The French, according to Mr. Mahoney, have a straightforward approach. The High Speed Rail train leaves the city on regular tracks running like an ordinary interurban express. When it gets out into the countryside, the HSR tracks start and it kicks up to full speed ... 220mph and over, depending on the specific train. Then when it gets to into the urban area of its destination, it switches to regular tracks and back to running like an interurban express.

Most of the route is through the countryside, and that's where its cheapest to build ... both directly, and in terms of cutting down on the cost of overpasses.

SO ... what did they do in California?

Promoted by afew

I have been reading the commentary in recent transit oriented posts on Matthew Yglesias' blog (explicit links below the fold) ... well, I'll admit it, skimming the commentary of the troll that tries to sidetrack any transit posting by Yglesias ... and as far as I can tell, the idea of the Great American Suburban Retrofit (detailed links below the fold) just has not sunk in at all ... not even a little bit.

Instead its the usual "big city transit user saying we all need to live in walkable big cities" versus "happy suburbanite lecturing on how we not only don't all live in Big Eastern Seaboard Cities, but many of use don't want" ... kind of talking past each other.

So Once More Into the Breach: We can Retrofit American Suburbia to make it Far Easier to Use Public Transit and offer Walkable Communities as a Suburban Option ... without necessarily abandoning the suburbs and everyone moving to the closest big city.

Join me for a design challenge, below the fold.

Rough draft in Orange

The Coming Revolution in Africa, is how G. Pascal Zachary titles his piece for the Wilson Quarterly (Winter 2008, Vol. XXXII, no. 1, pp. 50-66.^{1}) ...

... and yes, it takes a journalist to see the coming Revolution clearly, since so much of the so-called "development" profession has a conflict of interest. As Pascal notes well into his piece:

Even as a steady diet of stories about "urgent" food crises in Africa dominated public discussion, these successes became impossible to ignore. In 2004, the International Food and Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) published a series of papers titled "Successes in African Agriculture". The papers both reflected and provoked a revolution in thinking about African farming. They also ended a long conspiracy of silence among aid agencies and professional Africanists. For decades the "food mafia," led by the World Food program and the UN's Food and Agriculture Organization, had refused to acknowledge any good news about African farming out of fear that evidence of bright spots would reduce the flow of charitable donations to the UN's massive "famine" bureaucracy, designed to feed the hungry.

Diary rescue by Migeru

Excerpted from Burning the Midnight Oil for the Arc of the Sun, in the Burning the Midnight Oil blog-within-a-blog, hosted by kos, though to the best of my knowledge he doesn't know it. Nota Bene: Some simplifications to avoid sidetracking in an American context, but, yeah, I know that they're there.

What if They Threw an Empire, and Nobody Came?

Sometimes there is nothing more tedious than an argument over the meaning of terms. It often gets called an argument over semantics but semantics ... that is meaning ... is what is important arguing over.

The trivial argument that brings "arguing over semantics" into disrepute is which meanings to attach to which word. And, of course, if you want to call that an "argument over semantics" and leave the "of words" implied, be my guest ... if I can work out what you are trying to say, that's good enough.

One of those words that spark endless argument is "Empire". Is there an American Empire? Well, like what Empire? Like the British Empire? Like the Austro-Hungarian Empire? Like the multiple Chinese Empires? Like the several Roman Empires? Like the Zulu Empire?

Whether we call it an Empire or Empire-ish or The Natural and Automatic Consequence of Being the Latest Greatest Country on the Face of the Earth ... is there an alternative?

Promoted by Migeru

Hmmm, maybe that's me, second from the left ... you know if it was free coffee and donuts, I'm there

My country's financial system is going to go through the wringer over the next two years at a minimum ... and much longer unless the initial reaction is constructive. Bear in mind the "lost decade" in Japan in the 90's after their bubble burst ... and while it was a quite impressive bubble, the Japanese financial system was nowhere near as fragile then as the US financial system is now.

So, OK, those running things here have screwed the pooch.

My question is, what are y'all going to do about it?

After seeing a recounting of a conference call, it does make sense ... Edwards feels that McCain has a very high likelihood of rapidly wrapping up the Republican nomination.

