ap article about shortline railroads

h/t my husband R. for e-mailing this to me:

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090826/ap_on_re_us/us_boutique_railroads_1

Several takeaways: deregulation made it possible for shortlines to start/grow/recover; as long as a shortline has access to at least 2 class one lines for connectivity, they can play one off the other to keep rates low to their own (the shortlines) customers; companies (especially Big Food processors) like to locate where land is cheap and there is also cheap freight available -- which shortlines can provide.

It's seems clear to me that I understood this article better as a result of reading Stilgoe, but I still think the article is well-enough written (clear and with enough detail) for readers first encountering these ideas to pick up on them. Great stuff.

haunted by the chicago to NYC train idea

And no, I have _no_ mortal clue why I find this idea so fascinating. I really am a slave to random ideas that charm me into pursuing them unwisely into odd corners of data. Here I go again.

R. and I have been talking about trains. We recently managed to thoroughly confuse the Kearney Subdivision (which he knew about from a McPhee book he recently read) and the Meridian (sp?) Speedway. I had a feeling he was mixing something up, because Stilgoe hadn't been talking a lot about unit trains of coal on the Speedway and R. couldn't leave it alone. Of course Kearney is Union Pacific and the Speedway is Kansas City Southern and they aren't anywhere near each other (really), but they _are_ both triple track and move a lot of shit. Which was the aspect we were both interested in. Once we had that straightened out, we got sort of interested in triple track in general, which was a nice little rabbit hole to fall down, particularly in terms of extending the fast passenger corridor south of DC, but never mind the Fredericksburg line right now, and the hill that slows the freight trains right down because I want to think about Chicago to NYC.

The NYT has its archives (well, some chunk of them) available online and they show up on google searches, so I now know that in 1881, it took 26 hours for a fast passenger train to do that run, and in 1901, it took 20 (and it's quite charming to read how leery the Times writer was of chasing speed, even if passengers has disability/life insurance policies in case they took damage in transit). I also know that in 1922, there was a railroad strike in progress and somebody pulled a bunch of spikes from the track. A baggage train was running late and hightailing it down that line to beat the passenger train behind it, so only 2 guys died instead of coach loads full.

I know that Japanese passenger trains have been the target of terrorists, altho I seem to recall Aum Shinrikyo went after the station, and that could happen to airports just as easily. I'm a little spooked to contemplate someone removing spikes to derail a train. OTOH, how hard would it be to put all the high speed rail under automated surveillance, anyway? Is this a solvable problem? I'm also contemplating the amount of labor involved in trucking vs. trains, and thinking about all those livelihoods impacted by moving goods on the iron road instead of asphalt. You could sort of imagine there'd be an aggrieved population with motive and opportunity to cause trouble.

R. thinks that the run gets really interesting if someone can get it down a few more hours. I'm skeptical, because I think it's most appealing if you can get a little work done, two meals and a full night's sleep. OTOH, maybe you can get an evening/morning worth of family time back if you can shave it from 12 down to 8. The idea of a train averaging 100 mph for 8 hours is a little mind boggling. I don't think that's been done anywhere, but I would _love_ to be proved wrong. I'm not saying it's impossible, mind you. They're already blowing trains through the middle of Lansing at 80+ on level crossings in the middle of town.

zoning

Yeah, never get involved in this. That said, I'm reading Anthony Flint's previous book, _This Land_ (review will eventually follow, presumably, but it's nowhere near as compelling as _Wrestling with Moses_) and he's talking about green buildings and sprawl and densification and smarth growth and the New Urbanism and you know the drill. Given the publication date (2006), one assumes it was researched and written during the housing boom. In his summary of attempts to do some regional anti-sprawl planning, he talks about backlash against initially popular smart growth legislation and initiatives by governors. The backlash came in a couple of forms: ballot initiatives or legislation to undo the smart growth rules and new rules that took the fast-track "good" development and made it so it fast-tracked _all_ development. In retrospect, it is extremely obvious what must have happened. Smart growth seemed like a great idea, so it went through. Once in place, a bunch of developers standing under the overturned bucket of cash that was poured into the housing market under Bush and "Serial Bubbler" Greenspan must have redirected that stream of green stuff to make it possible to build what they've always built: vast tracts of something or other on ag land.

The farmers, of course, must have loved this: finally, they can get out from under a huge load of debt and retire. Towns aren't necessarily all that bright when it comes to planning development -- they rarely realize just how much it will cost them to build roads and run services to those new developments and they _always_ overestimate how much they'll get out of the new tax base. And all the people who went for Smart Growth because it sounded like a good idea also went for Property Rights because that sounded like a good idea, too.

Once they saw the results of Property Rights, of course, Oregon shoved through another ballot initiative to undue that horrific mistake, but that wasn't until _after_ the book was published -- that's not in there. So here's the question: when is the right time to redo zoning?

