Why America still needs Amtrak

Passenger trains serve many rural communities, and in densely populated corridors such as Washington-New York, Chicago-St. Louis, Los Angeles-San Diego and Portland-Seattle, trains offer considerable advantages over flying or driving.


Amtrak's Pennsylvanian exits Allegheny Tunnel at Gallitzin, Pennsylvania, April 25, 2009. The train is bound for Pittsburgh from Philadelphia. Regular Amtrak riders from coast to coast have come to expect delays, and to be sure, many trains almost never run on time. (Curtis Tate, McClatchy-Tribune / April 25, 2009)



By Curtis Tate, McClatchy-Tribune Newspapers
April 30, 2010



U.S. travelers have grown accustomed to long airport security lines, delayed and crowded flights, and congested roadways.

It should come as little surprise to anyone, then, to encounter similar hassles on America's long-neglected passenger railroad, Amtrak.

In an April 25 travel story, Washington Post reporters Andrea Sachs and Nancy Trejos described the plight of two chronically late trains to Washington -- one from Boston, the other from Charlotte, N.C.

Regular Amtrak riders from coast to coast have come to expect delays, and to be sure, many trains almost never run on time.

However, the Post article only examined two schedules out of hundreds and only in one sliver of the country, giving readers an incomplete rendering of Amtrak's problems and their underlying causes.

more

http://www.chicagotribune.com/travel/ct-travel-amtrak-story-20100430,0,4257602.story

My mother, who lives in Philadelphia, visits my brother and his family in Florida each year and travels by Amtrak.

It was alright, but a bit spartan, through the 1990s. Then, when Bush was installed, the CEO was fired and replaced with a Bush crony. The quality took a nosedive. The trains were customarily late by as much as 8 hours (Philly to FL is usually a 20-hour trip), service was terrible (due to the staff being short-handed), the food became cafeteria-quality, and cleanliness suffered.

Last year, the trains were clean again, and her train was only an hour late arriving in FL and 30 minutes late coming home. This past winter (early March), they were 10 minutes early each way. There was more staff and morale was high, the food had improved dramatically, and it was overall a much better experience.

Amtrak -- and our entire transportation infrastructure -- still needs a lot of work after almost 40 years of neglect (actually, a little did get done under Clinton). But just the improvement in the "little things" is a good sign.

--d!

critical to any national defense response, similar to major manufacturing concerns.

control by railroad "robber barons" and create (in their twisted view) "freedom."

We now all share the "freedom" of watching the entire Gulf of Mexico be covered by an oil slick.

Distributed energy sucks and is a function of the dumb American fascination with libertarianism.

K&R on this thread.

Tharze plenty of room for both. Lower cost or a measure of independence, competing values that are not directly comparable, political ideology notwithstanding.

I would agree that the political philosophy is not the paramount point, but I note that the mentality of many "off the grid" types is very close to those idiots who hole up in Idaho with a pile of guns and a whole lot of "self-sufficient" bull.

If a catalytic converter fails on an automobile (or for that matter some stupid wood burning stove) there is possibility of continuous monitoring. How many "my wood stove has a catalyst" type own a gas chromatograph?

Distributed energy sucks.

The Potential Benefits of Distributed Generation and the Rate-Related Issues That May Impede Its Expansion

Report Pursuant to Section 1817 of the Energy Policy Act of 2005

Background
Section 1817 of the Energy Policy Act (EPACT) of 2005 calls for the Secretary of Energy to conduct a study of the potential benefits of cogeneration and small power production, otherwise known as distributed generation, or DG. The benefits to be studied are described in subpart (2)(A) of Section 1817.

In accordance with Section 1817 the study includes those benefits received “either directly or indirectly by an electricity distribution or transmission service provider, other customers served by an electricity distribution or transmission service provider and/or the general public in the area served by the public utility in which the cogenerator or small power producer is located.” Congress did not require the study to include the potential benefits to owners/operators of DG units.1 The specific areas of potential benefits covered in this study include:

• Increased electric system reliability (Section 2 of the Study)

• An emergency supply of power (Section 2 and 7 of the Study)

• Reduction of peak power requirements (Section 3 of the Study)

• Offsets to investments in generation, transmission, or distribution facilities that would otherwise be recovered through rates (Section 3 of the Study)

• Provision of ancillary services, including reactive power (Section 4 of the Study)

• Improvements in power quality (Section 5 of the Study)

• Reductions in land-use effects and rights-of-way acquisition costs (Section 6 of the Study)

• Reduction in vulnerability to terrorism and improvements in infrastructure resilience (Section 7 of the Study)

Additionally, Congress requested an analysis of “...any rate-related issue that may impede or otherwise discourage the expansion of cogeneration and small power production facilities, including a review of whether rates, rules, or other requirements imposed on the facilities are comparable to rates imposed on customers of the same class that do not have cogeneration or small power production.” (Section 8 of the Study)
The full study may be found at http://www.oe.energy.gov.

Anyone with a smidgen of a fraction of a mote of mite of common sense realizes that this particular section of the "study" is pure garbage:




The first one certainly is experimentally observed to be pure garbage, which is why the whole fucking planet is wasting money and time on trying to "integrate" stupid wasteful wind systems at 10%. It's well known, except by complete idiots that the capacity utilization of wind power is at best, 25%, solar even worse.