And if the Republican party has a nominee by mid-February while the Democratic party goes to the convention with the nominee still undecided, the Democrats concede the high ground to the Republicans, in an election that the Democrats ought to be able to win handily.

So stepping back makes it far more likely that a perceived nominee will come out of February 5th, and then if nobody comes out as the nominee presumptive after Feb. 12 (MD/DC/VA), then when Texas and we Buckeyes vote in March 4th, that'll wrap it up.

Of course, that also explains why no endorsement ... if John Edwards feels that he can bring the race to a close by endorsing, that's when he will endorse.

I'm not sure how public this conference call was, as I was forwarded one report on the contents. But that would seem to be the main story.

One serious confusion in some progressive populist thinking online has been a misunderstanding of the role of the progressive blogosphere as a tool for building a progressive movement.

However, as a progressive populist looking at the passive-voice descriptions that "populist messaging fails because there is not a populist movement" ... I feel like jumping up and down and yelling, "read your history books you idiots!"

A populist movement is not created in coffee house discussions, whether live or online ... it is created in the process of fighting for things, and in the process learning how to engage in a political fight and transform ourselves from political consumers to citizens of a Republic.

And without populist messaging leading the way, there will be nothing to take to our fellows when we get out amongst them.

Picture Credit: David Leeson (#8)

The Friday before Christmas, I did something different ...

... I decided that I would Take the Long Way Home

... as that Tom Waite^{NB} lyric says at the beginning:

Well I stumbled in the darkness
I'm lost and alone
Though I said I'd go before us
And show the way back home
There a light up ahead
I can't hold onto her arm
Forgive me pretty baby but I always take the long way home

Now, I wasn't literally lost. What I did was decide that, with four days off coming up, I could take the long way home, which ought to be very pretty this time of year. Instead of going down the county highway to turn left onto the township highway to turn right onto the main county highway that goes straight to my (current) home town ...

... I decided to turn right to go past the Quarry, then cross the state route to go along the Lake road then the bike trail that runs to my home town.

And I was glad I did, because it was a terrible route, and I set me thinking about bikeways versus freedom to ride.

Diary rescue by Migeru

Update [2008-1-2 19:7:32 by BruceMcF]:: The content of this diary has been deleted by the author! Those who read the original content will understand why an exclamation mark is required to finish sentences!

Early this month I finished Justinian's Flea, which looks at the reign of Justinian the Great as the pivot between "late antiquity" and the rise of medieval Europe ... and the central role in the drama played by the Plague of Justinian, the first clearly documented outbreak of the Bubonic Plague.

Which was one more addition to the mix of things involved in my reaction (s) to the diary by Jerome a Paris, Hostility to the notion of limits to growth ... and the question of what was so special about the Industrial Revolution.

I'll start with what is normal, then with what has been peculiar in the past couple of hundred years, and then how that peculiarity must have warped our economic institutions ... and to get back to normality, we will have to unwarp them.

OK, "tell them what you are going to tell them". Check. Make it clear as mud. Check. "then tell them". That's after the fold.

Diary rescue by Migeru

The world can't end today ... its already tomorrow at Docudharma

OK, so I just back from a trip to the store.

Well, let me set the scene, courtesy of the online weather report for this part of NorthEast Ohio ...

NOW ... AREAS OF HEAVY SNOW ... AND A MIX OF SNOW ... SLEET AND FREEZING RAIN WILL CONTINUE THROUGH 8PM. THE MIX PRECIPITATION WILL BE ALONG AND SOUTH OF A MARION TO CANTON LINE. A INCH AN HOUR SNOWFALL WILL BE FROM AROUND MANSFIELD TO CANTON. UNTREATED SURFACES AND ROADWAYS CAN BE ICY AND SNOW COVERED AND SLIPPERY.

... indeed, my mum was trying to talk me out of my little trip, first downtown to the bank (like, eight blocks) and then down main street to the bargain supermarket, then back. Not far at all, and in the fall simply a pleasant little excursion.

But ... oh my, oh no, there was sleety snow falling down! Oh my!

Oh ... did I say joy? The joy, after the fold.

NB. Picture gleaned from the Intertubes ... not taken by your humble scribe. Indeed, since it comes from Peninsular Far West Asia ... Amsterdam, to be precise ... and I've only been on the southeastern edge of that massive continent, it could not possibly have been taken by your humble scribe.

