Chicago logistics conference

To:	PeoriaandEastern@yahoogroups.com
CC:	wholelephant@yahoo.com
From:	"william wendt" Add to Address Book Add Mobile Alert
Date:	Wed, 22 Nov 2006 15:16:49 -0800 (PST)
Subject:	[PeoriaandEastern] Chicago logistics conference

I proudly, perhaps even defiantly, wore my still
resplendent P&E shirt to a major logistics conference
at the University of Illinois at Chicago Nov 21. And
that was over a two-tone gray and black NYC-suggestive
long-sleeve shirt.

I got there just in time to hear Mark Hinsdale,
planning veep for CSX, say, among other things, they
figured the population of Georgia and Florida would
soon be larger than NY and NJ and that they expected
traffic from the Northwest to increase. Of course he
paid the usual tribute to Chicago as the hub of the
rail freight universe.

I got to the mike before anyone else and said many of
the 9,000 cars a day going through Chicago might find
shorter, less congested routes over the P&E and TP&W,
that there seemed to be a long-routing problem, and
that other lines might be restored.

He agreed completely on by-passing Chicago, that CSX
was working on routing western coal via Terre Haute.
He also said tbe problem was not long-routing, just
where the lines are now, and that a Wal-Mart is
obstructing the old Erie right-of-way.

After a UPS veep spoke about congested, crumbling
highways, I got in a plug for the monorail.

There was a break-out session in which the same rail
official who said a couple months ago there would not
be enough traffic for the P&E gave a history of the
CREATE project. I asked if he had read Frank Donovan,
Mileposts on the Prairie, on the Peoria gateway
relieving Chicago congestion in WWI and WWII. He had
not.

Another break-out session had a trucker talking about
thin margins in that industry, a rail veep about
market forces, and a somewhat lengthy but nevertheless
fascinating presention by a federal transportation
official from DC on congestion pricing for highways.
It has numerous beneficial effects, such as
increasing lane capacity from 800 to 1800 in at least
one instance, cutting delays, and raising revenues. He
also said 60% of the population in Stockholm opposed
it, but the Greens insisted on it as part of staying
in the governing coalition. Now that it is in, 60%
support it.

I said this was a much more effective approach to
highway congestion than blowing more billions on
outdated transit technology, getting in a dig or two
at the Chicago trolley project canceled eleven years
ago. In the audience was the executive director of
that project and the present executive director of the
RTA, apparently the major architect of the
MovingBeyondCongestion project to raid the public
treasury. We can also figure some proper charge for
highway use will level the field among modes.

There was some discussion afterward on overcoming the
political obstacles.

Several people asked me for my propaganda. One asked
if I were a railfan. I said my personal problem with
toy department railfanning is not having the time and
moola for anywhere as much as I like. But these
delights are a by-product and one has to pay attention
to the source. Not to do so is a different form of
masturbation.

A City of Chicago speaker said public money has to be
spent as carefully as private money. There does seem
to be a certain amount of reality setting in.

What I just thought of just this afternoon is "highway
entitlement syndrome" and "There ain't no such thing
as a free highway." When that sinks in we might expect
some real changes.

beyondblogfamily

william wendt wrote:

To whom it may concern:

These are six blogs I have just started in November 2006.

The first is about Chicago transportation issues. The title is a take-off on Moving Beyond Congestion, the project of the Chicago transit agencies to push a major funding bill through the legislature in 2007, which has its website under that name.

They want investment in the future, they say, but the general point here is that it is investment in the past.

http://beyondcongestionbetweenears.blogspot.com/

The second is about primordial human emotions that evolved in hunter-gatherer band over about two million years, but which still dominate our thinking, such as it is, today. Einstein said the bomb changed everything but the way we think. Indeed.

http://beyondmoralaggression.blogspot.com/

The third is about legal issues, the general point being that our vaunted protections of law are little but a Maginot Line easily by-pased through Belguim. It seeks to restore some semblance of legal legitimacy.

http://beyondstateofnature.blogspot.com/

The fourth is a non-Chicago transportation commentary. Shoving blind is pushing cars with no one on the point to signal a stop. It is a great way to cause a train wreck. "The one way to run a railroad" celebrated in Rush Loving, The Men Who Loved Railroads," is shoving blind in a larger context. This is for non-Chicago transportation topics.

http://beyondshovingblind.blogspot.com/

The fifth wonders if "pro-life" and "limited government" are merely cudgels in the cultural wars or have real and important meanings. Is sex subject to moral constraint but not war? Is criminal law or mere unremitting hostility the way to deal with drugs, abortion, and homosexuality?

http://beyondconservofascism.blogspot.com/

The sixth probes Jewish paranoia, certainly understandable in light of history, but a sort of cultural Tay-Sachs disease that creates its own enemies. If you're not paranoid, you're crazy, said Sherman Skolnick, that resolute son of the old sand.

http://beyondjewishparanoia.blogspot.com/

Stay tuned. Rome was not built in a day.

HOW ABOUT SERIOUS DECARIFICATION?

HOW ABOUT SERIOUS DECARIFICATION?

I ducked out of the May (Critical Mass) ride mostly because I disagreed with going on Lake Shore Drive. I did have other things to do, such as bike repair, and I was not too enthused about riding where bikes do not normally go.

Since then the Mayor hinself led a bicycle tour of several thousand on a blocked-off Lake Shore and congestion problems on the lakefront, even bicycle-pedestrian-rollerbade congestion, especially around downtown, are getting front-burner attention. Several of us had earlier attended a CATS meeting on the north side where we heard that residents drive their children across Sheridan Road because the traffic to and from Lake Shore Drive is so intense and reverse lanes do not work any more because the traffic is now roughly equal in both directions. Too, there is opposition in Streeterville to a large parking garage on the Northwestern campus.

There is even an idea floating around to cut Lake Shore Drive to four lanes.

With all that in mind, rides on Lake Shore Drive, especially extended rides, might make lots of sense, if attached to serious proposals to get cars off the lakefront. The lakefront is a ripe target for serious decarification.

A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. The first step of serious decarification just might be remote parking. No, the old buggy cannot get you all the way anymore. No, you have to stash the insolent chariot a mile or two away, perhaps considerably further, and complete the trip some other way.

There are at least two likely spots for remote downtown parking. One is the expressway interchange just north of Grand Avenue; the other is the some 80 acres of long empty riverfront land north and south of Roosevelt Road, the old Grand Central Station yards, where a structure would not be necessary for some time. Even a large garage at either location might cost less than just the land for the proposed Northwestern garage.

There are people who will bring bikes by car, but most will need some form of public transportation to complete their trip. The likely first step will be now ubiquitious "trolleys" (small buses on a cable car theme with propane engines). CTA could run special buses, too, but somethimg more ambitious will be necesary.

There is a promising, largely untried monorail technology that has been inexcusably neglected by transit planners and the general public both. Its structure ibeing a simple, standard steel beam, 14" x 24", held aloft by heavy-duty light poles, it blocks very little light. The vehicle is simply a modified bus body, costing about as much as a bus of similar capacity. It is both propelled and about 95% suspended by a linear induction motor, a variant of the common clock motor. Having no moving, mechanical parts, it is just as silent as a clock motor. Such motors are commonly used in industry to move metals, from powders to ingots, without intervening machinery. This technology should be environmentally acceptable even in Grant Park, while affording spectacular views of both lake and downtown. Initial stages might connect Navy Pier with a Grand/expressway garage or a Roosevelt/river lot with the museums.

By some strange coincidence, the Roosevelt/river site is the only practical site in town for a football stadium. In the midst of downtown public transportation, expressways and parking, its additional parking needs would be minimal. Even the Tribune endorsed it as the "most attractive, accesible" site in the city. (April 25, 1986)

The lakefront offers a superb opportunity to begin serious decarification, and to associate it with a highly visible and and prestigious location.



William F. Wendt, Jr.

