the ski train, Pacific Northwest edition

http://www.seattlepi.com/local/6420ap_wa_amtrak_leavenworth.html?source=mypi

Okay, cross country skiing and really, mostly shopping, but hey. Kinda cool, tho.

ETA: And in time for Oktoberfest, too.

hey, I haven't viciously attacked anyone for stupid kindle coverage in a while

Guess it's time.

http://www.motherjones.com/blue-marble/2009/09/econundrum-kindles-vs-books

This time, it's whether the impact on the planet of e-books or paper books is more significant, looked at from the perspective of an individual reader with an individual kindle. The hypothetical reader buys 20 books a year, never uses the library.

So right there, not a good match for the person asking the question, who self-describes as a "bookstore junkie". Come on. What junkie lets more weeks of the year go by _without_ a fix than a week with a fix? Please. We should be looking at the 100 book a year crowd, or the multiple newspaper/magazine subscription crowd. This person is a bookstore/book "chipper". And they don't have to _read_ a 100 books a year. They just have to acquire them. I mean, how the hell else do you get to be 30 and conclude that you're going to have to cull the library down to 3K and keep it that way or never, ever, ever move again? Not that I'm speaking from personal experience. Because I hit that particular insight well before 30.

The comparison is interesting. The actual report's press release is here:

http://cleantech.com/news/4867/cleantech-group-finds-positive-envi

But cleantech wants you to become a member to get at the report and I'm not feeling that ambitious right now. If I change my mind, be sure I'll post about it. The press release is far from clear. Here are the relevant sentences:

"The report indicates that, on average, the carbon emitted in the lifecycle of a Kindle is fully offset after the first year of use.

The report, authored by Emma Ritch, states: "Any additional years of use result in net carbon savings, equivalent to an average of 168 kg of CO2 per year (the emissions produced in the manufacture and distribution of 22.5 books)." "

MoJo suggests that our not-a-junkie-but-a-chipper should buy her 5 books she Must Have Right Away and then get the rest from the library (because we all know libraries don't buy multiple copies of heavily read bestsellers no they don't). Alternative ideas in the comments include used books, which would imply having (a) the patience to wait for the (b) used bookstore in your neighborhood to have that highly desirable hardback available in a few weeks. And the time to find that hardback in the used bookstore -- or surf for it online or whatever. Of course, then there are shipping impacts. . .

What are my complaints here?

(1) 20 books a year is a chipper. Not a junkie. I've complained about this before. I don't really believe someone has a real problem with books (and is therefore a plausible kindle candidate) until they're at or near three digits.

(2) Don't fucking call a library card retro. They have keychain library cards. Those are not retro. They have bar codes. Those are not retro. Libraries are hip and cool. Haven't you heard?

(3) Can kindle subscriptions gets a _little_ respect? Come on. The only people who mention kindlers with magazines on them are busy mocking them, and the people who are looking at eco-impact aren't doing what they should be doing, which is, hey, want this content to survive? Pay for it and get it on your kindle without the ads.

You can get Mother Jones on the kindle. Hell, you can get _Z_ on the kindle. (Maybe I should. Hmmm.) And yet is MoJo pointing any of this out? No.

(They started it. I saw the coverage in a MoJo e-letter. I get the paper edition of MoJo, but not after my subscription runs out. I'm switching it to the kindle. I fucking hate paper, even more than I hate not being able to make sense out of charts and tables on the kindle.)

he had me going for several paragraphs

Of course, Frank Rich often gets me going for a few paragraphs, until he says something that is _such_ a howler I just can't continue.

In this case:

"the faster it will commit demographic suicide as America becomes ever younger and more diverse"

The US is getting younger? The more diverse I won't argue with. But younger? What planet is Frank Rich on?

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/20/opinion/20rich.html?em

ETA: I think I know what he meant. I _meant_ that the membership of the GOP ends with a cohort -- the GOP is aging, and right now that aging looks irreversible. It is not the US that is getting younger. It is the GOP that is getting older. But that doesn't work with his argument because it is tautological.

I Love Gail Collins

Saturday's column was about the end of Guiding Light.

"The original story involved a minister who left a light in the window so people could see that he was home and ready to listen to their problems. While it is conceivable that you could sell an idea for a series like that today, the minister in question would probably have to be a vampire."

