Burning the Midnight Oil for Living Energy Independence

As I mentioned in last week’s Sunday Train, the California HSR Authority came out with a revised draft Business Plan.

And why do you revise a draft Business Plan? Because some people suggested some modifications to your previous draft Business Plan might be in order … for instance, if there’s a possibility that you cannot get bonds authorized to start work on the part of the corridor where the Federal Government has already put some funding on the table.

The new, revised, draft Business Plan seems to mark the final passing of the baton from the Judge Kopp absolutist vision of the what an HSR “simply has to be” to the more grounded, realistic vision of Governor Brown …

… and in the process of dragging the HSR Authority back into touch with reality, it is quite possible that Governor Brown has saved the California HSR project.

There are two qualifiers here. The first is that without an account of someone privy to the details of the Governor’s intervention, we won’t know what changes were things the California HSR was on track to doing anyway, and what changes were pushed upon them. But even there, what “the HSR Authority wanted to do” was likely heavily influenced by the changing of the guard from Schwarzenegger appointees to Brown appointees at the Authority.

The second is that getting to work is not yet a done deal. Supporters of the project ~ whether ongoing supporters or those won over by the newly revised plan ~ still need to work to help see the project through to construction of the first construction segment.

The devil is in the details, so we go chasing the devil below the fold.

The headlines out of California indicate that there has been a substantial shift in terms of the California HSR system. In particular, it seems that Gov. Brown has waded into the fray and is reframing the issue from the Only-An-Infrastructure-Geek-Could-Love frame of the Initial Construction Segment and the mythical “Train to Nowhere”, to the “when do I get to ride it?” frame of the Initial Operating Service.

You can find the lead up to the big move at the CHSRblog:

Deal Reached to Combine Caltrain Electrification and HSR (22MAR)

Legislature Appears to Have Votes to Approve HSR Funding (23MAR)

Jerry Brown Lowers HSR Cost by $30 billion

And Newspaper sneak previews of what will be Monday’s Big News at:

Sacramento Bee: Gov. Jerry Brown to change high-speed rail plan, lower cost by $30

Mercury News: Questions remain despite revised Calif. rail plan  

SF Chronicle: High-speed rail plan slashes costs to calm critics

However, while the newspaper accounts given glimpses and hints and quotes of very carefully written statements from the principle actors … digging into the details will have to wait until the details are released.

So instead, I want to take a look at the existing “Slow Speed Rail” systems of Northern California, to get a better background understanding of what “connecting with” the existing systems might mean.

I think there ought to be a rule. If a famous musician just a few years younger than you survives their twenties, they ought to make it until you can go as a retiree yourself see them singing golden oldies on a golden oldies tour. That’s the way it ought to be.

This is not a political diary, as such, but just a log of my reaction to hearing the news. I heard the news on twitter, and after clicking through to listen to the linked YouTube clip … and verifying the news, which at first I could not believe … I set to browsing Youtube and sharing little reactions and memories, as one does when thinking about the passing of a pop culture star.

The tweet that sent me off on my journey was this one, which I retweeted with my visceral reaction:

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V @edgery / @TheTweetOfGod: This will always and forever be the definition of “nailing it”. […] || Wow. Shivers.

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My lord, it gave me chills again. Someone with the range to not merely belt out the high notes, but to sing them, and toss in a rising flourish on top of “Home of the Free” … and the ability to sing the anthem as a song.

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NB. A lot of these clips are the VEVO music rights clearing house system, which inserts ads ~ but their ad servers may be running behind due to the load, so if there is more than normal buffering, that could be the problem.

Nearly a month ago, Yonah Freemark had a post at The Transport Politic entitled, Los Angeles’ Streetcar Plans: Too Duplicative of Existing Services?. He wrote:

Los Angeles has big hopes for its downtown, and, like most of the country’s major cities, it has seen significant population growth in the inner core over the past ten years. Now, to extend this renaissance, the city – also like many others – is planning a streetcar line that would traverse the district from north to south. Last month, it applied for $37.5 million in U.S. Department of Transportation TIGER grant dollars, which it hopes to supplement with local and private funds to complete an initial route of between 3 and 5 one-way track miles at a cost of between $106 and $138 million.