 

OVERHEAD TRUCK LANES

March 1, 2004
To the editor:

Charles Potts, president of the National Asphalt Pavement Association, calls for dedicated truck lanes and improved intermodal transportation to ease major congestion, road repair, and safety problems on the Interstates. (Sun-Times, Feb. 28)

Why not put the truck lanes overhead? The chic catchphrase to the contrary, there is a technical solution, say, a new monorail technology. Its structure is a simple steel I-beam held overhead by heavy duty light poles every eighty feet or so. It blocks very little light, does not need another swath through city or countryside, and can use existing road or rail rights-of-way without disrupting near-by activity.

The vehicle underneath the beam is both propelled and suspended by a glorified clock motor, otherwise known as a linear induction motor. There is little more to a linear induction motor than the grade school experiment in which a kid wraps wire around a nail and makes an electromagnet. Such motors have long been used in industry to move metals directly, from powders to ingots, with induced currents and magnetic fields, without intervening machinery.
About 3/8" under a steel beam, it creates a magnetic force along the beam and about ten times as much toward it. Not being a pure maglev, this technology uses caster wheels over and under the flanges of the beam to keep it from falling or clamping up. Being suspended beneath the beam, the vehicle does not need elaborate, expensive structure or mechanisms to keep it from tipping. Do you carry a bucket of water from above or below?

A heavy duty version could get 40 ton trucks off the highway, while moving them much faster. The vehicle need only be the motor, automatic controls, and a clamp to pick up the trailer. It need only pick up the load and go, just like trucks, singly or in electronically spaced convoys. without being loaded into railroad cars, without time-consuming switching into trains.
The clamp could likewise pick up a skid that a bus could drive on and off, whether between cities or within metropolitan areas.

Such a monorail could be built over existing expressways and offer high speed service, freight and passenger, 150 mph or more, if desired. The Interstates are shorter and straighter than railroads built decades earlier. The conflicts with existing road and rail traffic that hamstring high speed rail simply do not exist.

At 150 mph, coast-to-coast would only take twenty hours.

The major freight markets, however, are less than 500 miles. As it happens, such short markets are largely the province of overnight trucking, rail being too slow and cumbersome. Thus drivers are forced into night jobs requiring them to sleep away from home half the time. The trucking industry is short several hundred thousand drivers; people simply do not want to be away from home like that anymore. Such a monorail could handle the intercity run two or three times faster than the highway and leave the driving to local pick-up and delivery.

The operating expense would be little more than electricity. Overnight power, of course, is much more easily and cheaply available than in peak periods.

William F. Wendt, Jr.

breaking gridlock between ears

beyondcongestionbetwenears is admitedly a play on MovingBeyondCongestion, the transit agencies push for mucho moola. But this is a commentary yours truly penned several years ago on a bicycle riders conference.

BREAKING THE GRIDLOCK BETWEEN THE EARS
What will it take to sharply reduce the role of the automobile in American life? Or just in Chicago? Something more drastic, say, than simply "sustaining activism," the theme of the Break the Gridlock conference, which, in this town for the past fifteen years or so, has amounted to little more than a kid pestering daddy for more allowance. Rather than playing neglected little kid to the unsympathetic governmental parent, activists will have to play parent, or even child psychologist, to wayward, wasteful government.

It means, in short, making the overgrown brat handle its allowance properly. Civic and commercial life takes place in a sea of monetary currents. Whether it benefits the people (or special interests) like the warmth of the Gulf Stream or sucks them under in a vicious undertow depends on government policies, those largely taxation and spending. One important general principle is that beneficiaries (except indigents) should pay for their benefits, that large social enterprises should cover their own costs. That is a principle little observed in transportation affairs.

Highway users pay far from the whole cost of highways. The long standing joke is that new expressways only create more congestion. In other words, demand outstrips supply, and, by elementary economics, highways are woefully underpriced. Something like one-third of police budgets and one-sixth of fire budgets are highway related. They do not pick up health costs, whether ftom pollution or accidents. Whether they even pick up local street repair costs is an open question. Daniel Lazare, The War on the Cities, is perhaps the best compilation of the costs the automobile has inflicted on the rest of society. In Europe highways are supposed to be profit centers. Whe ever heard of making a profit from highways here, except toll surpluses to fund more toll roads?

The privately financed railroads, on the other hand, are over capacity now and, facing a doubling of traffic in coming years, cannot raise the private capital needed. Why, for all the hubbub over carbon taxes in the past decade, have depletion allowances (26 United States Code 611 et. seq.) gone unmentioned since the sixties? Not just for oil, they are a blatant subsidy for extractive industries, for the profligate use of natural resources. By a 1981 Supreme Court decision, they are not even limited to the costs of extraction. If curiously enough applied to timber, they were disallowed to salt from the Great Salt Lake on grounds it is replenishable.

Meanwhile alternatives to oil fail in the marketplace and recyclers have to scramble for business. Throwing money at public transportation is no answer. In Chicago it will have a funding problem as long as the cost of the rush hour is essentially the cost of the transit system and as long as the downtown office industry can send everyone home at 5 without paying diddly squat for transit. Meanwhile CTA nickel-dimes neighborhood off-peak service to death, just what merchants need for the 1% sales tax that pays most CTA expenses. Meanwhile the 2002 Central Area Plan calls for a one-third increase in downtown office space and corresponding CTA service. Federal funding for transit investment removes cost considerations and creates a junior military-industrial complex. It also has a magnetic appeal to the grantsmanship of Alinskyite activism.

Cable cars came and went in two decades when costs were a consideration, but now third rail is enshrined as the prime rainmaker. Billions for that, but never mind a monorail that can do a lot more for a lot less. Accountability is not what you expect but what you inspect. It is a parental function, one requiring adult expectations, not childish favor-seeking. Accountability activism in Chicago pretty well ceased when the Chicago 1992 Committee did a study of poverty programs subsidizing south loop development about fifteen years ago. That immediately drew hostile editorials from the Tribune on the unquestionable worth of south loop development, eventually an editorial on the Low Income Support Corporation reaching an accomodation with the activists. Alinskyite activism, prominent in the Break the Gridlock flyer, has its definite limitations. It is great at dramatizing issues and getting people involved, but its superficial analysis and ingrained grantsmanship too often leave it playing the little kid, with his own gridlock between the ears.

William F. Wendt, Jr.

monorail demonstration

RTA BUDGET STATEMENT 2004
With RTA approval, CTA invests some $400 million in third rail rapid transit each year, Metra some $300 million in commuter rail, CTA some $50 million in bus, and PACE some $30 million in bus. As I have been saying for the past decade and a half, it is high time indeed to question such prodigious investment in outdated rail technology, one that has not been substantially improved in over a century, the other in a half-century. In an age of topsy-turvy technical development, the RTA’s only venture into new technology has been the ill-fated, ill-conceived PRT project, again of a decade and a half ago. Otherwise everything has been invented. There is a so far little known and less used public transportation technology in which the vehicle runs under a standard steel beam held aloft by heavy-duty light poles. The vehicle is both propelled and suspended by a linear induction motor, running about 3/8" under the beam. The motor generates magnetic forces both along the beam and toward it. Thus it both propels and suspends the vehicle. Not a pure maglev by any stretch of the imagination, it has caster wheels to keep it from falling or clamping to the beam. It could do considerably more for considerably less than current technologies, including getting a lot of trucks off the road in a heavy-duty version. Where, however, to give it an initial shakedown cruise, to work out any kinks before putting it into regular service? An initial application should meet these criteria: 1. It should be short, not more than five miles or so. 2. It should perform a useful function, but not an essential or irreplaceable one. 3. It should be reasonably accessible to anyone who wantsd to check it out, but not in a busy, congested area where it might disrupt normal functions. 4. It should be possible to include it in a larger system, once it is proved. One possible demonstration would run from the Desplaines Ave. terminal of the CTA Congess line to the Maybrook courthouse complex, which also has a sheriff’s police office, a Com Ed facility, and an office building. It is barely a mile as the crow flies, but twice that by roundabout roads. A bus leaving the terminal now has to go about a half mile north-northeast, make about a 110% turn onto Madison, go about a mile on Madison mostly through forest preserves and over the Desplaines River, then double back a half-mile south on busy 1st Ave. and a quarter-mile east on access roads. The PACE 320 bus makes about a dozen runs a day between the two, taking 9 to 11 minutes. The monorail demonstration would need only a single steel beam between the two an a long abandoned railroad right-of-way. The vehicle need only be a skid that a bus can drive on and off. It could get the bus between the terminal and the courthouse in two or three minutes. At first the 320 bus could make its runs on the monorail. Once that is established, other buses going west from the terminal could use it. The second beam might become necessary. The old Chicago, Aurora and Elgin and Chicago Great Western rights-of-way both extend west from there, becoming the Prairie Path in DuPage County. Or it might extend west to Oak Brook and Yorktown over the expressway or east into the City once the Congress line needs to be replaced, at far less cost than rapid transit. Once proved, who knows, this technology could provide an overhead high-occupancy lane quite separate from existing traffic and provide long-distance express runs. With computer matched loads, it could offer one seat bus stop to bus stop runs of thirty miles in one hour. But it has to be tried first, and the RTA has to take some responsibility for that.

