Panama City is opening a new rail transit line this month, but the Antiplanner’s review of the project found a significant flaw: though it cost as much to build as a heavy-rail line, it’s capacity to carry people is less than a light-rail line. The city says it can move about 15,000 people an hour, which is not very many considering that the city estimates nearly 100,000 people enter the city during a one-hour period on weekday mornings. But the 15,000 is at crush capacity, and I estimate a more realistic number is about half that.
As with the Mumbai monorail, I have to ask: if you are going to the expense of building a heavy-rail line, why are you providing the capacity of a light-rail line or less? One answer is the city expects the low-capacity trains to be full, thus giving the impression that the project is a great success.
I’ve never been to Panama City, and early responses to my review suggest that the bus-rapid transit alternative I propose wouldn’t work on Panama City streets. But I suspect it would cost a lot less to modify a few of the streets to allow more buses that could move a lot more people than the rail line will be able to handle.
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These high-cost, low-capacity rail lines are increasingly common in developing countries (not to mention Honolulu, Seattle, and a few other American cities). We abbreviate light rail “LR” and heavy rail “HR.” Should high-cost, low-capacity rail be abbreviated HLR, or simply $R?
Clearly the Panama City rail should apply to Obama for massive subsidies, as they would assume it is Panama City, Florida, and fast-track the subsidies to help win Florida in the next election.
How consolidated is the political machine that advocated for this rail? Scott Walker was Governor when he rejected the billions of dollars for high-speed rail. We use the word bipartisan politics often to describe “when both sides agree”. Of course we should be weary of that. Usually when politicians agree……they agree they should spend your money. Consolidated politics………..
Second, I’d like to point out one thing the Antiplanner mentions most often that new transit is run off electricity mostly met by coal. Which is true…….however running more transit or electric cars is not gonna necessarily increase coal consumption, namely because coal fired power plants are base load facilities, that run 24 hours a day and slight increases or decreases in power demand do little to change the output of these plants. Most of new generation capacity is met with natural gas power. And also depending on the electric source. California gets 45% of it’s power from hydroelectric and nuclear power so the carbon emissions of any transit system is nil. Oregon 79%. Just because a lot of transit systems run on electricity from coal, does not mean all transit systems run on electricity from coal.
Or we can build LFTR (Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactor) It can’t suffer meltdown, the fuel is already melted as liquid salt, it doesn’t operate at high pressure. It doesn’t need water for coolant so you don’t have to build it near the sea, don’t have to worry about the fear of steam explosions. Thorium has a million times the energy density of a carbon-hydrogen bond and a carbon-hydrogren bond has more energy density than wind and solar energy. If you could put million to one energy odds, a 20 megawatt LFTR the size of a town house, a gigawatt of power on less than a 100 acres of land and do so on existing developed site. Main reason they’ve yet to build it isn’t that big a stretch. They {nuclear industry} has no incentive to. They make most of their money on fuel supply contracts, they’re business model is locking down utilities on the basis of their fuel. It takes enormous effort and capital to fabricate solid fuel uranium and the fabrication of the fuel rods only permits them in a given reactor. So a GE reactors only use GE fuel, Westinghouse, Toshiba and so forth. And they’re not really building reactors anymore, 30 years ago they were but now they’re in the business of selling fuel. Someone comes along and says they have a new reactor design, they may sound impressed. Tell them that it doesn’t require fuel fabrication, they kick your ass out the door; you’ve have just upended their business model. And you can get the fuel anywhere. Thorium is not rare, it’s as abundant as lead in the Earth’s crust, there’s a thousand places in the US alone where you can dig it up. Just remember last year, human energy habits consumed 4 billion tons of coal, 4 trillion cubic feet of natural gas and 65,000 tons of uranium. 20,000 tons of thorium could replace all of that and theirs 6 parts per million of thorium in the Earth’s crust………that’s 120 billion tons. We will never run out of this stuff.
“Scott Walker was Governor when he rejected the billions of dollars for high-speed rail. ”
Just as a point of clarification, Scott Walker did not reject any high-speed rail ( HSR ) projects. That’s not to say he wouldn’t, but not were presented that he did. What he and the WI legislature did was back out of a project that was labeled HSR but only met the FRA’s very loose standards for it.
Walker and others felt the Madison – Milwaukee extension of the Hiawatha service was not a good investment given it’s very high costs and low ridership. They did favor and have lobbied for funding to beef up the existing portion of Amtrak’s Hiawatha which serves the short Milwaukee – Chicago corridor.
“running more transit or electric cars is not gonna necessarily increase coal consumption, namely because coal fired power plants are base load facilities, that run 24 hours a day and slight increases or decreases in power demand do little to change the output of these plants. Most of new generation capacity is met with natural gas power. And also depending on the electric source. California gets 45% of it’s power from hydroelectric and nuclear power so the carbon emissions of any transit system is nil. Oregon 79%. Just because a lot of transit systems run on electricity from coal, does not mean all transit systems run on electricity from coal.”
First of all, coal and natural gas are both hydrocarbon based, so the logic that gas-fired generators emit less carbon from burning is not necessarily true. There are lots of old gas-fired generators out there that don’t do any better than say … a new liquefied coal power plant, but the government permits new gas plants but no new coal plants are being approved and coal plants are being shut faster than the power is being replaced with very expensive “renewable” wind and solar. Funny thing how environmentalists are OK with monstrous wind generators that only produce 15-20% of time that kill birds and bats and endanger humans but dirty coal with its life-giving CO2 emissions is an endangerment. Immense solar arrays are disrupting bird migration in the process of frying birds which cannot be good long term (we can do about anything for environmentalism projects but don’t you dare redirect water for humans and farming in California’s Central Valley. Some of us think that man is incapable of endangering the earth and that empirical evidence is lacking to relate CO2 levels to actual atmospheric temperatures. We also think that God put hydrocarbons on earth to keep us warm. Just think of all the money the world would save if we could get off this misdirected “carbon is bad” shtick. By mass, the human body is 65% oxygen, 10% hydrogen and 18% carbon and CO2 is needed to grow that which we eat.
Correction. Rick Scott. It was Florida Governor, Rick Scott that rejected the HSR funds….
Tennessee senate just voted to study building a Monorail in Nashville.
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