Despite the fact that planning for the L.A. streetcar goes back for more than a decade thanks to the work of a public-private local advocacy group, the city will have plenty of competition in its effort to win federal funds. Requests for the third round of TIGER funding outnumbered actual funding available by 27 to 1. With so many projects up for consideration, anything funded by Washington ought to be valuable. But L.A.’s project could benefit from significant improvement.

And then … well, join me over the fold.

Burning the Midnight Oil for Living Energy Independence

Yeah, OK, its not Sunday, but I got called on Saturday morning after a Friday night class to substitute for a colleague, and that threw me off completely. Fortunately for the Sunday Train, I am massively underemployed, so there is Monday afternoon available to finish composing what I been thinking about this week.

As I discussed in Whether and How to Sell the Jobs Policy, there is not a whole lot of “pop” in the jobs bill, but there is some. The EPI analysis suggests 1m in jobs “created or saved”, but of course “jobs saved” is an increase compared to a counterfactual, and not an actual increase. Over half of those are “job saved”, so the “pop” is under half a million jobs.

If spread evenly across a calendar year, “just under half a million new jobs” would be 40,000 new jobs per month. If 150,000 new jobs per month is needed to bring unemployment down, that is relying on our stuttering economy to create 110,000 or more ~ close to what we have often been achieving, but there is substantial concern that we might not keep it up, after a month with about 0 (zero, zilch, nada) new private jobs created.

So the aim here is to look for something that can add some more “pop”. And having read the title, you know that a 1 penny Oil Tariff is involved. Hopefully raising the question in our mind: “uhmmm, where’s the ‘pop’ in that?”

Burning the Midnight Oil for Progressive Populism

First off, the thing to do with the BS about gutting the safety net on the excuse that the Take Everything Away Party wants to kill it is to take the idea of gutting the safety programs behind the farmhouse to the mint bed and apply a sharp ax.

How to do that, I don’t know.

But if it can be done, then there’s still the question of whether and how to sell the “Jobs Policy”

In a Nutshell

Without the specifics, the broad outline (pdf) of the policy is about $240b in tax cuts and $200b in spending. Of the $200b in spending, about $50b is unemployment insurance extension, which is maintaining what we presently have, and $35b is offsetting state and local cuts in teacher and first responder employment, so about $115b in new spending stimulus.

Economically, the alternative is not status quo, the alternative is ongoing cuts, so you could argue that its a useful $200b increase in spending in economic terms ~ but in political terms, “it could have been worse” is a sharp an argument as a plastic knife, so I’ll count it as $115b in stimulus.

Can that work? Well, it depends on what you mean by work. To the extent that the $115b in spending can be done over the next year, it is more “Stimulus” than we had last year, and almost as much as we had in the Fiscal Year from October 2009 to September 2010 ~ when unemployment did, in fact, noticably decline.

So in terms of “will unemployment noticeably decline?” as working (as low a bar as that may be), yes, it’s likely to work.

Over the long haul, if that worth the promised future spending cuts over the next decade to “pay for” the payroll tax cuts that will have such weak effect? …

… well, that’s the question.

In policy terms, we need employment now. When we set the damage to be done in the future against whatever fights we lose in the future based on the “baseline” including absurd cuts …. against the damage that will be done by a second recession if we allow the economy to continue heading into a second recession … the recession is more total damage.

And in political terms, I was here in Ohio when Governor Strickland was facing re-election against a heavily corporate backed and heavily attacked for his corporate background rival, and the heavy attacks on his corporate background had a serious impact … but Kasich still won by 2%. If the economy slips into a recession next year, the Citizen’s United money is going to get that to use to continue attacking the half measures taken in 2009, and could quite conceivably lay the foundation for policies that extend the current Depression into something to rival the Great Depression.

Fighting to preserve the safety net is complex enough: I argue for simplifying everything else.

But HOW to support the Jobs Bill

The problem is, based on past performance, we would expect the Obama administration to cave on the useful parts of the Job Bill and accept a “compromise” consisting of only the useless parts. After all, the Republicans would happily accept the useless parts, as advancing their interests while still tilting the playing field to their advantage as they choose between nominating a bad candidate or several worse ones.

So support needs to be both simple, and to be support for the spending plus tax cuts as a package deal.

I reckon the message is:

The real job creators are customers. All the tax cuts in the world are useless unless businesses have orders to fill. Pulling out the spending makes the tax cuts useless, so no spending, no jobs. And no jobs, no deal.