THE PSYCHOLOGY OF TRANSIT PLANNING
> "Mommy puts on my coat." That is what the little
> five year old girl tells Daddy, when he is trying to get
> her and her sister out of the house for a train ride,
> on that delightful Metra radio commercial for its
> week-end family fares. If you are five years old, of
> course, and Mommy has always put on your coat, it
> might indeed be a bit strange to have Daddy do it or
> to put it on yourself.
> It is not much of an answer, however, if you are
> dealing with serious transportation problems. That
> is what you almost always get, nevertheless, from
> bureaucrats and activists both, translated into
> adultese, "We've always done it this way." Transit
> policy is formulated on about a four year old mental
> level.
> Maria Montessori wrote of small children getting
> very upset by a change in their surroundings. Jean
> Piaget wrote of a mentality of children in the
> "pre-operational" stage, from about two to seven,
> that takes such things as the rules for marbles as
> absolute. He wrote of "syncretic" thinking in that
> stage, which is an inability to see wholes, and of
> "juxtaposition" which does not see inconsistencies.
> In "concrete operations," from about seven to fourteen,
> the child can at least perceive wholes, and in "formal
> operations," over age fourteen, the adolescent can
> imagine something different in "hypothetico- deductive"
> thinking.
> Both of them should have seen the uproar over
> rebuilding the Green Line five years ago. I have
> done my share of bureaucracy bashing, but I have never
> seen any transit bureaucracy as monomaniacal as "the
> community" was about rebuilding century old
> elevateds.
> It was the Chicken Little school of transit
> planning; the elevateds are falling down and we simply cannot
> imagine life without them. Any old excuse to throw
> money at them was good enough, even putting in stops
> every two blocks. Anything to save money or open new
> possibilities or to look at new technology was
> ignored or even censored. Never mind, say, a unified
> CTA/commuter train fare or keeping the line open on
> a limted basis or a new monorail technology.
> As matters stand now, neither the activists nor the
> bureaucracy can think of else than rebuilding
> century old third rail technology. Never mind that CTA
> recently revised the total cost from $3 billion to $7
> billion (see the 1998 budget). Metra isn't any
> better about rebuilding commuter trains, even though all
> those billions could conceivably fund a unified
> city/suburban system with a new technology, one that
> serves suburban industry as well as the downtown.
> What would Montessori and Piaget make of the
> various apprehensions over "privatization" ? That might mean
> going back to unsubsidized private companies, which
> no one is seriously proposing. Or, the
> "lease/leaseback" deal for the Green Line, which is just a tax gimmick
> that is costing the federal government far more than
> a direct grant, including, according to some reports,
> some $9 million for "consultants. " The riders will
> not see any difference in operations, unless there is a
> provision to foreclose on CTA.
> It can also mean private companies, or even the
> unions, for that matter, providing service under
> contract to CTA. The advocates claim it would save
> considerable money while providing much better
> service. A recent report says CTA is paying some $54
> an hour to operate buses, while a number of other
> carriers pay about two-thirds as much. On CTA this
> would easily save several times the $25 million in
> current cuts that are causing so much grief and
> agony.
> In Indianapolis the union got 12 of the 18 routes
> put up for bid. Government contracting, which this sort
> of "privatization" is, is no automatic cure-all, to
> be sure. Just look at the military-industrial
> complex. If the bidding process is honest, however
> (quite a big "if" in this town), I think privatization
> of this sort would do what its proponents say it
> will.
> Maybe if the public voted directly for bus companies
> instead of politicians, we would see a much better
> turn-out on election day.
> The "U-pass" for college students is an intriguing
> idea, a $90 student fee for five months of unlimited
> riding, when the monthly pass is $88. What's the
> gimmick? Partly, a mass sign-up; partly, CTA's
> dawning realization that most of the rides would fill empty
> off-peak seats. The major expense of a transit
> system is the rush hour. Once that is paid for, the
> off-peak merely uses what is already paid for, almost a free
> ride. When downtown has to pay for its enormously
> expensive rush hour, then CTA's money problems will
> be over.
> To a four year old mentality, however, there is no
> solution for CTA's problems except to throw money at
> them. So you traipse off to Springfield and
> Washington, like a little kid pestering Daddy for an
> increase in allowance. You better enjoy it, however.
> Throwing money at CTA is like filling a seive, you
> have to keep at it.
> Although "the community" would like to cover the $25
> million cuts with an $83 million city surplus, CTA
> calls that only a "short term" solution. Only nice
> free painless buckoes from afar need apply to CTA.
> Local responsibility for CTA finances might just
> require an adult mentality about CTA spending.
> In any event, I must commend the Pilsen/Little
> Village businesses for giving discounts to CTA
> riders and putting their money where their mouths are,
> quite unlike their downtown big brothers.
> Well, well, well, Daddy got little Katie and Alex
> to the train and they were adventursome enough to ride
> on the upper deck. If their elders were half as
> open-minded, they would straighten some of this out.
> William F. Wendt, Jr.
>
> printed in Southwest News-Herald June 4, 1998 under the title,
CTA Problems Won't Go Away With More Money