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/19/opinion/19collins.html

ETA: Or a zombie.

so close....mocking the kindle coverage, redux

http://www.fonerbooks.com/kindle.htm

Really amazing analysis actually, but here's what made me blog so I could take a whack at the author:

"Another interesting thing is that the sales curve suggests (in the reliable section, no less) that Amazon is selling north of 600,000 Kindle eBooks a week. If we stick with the guess of around 600,000 Kindle readers in existence, that would mean that the average Kindle owner buys a book a week. That may be possible, or it could be that a lot of iPhone users are buying Kindle ebooks. If we double our estimate of the number of Kindles sold to 1.2 million, that would lower the Kindle eBook purchase rate to 2 per month per Kindle owner."

Argh! So close! He actually has data that support my hypothesis (kindle buyers are 100+ books a year buyers) -- okay, his data support 50 -- and _he does not believe it_. Shoves it back down to 2 a month, in that two dozen a year range that all the other commentators are using.

None so blind as those...

h/t some blog devoted to kindle news, which I will update with a link to at some point.

because if downtown Seattle is totally destroyed by Mt Rainier

Whether or not you have access to books on your kindle is _definitely_ a high priority!

http://thekindlenationblog.blogspot.com/2009/09/kindle-store-down-for-while-on-saturday.html?showComment=1252944916750#c825273855591545711

That's an anonymous commenter, so don't hold it against the person running the blog, which is where I got the pointer to the Foner website mentioned earlier.

I don't think I have anything useful to add, because, really, what _could_ I say?

_Slate_ has _good_ analysis of the kindle?

Had, I should say, back in July. Where was I? h/t Kindle Nation.

http://www.slate.com/id/2222941/

The basic premise: if publishers regain price control, to wit, if they succeed in forcing Amazon to sell e-books for what the publishers think they should sell for instead of what Bezos thinks they should sell for, the entire industry could become subject to piracy very quickly.

It is an interesting argument, well developed.

much better coverage of the CleanTech lifecycle analysis

http://thekindlenationblog.blogspot.com/2009/08/how-green-is-your-kindle.html

Sim I-Train

A lot of data would be needed to assemble an accurate simulation of I-Train, to figure out which parts make sense to deploy first and how much it would cost. Also, to get a better sense of how much power is needed for the cars, whether to go with each-car-powered, every-other-car-powered or something else, how much of a grid is required (base load/following load, etc.) to support it, where the power for that might be located, gauge, car width, whether to disassemble/reassemble trains at some junctions or only do through trains bouncing back and forth along sections of interstate, train length, car capacity, whether to include dining/sleeping facilities, station layouts, whether to have multiple kinds of station or just one, amount of economic support on existing lines in the form of paying passengers and/or freight, etc.

What data:

(1) Census data on who lives where, and, ideally, the paired addresses in the journey-to-work questions.
(2) Map data to make sense of those addresses
(3) Interstate data: number of lanes, location of overpasses, grade and curvature details, location of tunnels (especially ones that aren't just a single tunnel for the whole interstate both ways), bridges, multi-deck highways.
(4) Traffic data: in an ideal world, by every hour of the year. In a less ideal world, at least to know what things look like on holidays (holiday weekends, especially), Sundays, Saturdays, morning and evening commutes. For rural interstate that provides ag access (such as I-90 through Montana), the pattern and speed of agricultural vehicles. If you're taking away one lane each of 2 lanes each way, and a tractor is moving down the interstate car travel lane at <35 mph, what does _that_ do. It may or may not matter, but if it's going to result in multi-hour backups that extend for a dozen miles, you'd sort of like to know about it ahead of time.
(5) Truck traffic data: volume of freight shipments already moving in which corridors, especially LTL. Be sweet if you could get some kind of dollar amount on that.

In order for this system to really work, there almost has to be some kind of surface transportation available along the overpasses where stations are located. The author suggests trams, but buses or jitneys could easily work as well. The construction of interstates is such that these will virtually never be walkable to sufficient density of interest; public transit in the country has little motivation to locate stops on these overpasses (altho some buses do stop at park and ride lots located right on a freeway entrance/exit).

Judging by my limited understanding of How to Build a Quick and Dirty Railroad and Make Money on It So You Can Afford to Improve the Line Over Time, you want this thing to connect to communities with people who will be willing to pay you to move them or their stuff from where they are to somewhere else. The Interstate system is generally not bad for that, but some parts of the interstate system are better than others, and in some interesting ways. For example, I-5 through Seattle would in theory generate some lush passenger and freight traffic, altho it might be a bit tricky biting off the 1-3 lanes per direction that would enable one to run a combination of express/through and local trains (I say 1-3 because you might want a lane for people blazing straight up 5 with a stop downtown, a lane for an express that separates at I-90, and a lane for the train that stops at all the stops. And don't be thinking you're going to take the existing HOV/bus lanes, because those have a finer granularity yet.). By the time you make I-5 work for a train setup, you might have precluded even buses, never mind anything else.

