Background 1

"Buffalo was served by more than 300 passenger trains a day, and of course the [New York] Central's traffic was dominant. Between Buffalo and New York, four railroads offered sleeping car service over six different lines." Night Trains: The Pullman System in the Golden Years of American Rail Travel, Peter Maken.

Night Trains is a great book that discusses the Pullman Service in the US. At the end is an appendix that is a freeze-frame snapshot of all Pullman trains on the rails on a Midnight in March 1952. The appendix produces an amazing picture of thousands of trains at predetermined spots across the country on a huge interconnected web of steel. Trains in which people are sleeping, dozing, or staring out the window at whatever landscape they can discern at the late hour. Idyllic? Maybe on the surface or from a satellite's-eye view of the rail map, but certainly not for all - with labor unrest, automobile travel via super highways on the horizon, and racial tensions beginning to percolate. America's love affair - or perhaps better put, America's weekend fling - with railroads soon would end. It wouldn't end with a crash, but with a steady decline punctuated by individual bankruptcies and abandonments.

One could get from Buffalo to NYC on the New York Central Railroad in under 8 hours at the fastest. Today, it takes just over 8 hours to travel the same route (stops included). So, we could say that the trains are not much slower than they were at the height of passenger rail in the US, or we could say that things have not progressed at all during a time in which passenger rail speeds in Europe and Asia have increased significantly. So which is it?

 

Posted with Blogsy

Random Drifts

• Too many locations on Hertel and Elmwood (and other streets, I'm sure) where on-street parking is banned "from here to corner" for no reason. These need to be looked at and fixed. More spaces on the street = more people can park = more business = happier business owners. Also, more parking revenue when it is not being stolen. Which leads to...
• App my parking meter. The elimination of the post-WWII-era coin-op parking meters in favor of the randomly distributed paper-receipt-on-dashboard-producng-meters has been a step in the right direction, but its time to app-ify parking. Park on the street and click the Nickel City Meter App to pay for your parking. Day and Time already entered. You enter the duration and your credit card or account is charged. Metermaid/maiden/person can snap a pic of your plate to check your payment status. Question: What's wrong with the new meters? Answer: Winter. Park and then try to get to one of the meter stations with a big pile of slushy snow and no cuts to get from street to sidewalk. Answer #2: Less chance for people stealing from the machines if there is no money in the machine. Problem: No smartphone. Solution: What year is it?
• Dude, where's my bus? Go to the NFTA site to look at their online bus schedules/route maps. At least they are available online, but a mobile app would make riding the bus easier for infrequent riders. An app showing routes, current bus locations, ETAs, and fare information would encourage more people to hop on the bus. Walk up to a bus stop and scan the QR code on the sign and up pops information about the buses that will come by, when they will come by, and where they go. Good for locals and out of towners.
• Walk/Don't Walk signals that don't work. Fix them or standardize them. Don't leave us guessing if the button really works, or if it is intended to be a placibo.

 

Posted with Blogsy

Hyperloop Hyper Hype

So Elon Musk's announcement of a high-speed near-ground transportation came and went. He wasn't interested in funding it, but felt the need to make a grand announcement anyway. In case you missed the details, you can read about it here, here, or here. But briefly, the idea is to build a giant series of tubes (not the internet, Senator Stevens), similar to the type that you might use at a drive-through bank teller, but instead of money, the canisters inside the tubes would carry a few people - at speeds of up to 760 mph. This would mean you (or, actually, he - Elon Musk) could get from LA to San Francisco in 35 minutes. This (supposedly) could be built for a fraction of the cost of the California High Speed rail (HSR) system now being pushed. Musk's numbers reveal that the system would cost $6 Billion for a passenger-only system LA-San Francisco, while the planned HSR is said to cost $70-$100 Billion - at least ten times more.

The distance for the route LA to San Francisco is 382 miles along US Interstate Route 5 (Google Maps). Using this with the max speed of 760 mph conveniently works out to almost exact 30 minutes (30 minutes and 9 seconds). Add in his proposed 5 minutes for unloading (hopefully no one is travelling with small kids or elderly), and you get the 35 minute trip. For reference, Buffalo to NYC along the NYS Thruway is 440 miles, or 438 miles from Amtrak Exchange Street to NY Penn Station (8.5 hours on Amtrak). A Hyperloop from Buffalo to NYPenn would take only 35 minutes + 5(!) minutes to unload. Of course, this assumes no stops - and this is true for his LA to San Francisco route as well. This is catch #1.

Catch #2 is the number of people per hour the hyperloop can carry. According to Matt Johnson, the number of passengers per hour for this is 3360 under ideal conditions. A more realistic, if still fantastical, estimate is just around 1300 people per hour. Again, this is for a direct trips only (Rochester to NY Penn? You need another tube). Again, according Johnson, the California HSR would have capacity of 12,000 people per hour, about 10 times more, and it can make intermediate stops.

The desire for very fast, convenient, city center to city center transport is understandable, and desired by many. However, the Hyperloop is not the solution. It is a pie in the sky idea at "personalized pod transport" that, when taken to its extreme (have tubes that branch off, to allow for intermediate stops and pods that detach and coast into stations, etc), become high speed rail-like. The problem isn't HSR, it is the lack of it in the US. There is a fair amount of smoke around HSR in various corridors, but still not much fire. Acela is the closest, but it is not truly high speed compared with Europe or Japan. The US HSR Association has a Toronto-Buffalo-Rochester HSR corridor target for 2020, with top speeds of 220 mph. This would be extended across NYState by 2025. Political will aside, it is certainly achievable. The New York State corridor west of Utica is flat and straight by rail standards (deviations from true east-west runs to Rome and Rochester are gradual). Grade crossings are the primary stumbling blocks, as is integration with freight - but there is capacity on the existing right of way since there are now only two tracks when there once was three or four.

So, forget the Hyperloop hype. Let's look at ways to make real transportation progress in NY State, which will be the focus of follow-on posts.

 

Posted with Blogsy