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repealing railroads' antitrust exemption?

Time for another of my minimally-edited and haphazardly-written railroad ramblings.

I'm not sure what I think of this bill making its way through the system right now. As with every piece of legislation passed pertaining to the railroads these days, it doesn't understand the true context, ignores the root concerns, forgets history, has some massive unintended consequences, and will inevitably worsen the very problems it's trying to fix. Oh wait, never mind, I know exactly what I think of it. As reported by Progressive Railroading and Railway Age the Senate Judiciary Committee voted to pass the bill that removes American railroads' antitrust exemptions. In general I tend to side with antitrust protections, however there is no doubt that one of the key factors in the railroads' crash was the stifling government rate controls, and their removal did play a major role in the recovery.

Railroads in America are a unique industry, one that few really understand or appreciate. They are very different from every other rail network in the world, and not at all like any other industry in America. In many ways they are most akin to a utility, and in almost all of the rest of the world would be treated as a public entity. But here we have yet another weird not-free market, not-socialist, not-anything else system that evolved over decades into something very peculiar. America (and Canada - the two networks are functionally one and the same in most situations) is perhaps the only place with private, profitable freight railroads. Certainly the only of this scale or of a comparable context. Nothing else comes close, and our freight rail network is far and away one of the best in the world ("best" meaning efficiency especially, and to a lesser degree, capacity and utilization relative to population though some of that is debatable). But just a few decades ago under very different regulatory conditions (and much more - economy, technology, etc) that was not the case. It's outside the scope of this rambling to go into, and has been covered a million times over. All that matters is that we were very close to having a freight rail network of comparable quality to most of the rest of the world in large part due to the regulatory environment of the time, and we're very lucky that didn't happen.

We treat utilities very haphazardly in America, and on the whole very stupidly I think. We set up the system through regulations in such a way that both true competition and the protection of the public interest are prevented. Not to mention a system that economically-encourages poor investment in the network, helping to worsen our infrastructure gap with the rest of the developed world. And yet our railroads are somehow outside of that usual pattern.

I think that going the route that England and a few others have tried to some degree could possibly work, depending on the details. It's always the subtle nuances and follow-through that make or break seemingly-similar systems. Nationalize the backbone network, and allow open competitive access to all companies over the same track. But the path back towards antitrust regulation and rate-setting will almost-certainly cause the same problems it did last time. As it stands, the railroads are regulated, the standards under which they're regulated are just very different. The rate monopoly complaints of shippers that have prompted this legislation? Some of it is very legitimate. Some of it is total bullshit when you look at the overall transportation system in America. But it is still far less of a problem than it had been under previous regulatory environments.

Mostly I just think this will make things worse in the long run if passed, though it probably won't have a significant immediate impact.

The Modern Iconoclast (Non Sequitur comic)

Non Sequitur by Wiley Miller

our security theater obsession is directly tied to why we're losing the war(s) and putting ourselves in far greater danger

exactly. [via @Fraying and Gruber]
[edit:] and, to steal a great quote from the article that Gruber picked out:

Of course, the U.S. national security state has quite a different formula for engendering safety in America: fight the Afghan war until hell freezes over; keep the odd base or two in Iraq; dig into the Persian Gulf region; send U.S. Special Operations troops into any country where a terrorist might possibly lurk; and make sure the drones aren’t far behind. In other words, reinforce our war state by ensuring that we’re eternally in a state of war, and then scare the hell out of Americans by repeatedly insisting that we’re in imminent danger, that shoe, underwear, and someday butt bombers will destroy our country, our lives, and our civilization. Insist that a single percent of risk is 1 percent too much when it comes to terror and American lives, and then demand that those who feel otherwise be dealt with punitively, if they won’t shut up.

Amtrak P-32BWH unit as biodiesel testbed

Somehow I missed (or just ignored) the news back in April that Amtrak's testing one of their GW Pepsi Can P32-8's as a biodiesel unit. I'll bet good money on this: it'll be sidelined within a year of the test being over. The minute it needs a moderately-expensive repair. A never really-successful run of 20 units that are just-unusual-enough to be among the first to get sidelined and then have one converted into a one-off unit with a moderately-unique parts inventory? It's a goner. The one-off testbeds are always the spare units they have lying around with little useful life left that they want to ditch but can't justify retiring quite yet. Biodiesel testing is a headline-grabber that won't catch on for at least another decade, if ever in the north American market. It's not enough-better than conventional diesel and just-enough non-standard to warrant a fleet switchover. In another part of the world maybe, but under the north American practices? Not gonna happen. Oh well, as a way to end it's life, I suppose this is a pretty good end at least and is better than just sitting in storage like many of Amtrak's other units. At least this way it's earning Amtrak very cheap "Green" [washing] publicity.

