An asylum for the preservation of illusion.

Do You Feel Sufficiently Patronized Yet?

A while back, the CTA created a plan to reroute the Douglas Branch of the Blue Line up to the Green Line and around the Loop. This means that there would be trains between 54/Cermak and The Loop rather than 54/Cermak and O'Hare. The plan was announced without public input and community reactions were fiercely negative. A great deal of noise came from UIC, where students wouldn't be able to use the L as a shuttle between East and West campuses, but even "real" residents of the neighborhood were angry, principally over the lost one-seat ride to O'Hare.

At the time I believed it was a good plan, and I still do, but I was working on other political things with the CTA and saw their poor handling of the Blue Line situation as being a mirror of our experiences with them. They are arrogant, presumptive, and heavy handed. At any rate, the plan fell apart and the CTA had to slink away with its tale between its legs.

Uses of Oil

I tried to look this up for a discussion on a mailing list, but the information was very hard to google (it ended up being buried in a government-published PDF linked from wikipedia).

Common arguments about oil include:

1. Oil is not, in fact, used primarily for transportation but for generation of energy for other purposes. Therefore, reducing automobile use will not significantly reduce oil use and,
2. A large amount of oil pumped is used for things other than creating energy, for instance, it is turned into plastic, so even if we weren't using oil for energy we'd still need to pump a great deal of it.

According to government data (page 35 of that document), number 1 was true in 1973, 42.3% of oil pumped was used in transportation, with the rest used as energy for industry, "other sectors" (agriculture, etcetera) or for oil-based products. but by 2003, fully 57.8% of oil pumped went into transportation.

The growing share of oil used in transportation came at the expense of oil used as an energy source in production sectors, and non-energy uses remained about the same. All oil products, from pesticides to plastics to bike chain oil, consume only 6.6% of all oil pumped.

Click Read More below to see a table of the data, or look at the PDF for pie charts.

No Way to Run a Railroad

There's been a lot of Amtrak news recently as the fight for the railroad's existence heats up. this article contains a welcome image: a protest in East Lansing Michigan to save the train. Related is President Bush's recent recess appointments to the board. The recess appointments allow Bush to put people on the board who have not been vetted by Congress. Given, that a majority of Congressmen consisting of senators and representatives from both sides of the isle have made it clear that they are not willing to let Mr. Bush dismantle the system, it is understandable why they don't like his choices: an oil man and a Kmart executive who's admitted to never riding the train.

High Speed Rail: Slowly Getting There

Here's an unfortunately not-too-detailed look at the technology behind the "high-speed rail" being developed in Michigan and Illinois (former Amtrak president David Gunn, among others have argued that the 110mph trains should be called "higher-speed" rather than diluting the term "high-speed," which in Europe only applies to trains traveling faster than 250kph, or about 155mph.)

Still, the system appears to be working on the test track in Michigan, which is impressive in itself, and it is cheap enough that it can be funded by states without a strong Federal commitment (which is not going to come in the near future). David Gunn has previously said that the way to rebuild the national railroad network is in small improvements in service and reliability: new sidings and flyovers, better signaling, new passenger carriages, and a better attitude from the freight railroads, rather than glitzy and expensive technological showcases like Acela. The excellent organization, Midwest High Speed Rail Association has a vision of what a Chicago-centered 110mph "higher speed" rail network built on those principles would look like.