If the developers own the land, they'll be pissed if you stop them from building on it. It would be nice to put the rules in place before they buy the land. Probably not possible, altho land purchases by builders do relate to the business cycle in fairly predictable ways, which I'll get back to momentarily because _that_ is the whole point of this rant. Towns tend to be so desperate for anything to get going during the worst of a downturn that they're loathe to put new rules in then. Towns are _most_ likely to put things in place when they're watching the cookie cutter crap surround them (slam the door after entering) -- but there's huge resistance at that point with half-finished projects, already purchased land, projects have been okayed but not built, etc. There's just never a good time.

And now, returning to my point: homebuilders unload land at the end of a boom, trying to find a sucker who doesn't realize a bust is in progress. If they can't find a sucker, they may _still_ unload land, because they develop incredible cash flow problems when in-flight projects need cash to finish and they aren't able to sell completed projects in a timely fashion because a bust is in progress and buyers are loathe to buy when they think they can get a better deal by waiting. And that's an ordinary cycle -- what we just went through was substantially worse than usual.

The bust has been in progress for long enough that developers who were really in crisis have more or less gone bust; the big wave of panic selling is done. But there are still some cherry deals out there for people with the cash and foresight to buy while it's cheap -- and there are some builders out there who still have a lot more on hand than they are happy with. Also, there are some builders out there betting that some of their land ain't never gonna be developed after all and hoping to find someone willing to take the other side of that bet. The tide is turning right now -- purchases are headed up. In much the way that the stock market is a leading indicator of a turn in the economy as a hole, builder land purchases are a leading indicator of a turn in the housing market. Now would be the _perfect_ time to set some hard boundaries around metropolitan areas, and it is not going to happen.

The good news? One of the policies that survived the smart growth backlash, and seems to have persisted and expanded since then, has to do with roads. No one is building new ones any more -- with limited money locally, and nothing coming from the Feds, I would expect that developers looking at having to provide all the road costs for greenfields development might decide to do some infill along existing transit corridors instead. We can hope.

infill development woes

In an earlier post, I suggested that whether anyone required them to do so or not, odds on, homebuilders would be leaning towards infill over greenfields through this downturn and for the foreseeable future, given that There Will Never Be Another Guvmint-Funded New Road Again (obviously an overgeneralization).

http://www.mycentraljersey.com/article/20090825/NEWS/908250329/Judge+s+ruling+clears+way+for+East+Brunswick+to+sue+developer+over+stalled+

Toll Brothers in 2003 bought an urban/infill developer; I'm assuming it's the present-day incarnation of that subsidiary involved in this. They cut a deal with East Brunswick to build mixed use (what Smart Growth/densifiers/etc. want) commercial + residential. Then the crash happened and there's way too fucking much housing everywhere and Toll Brothers wants to make the deal all commercial (it's not clear to me that that's such a hot idea either, but I don't actually know anything about East Brunswick and real estate is all about local conditions). The town doesn't want that and everyone is suing everyone and a judge is making decisions, reversing them, etc. I'm sure antics will continue for the foreseeable future.

I should probably note that having tried valiantly to actually _watch_ the sausage process in a few things that had the same kind of everyone-sues-everyone-else-and-judges-get-overturned-etc. traits, I'm fairly optimistic that the outcome won't be bad. And hey, it'll provide much needed work for attorneys. Given that I have in-laws who are attorneys in NJ, that's a good thing, right?

Sabotage and the Roads

I've been contemplating the track sabotage problem (in which a prankster, disgruntled person or terrorist damages track with the intent to derail a train carrying goods and/or people) in the wake of reading that 1922 NYT article about rail strikers. R. said there had been a fairly recent event. After finding numerous instances of track sabotage affecting freight (oddly, many in Florida), I found the one he was remembering (mid 1990s derailment of the Sunset Limited in Arizona), discussed as part of a larger analysis of organizational vulnerability to terrorism. (It occurs to me that blogging about this stuff is probably making my blog really interesting to someone, somewhere.)

R. and I kicked around whether there was a parallel problem with asphalt roads. He commented on bridges, and I said bridges are bridges -- how about the _road_. He mentioned a couple of methods for damaging the road, but none were particularly compelling. And then he recalled the rocks-off-the-highway-overpass problem.

Yeah, that's about right. It's damn easy to do. It kills people quite successfully (people shooting at cars, similarly, whether shooting from in another car or by the side of the road), whether the person meant to or not. And it's fucking expensive to prevent.

So anyone suggesting that it would be too dangerous to run fast passenger trains because of sabotage risk and/or too expensive to put in place measures to prevent sabotage (grade separation, fencing, automated surveillance, etc.) is going to have to run a comparison against people killing motorists by doing things like dropping rocks off of overpasses.