(Much easier politically for them to get money for brand new units than refurbish perfectly-good 1-2 decade old units that need mid-life overhauls but are too valuable to retire. The same goes for the dozens wreck-damaged Superliners sitting in storage. With no domestic conventional passenger car manufacturers left the damaged cars would be a million or more to replace per unit and are quite valuable given the tight supply of cars Amtrak has left, but it's way harder to get funding for the price it would be to refurb them. So they sit. For decades in some cases.)

New Amtrak Northeast Corridor Electric Locos

I'm very interested, excited, and a little anxious about these coming new engines. The order for 70 Siemens “Cities Sprinter” ACS-64 electrics will completely replace the existing AEM-7 (the older DC and the newer AC units), and the quite recently-build HHP-8 units build as part of the Acela order.

[And now for some off-the-cuff ranting and rambling that need some more solid research to clarify some of my assumptions and impressions to be truly valid about Amtrak's sad history of locomotive designs.]

These engines are needed, there's no doubt there. The Northeast Corridor is at (or past) it's limit for capacity possible with the existing fleet and train cancelations from insufficient equipment availability have been increasing. But it speaks to the frustrating history Amtrak has with locomotives. Every single engine they've ever purchased new has been a modified design of freight units, modified foreign designs, or designed from scratch. The problem is there has been almost no market in North America to support domestic passenger engine design. The commuter rail field has had enough of a sustained market for a couple designs over the years - most recently the Motive Power family, and before that EMD's F59PHI. But those don't meet most of Amtrak's intercity needs. So freight designs have been modified - sometimes with great success as in the F40PH - but more often with designs that failed to meet the operating needs and were retired or deprecated very rapidly - the 8-32BWH or E60. The foreign imports have occasionally been amazing - the AEM-7 (and the Talgo trainsets) - but more often mediocre - the HHP-8. Both foreign and freight operating conditions and design needs are different enough from Amtrak's that a simple design modification is very likely to fail. The problem is that designs from scratch have the same issue of never being able to fully-anticipate every issue and even with heavy prototype field-testing will have unforeseen issues in the future.

The thing is, this issue is ALWAYS true of design in any field. The ideal is one like the North American freight diesel loco market which is large and robust enough to support multiple strong manufacturers with decades of experience to constantly iterate on their designs and specialize to the very distinctive operating conditions of this continent. (Foreign imports end up being unsuited and retired far before the anticipated lifespan the vast majority of the time.)

So Amtrak has no good options here, right? Well, somewhat. It is true that whatever design approach they choose will be fraught with teething unforeseen design issues. But by being very careful with which firms they select they can stack the deck in their favor. I feel that Siemens is probably among their better options, and they should have the skills to succeed. The problems will come when the decisions get made for political reasons instead of design qualifications. That's how you get HHP-8's being retired decades earlier than the average electric locomotive lifespan. One big advantage for these ACS-64's is their large fleet size. The one-off orphan units are always the first to be retired for maintenance and fleet management efficiency. The other big risk for these new engines? Sustained funding for maintenance. I don't know the details offhand enough to say, but given the recent Amtrak operating environment, I would bet that these engines were run into the ground with insufficient maintenance funding. That can shorten the lives of even very solidly-designed engines by decades. It is far easier to get money for something new and shiny than to maintain something people take for granted. (I'm guessing that's why the AEM-7's which as far as I know have been a very successful series are going to be replaced. They're not young, but in many other contexts they would be kept on for another decade or so with regular maintenance and overhauls, not discarded because that's more politically-viable.)

So what was the point of this diatribe? Well, essentially that I'm worried that these will become yet another in the long line of failed designs that needs to be replaced in a decade. But I am still excited, if only for the chance to have something new to photograph!

[via Progressive Railroading]

the conflict between high speed passenger service and freight rail in america

(a minimally-edited off-the-cuff draft):
As the Wall Street Journal summarizes in an article I find a bit skewed and thin on context, the freight railroads see national high speed passenger service as a serious threat [via The Infrastructurist]. And, while we desperately need passenger service of anything even pretending-to-resemble a functional national network, the freight railroads are right. Passenger service is a huge liability for them. After decades of starvation, the US (well, US and Canada - the two are functionally one and the same in the railroad world) railroads have finally had significant growth for the past couple decades, and in the past decade have actually reached the point of spending billions on infrastructure capacity upgrades to handle the traffic. They now carry way more traffic than ever on a fraction the route-miles through much more efficient networks. North America (US and Canada primarily, but Mexico is catching up fast) has the most successful and efficient freight rail systems in the world, and one of the few that is fully-privitized. They simply do not have the capacity for passenger service on any of their core lines without heavy capacity expansions. When there is plenty of open capacity on a line, the incremental costs of an added train are not too major - when the line is at capacity, incremental costs can escalate exponentially in extreme cases (need another track and you're in a mountain range? have fun blasting lots of rock...). A single passenger train actually has the capacity needs of several freight trains - the greater the speed-disparity, the more a passenger train delays the surrounding freights, and their tighter scheduling requirements (federally-regulated and hard-fought in the courts over the decades of Amtrak's life) mean that a delayed passenger train destroys the schedules of every other train around it. Excellent freight and passenger networks can coexist, but that takes massive capital, and exists almost nowhere in the world. Not in Europe, thats for sure - all those countries in western Europe with their excellent passenger service? Yea, they have freight networks varying from small-and-plucky to abysmal. If you have to choose one or the other, then America needs freight way more given our geography, economy, and the far greater efficiencies of freight transport than passenger by rail due to the inherent nature of their traffic patterns (with occasional exceptions like urban mass-transit).

