Walk, phone calls, dinner at 80 Thoreau

I had a walk with M.

I had a delightful long phone call with J., including hearing the story of his mother’s religion, and his experience growing up around that and what led to his fading and then fulling breaking with that organization. I was astonished that I never knew this — we’ve known each other for other 25 years now. He had told me the denomination, and it was one I knew nothing about. Apparently it was in the context of a conversation where I was talking about my experiences, and I asked about his background with growing up in a religion but then never followed up. I am glad I finally listened to his story. It was an amazing one.

I had a phone call with Priestess. Post munch there was an Incident. Yikes! But the community did a great job of taking care of itself, which is awesome.

I had dinner at 80 Thoreau with R.

Probably a whole lot of words about transportation

A lot of this is about transportation. It’s January, so I’ve been engaging in a lot of travel planning for the year. I’m also trying to be a lot more conscious about long-standing areas of conflict and unhappiness. So I’ve been doing things, for example, like very consciously shopping for bras to see if the kind of bra that I think I would be comfortable wearing even exists. Anywhere. Not just a bra that I can tolerate when I have to, but one that I actually am completely okay with wearing. It’s a high bar, I know.

Another area is airports specifically, but also how to make travel be more of an enjoyable experience for all the participants. We’ve really made significant progress over the years, but we’re in the middle of a huge transition right now because T. says he won’t be traveling with us (as much) any more, so it’ll be three of us again instead of four. We also caught up on our big commitments (go to Seattle and the Netherlands and the UK) last year, so while I’d love to get back to Seattle some time this year, I don’t feel like I _have_ to, and I’m not flying over an ocean this year. We had talked about Quebec for a long time (I’ve never been to Canada east of Alberta, and R.’s ancestry is Quebecois on his dad’s side), planned a road trip for August 2020 and you can guess what happened to that. I’m in the process of bringing that trip back from cold storage — possibly literally all the same stops in the same places on the same dates, altho some of what we will do in each place will be different because restaurants go out of business sometimes, alas.

I did look at cruise and rail options for the Quebec trip, and there are really interesting possibilities for both, but I drew back because they wouldn’t give us any time in Rimouski and Trois Pistoles and R. really wanted that. But I did start to really develop some familiarity with Amtrak and Via and I started asking a lot of questions and thinking about what would it take to get most passengers out of planes and onto trains instead.

I think the first, and most important thing, is the schedule. If you want to go from Seattle to Spokane, there’s a train, but it’s once a day, and it arrives in Spokane at 2ish in the morning and leaves shortly thereafter. That’s terrible. I mean, really, really terrible. We really need the continued spread of things like the Sounder, and maybe more of things like Brightline. If you can do the trip in a car, but it is an exhaustingly long drive (for most people, anything over 4 hours is probably more driving than they really want to do), it’s ideal for a train, because you don’t need to provide sleeping accommodations. But you also need to make sure that you’ve got some choice of arrival and departure. There will be some trains that leave late and arrive even later that will attract riders (I kinda wish they’d bring back the really late departures on Fitchburg line, for example, so we could listen to all the encores at a concert without worrying about missing our train home), but ordinary people wanting to get from Seattle to Spokane don’t really want to be arriving at 2 in the morning.

It’s a chicken and egg problem — a better schedule will attract more ridership and you need more ridership to justify more scheduling choices. There are also issues in terms of traffic on the line because most of these lines are shared passenger and freight.

The second, and possibly as important thing, is wifi and quality of wifi. To the extent that trains run through populous areas which have cellular data service, the train doesn’t need to offer wifi itself — people can use their phones. But as the train moves faster and the towers are spread out more, the handoffs become trickier and the lags worse and it’s annoying. A person who might take a train, so they can work instead of having to drive, might instead go looking for a flight, where they can work in the terminal, and possibly even work during the flight. There’s no obvious reason that trains couldn’t have the same kind of satellite based (typically Viasat) internet that some flights have, but of course Starlink is way better and Brightline has demonstrated it works great on trains. It’s a little weird that the way Starlink wound up on Brightline is that somebody experienced Starlink on a cruise and then went and got it for his trains. But whatever.

The third, and most unclear component of this puzzle, is sleeping accommodations. Pullman cars of yore had 2nd class accommodations in which facing double/wide seats could convert to berths that were 35” wide. This is substantially wider than either of the berths in any of the roomettes, altho not as wide as the lower berth in a bedroom, in any of the sleeper cars on current Amtrak trains. Then, as now, a popular choice was to book that pair of seats / berths for a single person so the upper berth was never pulled down; you got more headroom for getting ready before pulling the curtain back. It wasn’t a full compartment, the way a roomette is, but it was a “section”. If we intend to move a lot of people who travel cross country off of planes and into trains, and those are people who can afford to pay for a seat in Mint, it makes sense to offer them something along these lines. I mean, sure the Mint seat _is_ narrower even than the upper bunk in a Superliner Roomette, but at least in the Mint seat, your shoulders and feet are largely enclosed and you don’t have to climb up and down a weird not-quite-ladder.

Anyone who has repeatedly driven up and down either of the coasts has probably at least thought about taking the train instead (we did when I was a kid in the 70s — we drove it twice and took the train once and then we flew — the heat got stuck on in our car and it was horrible. We did not have any sleeping accommodations at all), and most people still wind up flying if they can’t face the drive. The flight is cheap, compared to driving and staying in hotels or sleeping accommodations on the train. The other factor is the amount of time involved. I would argue that really reliable internet access might make the train a more viable replacement for flying, especially if there are any intermediate destinations that one might want to stop. However, the current limited schedule makes it hard to stop for part or all of one day and then resume one’s trip. Further, the cost associated with getting off and then on a later train on the same route can be prohibitive unless you’re doing some kind of rail pass / coach only trip.