Here's a link to a, um, scientific paper showing the offshore oil and gas Danes worrying about the shitty quality of their power: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleURL&_udi=B6V2T-4HNSB5J-1&_user=10&_coverDate=01%2F31%2F2006&_rdoc=1&_fmt=high&_orig=search&_sort=d&_docanchor=&view=c&_searchStrId=1318921826&_rerunOrigin=google&_acct=C000050221&_version=1&_urlVersion=0&_userid=10&md5=5d1ce6b5c63006df89971e757697fe47"> International Journal of Electrical Power & Energy Systems Volume 28, Issue 1, January 2006, Pages 48-57. It seems our scientifically illiterate anti-nukes are very, very, very, very, very, very, lazy about what they cut and paste.

That's no surprise. It's not like there is ONE anti-nuke here who thinks critically or broadly.

One of the fun things about anti-nukes who are no where near as slick as they think they are when they apply the kind of selective attention that generates, um, real slicks visible from space is the obvious laziness with which they produce and repeat tripe.

The second claim is obviously stupid on the grounds of the number of organizations that have sprung up around the world to oppose wind farms. Grass roots opposition to wind farms exist all over the UK, Wisconsin, Maryland, Maine...

http://saveourseashore.org/?p=667

http://www.saveoursound.org/site/PageServer

http://www.livinginnewyork.org/bovina_ny_bans_industrial_wind

http://www.mlive.com/news/muskegon/index.ssf/2010/01/opposition_growing_to_norwegia.html

http://alleghenytreasures.wordpress.com/2010/02/28/wind-farm-owners-have-a-strong-incentive-to-sell-off-or-abandon-their-projects-once-tax-benefits-have-been-captured/

http://www.epaw.org/

The last link contains a list of 401 anti-wind organizations in 21 European countries, including Denmark. Obviously these people have a very different view of land use than implied by the stupid cut and paste job.

Couldn't care less?

I thought so.

The main feature of every single "renewables will save us" cretin who wants to greenwash and generate complacency in favor of the dangerous fossil fuel culture with slick wishful thinking is that they don't give a fuck about the people who live with the consequences of their propaganda. It's not like they're building industrial wind farms on Amory Lovins tract in Snow Mass.

I could post these all night. But what would be the point? Anyone so oblivious as to cut and paste this line of horseshit obviously is in denial.

I never tire of pointing out that most of the new reactors being proposed around the world by, um, rational people will each easily produce more energy than the whole fucking offshore oil drilling Kingdom of Denmark can produce in a whole country full of whirling unstable breaking metal wind toys.

The rights of way bull is also covered by the complaints of actual people living next to actual wind farms around the world about how their roads have been torn to pieces by wind construction crews and the inevitable repair crews that follow within one to five years.

Suck on this wind farm right of way "land use" liar:



http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~hills/cc/gallery/

By the way: You see those big earth moving machines. They're powered by oil, the same kind leaking all over the gulf. The sad thing is that they'll be back in a few years to pick up the pieces of broken useless metal strewn all over the land, unless, as is often the case, they just leave the leaking grease sticks abandoned:



The last bit, the idiotic "terrorist" bit, is nonsense. Wind and renewable energy do nothing to stop the only observed energy related terrorism, the terrorism that anti-nukes couldn't fucking less about: Oil terrorism. No country's energy infrastructure has been shut down by terrorism, however. In fact, the main funding for the anti-nuke industry comes from, um, oil and gas companies.

I note that BP was advertising itself as "Beyond Petroleum" with a slick, very slick, marketing campaign of no value in the current international climate and dangerous fossil fuel accident crisis: The useless BP solar. It was never about energy, not for a second. It was about slick marketing and slick public relations.

Have a nice slime coated cut and paste rote evening.

Poor little feller just ain't got a clue...

The Potential Benefits of Distributed Generation and the Rate-Related Issues That May Impede Its Expansion

Report Pursuant to Section 1817 of the Energy Policy Act of 2005

Background
Section 1817 of the Energy Policy Act (EPACT) of 2005 calls for the Secretary of Energy to conduct a study of the potential benefits of cogeneration and small power production, otherwise known as distributed generation, or DG. The benefits to be studied are described in subpart (2)(A) of Section 1817.

In accordance with Section 1817 the study includes those benefits received “either directly or indirectly by an electricity distribution or transmission service provider, other customers served by an electricity distribution or transmission service provider and/or the general public in the area served by the public utility in which the cogenerator or small power producer is located.” Congress did not require the study to include the potential benefits to owners/operators of DG units.1 The specific areas of potential benefits covered in this study include:

• Increased electric system reliability (Section 2 of the Study)

• An emergency supply of power (Section 2 and 7 of the Study)

• Reduction of peak power requirements (Section 3 of the Study)

• Offsets to investments in generation, transmission, or distribution facilities that would otherwise be recovered through rates (Section 3 of the Study)

• Provision of ancillary services, including reactive power (Section 4 of the Study)

• Improvements in power quality (Section 5 of the Study)

• Reductions in land-use effects and rights-of-way acquisition costs (Section 6 of the Study)

• Reduction in vulnerability to terrorism and improvements in infrastructure resilience (Section 7 of the Study)

Additionally, Congress requested an analysis of “...any rate-related issue that may impede or otherwise discourage the expansion of cogeneration and small power production facilities, including a review of whether rates, rules, or other requirements imposed on the facilities are comparable to rates imposed on customers of the same class that do not have cogeneration or small power production.” (Section 8 of the Study)
The full study may be found at http://www.oe.energy.gov .



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In a "huffing paint fumes" sort of way

we need to go to buses, and trains on a large scale. This would free up an expense that could go right back into the economy. The transportation should be as inexpensive as possible and perhaps credit given in tax breaks for using mass transit. Good luck with that happening anytime soon. Some of this already happens in Europe.

That's one of the great advantages of railroads.