In all of this it's also important to remember that our freight railroads have grown incredibly-protective and wary of any government involvement - one of the biggest things that saved the entire industry from death was the Staggers Act which largely deregulated them and eliminated decades (close to a century even?) of heavy pricing regulations - a holdover from the Robber Baron era. They are still massive corporate interests with great power, but despite being many times larger geographically than ever before (to oversimplify: UP and BNSF are Mississippi to Pacific, CSX and NS are Mississippi to Atlantic, CN and CP are Canada), they have a tiny fraction the actual power and have to compete with the massively-Federally-subsidized highway network. Amtrak was a government bailout that took the passenger service out of the hand of the freight railroads and relieved them of a government-mandated service were collectively hemorrhaging some $700 million annually as early as the '50's and literally bankrupted several mid-sized railroads. But it was inherently a compromise that satisfied no one. It retained a fraction of the routes and was structured in a way that it would be perpetually fucked financially and politically, but they survived at all. And it still forced the freight railroads to give these trains priority dispatching that earned them no money, but at least they were not directly costing them millions.

If we want any remotely-decent national passenger network, we need to mimic the approach of the regional commuter agencies negotiations with the freight railroads. If guaranteed their train capacity needs, some liability protections (liability costs are OBSCENE these days), and some say, they will happily cooperate, hand over some control, and even pitch in some on infrastructure upgrades as long as they see some benefits. The key is not expecting them to give up capacity, control and liability just because.

(Interestingly I am biased in both directions on this matter - as a US railfan, the freight networks are something I know well and care about a lot, but similarly as a train nerd and someone interested in transportation planning, I have always thought our passenger network needed tens of billions in investment annually for a couple decades at least to fix the crimes of the past half-century.)

[edit: an example of a more detailed description of the costs from Union Pacific]

interesting maps of the results of the post-WWII US racial-segregation exodus

fastcodesign.com (summary of the history of White Flight, etc) [via The Infratructurist]

"Building a Nation of Know-Nothings"

NY Times editorial on the horrifying political scene we have with even basic facts flagrantly lied about - this terrifies me - it is distressing how easily our species falls for this over and over again... and if we have this sort of purposely-spread lies/nonsense/ignorance on things so basic and fundamental, how the fuck can we make progress on things like transgender rights or not causing our own extinction or fixing our poverty gap... [via Daring Fireball]

"No, We Can't" - why the Obama campaigns internet grass-roots network has melted away

It's several months old, and rather pessimistic, but this editorial feels worth passing along - I know I certainly feel similar, albeit far more muted. We 'Hoped' for another FDR, we got another business-as-usual (by global and historic standards Obama is very moderate politically).

...[E]verything we had Hope™d for has either not panned out, been compromised so far as to be unrecognizable, or seemingly been forgotten.
...
We wanted the criminal injustices perpetrated by the Bush administration to be recognized and prosecuted. That was judged to be too politically expensive and was quickly forgotten. If we did that, Obama would have a difficult time getting his other major policy goals accomplished.

- Marco.org

You really need to watch/hear this episode of TWiT - net neutrality, wkileaks, etc

You all need to watch/hear (or read the transcript of) this episode of This Week in Tech episode 260 on net neutrality, wikileaks, and more important discussions that will shape much of the next decade or two of our society.

brain-dump thoughts on bridging the gap between 'leaders' and 'public'

[Presumably this will be turned into coherent english at some point, but for now I wanted to get my thoughts down and I figured some of you might be interested to see one of my brain-dumps edited just enough to be semi-comprehensible to others. Amusingly-enough turning this from my shorthand into something I figured you could actually follow more than quadrupled its length...]:

Very common problem with any organization: general 'public'/membership don't know what's going on with the leaders/who the people in any given possition are (elected, appointed, hired, volunteered, conscripted, blackmailed), what they're up to, what current business is being transacted
--> public too lazy to bother to find out or to listen when that info is shared - is somewhat their own damned fault
--> but as with all design issues anything that's "user-error" is almost always a faulty design that influences people to behave in an undesirable manner - if widespread is (almost) always structural design flaw (see The Design Of Everyday Things by Norman - READ IT NOW!!)
--> leaders/people in specific positions don't advertise this enough, don't distribute info widely enough in dif mediums, don't run things "open source" enough
--> depending on demographics, learning styles, lifestyles people have differing mediums to learn info that do/don't work as well - relying on just one medium will leave out too many
(side/related issue: email vs phone vs text vs im vs face-to-face - each mediums have strengths/weaknesses - each medium preferred by dif people depending on their learning styles, lifestyles, familiarity, context - dif mediums inaccessible to dif demo's and disenfranchise certain groups - need to understand this to communicate effectively w/ various people)
--> examples: umASS residence life, umASS bureaucracy in general, town govs, smaller obscure gov agencies, etc
--> need to offer as many oportunities for public to interact as possible - will get more active involvement, people will feel more empowered, will have better respect for the work that is getting done, will be more willing to pay for the work being done
--> can never reach everyone, too many people don't care, don't want to know - what's the right balance? when leave them to their bliss and tell them to shove off when they bitch unjustifiably?

A Bench You Pay To Sit On

A only-mildly-excessive jab at the American anti-tax nonsense - "Almost Genius"

PAY & SIT: the private bench (HD) from Fabian Brunsing on Vimeo.

[via Planetizen]

India's railroads failing to keep up with growth

and in the process choking the nation's economy. India has a railroad infrastructure that is very similar in design, equipment, and practices to those of other eastern-Asian and African former-colonies, which is to say a mirror of British practices from the 30's and 40's. Despite being a powerhouse of the global economy and having the second-largest population in the world, India is running what is essentially an overgrown 'third-world' railroad. The loading gauges and tonnages are tiny by American standards and even modest by international standards.

(One quibble with the article - the author comparison of passenger train speeds is rather irrelevant - the Acela hardly counts as high-speed, and it's average speed is closer to 70 or 80 mph, not the 150 that it manages for only a couple short miles in eastern CT. Most countries get by just fine with conventional speed passenger service, and even in nations like France with heavy TGV penetration the vast majority of service is on local and conventional trains - high speed trains are irrelevant to normal passengers' needs.)

An important lesson to remember from India though, is that north-american railroads are expected to see over 40% traffic increases for the next several decades, and will need tens or hundreds of billions in capital investments to meet that demand. They are already at-capacity on all core routes, and can't come close to affording the sort of build-out they will need. For the next decade or so they can get by with incremental improvements to the existing infrastructure - eliminating bottlenecks primarily - but they will eventually need to invest in major build-outs. (Note that this means heavy investment to existing routes, not new routes or reopening old lines - it is far more efficient to upgrade the slimmed-down and vastly more-efficient modern network than to spread themselves thin since the constraints are all on the trunk routes, not the feeder-lines.)

Aukland Transit Privitization Case Study

a cautionary tail of the dangers of transit privatization (I know of no place where fully-privitized systems work well, although to be fair, there are other place where semi-privatized systems have been very successful when well-implemented - the key differentiator between the successes and failures is often in the details which vary widely and make generalizations impossible.)

Perspectives on Poverty photo project

Looking at the real faces of "third-world poverty" at their best [via Kottke]

Infrastructures (xkcd comic)

Yea... let me know when that violin of yours exits alpha and has a native OS X port...

US taxes at lowest level since 1950

as calculated by percentage of personal income (via @whitehouse) - which to me is jsut more evidence that our taxes are way too low - we're starving our government and killing off vital services while throwing ourselves into absurd levels of debt (and destroying the surplus Clinton had carefully built up) - fuck the 'tea party's NIMBY-ist bigoted lies and attempts to fuck over those Americans who we have fucked over for generations and have the gall to blame for what we did to them

okay nerds, it's time to go to war

Molly Wood: fighting the copyright police state (this actually reminds me a lot of what I've read about the Red Scare communist witch hunts of the Cold War era...)

this highlights one of my big rants about American conservatives (parody)

"I am an American conservative shitheal"

This morning I was awoken by my alarm clock powered by electricity generated by the public power monopoly regulated by the US department of energy. I then took a shower in the clean water provided by the municipal water utility. After that, I turned on the TV to one of the FCC regulated channels to see what the national weather service of the national oceanographic and atmospheric administration determined the weather was going to be like using satellites designed, built, and launched by the national aeronautics and space administration. I watched this while eating my breakfast of US department of agriculture inspected food and taking the drugs which have been determined as safe by the food and drug administration.