cta budget hearing nov 2006

CTA BUDGET HEARING November 2006
What is CTA’s idea of essential? A $93 million
airport express subway station, under construction,
before the rest of the three-quarter billion, at
least, project is funded? Frank Kruesi said it is, at
an RTA press conference to kick off the big transit
funding drive. The system needs connectivity, he said,
and other cities have airport expresses too. That,
after a lot of flesh-creeping about the system falling
apart.
Much more essential is combining the 11 Lincoln and
37 Sedgwick buses, something I should have thought of.
It is far better than what Frank Kruesi said at a
public meeting a year and a half ago, that he could
not restore the 11 bus downtown without more money,
while a half billion was going into near-by elevated
expansion. And this year we have the old Congress
getting almost a doubling of service and the old
Douglas rerouted over the Lake, as it was a half
century ago during expressway construction. That might
seem inconsistent, but both are quite consistent with
federally funded boondoggles, whether the Ravenswood
expansion or the proposed Circle line, another excuse
for blowing federal funds.
Kruesi also said, six and a half years ago, that the
marginal cost of off-peak service is just about
nothing, as I have reminded everyone at this hearing
ever since, without contradiction. That, after his
presentation on filling the Loop with parking garages
if CTA passengers all drove, and my rejoinder about
nickel-diming off-peak neighborhood service to death,
the service retailers need to generate the sales taxes
that fund CTA operations. Then, apparently, CTA finds
it essential to twice refer to the health of sales tax
revenues on p39 of his budget. When has CTA ever done
anything for retailers? Or about the $6 billion annual
retail sales that leave the city every year, as
Crain’s reported a couple years ago?
And, CTA being so essence oriented, it is presenting
a budget assuming a $110 million bailout from
Springfield. It should look closer to home. That
figure spread over some 400,000 downtown employees
comes to $275 per head, or, divided by 250 business
days, a buck and a bit per round trip. CTA does not
need any new taxes to cover this shortfall. Simply
trim rush hour service to cover it, unless downtown
decides to cough up. Contrary to the negligible
marginal cost of off-peak service, the cost of the
rush is essentially the cost of the system. If the
downtown interests do not think it is worth it, who
else should?
For all the bleating about unity among the agencies,
I have not seen anything in the CTA or Metra budgets
about fare integration, whether Mike Payne’s Gray Line
or something more comprehensive. Two fares for one
ride is not unity from from the riders’ standpoint,
and the electric lines in the city are woefully
underused.
Page 73 lists $2.7 billion in available capital
funding, an additional, unfunded $5.8 billion needed
to get the system in good repair, and $4.2 billion for
expansion. By my arithmetic, not CTA’s, that comes to
$8.5 billion, just for repair. A whole new bus
operation would cost a half billion. Eight billion,
then, just to repair a technology that cannot do
anything now it could not a century ago, when it was
much more fun. And even CTA says it is a bottomless
pit, page 7, almost in so many words.
Transit culture has yet to catch up with car culture
in one important respect. When the repair shop says it
will cost $80,000 to fix the old jalopy, car culture
figures the Mercedes and Lexus dealers will be quite
happy to talk for that kind of moola. Transit culture
takes the Jerry Rubin approach, however, just do it.
Not that it always did. Indeed, third rail rapid
transit and push-pull commuter trains were the transit
Mercedes or Lexus of their day, if a century or half a
century ago. That was under private cost/benefit
comparison, something lost under something-for-nothing
state and federal funding. If transit projects were
funded by land value capture instead, there would be
something akin to private cost/benefit comparison and
new technology, instead of pork barrel boondoggling
and excuses to spend federal moola.
William F. Wendt, Jr.

September 12, 2006

To:
International Olympic Committee
Chateau de Vidy
1007 Lausanne Switzerland

United States Olympic Committee
1 Olympic Plaza
Colorado Springs, Colorado 80909

Dear Sirs/Madams:

Unless you make your own special effort to assess the
site at Roosevelt Road and the river, easily the best
stadium site in the city of Chicago, actually the only
practical one, it will pass under your radar. Unless
you open a public discussion of it you might easily
miss the best site anywhere else as well.

It is over sixty, unobstructed acres of abandoned
railroad yard, unused for over three decades, for
which recent development plans have recently collapsed
amidst some scandal. Less than a mile walk from
downtown public transportation and parking, it is also
in the midst of near-by expressways. No less than the
Chicago Tribune, April 25, 1986, called it the most
attractive, most accessible stadium site in the city,
which it definitely is. It has been highly rated by
prominent civic bodies, even the City itself. Enclosed
are ratings for stadium use from then, qualified upon
infrastructure that has since largely been built. The
site is easily viewed from the recently reconstructed
Roosevelt Road bridge, which itself creates a
ready-made walkway to the fifteen or so vacant acres
to the north, and which has a magnificent view of the
downtown.

Immdeiately to their north is River City, an
avant-garde but failed and somewhat drropy mid-rise
housing complex which might finally find itself as an
Olympic village. (And just beyond is the still vacant
site of Grand Central Station, the architectural gem
of Chicago train stations, which I would like to see
reconstructed.)

A serious Olympic proposal would also reopen near-by
Meigs Field. If there is some island of sanity in the
airline industry, it might even be served by 2016 with
the Lockheed Electra, the original airliner version of
the veteran navy patrol plane, almost as fast as jets
in the air but which can serve small airports with
little noise and using much less fuel. A serious
proposal would also offer to install a promising
monorail technology to connect the two and other
points in the city.

The current Olympic proposal by the City of Chicago is
to build a temporary stadium in parking lots just
south of the new $606 million but grossly mislocated
and grossly inadequate football stadium on the
lakefront. The site is considerably less accessible
and more congested, in the midst of heavily used
lakefront museums and exhibition halls. It has only
one major road and one transit line near-by, and that
a barrier to the west. About twice as far from the
downtown as Roosevelt and the river, with precious new
upscale downtown neighborhoods just across the
multi-track electric commuter line, pedestrian access
is poor, to say the least.

The real reason for passing over the incomparably
superior site is in those same ratings, that it has
long been saved for downtown housing. This is also the
real reason for closing Meigs, as shown in the 1973
Chicago 21 Plan. Questioning such long-standing
ambitions is simply not done in local circles, even
among the loyal, enervated opposition. See Cohen and
Taylor, American Pharaoh, index entries under "Central
Area Committee," as to how this town has been run for
the past fifty years.

The City originally proposed a stadium on the
Sportsmans Park horsetrack site about three miles
north of Midway Field and an Olympic village on the
abandoned U. S. Steel site on the south lakefront.
These sites are not far from the route of the long
proposed Mid-City transit route, some 20 miles along
Cicero and 75th, the former Crosstown Expressway route
and lately proposed for a truck by-pass. It is only
ten years until the 2016 Olympics, but it might be
possible to install a heavy-duty monorail on that same
route, one capable of hauling trucks as well as
passenger vehicles. This particular if little known
technology could allow mile-a-minute express runs as
well, thus making possible a scattered site Olympics
with high-speed links among the three sites, no more
than fifteen minutes from each other.

Unfortunately the City of Chicago stunted its own
industrial development for decades, instead insulating
the downtown from poor neighborhoods. Indeed, a fall
1968 Daedulus article by the long dreaded planner
Anthony Downs decried "enrichment" strategies that
would attract poor migrants and adovcated the
"integrated core" strategy by which downtown housing
would expand and eventually push everything else out
of the city.

Unfortunately, too, there are precious few people in
this precariously toddlin' town willing and able to
discuss such things and they are convinced no one else
cares. Too, Second City syndrome is still in full
effect here; no one pays any attention unless you make
a splash somewhere else. That an Olympic bid could
advance this far with these issues unmentioned in
public shows the paralysis of the civic culture. It
will take an out-of-town influence to get things off
dead-center. Otherwise downtown housing could easily
push out the Olympics too.

The current situation is more fluid than usual because
of the upcoming municipal election in February. While
intervention in the election would be no proper role
of yours, you still have a duty to secure the best
possible site. Thus you have a vital, proper interest
in land use and transportation policies, inevitable
political implications notwithstanding. Thus you have
a most proper interest, even a public responsibility,
in opening a full discussion of these matters,
election or not.

You do have to toot your own horn, don't you? Who else
will? Is the Missouri mule ready for reform yet? Who
knows, but the 2 x 4 will have to come from out of
town.

William F. Wendt, Jr. -

RESTORE THE PEORIA AND EASTERN

RESTORE THE PEORIA AND EASTERN


Does all rail freight have to go through Chicago? Once upon a time it was "quicker via Peoria," 210 direct, unobstructed miles on the Peoria and Eastern between Peoria and Indianapolis instead of 350 miles via Chicago and congestion.

Much has changed in the quarter century since the P&E was an unbroken route. For over a century the railroads had an overcapacity problem, one solved by the mid-1990s by
increasing traffic and decreasing route-miles. The Chicago railroads are now seeking $1.5 billion in public and private funds for the CREATE (Chicago Regional and Transportation Efficiency) program to upgrade trackage and ease congestion, which so far has not gotten the expected appropriation from Congress.

37,000 freight cars move through the Chicago area every day (CREATE brochure). Some 25% does not originate or terminate there ("Freight Rail Futures," Chicago Department of Transportation website). That is over 9,000 cars a day, easily 90 or 100 trains, merely moving through the area.

