Amtrak’s Gold-Plated Trains

Amtrak’s plan to use most of the $2.45 billion “loan” it received from the Department of Transportation to buy new high-speed trains for the Northeast Corridor has come under fire from, of all people, a high-speed rail advocate named Alon Levy. The new trains will cost about $9 million per car, which Levy points out is nearly twice as much as France is paying for Eurostar train cars. The reason for the high cost is that the new trains can go more than 200 mph and tilt on curves more than any previous trains.

Levy is a transportation writer who takes a highly mathematical approach to reviewing proposals and who says he is for “good transit” but against boondoggles. He says the problem with the expensive new trains is that Amtrak tracks can’t support trains that are as fast as they can go, and in order to support such fast trains, they would have to reduce curvature so much that they wouldn’t need to tilt as much as the new trains. Levy argues that Amtrak should have spent less on the trains and more on the infrastructure needed to boost speeds. As another high-speed rail advocate put it, “They need to speed up the slow bits first, which isn’t something you do by blowing money on trains.”

Amtrak hopes that Democrats will sweep Congress this November and give it the $290 billion it wants to rebuild the Northeast Corridor to higher speeds. But, as Levy points out in other articles, Amtrak’s Northeast Corridor plans are far more expensive than they need to be.
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DC Metro’s Accelerating Decline

Washington Metro Rail ridership in the second quarter of 2016 (the fourth quarter of Metro’s fiscal year) declined a whopping 11 percent. The drop in ridership started before major service disruptions in order to do track maintenance began in June: ridership in May, for example, was 9 percent lower on weekdays and 20 percent lower on weekends than in 2015.

Bus ridership for the quarter was 6 percent lower than in 2015. For all of F.Y. 2016, rail ridership was 7 percent lower and bus ridership 4 percent lower than in F.Y. 2015.

Metro officials offered several explanations for the decline, including lower gas prices, loss of public confidence in the system’s reliability and safety, and the early blooming of cherry blossoms that normally attracts many tourists. But ridership has declined in every year since 2012, suggesting that at least some of the decline is irreversible.

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