Stephen Rees’s blog

Anthony Perl and Richard Gilbert add some weight to my recent comments about the future of the airline industry.

Last week, the chief financial officer of American Airlines Tom Horton said “there really is no playbook now for $110 a barrel oil.”

They argue that we are going to need to use buses and trains a lot more. This idea will not sit well with the “business as usual” folk but it is inevitable that the days of the cheap airline ticket are over. It is going to take time to get all this organised, and we should already be moving. But governments, chambers of commerce and boards of trade are still talking about airport expansions and better road connections for them.

It is not just here either. One of the really big issues at present in London is the proposal for yet another runway at Heathrow.

Sadly our political elites are still behind the times. Their idea of planning is still based on “previous trends recover and continue” not that we have entered a new era, that demands fresh thinking. Although to be fair, the idea that Canada needs decent passenger trains is hardly new. It just has not occurred to the governments and railway operators yet.

Two stories which may not. on the surface, seem to have much to do with us.

New Zealand has decided to buy back its railway and its ferries. It seems that sometimes privatisation is not the solution to every problem, and the movement back to public ownership is happening elsewhere too. Both Railtrack and Metronet in Britain are now back under public ownership, as is the Croydon Tramlink. Some places had to learn some very hard lessons - and we should take note. For the BC government mandates P3s for large projects. This approach almost makes it certain that we will be paying more for worse public services, since we seem to be incapable of framing contracts in a way that ensures that non-financial but still important concerns are taken into account.

The other lurch back to reasonableness is in Quebec which had been following a policy of insisting that its buses be built locally. With predictably bad results. So now they are going to allow open and fair bidding.

I am not actually against privatisation. I am against dogmatism in the face of hard evidence. If something is clearly not working as intended then you should stop doing it and try to work out why. It is not true that “government is the problem”. The private sector is concerned with making profits - and sometimes loses sight of the need to balance other concerns against that. That is why most industries require some degree of regulation - of only because left to their own devices, profit making enterprises behave very badly indeed. When I started learning economics, the example was of children being employed in coal mines. Sadly we now have plenty of more modern examples of the outrageous lengths entrepreneurs will go to make a quick buck. And the life and health of their customers, employees and even shareholders is of no concern at all.

If you set out the terms of the contract clearly, and ensure an open and fair bidding process contracting out can work well. Sadly, in many cases the only reason to contract out has been to reduce employees wages. But of course the spin doctors say it is about innovation and new methods, and the much greater efficiency of modern management methods. And most of that turned out to be hogwash.

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CBC

The film’s star, Mackenzie Crook, plays a tube driver in search of a volunteer to commit suicide under his train so he can get compensation.

249 bodies ended up underneath trains last year. I cannot see how this is a suitable subject for a comedy.

Piccadilly Line Barons Court 20051201 by Stephen Rees, on Flickr

One common approach to the issue of suicide is that it is under-reported. And that is quite deliberate. For there are many people who suffer from depression, and a lot of them are not being treated, or are not taking their meds or their meds are not working. Indeed in some cases the meds have the effect of increasing the depression. When you have depression you do not make good choices. And a splashy news story that talks in detail about how someone ended their life always results in people trying the same thing.

You will usually not hear or read about people under trains. There has been “an incident”, or “a medical emergency”.

The fact that SkyTrain does not have a driver changes nothing. There are detectors to cut power if there is an intrusion on to the track at a station. But it still happens, and there can often be someone looking out of the front window. And SkyTrain staff, and emergency personnel have to deal with the outcome.

And families of suicides suffer, just as much as those of victims of accidents, or diseases. Perhaps more, as there is a hefty element of guilt - and the continuing issue of the extent to which this disease seems to run in families.

I won’t be tempted to see this film. I cannot understand why anyone would want to

Railway Age

March 25, 2008

Regular readers will be aware of the support this blog gives to High Speed Trains, which are showing the world over a new way to travel in greater comfort and style, and often faster than air travel. The best thing for me though is that while planes are once of the worst CO2 emitters, train travel is one of the least offensive in terms of carbon emissions.

Now I was very surprised indeed to learn from Transport 2000 that even Amtrak, not noted for either its speed or reliability, is now beating the airlines

Harrisburg-New York air service ending, attributed in part to Amtrak

Nonstop air service between Harrisburg, Pa., and New York City will cease April 6, an apparent victim of fuel prices, airport congestion, and Amtrak.

Colgan Air, a subsidiary of Pinnacle Airlines Corp., began the short-distance service last September. Colgan has not commented on its decision to end service.

But a spokesman for Harrisburg International Airport said Colgan load factors for flights between the two cities averaged 25% to 30%, below Colgan’s targeted 40% threshold. The spokesman noted that, due to frequent flight delays, Amtrak service linking the two cities was time competitive and less costly.

Amtrak, in conjunction with Pennsylvania, recently increased service on the Keystone Corridor, linking Harrisburg and Philadelphia, after upgrading infrastructure between the two cities. It also extended the service onto its Northeast Corridor to provide more direct service between Harrisburg and New York.

The North East Corridor is one of the few places in North America that has long distance, electric passenger trains. And service by Amtrak on the NEC is quite unlike most of the intercity services they provide elsewhere.

Missing from the story is any mention of airport security. But that in itself these days is a major source of delays and inconvenience . It does show that you do not have to be very much better - just give people a viable option. What most commentators also neglect to mention when it comes to North American air versus passenger rail is how much public investment has been made in airports, and many communities see airport building as way of capturing more business, rather than making money out of airport operations.