Do they all have to go through Chicago? Is Chicago always on the shortest, most direct route? Obviously not. Rail officials are looking into alternatives now that political funding has come up short. (Crain's Chicago Business, Jan. 16, 2006; TRAINS, March 2006) On rerouting traffic, now under consideration, TRAINS said, "… railroads may wind up sacrificing revenue if reroutes result in shorter hauls."

Exactly. There is a deeply encrusted practice of "long-routing" to increase the originating road's cut of revenues. Obviously it requires a longer route, with the obvious disadvantages of greater travel time, more expense, less reliable service, and poorer use of now scarce rail resources.
Running everything through Chicago is defended in rail circles on grounds of more frequent connections and keeping crews in position. Those are usually compelling advantages, to be sure, but not always. Bigger is not necessarily better.

Long-routing is under attack in more enlightened rail circles. By some strange co-incidence, the principal apostle of direct routing is Hunter Harrison, president of the Canadian National, also the system returning considerably more on investment than other rail lines. CN also routes traffic through Chicago (TRAINS, March 2005).

There once were rail by-passes of Chicago, notably the Peoria and Eastern. It has not functioned as a through route since a bridge washout in 1981 and getting caught in merger backwash.
In its heyday it handled about 40,000 cars a year or 110 a day, less than 2% of the traffic now going through Chicago.

What it would take to restore I do not know. It can be more difficult to restore an abandoned line than to build a new one. It would need connections to the BNSF and UP lines to the north to be fully effective, perhaps over its also bygone Peoria connection, the Minneapolis and St. Louis, or the old Burlington route to Galesburg.

There is also the still functioning Toledo, Peoria and Western, which has little if any bridge traffic and perhaps inadequate eastern connections. Under the best of circumstances it would be a considerably longer route between Peoria and Indianapolis.

There are also abandoned Pennsy, B&O, and Nickel Plate lines in the area that might be considered, especially if obstacles preclude any P&E segment.

These questions need a full study, the obvious next step.

If we need political action for rail investment, how about tax-free bonds, which neither burden nor subsidize?

William F. Wendt, Jr.

edison was wrong about AC and so is transit industry

There are two basic types of electric current, direct
current (DC) and alternating current (AC). A century
ago alternating current beat out direct current for
large scale power systems for one overriding reason.
Alternating current can continuously "induce" currents
in adjacent circuits whereas direct current can do
that only when shut off or turned on.
There are consequently two basic types of electric
transit systems, those based on each type of current.
Now that CTA needs some $7 billion to rebuild its
direct current rapid transit system (per 1999 budget,
allowing $1 billion for a whole new bus operation),
let's take a look at alternating current and what it
can "induce" in public tranportation technology.
The first type of current is direct current, which
flows in one direction only. It was discovered about
two centuries ago in chemical experiments that led to
crude batteries. It has pressure, measured in volts,
and volume, measured in amperes. (Volta and Ampere
were early electric experimenters) Volts times amperes
(or amps) result in watts, the unit of electric power,
named for the developer of the first efficient steam
engine. 746 watts equals one horsepower; 1000 watts or
a kilowatt is 1 1/3 horsepower.
It was discovered in the 1820s that flowing current
will deflect a compass needle. In other words, it will
develop a magnetic field. Also, that reversing the
flow will reverse the field, in other words, transpose
its north and south poles. Likewise, that coiling the
wire will concentrate the magnetic field and wrapping
the wire around an iron bar will concentrate it
further. In the 1830s experimenters discovered that
moving a wire through a magnetic field will generate a
current. They also discovered that a current flowing
through one coiled, insulated wire, when turned on or
off, will induce a current in a nearby but unconnected
coil. A steady current, however, would not induce
another current.
The second type of current is alternating current. It
too has volts and amperes, but constantly rising and
falling as the current continuously reverses
direction. Common house current today reverses
direction 60 times a second, or 60 cycles per second,
or 60 hertz, after a mid-ninteenth century
experimenter. Experimenters quickly discovered that
moving the wire the other way through the field will
reverse the current. Rotating the wire or coil of wire
in a magnetic field causes the direction of the
current to reverse continuously, as the wire cuts the
field one way and then the other, and as metal rings
conduct the current to stationary wires through
sliding contacts. Except for primitive arc lighting
(prior to the light bulb, which generated light with
sparks not unlike arc welding today), alternating
current was pretty much a nuisance in its early years.

