Category Archives: News commentary

Some people criticized me last week for assuming that all the electricity needed for rail transit came from coal. This was a valid criticism, though less so than you might think. The last major hydroelectric dam in the Northwest was built in the early 1970s, but the first light-rail lines were built after 1980. So none of the incremental energy needed to power light rail came from hydroelectric sources. Wind power, maybe, but not hydro.

I am working on a revised version of my report on greenhouse gases and rail transit. To be fair, I will include both the assumption that electric power comes from coal and that it comes from a mix of sources. I’ll also try to show why, in most states at least, coal will be the source of power for any new electric rail lines. And I’ll compare transit with SUVs as well as conventional cars. I don’t expect these changes will greatly improve the outcome for rail transit, but we will see.

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Congress appropriated money to replace the I-35W bridge that collapsed in Minnesota, but not to increase capacity or add light rail to the bridge. The Minnesota Department of Transportation estimates that each day the replacement is delayed costs Minnesota travelers more than $400,000.

Yet Minneapolis Mayor Rybak is willing to delay the reconstruction by a few months, or a few years, so they can put a light-rail line on the new bridge.

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I am usually a poor political prognosticator. But on Monday, I wrote, “I foresee a movement to raise taxes to replace thousands of bridges.”

Today, the Associated Press reports that Alaska Representative Don Young wants to raise gas taxes to replace the hundreds of bridges that are in poor condition. “May the sky not fall on me,” he says.

Artist’s rendering of the Gravina Bridge, aka the Bridge to Nowhere, which is to connect Gravina Island (population 50 plus an airport) with Ketchican, Alaska. The island is now well served by frequent ferry service.

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It is too soon to know what caused the I-35 bridge in Minneapolis to collapse suddenly last night (4.9mb video). But at least one report indicated that a 2006 inspection of the forty-year-old bridge found “fatigue cracks and bending of girders that lift the approaching span.”

Another report says that federal inspectors rated the bridge “structurally deficient” in 2005, although it added that 80,000 bridges in the U.S. have earned that mediocre rating. However, as long ago as 2001, the state found that the bridge “exhibited several fatigue problems, primarily due to unanticipated out-of-plane distortion of the girders. Concern about fatigue cracking in the deck truss is heightened by a lack of redundancy in the main truss system.”

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Cost overruns on a light-rail system in Charlotte, NC, have proven so great that voters have collected enough signatures to put a measure on this November’s ballot to repeal the half-cent sales tax that supports rail. To support the program, the University of North Carolina – Charlotte (UNCC) published a supposedly independent study claiming to find that light-rail was a good investment.

The study only added to the project’s embarrassment, however. First, critics claimed that some of the data in the study were obtained from biased sources, and the authors of the study admitted that the data came from a pro-light-rail web site. Based on this, the UNCC study concluded that there were no cost overruns, which the authors later agreed was wrong.

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