There are some auxiliary problems associated with rail travel that are probably much more straightforward to solve (altho maybe not!). The biggest is the intermodal problem. While there are cities large enough to have some kind of connectivity from the train to the airport, there are plenty of cities where, if you flew into them, you would rent a car as your next travel step. And when you arrive in the train station in such a city (or an even smaller city or town) there is rarely an open rental car service in that train station (there might not a station, per se, honestly, just a platform and if you’re lucky an automated ticket kiosk). To some degree, the existence of Uber/Lyft/etc. mitigates this problem, and sometimes there are shuttles to a rental car service located elsewhere or a number you can call to access such a shuttle or whatever. But it’s annoying as fuck. I am so happy that Brightline puts parking garages at their stations and incorporates car rental services within those garages. If you are going to move people out of airports and into trains, This Is the Way.

As I noted in a previous entry, I started doing this research in an effort to avoid airports, because I was operating under the theory that Airports Are the Problem. Of course, Airports are NOT the problem. R. is the problem. We’re working on figuring out how we can help him respond to the inevitable stressors of travel in some way that is less problematic to his travel companions (me and A., basically). However, now that I’ve started, I’ve gotten really interested in this conundrum for several reasons.

First, it really bothers me that I can go read economic projections for air travel extending out decades. I can also go read projections about climate and fossil fuel use and so forth. I’m not totally oblivious. I know that we are much further along the path to making boats and trains less dependent on fossil fuels than we are to having the kind of air travel we have now less dependent on fossil fuels. I’m not saying air travel is going to go away. I, personally, would _love_ to see a large scale return to airships. But I don’t think airships are going to go at the speeds that we are used to with current air planes. And the observations I am making above — schedule, internet/wifi and sleeping accommodations — apply to _all_ “slow mode” travel. Airlines and airplane manufacturers seem to exist in a planning universe that does not anticipate a systematic reduction in the use of air planes. However, climate projections really _want_ us to systematically reduce our use of air planes. We all exist in the same reality. Only one of these things is gonna be right.

Second, business travel on air planes has not returned to pre-covid levels, in part because of efforts to keep spending down during an inflationary period, and in part because covid normalized virtual meetings thus changing the nature of business travel. I absolutely knew people pre-covid who refused to fly because of the climate impact, and I absolutely was aware of the climate impact of air travel. However, it had not occurred to me that you didn’t need to replace air travel with other travel, but you could actually just not travel, if you had really good communications systems. Seems kinda like a duh thing now, but I sure wasn’t thinking about that in 2018 and it’s not like we didn’t _have_ zoom and things like zoom. It’s just that a lot of people had no experience with them. We all got a lot of experience with them in a hurry, and for the people that worked well for, they suddenly can avoid airports a lot more effectively.

Third, developments in multiple conflicts around the world have recently showcased just how effective small scale, no-human-aboard equipment (“drones”) can be at destroying large scale, humans-aboard equipment. It really is an indication that we don’t need to replace airplanes with less-bad-for-the-climate-airplanes. We use airplanes to accomplish goals. Thinking about the goals can lead us to alternatives that accomplish those goals in very, very different ways. Drones can be used to replace agricultural use of planes, too, which is a huge deal.

I’m not saying, get rid of planes, we don’t need planes, no one should ever fly, we should ban air travel blah blah blah. Wtf. No. I’m still out there shopping for plane tickets for trips later this year. Come on. What I am trying to do is to visualize what kinds of adjustments we should be making now or soon so that we bend the curve on what trips happen and in what kind of vehicles.

I’m paying attention now to Amtrak’s RFIs for next-gen long-distance trains. They are focused pretty closely on accessibility, which is very important. I’m happy that money has been allocated to this very important project. But while Amtrak offers wifi on some trains, and is planning to upgrade at least Acela / NEC to 5G, it isn’t upgraded yet. It is an indication of just how awful airports are that Acela was able to persistently divert so many people from air shuttles to the train, even with absolutely erratic wifi.

All that was pretty focused on passenger travel. However, stuff has to move around, too. R. tells me that there are plans to get an icebreaker into the Great Lakes, so that containers can be shipped into the the lakes instead of transferring containers to rails. This is a big deal for a lot of reasons (reduction in fuel use, reduction in cost, and if you bring containers _in_ then you have a chance to ship stuff _out_ cheap, which should be _really really good_ in terms of encouraging the return of manufacturing to the middle of the country), among those reasons is that it might free up rail capacity for moving humans around.

I’m trying to figure out currently how air cargo works. If you look at dedicated flights, it _looks_ like there is a lot more passenger air travel than cargo. But if you look at the fraction of a passenger flight that is cargo, you get a very different picture. Again, you have to ask how that cargo would move if it did not go on a plane. Would it move at all? Would it move on a train, a truck? Would it instead be made somewhere else, closer to where it is wanted? One of the biggest impacts of the grounding in 2001 of all flights was that it stopped checks moving around. We passed legislation enabling the full electronic processing of checks in subsequent years and now we don’t fly checks around; they were once a huge fraction of air cargo. What else are we shipping in planes that we would be utterly flabbergasted at the idea of moving at all, physically, in decades to come?