To produce direct current, the early rotating coils
needed a wiring arrangement with sliding contacts and
rings divided into segments, known as a commutator, to
reverse the electric contacts as the coils rotated.
With a commutator and mechanical power to rotate the
coils, the rotating coils would generate direct
current. On the flip side, feeding electric power into
those same coils with a commutator would cause them to
rotate and generate mechanical power. Properly
designed, the rotating coils with a commutator could
take mechanical or electric power and convert it into
the other. The same piece of machinery could be a
generator or a motor.
While steady direct current would not induce currents
in neighboring coils, alternating current, however,
constantly rising, falling and reversing, would create
fluctuating magnetic fields that would. Furthermore,
if the secondary coil had more turns than the primary
coil, the voltage would rise in proportion and the
amperage would likewise decrease. If the secondary
coil had fewer turns, the voltage would decrease and
the amperage proportionally increase. The power, volts
times amps, would remain the same, except for losses
to electrical resistance.
In other words, alternating current could be
transformed from low voltage to high and back to low.
By the 1880s practical transformers were available to
the fledgling electric power industry. The high
voltages allow alternating current to be transmitted
over long distances with small losses. The low
voltages allow it to be used safely, except there was
no practial alternating current motor.
It was about this time that the brilliant
mathemitician, engineer and inventor Nikola Tesla took
a distaste to sparking commutators with their sliding
contacts. By the late 1880s he had developed a motor
in which the stationary coils induced currents in the
rotating coils, quite without electrical contact by
moving parts and quite without sparking and its
problems. The induced currents would then create
magnetic fields of their own which opposed those of
the stationary fields and caused their coils to
rotate. Early alternating current motors would run
efficiently at only one speed, however, which was
quite acceptable in many factory applications. Thus
factory machines could be powered independently
instead of linked to a central steam engine with belts
and jackshafts.
Thomas Edison was not interested in Tesla's induction
motor with its complicated mathematics. Tesla found
backing nevertheless from George Westinghouse,
inventor of the railroad air brake. Thus was set the
titanic battle in the early electric power industy,
Edison with his direct current system versus Tesla and
Westinghouse with their alternating current system.
Edison argued safety, that high alternating currents
were dangerous. His advocates staged numerous
electrocutions of dogs, cats and horses with
alternating current. One even got a law passed by the
New York legislature to replace hanging with the
electric chair, by alternating current, of course.
"Westinghoused" was the term Edison tried to introduce
for electrocution. The first electrocution, however,
of a poor wretch named Thomas Kemmler, was a badly
botched affair that generated a lot of bad publicity.
For safe use in ordinary life, however, 250 volts is
about the maximum allowable. Common house current is
110 volts. Since direct current cannot be transformed,
it had to be generated at the same voltage it was
used. Since low voltage current loses power rapidly
over distance, direct current had to be used close to
its generator. Thus it needed many small generators
instead of one large, much less expensive central
generator. By the early twentieth century direct
current lost to alternating current for the simple
reason that alternating current can be transformed and
thus used at great distances from the generator. All
the brilliance, renown and prestige of Thomas Edison
could not change this simple proposition.
While large electric locomotives generally used
alternating current motors in the early twentieth
century, trolley cars, rapid transit cars, and trolley
buses used direct current motors, sparking commutators
notwithstanding, because direct current motors can be
more easily controlled over wide speed ranges. All the
brilliance, renown and prestige of Nikola Tesla and
George Westinghouse could not change this simple
proposition, even if most power plants generated
alternating current. Direct current transit was the
better mousetrap of its day, better enough that it
rapidly replaced cable cars, a technology only two
decades old. In the early years a large alternating
current motor had to turn a direct current generator,
but practical rectifiers were developed later on,
one-way valves, of sorts, for electricity. Electronic
controls of recent decades allow much wider use of
alternating current motors.
Any rotating motor, of course, has to power the
vehicle through wheels and usually gears of some sort.
The wheels need traction with the road or rail and
complex suspension and braking systems. The mechanical
parts need oiling that picks up dust and creates
sludge. Rail cars need heavy, complex assemblies
called "trucks" (here) or "bogies" (England) to
arrange the wheels, brakes and suspension system, and
motors too in electric vehicles. The motors are under
the car, close to the rail, exposed to dust and snow,
etc. Electric rail cars are about three times as
expensive as buses of the same passenger capacity.
As induction motors developed, simple pieces of metal
replaced expensive rotating wire coils, especially in
low power applications. This we see today in the
common clock or squirrel cage motors. Stationary coils
are still needed to induce currents in the simple
piece of metal, but, once induced, those swirling
"eddy" currents create their own opposing magnetic
fields and cause the simple piece of metal to rotate.
That simple piece of metal does not have to be
magnetic, such as iron or steel. Any good conductor
will do, such as copper or aluminum.
If the fluctuating magnetic fields of alternating
current can make a simple piece of metal go around and
around, they can also make simple pieces of metal go
in a straight line. Thus the linear induction motor,
which is commonly used in industry to move metals,
from powders to ingots, in a straight line without
intervening machinery or even sparking commutators.
Indeed, since different metals form different eddy
currents, linear induction motors can separate powders
of different metals.
Again, on the flip side, it dawned upon some
ingenious souls that maybe the linear induction motor
could move with its vehicle, pushing against a
stationary "reaction rail" with direct magnetic
propulsion. Reversing the motor would brake the
vehicle. Thus expensive, troublesome mechanical
propulsion and braking could be eliminated and it did
not make any difference how slippery it got outside.
No friction between wheel and road or rail is
necessary.
It also dawned upon some ingenious souls that the
linear induction motor exerted magnetic forces in two
directions. It exerted not only a force along the line
of travel, but about ten times as much force
perpendicular to the line of travel, if the "reaction
rail" were steel instead of copper or aluminum.
(Standing passengers can only accelerate about
one-tenth gravity anyway.)
In other words, the linear induction motor could
suspend the vehicle, while also propelling it. It is a
"levitation machine." All those expensive, troublesome
wheels and suspension systems could be eliminated too.
It was not until recent decades, again, that
electronic controls became sophisticated enough to
fully exploit these possibilities.
To suspend the vehicle, the linear induction motor
has to be under the reaction rail, in this case a
steel beam. It only exerts attractive force toward the
steel beam, not the repulsive forces in some proposed
"maglev" schemes. Not that this creates any problems,
but rather solves quite a few.
Take this one step further and put the car under the
motor. The steel beam thus has to be elevated over the
car, and while we are elevating it, we might as well
make it high enough to clear traffic. Thus, instead of
a noisy, bulky, light-blocking, complicated, expensive
railroad structure, we only need a simple, standard
steel beam supported by heavy duty light poles. It
blocks very little light, makes almost no noise, and
costs about one-tenth as much as standard elevated
structure. While a linear induction motor with its
sophisticated controls is rather an expensive piece of
equipment, still a car for such a system costs only
about as much as a bus of similar capacity, again,
about one-third as much as a rail car.
Alternating current can even eliminate sliding,
sparking electric contacts. The electrical pick-up
need only be a transformer, with a moving coil on the
car and stationary wires. Attached to the beam with
small brackets, it does not need a heavy, exposed,
notoriously dangerous third rail or the expensive,
complicated bracing that trolley wires do. Without
wheels and a bouncy, springy suspension system, the
two parts are close enough for efficient operation.
The small amount of heat generated will melt ice, and
water will not disrupt electrical contact. The power
wires are well removed from any possible passenger
contact in the first place and remain insulated in the
second. It would take a determined vandal with cutting
tools to get himself electrocuted by this system.
Edison's argument of safety is completely turned
around by alternating current transit.
In the 1860s James Clerk Maxwell wrote four famous
equations which still form the basis of electronics.
He reasoned that if changing magnetic fields induce
changing currents which in turn induce more changing
fields, then waves will be created that will propagate
with the speed of light. Maxwell's predictions were
confirmed by Hertz, for whom the frequencies of
changing currents or waves are named.
Alternating current still forms the basis of
electronics. Instead of simple cycles per second,
however, AM radio is based on kilohertz frequencies,
or thousands of cycles per second, FM and TV on
megahertz, or millions of cycles per second, and
microwaves on gigahertz, or billions of cycles per
second. Microwaves can be projected down a metal tube
called a waveguide, perhaps one with a slot for a
moving antenna. Thus control signals can be easily and
reliably sent and recieved.
In a moving vehicle with a bouncy mechanical
suspension such a system would not be practical due to
close clearances needed and conflicts with other
functions. On an elevated steel beam with a
magnetically suspended vehicle, it is not only quite
possible but practical. Thus the system can be easily
automated, much more so than one with wheeled
vehicles.
A century after alternating current won the battle
for major power systems, direct current still
dominates transit systems, even when they require
billions for rebuilding. It dominates transit systems
so completely that precious little mention is made of
alternating current's advantages. There is no George
Westinghouse with the funding to build a better
mousetrap. The federal capital funding that commonly
funds public transportation is generally the captive
of pork barrel politics. We joke today about the
patent clerk a century ago who quit because he thought
everything had been invented, but that is the attitude
today, in the transit bureaucracy and among the
traveling public both.
P.S. The current CTA president, Frank Kreusi, is a
great-grandson of John Kreusi, on of Edison's top
assistants. When shown a diagram of alternating
current transit at the 1998 CTA budget hearing and
reminded of the AC-DC war of a century ago, he said
his grandfather, Frank Kreusi, was instrumental in
setting up the AC network. He was not particularly
interested in AC transit, however.

A NEW EXPRESSION FOR AVOIDING THE THIRD RAIL- IN COURT
Touch the third rail of a rapid transit system, which
conducts six hundred volts or more to the subway or
elevated trains, and you are instantly dead.
In recent years "avoiding the third rail" has become
the expression for politicians’ ducking issues that
could easily result in political suicide. Political
candidates, in office or not, can and do duck issues
they do not care to address, as long as they answer to
the electorate.
In court, however, it is a different story. What if
courts avoided issues the way politicians do? What if
courts ignored precedents or even constitutional
questions?
In theory, at least, courts of law have nowhere the
sort of discretion that politicians do. What kind of
law would we have if courts ducked issues?
Going back to Blackstone, at least, they are bound by
precedents, by the doctrine of "stare decisis," so
that judges do not make new law every time a case is
decided. Going back to Marbury v. Madison (1803)
American courts are obligated to rule on
constitutional issues when necessary to decide a case,
or else there is no constitution. The whole idea of
due process is to prevent arbitrary action. Judicial
acts are immune from lawsuit so that judges can be
free to address controversial issues. If judges could
"avoid the third rail," would there be any rule of
law? Is there any rule of law when they do, at least
in my recent cases?
In 1995 I sued the University of Illinois over its
appropriation to wipe out Maxwell St., on grounds it
was passed at a legislative hearing without the
opposition being notified. Although I plainly cited
sections of the Illinois constitution, requiring
notification of legislative hearings and protecting
the right to petition for redress of grievances, the
state courts denied there was a constitutional issue.
My last motion in the state supreme court cited
Marbury and threatened a federal lawsuit if there were
no constitutional ruling.
In 1998 I filed a federal lawsuit under the Civil
Rights Acts of 1866 and 1871, for deprivation of my
right to sue and conspiracy to block the course of
justice in state court. The first is Reconstruction
legislation to eliminate the "badges and incidents" of
slavery (slaves were not allowed to sue, own property,
make contracts, etc.), the second the "Ku Klux Klan
Act" to restore civil order in the South, among other
things, to keep the state courts open.
The suit was thrown out on "Rooker Feldman doctrine"
that state court judgments cannot be appealed to a
federal trial court. Quite lost in the "doctrine,"
however, named after U.S. Supreme Court decisions, is
language in both distinguishing valid from invalid
decisions. Rooker v. Fidelity Trust (1923) described a
decision in which there was an exercise of
jurisdiction, a full and fair hearing, and a ruling
responsive to the issues. District of Columbia Court
of Appeals v. Feldman (1983) defined the judicial
process as application of law to fact. That none of
this happened in my state case was ignored completely.
Likewise, my strenuous objection that ignoring this
argument is beyond court authority, in legal language,
an hypothetical jurisdictional bar.
In 2000 I sued to stop federal funding of local
public transportation projects, on grounds the federal
government has no authority to fund local projects
under a 1935 U.S. Supreme Court decision, U.S. v.
Butler. Also, that existing systems were being rebuilt
without considering new technologies. Although I cited
the government's own motion describing a federal
program to fund local projects, the trial court ruled
the matter a "political question." On appeal, after I
filed a brief again citing the government's own
description, the government moved to summarily affirm
the trial court on technical grounds. Even though the
trial court order itself said that my record was
complete for appeal and that it did not have time to
address my issues, the 7th Circuit affirmed on grounds
it did not desire further briefing. My strenuous
objections about ignoring constitutional issues were
denied without explanation.
"Avoiding the third rail" in court deserves a new
expression, which the 7th Circuit also ignored. Part
of Chicago legal lore is the lawsuit against the
Chicago Transit Authority over a drunk who established
electrical contact with the third rail and died by
urinating on it. And that is exactly what the 7th
Circuit did to the Constitution.