No spending, no jobs. And no jobs, no deal.

Burning the Midnight Oil for Living Energy Independent

There has recently been a flurry of activism regarding regulatory approval of the “XL Pipeline” in support of bitumen production from Canadian Tar Sands. This is an issue that has attracted substantial attention from a variety of bloggers ~ the XL Pipeline tag alone at dkos has 64 entries ~ and since Tar Sands are billed as a Crude Oil substitute, and about 70% of US Petroleum consumption goes to transport, I thought it was time for the Sunday Train to look at the issue.

As the proponents of bitumen production from Tar Sands are selling it as a Crude Oil Substitute, I thought that what I would do would be to see what alternatives there are out there.

But the XL Pipeline itself is a bit small of a target to aim at, so the question I am looking at is, what alternatives would there be to entire potential output of Canadian Tar Sands bitumen? Hence, four transport alternatives to Canadian Tar Sands.

Note: this is a slightly modified version of the essay, after a commentator at Daily Kos pointed out that I had misread the source on the Tar Sands Energy Return on Investment

Burning the Midnight Oil for Living Energy Independence

Yonah Freemark at his site The Transport Politic discusses Chicago “BRT” proposals. “BRT” is the transit professional and transit blogger three letter abbreviation for “Bus Rapid Transit.

See, sometimes spelling out the abbreviation doesn’t do that much good on its own. The idea of “Bus Rapid Transit” is to implement a range of features we normally associate with rail based “rapid transit” for specific bus routes, which then can offer some of the benefits of rapid transit that is not normally available to bus riders.

The BRT category is a fuzzy one, ranging from slapping a paint job on the buses and installing bus stops with better seating and “next bus” indicators to dedicated lanes, signal priority, and purchase of tickets at the stop. What the Chicago Transit Authority has proposed is three routes on the “BRT-lite” side, but as Yonah covers, the business leaders on the Metropolitan Planning Council have proposed a much more expansive system (see map).

While the My-Mode-Uber-Alles types will line up for or against the BRT proposal based on whether buses are “their” mode or “a rival mode”, in the real world there is no fundamental conflict between BRT and streetcars. Indeed, it makes much more sense for streetcars to share a lane with BRT than for streetcars to run mixed in traffic with automobiles.

The Beauty Platform and Sequential Art

First they came for the guys and gals

   with skeevy comic books.

But I don’t buy skeevy comic books,

   so I shut up and kept my head down.

Then they came for the guys and gals

   with graphically violent comic books.

But I don’t buy comic books with graphic violence^{1},

   so I shut up and kept my head down.

Then they came for the guys and gals;

   with “adult” gay and lesbian comic books.

But I don’t buy adult gay and lesbian^{1} comic books,

   so I shut up and kept my head down.

Then they came for the guys and gals

   with “excessively” adult comic books of any sorts.

But I don’t buy excessively adult adult  comic books of any sort,

   so I shut up and kept my head down.

Then they came for the guys and gals with politically and socially radical comic books.

And the legal precedent was already set, so it was an open and shut case.

And that’s what I’m in for.

……………………..

That is, in any event, the dystopian future scenario. Right now we are still in a position to push back against the “North American Taliban”, and that is what the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund aims to do.

{1. OK, ok, on some of these sites my sig says otherwise with respect to yuri manga, and some science fiction dystopian manga has some pretty graphic violence, but stick with me here for dramatic effect}

Burning the Midnight Oil for Living Energy Independence

Back in the 90’s, Texas tried to get an Express HSR system off the ground (that is, a bullet train system somewhere in the 125mph to 220mph range) with the “Texas Triangle” project. It was to be an entirely privately funded project. Not surprisingly, competing against the heavily  publicly subsidized interstate highway and air travel systems, it did not get off the ground.

More recently, the Texas T-Bone was proposed, based on the Dallas to San Antonio leg of the Triangle and a route from Houston to Temple, then running north to Dallas with connections south to Austin and San Antonio.

While the Texas T-Bone seems to be the current plan of the Texas High Speed Rail and Transportation Corporation, this is more of an advocacy group than an official HSR Commission or Rail Development Commission.

Given that we are in between periods of substantial federal funding for High Speed Rail, I thought this might be a good time to take a look at the prospects for Regional HSR, in some of the existing rail corridors within the “Texas Triangle” region … and so arrived at the Texas Wishbone.