first of all and secondly it is quite nice in summer. I just to look forward to flying there from Houston in summer to get out of the Texas heat and humidity.
Anything is better than Houston, which I learned the hard way.
I see Mexico City is at 7,300 feet which explains the moderate summer temperatures. Obviously, I have never been there.
Another oddball city with PCC streetcars was El Paso / Juárez. The system mainly existed to take people back and forth over the border
http://www.railwayage.com/index.php/passenger/light-rail/brookville-to-restore-modernize-el-paso-pcc-streetcars.html
Six of the streetcars have been loitering in the sun since 1974 and are going back in service
http://elpasoheraldpost.com/historic-trolleys-begin-long-journey-back-to-service/
Cost to put 6 technologically obsolete streetcars back in service on a 4.5 mile line – a mere $97 million (brand new LRVs are ~$3 million each)
The Qline in Detroit (Quicken line?) will be 3.3 miles for a mere $137 million including six new LRVs. A quirk of Qline is portions of the line will have no power. Lithium Ion batteries will power the cars and be recharged where the cars have overhead power
http://www.freep.com/story/news/local/michigan/detroit/2016/04/19/detroits-future-streetcar-home-prepares-open/83241696/
Ridership is projected to be around a million passengers a year, with operating costs of about $6 million with a standard fare of $1.50
That’s more cost effective than the Q-Line (fake) Trolley in Wichita. If these systems would just pay homeless people to ride all day, they can drive down the cost per passenger trip a lot
http://wichitaliberty.org/wichita-government/wichita-q-line-an-expensive-ride/
http://therenfro.com/assets/files/Q-Line_Handout.pdf
My office is right outside the end of the Qline, and I did not know that about the batteries. The construction has been going on forever for it.
60% of the line will be unpowered. One of the complications is Detroit still has the Thanksgiving parade with balloons that go up Woodward past the department store that no longer exists. Keeping the balloons away from the power lines will be tricky. The primary reason for no overhead wires is to preserve the historical character of the neighborhood (ignoring the 60 years Woodward had overhead wires)
Enjoy!
https://youtu.be/YBLoh8VG2q4
I’m pretty sure I remember seeing Detroit’s parade as a child – but after watching Macy’s parade from New York, staying interested was tough
https://youtu.be/57s8b-OfFmw
1962 edition hosted by Captain Kangaroo
The salton sea would be an excellent place to put floating solar panels. In addition to making power, they would reduce evaporation. They could also add in electric eels for extra energy
Another option would be to use the solar power to separate the salt from the water so that the water could be reused.
5.2 earthquake just happened at the Salton sea. Once again, the news before it even happens