duorail passenger future

To:	PeoriaandEastern@yahoogroups.com
From:	"william wendt" Add to Address Book Add Mobile Alert
Date:	Tue, 3 Oct 2006 17:20:21 -0700 (PDT)
Subject:	[PeoriaandEastern] Fwd: [steam_tech] duorail pasenger future?

Fond as my memories of the Peoria & Eastern are, actually those of pre-Amtrak passenger trains are just a tad fonder. I do not advocate restoring either because of fond memories, however, and for non-sentimental reasons I have come to opposite conclusions on each. (Just in case anyone thinks, or merely says, I am wading in nostalgia.)

This is an unpublished letter to a libertarian magazine, with a copy
of the equipment list from a 1967 GN timetable enclosed:

To the editor, Liberty:
Has Randal O'Toole the railfan emerged from his car culture closet?
("Can Trains Be Saved?" Liberty, April 2006) Not completely; let me indulge my "foamer" (rail industry term for trivia obsessed railfans) proclivities by pointing out the 1950s Empire Builder did not open all non-revenue space to all passengers; the full-length "Great Dome" was reserved for Pullman passengers. For more non-revenue space in Amtrak's double-deck Superliners, let's put glassed-in observation lounges in the "transition" cars (to single-deck level), allowing a view over the top of the train as on beloved but now almost by-gone Vista-Domes. Long-distance travel was marketed as entertainment as far back as the late 1940s California Zephyr of glorious memory.
Not so trivial is citing some unnamed government source alleging
negligible subsidies for air and highway travel, as if they were
creations of a near free market. Nor is asking the wrong question.
Can highways and airlines be saved? See what happens when the cheap oil runs out in James Howard Kunstler, The Long Emergency: Surviving the Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-First Century, Although it does not cite a single Austrian School source, it is surprisingly insightful on currency matters and concludes that suburban sprawl is the greatest misallocation of resources in human history, which will not go on much longer.
Nor is expecting freight railroads to handle passenger trains, as if
rising traffic and shrinking plant had not obviated the rail
overcapacity problem a decade ago. The December 1975 TRAINS said the traffic on the Richmond, Fredericksburg & Potomac could be handled on parallel I-95 without anyone noticing. In the November 2001 issue the same author said truck congestion on the Interstates was the chief source of complaints to the Virginia governor's office and the U.S. Secretary of Transportation wondered if coastwise shipping was the answer to rail and highway congestion.
Nor is expecting an antiquated technology, even of such blessed
memory, to meet future needs. The thumbnail area of contact between wheel and rail might be a hallmark of efficiency for hauling coal and grain. For passenger vehicles, however, it requires large, rigid masses in constant impact, concentrated stresses, complicated, expensive suspension and braking systems, and tank-like structures with million pound buff and draft capability for safety on the main line. For much higher speeds it requires entirely new, prohibitively expensive and disruptive rights-of-way.
There is little more to a linear induction motor, however, than the
grade school science experiment in which the kid wraps a wire around a nail and makes an electromagnet. Long used to move metals from powders to ingots directly, without intervening machinery, under a steel beam it can generate magnetic force both along the line of travel and about ten times as much perpendicular to it. Thus it can both propel and suspend a vehicle, to 1/10 g acceleration, before knocking standingpassengers off their feet. Not pure maglev just yet, the linear motor still needs caster (training?) wheels to maintain a 3/8" gap between motor and beam.
The overhead steel beam need only be supported by columns every eighty feet or so. Thus the structure does not need another swath through city or countryside. It need not disrupt near-by activity.

Thus it might go over the Interstates of the past half-century, much straighter and more direct than rail routes of a century ago.
Making as much noise as an elevator, the vehicle can go as fast as
passengers can handle. Swinging like a pendulum around curves, it
might get away with the 1/8 g allowed for elevators. It might even be a simple carriage for trucks and buses, making the system a sort of High-Speed High-Occupancy Lane. Thus truckers need on pick up and deliver, not take it over the road. Divide 150 or 200 mph into a travel distance and see if the result competes with air travel.
Linear induction motors might even launch satellites. Mechanical
Engineering, Feb. 2000.
Figure you have several rotary induction motors around the house in your blenders, fans, hot water pumps, old-fashioned clocks, etc.,
just in case the linear version still seems a bit exotic. Unlike
highly if sometimes subtly subsidized forms of transportation, they
should survive a transition to a truly free market.
William F. Wendt, Jr.

O'Toole had a previous article on everyone in New Orleans with a car getting out. They did publish my letter reminding him of Houston, Rita, and the 100 mile traffic jam, January 2006. I do have my complaints about libertarians who do not properly follow through on their own philosophy, in particular,descendi ng into socialistic car culture.

Simple, excellent introductions to the Austrian School of Economics
include Harry Brown, How You Can Profit From the Coming Devaluation, and Percy Greaves, Understanding the Dollar Crisis.