Not so in a city with fewer choke points, like Phoenix or Atlanta. You can carve off a few lanes there, and assuming you pull enough vehicles off the road and put their drivers in the trains, there should still be enough lanes left to permit some kind of non-railed traffic. OTOH, you might be getting into trouble, in that you'll be serving so many miles of interstate that the economic density of passengers and light freight is not enough to support the rails.

Moving the problem to a place like San Francisco, well, I think you'll probably be going around San Francisco. But I could be wrong; that's why I want the grade and lane data. And it'll be really interesting trying to figure out what order to build this system in -- my guess is that connecting Denver to everything else isn't going to be really high on the priority list, and Seattle to Portland's connection to anything else is downright fascinating.

Since our proponent is really enamored of a wider gauge (and there are some good reasons to contemplate a wider gauge, not least of which is smoothness of ride and capaciousness/sturdiness of vehicle), you can't solve the gee, that interstate grade is unworkable, can I just run on a Real Railway Right of Way for the Nasty Bits? Altho you could. If it turns out that the number of miles of I-Train and the number of miles of standard in the country are roughly comparable, and somehow I-Train gets built not-standard-gauge, I would sort of expect that a lot of the standard gauge right of way (particularly over difficult terrain where the existing railroad worked crazy hard to get it below 2.2%, and the highway grade is pushing 6% or has a waiver for more, or the curvature is insanely tight or...) might acquire a third rail to permit both kinds of train to run on it.

So you'd need a dataset that included all the standard gauge track, traffic on it in terms of congestion and in terms of how much it's charging to run on it, but you _would not_ necessarily need grade details because you can just sort of assume it'll be better than whatever you decided was unacceptable. And then you'd have to do some kind of calculation in terms of figuring out whether to put catenary on it and if so in what order. It would also be nice to put together some kind of guesstimate in terms of which high speed rail corridors will get developed in which order, since as those come online, you probably _don't want to duplicate that service on this system, because that kind of thing kills both and leaves everyone looking foolish; further, it probably brings the number of lanes you need to eat on I-5 through Seattle down to 2 each way, and that kind of thing could be very, very helpful.

I'm going to stop now.

interesting passenger rail proposal

http://www.thetransportpolitic.com/2009/01/30/envisioning-a-future-interstate-rail-network/

The usual arguments (climate change, increasing fuel prices) are rallied, along with the keeping up with the Joneses, er, Chinese or whatever. The analysis involved pulling a list of big cities in the US and then figuring out pairwise corridors that might be worth high speed or standard speed rail. The idea would be to lay down new track along existing right of way.

The comments thread is really interesting -- it's a mix, but a few of the remarks are _exactly_ what should be considered. Since the author has chosen to take a human-geography approach (where are the people and stuff) instead of a physical geography approach (which route is flattest/cheapest to run), some of the commenters are pointing out egregious physical geography problems with the results. Since the analysis was based on numbers that don't give any indication of journey-to-work, some of the commenters are saying that, hey, a lot of people travel from city A to city B, but it only gets a standard; not so many people travel from city C to city d, and it gets a high speed and suggesting adjustments.

I didn't notice anyone suggesting that this sucker could be built pairwise by a for-profit enterprise, instead of having the guv-mint do it. And yet pair-wise rail funded by private capital (mostly subscriptions raised in the "cities" to be served) is how the whole thing got going in the first place. I do think that the subsidy to roads makes it difficult to build a new (speculative) passenger line, especially in a world in which people _expect_ "public" transit to be heavily subsidized and regulated. But if we were charging user fees on the roads (a real gas tax) and doing cordon/congestion pricing, and we let "public" transit carriers charge enough to actually pay for the service, you might not _have_ to have the government build the thing in the first place.

I ran across this while researching I-Train (also called interstate rail). Some of the serious criticisms of Crawford's proposal seem to revolve around the unwisdom of running high/medium/low speed trains on a single track. I just assumed you'd have to pull more lanes so you could manage that problem.

I hope I don't dream about trains. Or, if I do, that there are sleeping compartments and people in them are having a Really Good Time not sleeping in those sleeping compartments. Doesn't that sound like fun?