I'm dreaming of a white Christmas... - Diary rescue by Migeru

The thesis of the argument is that the Chinese economy can weather an American recession without going into a recession itself.

This conclusion is based on three, inter-related points:

• the relative importance of the US export market for continued Chinese growth;
  
• the ongoing decline of the US dollar against the Euro; and
  
• the ability of the US economy to recapture domestic and overseas markets for manufactured goods in the face of an increase in the Yuan/Renminbi exchange rate.

• not as important as we in the US like to think;
  
• its going to keep on going down, and that is likely to accelerate in the event of recession; and
  
• an extremely limited ability to recapture market share in the event of even a substantial rise in the Yuan/Renminbi exchange rate.
  

Promoted by Colman

This diary is a follow-up to Buses and Trains Should Be Friends ... sparked by discussion in my Bikes and Trains: Greenwashing Anti-Rail in the Seattle Rail Debate about Bus Rapid Transit.

I talked in the Buses and Trains diary about the "pushback" from bus advocates against rail, which struck me as odd given the benefits to bus ridership when bus routes are anchored to effective rail systems. And in the Greenwash of Anti-Rail diary, the opposite showed up: pushback against BRT from rail advocates, such as oceanstar17:

But we are talking about BRT

BRT is a different animal altogether. The logic behind BRT is to--taking the words from a GAO report on it--"think rail, but use buses". ...

BRT proposals range from simple express bus service to actual lines that have their own right-of-way with subway-like stops. But in the end it's still a bus and won't attract the same patronage ...

oceanstar17

Why should Rail and BRT be friends? After the fold.

This is the follow-up to Bikes and Trains: Greenwashing Anti-Rail in the Seattle Rail Debate, over at the Daily Kos, which itself was hot on the heels of Help! w/Anti-Light Rail arguments ...

As I said in the "Greenwashing" diary:

One Thing I Want To Make Clear, Before Starting

Yes, I intend to write a short, clear, hard hitting, op-ed style reply to the steaming pile of Bullshit that Mr. Bundy dropped into the Seattle light rail funding debate.

But I gotta wade through the bullshit first. ...

And wade I did, with substantial help from a surprisingly large number of commentators. So refer to that substantial commentary (and secondarily to the diary itself) for the background to the following piece.

The promised op-ed, after the fold.

From the diaries - input requested ~ whataboutbob

To sketch Bundy's argument:

• a CO2 payback period for the tunnel on the order of 90 years
  
• public transport contribution to CO2 reduction is exagerated, because the US DoE Transport Data Book gives per passenger energy by rail as 2,784 BTU's vs 3,445 BTU's by car
  
• the most cost effective solutions are to use existing capacities ... subsidize bus fares to increase average loadings, encourage vanpools, etc.
  
• Sound Transit promotes sprawl by providing ample free parking in suburban locations and heavily subsidized trips to the city
  
• The same money could be used to much better effect in supporting other, rival, means of transport, with special attention paid to bicycles.

  The plea, and some thoughts, after the fold.

  From the diaries ~ whataboutbob

The big knock against high speed rail is, of course, that it does not run door to door. This is, of course, why the passenger air transport market is such a strategic target ... it is an existing fuel-inefficient mode of transport where everyone travels as a pedestrian. And a well designed high speed rail system will deliver the target market among pedestrian travellers from as close or closer to their origin, and drop them off as close or closer to their destination.

But those are not the only passengers that HSR will be catering to. A term I have heard railfans use for this type of activity is "recruiting" patronage, so, after the fold, I step through some of the important current, and potential, recruiters.

What if we [we Yanks, that is] just set the ground rules for a High Speed Rail system and let projects be put together catch as catch can.

What would happen?

Well, I reckon it would end up looking something like this:

Notice that I do not show you the map of the US, but I bet you can guess most of the details (point to Chicago ... point to Dallas ... point to LA/Riverside ... point to Florida). Where does this come from? From setting up some rules, and then following them. No master plan, just some basic ground rules. The details, under the fold.

Re: Social Security mimic a pension system ... (none / 0)

In response to this comment, I ranted on the difference between pointless financial games and that actual policy problem raised by a large retired cohort.

Below the fold ...