CMAP statement August 2006

CMAP STATEMENT Aug 2006
What is the public supposed to do with the vast array of
undigested material presented in the draft 2030 Regional
Transportation Plan Update, the proposed Transportation
Improvement Program, the draft Air Quality Conformity Analysis,
and the revised 2030 forecasts, but without any real cost-benefit
data?
Play an eeney-meeney- minee-moe game with transportation
projects? Grind some local axe? Hobby-horse some pet
technology?
What is the legislature supposed to do, swallow it whole?
The public is hard put to know what it thinks itself. The August 9
"meeting" was far from a real hearing where you get to hear
everybody and everybody gets to hear you. It was just a big
show'n'tell spread over several wall posters, several
documents, and several staffers. There were several
complaints, not just mine, that this is not a real hearing. Email is
not listed in meeting announcements, but why not a yahoo group
of sorts which lets everyone see everyone else's posting? Are
public comments just going into some bureaucratic memory
hole? Maybe there are legal grounds to compel some real
hearing procedure; maybe there is some federal administrative
requirement that might decertify the "planning" process.
How is an Illinois taxpayer, concerned with economic
investment of state funds in transportation, as opposed to the
usual pork barreling, bomber generaling, and civic ego tripping,
supposed to make any sense of all this? That alone would be a
full-time job. Figure many of these projects are local in nature
and should be funded locally, where the taxpayers have a
fighting chance of keeping track of things. Funding transit
projects in particular by land value capture would make them an
entirely different game, one that makes some real comparison of
costs and benefits.
How is a federal taxpayer supposed to do the same thing,
figuring what Uncle Sucker funds from Broken Bow to the Big
Apple? It will be astronomically far from the scrutiny any well-run
business makes of its expenditures. Figure this sort of failure to
prepare for the future is what caused the Soviet Union to
collapse, whether because of central planning or excessive
expenditures, and we are not that far behind. Federal funding of
local projects creates the incentive to run up a bill, especially
when the watchword now among transit agencies here is, don't
leave any federal dollars on the table. The
movingbeyondcongest ion website is a very slick promotion for
perpetuation of very expensive, very obsolete transportation
technologies.
With that in mind, I think there should be a moratorium on road
and rail capital projects, except either the Gray Line proposal to
put the electric commuter trains on a combined fare with CTA or
generally putting commuter trains and CTA on a common fare,
until;
1) both the public and transportation planners are familiar with
an ever increasing number of books on both oil and public
money running out. There is simply no time horizon running to
2030. In view of looming uncertainties it would be best to curtail
projects without a very short, very definite, non-pork barrel
pay-back. The resources are needed elsewhere now and will be
more so in the near future.
2) there is some real time, hands on experience with at least
one technology that can do much more for much less than third
rail rapid transit and commuter rail. This is a monorail
technology that uses a linear induction motor to both propel and
suspend the vehicle under a standard steel beam. Thus the
vehicle costs about the same as a bus of similar capacity or a
half or third as much as a comparable vehicle and the structure
about one-tenth as much as a elevated structure. The footprint
being only columns eighty feet apart, it can go over existing
rights-of-way without disrupting anything. A vehicle that an
ordinary bus can drive on and off would make it an overhead
high speed, high occupancy lane. With computer matched
riders, it could provide thirty mile, one seat, one hour rides, bus
stop to bus stop. A heavy duty version could move semi-trailers
with similar felicity. Transit culture most unfortunately does not
have any such term as "totaled." Figure CTA has been saying for
some years that it will cost $5 billion to get the system in good
shape. Figure, too, that one-tenth of that will buy a whole new
bus system. So, then, $4.5 billion for rapid transit? What does
car culture do when the repair shop says it will take $45,000 to fix
the old buggy? For that kind of moola the Mercedes or Lexus
dealer is more than happy to talk to you. Will such a monorail
actually work? Who knows, although it has been used in
amusement park rides for four decades. Who cares, at least
until the moola runs out?
3) there is some serious study of a rail freight by-pass strategy
of Chicago. Some 9,000 cars move through the Chicago area
daily, neither originating nor terminating here, a factor not
recognized in the CREATE plan.The case for restoring the Peoria
&Eastern, 210 direct miles Peoria to Indianapolis, as opposed to
350 via Chicago, is not merely a by-pass of Chicago congestion
but also a substantial short-cut for traffic to and from the
southeast. A thorough Chicago by-pass strategy would have to
consider the TP&W, the Kankakee Belt, and others, but those
would be largely for traffic to and from the northeast and with a
lesser if any short-cut. Actually it might be worth some mileage to
avoid Chicago congestion. As we move the fork in the road north
and west of Peoria, the mileage advantage decreases. Since
Galesburg is it for both ATSF and CBQ mainlines, the
Galesburg-Indianapo lis mileage is 260 via Peoria and 360 via
Chicago. The UP might route Sterling-Peoria, 83 miles or so, but
Sterling-Chicago is only 120 miles. Thus Sterling-Indianapol is is
295 miles via Peoria, 300 via Chicago, a wash mileage wise, but
still avoiding Chicago. In any event, the costs of restoring
downstate lines should be a small fraction of the CREATE
project.
When I got home that evening of Aug. 9 there was a TV report on
the Chicago Transit Authority needing some $8 billion capital
investment over the next five years, one little slice of reality that
somehow escaped me that afternoon. $7.5 billion for the once
great third rail? A billion here, a billion there, however, as some
downstate politician famously said some years ago. So let's not
too surprised if many of these projects are exercises in
spending federal money.
U.S. v. Butler, 297 U.S. 1, 64-68, held that an expanded reading
of the general welfare clause would authorize federal funding of
national projects but not local projects.
The only argument against the Gray Line project is that it does
run into some Rube Goldberg and putting the diesel lines too on
a common fare with CTA would not take that much more. In any
event, a single fare for CTA and commuter train riders would
make the system incomparably more useful and allow cuts of
CTA service, especially on the electric lines.
William F. Wendt, Jr.

metra budget 2006

METRA BUDGET STATEMENT November 2006
Just to show how reasonable I am, I will not be
complaining any more about the Metra security in front
of the Canal St. control center when the market is
open. That is, once I get a reason. After the regular
board meeting last month, Metra’s security chief and
his assistant explained to me that the building needed
24 hr. access, that there was no special threat from
the market, and that they worked with the market.
Someone could have explained this to me years ago,
but, as much as I am around Metra, I still had to find
the right person.
I still have yet to find the right person with my
larger question, about rebuilding the present system
in kind, without exploring any other technology. Until
then, I am opposing the big drive for more funding and
pushing a moratorium on transportation investment,
with these exceptions:
1. Mike Payne’s Gray Line proposal to allow electric
lines riders to use CTA on the same fare, unless full
fare integration is not much more difficult. At the
special Metra board meeting last month director Hill
said unity among the agencies was important. From a
rider’s standpoint, two fares for one ride is not
unity.
2. Metra might reroute the Southwest Service over the
Grand Trunk Western to a ramp down to old Panhandle
trackage near Western, then to the old GM&O, instead
of bleating for very expensive overpasses along 75th.
If pillars for the CTA southwest line preclude this,
then use a line further north. This would not
eliminate all freight interference, but the separated
crossing over the Western Ave lines would cut out a
lot. It would also allow a station at 63rd St. and
connection with the CTA line.
3. A rerouting along the Belt past Midway might also
be considered. This is an important destination in
itself and might even run through Union Station to
O’Hare. This would cost considerably less than the CTA
airport express, not only in monetary terms, but in
credibility about transit investment needs.
Metra might also use its apparent considerable
influence in the CREATE project to route much through
freight traffic over more direct, less congested
downstate lines and keep it out of Chicago altogether.
Maybe I just have not run into the right person on
that one too. So far I have only gotten "business as
usual" responses, or that there just would not be
enough business, that almost in the same breath as
statements of freight traffic exceeding predictions.
Transit culture has yet to catch up with car culture
in one important respect. When the repair shop says it
will cost $50,000 to fix the old jalopy, car culture
figures the Mercedes and Lexus dealers will be quite
happy to talk. Transit culture takes the Jerry Rubin
approach, however, just do it. Not that it always did.
Indeed, third rail rapid transit and push-pull
commuter trains were the transit Mercedes or Lexus of
their day, if a century or half a century ago. That
was under private cost/benefit comparison, something
lost under something-for- nothing state and federal
funding of transit projects. But there was the
complaint at that special board meeting about Metra
not having its own financial resources. If transit
were funded by land value capture instead, there would
be something akin to private cost/benefit comparison,
instead of pork barrel boondoggling.
Then Metra would plan a transition to new technology.
I would suggest adding cars and stations to a
heavy-duty monorail connecting the intermodal yards
and truck terminals along the Heritage Corridor, with
a detour to Clearing Yard and Midway that would be
awfully awkward with duorail. With that kind of
experience under the system’s belt, conversion of
heavy freight traffic lines might be a priority.
The Star Line will be swamped, if it works. Where is
its room for expansion? The monorail could be an
overhead high speed, high occupancy lane for express
buses, however, offering a far more effective and
flexible service.
William F. Wendt, Jr.