I just happened across this image. It shows a San Francisco MUNI light rail train. It is what is used to get people around the city - for regional connections there is BART. Note the combination of exclusive right of way and surface street running. And the complete absence of crossing barriers, flashing lights, bells and cross bucks. These trams are more common in SF than the cable cars - but those are iconic, this is prosaic. But along with trolleybuses this is what the residents use mostly. In the centre of the city there is a cut and cover section to downtown - and in fact is double decked with BART underneath. The trams then run in a tunnel underneath Forest Hill. The two systems are run by different agencies (a bit like TTC and GO in the centre of the known universe).

I think that a system like this along Arbutus would still be useful - except now it could follow Kent Avenue past the Canada Line and wind up in New Westminster. In fact in the early days of the Evergreen studies something like that was actually looked at as the CP tracks go all the way to Coquitlam. But being Metro Vancouver we never really take using existing railway track for transit seriously. It just works well everywhere else and could not be tried here. Except for the Vancouver Heritage Railway of course. But no-one takes that seriously.

My readers seem to like high speed train stories. So here is another one. From Auntie Beeb. I think I may detect here a bit of gloat. It was an English scientist, Eric Laithwaite, who invented maglev. And linear induction motors - as used on SkyTrain. He used to appear on one of those geewhiz science programs “Tomorrow’s World” when were I a lad. On BBC tv as it happens. And LIMs and Maglev were to be the future.

The UK was first to introduce maglev trains for commercial use in 1984 in Birmingham to bridge a short distance between the city’s airport and railway station.

But after 11 years in operation, reliability problems and the sheer expense of extending the network, which are incompatible with traditional railway lines, prompted its replacement with a conventional system.

I think that this may have been a forerunner of the SkyTrain. I have certainly read that UTDC thought its application was going to be as an airport people mover - though only New York bought into that. The idea of a frictionless, no moving parts propulsion system sounds great in theory. But the reality has been a great deal different. It is perhaps ironic that the only city in the world to have a major LIM driven transit system will have conventional electric trains serving its airport.

Maglev has had some spectacular failures - and only Shanghai (illustrated)  now has an operational system. Meanwhile more conventional electric trains have done very well indeed both for local transit and high speed applications. The conventional electric motor being the heart of both systems but electronic control technology making the real difference between modern systems and those first demonstrated by Frank Sprague back in the 1880s.

I think that the problem with Maglev was it was a solution looking for a problem. Conventional electric traction has been very versatile and efficient and quite amazingly reliable and long lived compared with say internal combustion engines. And electrical transmission systems for ic power sources are still together one of the most efficient ways of turning the energy in fossil fuels into motive power. It may be that I will be proved wrong as energy efficiency and need for speed continue to pose ever greater challenges. But not for a while, I think. Maglev to me looks a lot like the monorail - it looks pretty but it really doesn’t work very well.

Province

Chilliwack Mayor Clint Hames responding to an FVRD report

as the report says, we don’t have anywhere near the commuting population to support a system like this at this time

So both the FVRD and Clint have been sucked in by Falcon’s folly. The technique of repeating something untrue often enough so that it becomes accepted.

“A system like this” is also not what anyone was actually suggesting, right off the bat. And all you need to make a dmu on existing tracks worthwhile is enough people to fill the cars every so often. And all over the world people having been happily ripping up railway tracks, and then wondering why the roads are so congested. If you continue to do what you have always done, you cannot expect a different outcome. And that is what Mayor Hames and Kevin Falcon are worried about. Because they are heavily invested in business as usual. And the idea of Rail for the Valley is - why don’t we try something different for a change? Just like the people in Victoria who said why can’t we time the train on the E&N to bring people to work in the morning and take them home again in the late afternoon? Not exactly earth shatteringly different, you might have thought. Not really risky in any sense. But it was never even attempted.

Perhaps like Mrs Thatcher something nasty happened to them on a train once. She never rode on a train once all the time she was PM. I am sure she hates the fact that rail passenger ridership is up in Britain and the Channel Tunnel Rail Link (something she fiercely opposed) is now doing so well.

Rail for the Valley is not a panacea - but it really would not hurt to try would it? A demonstration project using hired rolling stock with minimal station facilities - a portacabin and a bit of hard standing for the platforms. And just on the bits not needed to run coal and container trains.

Of course there is one major risk that we must not ignore. The Mayor and the Minister might have to admit they were wrong. The planners at the FVRD won’t have to worry about that.

Although I saw this first in the Sun it is pretty much a rework of one of three similar announcements yesterday by CN - the others being aimed at Eastern Canada and the US.

So it is probably wrong to read too much into this development. But there is no mention of Vancouver - just Prince Rupert and its new container terminal a day’s sailing closer to China than us. Now that could just be that spending here is being kept quiet until the BC Rail case is finally disposed of, one way or another, since that was all about the Deltaport spur which is still in provincial hands. But I have also heard suggestions that CN intermodal trucks containers to its Thornton yard, and of course the port has been suggesting barging containers up the Fraser to new rail linked terminals which might allow CN and CP to sell off some very attractive waterfront real estate. This is all pure speculation on my part of course.

And an excuse to use another of my train pictures. This line to the Fraser Wharves terminal is slated for removal, as CN is going to build a shorter, no road crossings, bit of track along the south arm. There being no customers left along Vulcan Way and Shell Road.

And this link kills spam