Key Stakeholder: The Baby Boom

I'm scraping the bottom of the barrel, folks. Talk of infrastructure is dormant at the moment, with the media coverage focusing on QEII's iPod. It's looking more like the Sudeikas-Armisen Act (a.k.a. Obama's second infrastructure package, the one with High-Speed Rail, a mass transit bailout and more funding for NEW road/bridge projects) is not going to even brought up due to a lack of political capital stemming from the worries of men like Evan Bayh. The transit news is more regional right now--for example, the Los Angeles County MTA has decided a route for the Expo Line--with a view towards 2030, when I'll be 41. Due to those limitations, I am going to "freebase" on a key stakeholder in the infrastructure debate--the Baby Boom. The political culture and the aging of the Baby Boom affects many disparate policies in this country, infrastructure chief among them. The Baby Boom grew up in the 1950s and 60s, at a time when cities were ripping up their streetcar lines and not replacing them with efficient busings. Couple that with the White Flight occuring in the 1960s, and you get a disdain for mass transit (The man pictured at right has riden mass transit in his hometown on a handful of times). It's unlikely that we will get substantially better mass transit in cities like Los Angeles and Atlanta until the Baby Boom changes its attitude about riding it...perhaps coming at a time when a large percentage of dah boom is unable to drive from cataracts/fat around the eyes.

Thank you to Jeremiah Axelrod and Mike Shedlock

The 21st Century Limited

A week or so ago, Pennsylvania governor Ed Rendall pitched the idea of a national high-speed rail network to be funded in the next Obama stimulus package (This was the subject of last week's blogpost). So I decided to research it, with an eye toward finding an interesting visual. I stumbled on the blog/advocacy site transportpolitic.com, which has an article that advocates for a multibillion-dollar (just like the Interstate Highway Act 53 years ago) and THIS is what I found, besides the statistic that China is currently undertaking new rail construction that's as big as our current Amtrak.

The above visual displays the routes approved by the government in the stimulus package (with Amtrak in black), and the below visual displays the ones favored by the transport politic, with additional Amtrak lines thrown in . I would like to point out that both lines are somewhat politically correct, and i would add that service between Sacramento and San Francisco or the Dallas-San Antonio-Houston triangle or a direct route from the Midwest's two biggest cities (none completely on transitpolitic's list) are vastly more important than an Amtrak line across South Dakota. Also, I think that a major investment needs to be having 4 tracks in most Amtrak corridors, and 2-3 tracks everywhere else. Cornelius Vanderbilt did this in the New York-Albany corridor over 100 years ago when the population of the US wasn't a quarter of what it is now. This would help prevent the Coast Starlight waiting forever at sidings and me getting into my grandma's in Portland 9 hours late (Of course, so would giving right-of-way to the passenger trains, which I also favor).

The Transport Politic divided the network into corridors, then scored them through some algorythm, which I view as somewhat suspect--among other things, it gives the Detriot-Toledo Corridor a higher score than any corridor originating from Los Angeles, and refuses to acknowledge that several cities a few hundred miles apart have traditional ties, even without having much between them. In my opinion, here are the most important corridors, in order:

1. Boston-New-York-Philadelphia-Washington
2. San Diego-Los Angeles-San Francisco.
3. Chicago-Detroit
4. Miami-Tampa-Orlando
5. San Francisco-Sacramento
6. Los Angeles-Las Vegas
   

This is the map according to THEIR priorities. Note the difference between them and me.

Who would be helped most by this? In my opinion, it would be people living in high-density gentrifying areas. You probably already knew that Manhattan has already gentrified, and portions of Los Angeles (Silverlake and the Arts District) are doing it as well. People who live in many city centers often live an hour or more away from the international airport (for example, residents of Washington, Houston, or Denver) and being able to connect with a city less than 500 miles away by HSR running at ~200 mph would be more efficient than going to an airport, provided there is not as much of a security hassle for HSL.

Who would be hurt? exurbanites...since, with the exception of the politically-correct California High Speed Rail Network, most connections have a sole stop in the urban center, one would have to travel a ways into town. This is the flip side of the airport argument. And that's today's blogpost

A Dose of Promethean Policy, Part 2, or, California-Nevada Interstate Maglev

It's been a relatively slow week for infrastructure news...it pretty much peetered out after Obama's budget. So I'm going to dust off something that's been in the news for the past few weeks--the California-Nevada Interstate Maglev. Last week, in his reply to the State of the Union, Gov. Parcell, er, Jindal, attacked the proposed project as wasteful pork. The project apparently is the chief whipping boy (along with the NEA) of the GOP: A Los Angeles Times article from a while back notes Boehner's assault on high-speed rail. Republicans have chastisted Senator Harry Reid of Searchlight, Nevada (an hour's drive from Vegas or the California line) for slipping the funding in as pork. Republicans forgot that the $8 billion has not been appropriated for any specific project as of yet. The maglev project would need $12-14 billion to be fully built, less than half of the projected price tag of the California High-Speed Rail line from San Francisco to Los Angeles.

Here's some more facts and analysis about the high-speed rail project. The maglev would use German techology to travel over dedicated tracks (no freight interference) at up to 300 miles an hour. The train would stop in Las Vegas, at the Ivanpah Valley Airport in Primm, NV; in Barstow, Ontario, and Anaheim in CA, in addition to possible stops at in Victorville, CA, and at LA's Union Station. Now, you've probably heard of most of those, except for Primm--right now an unicorporated community of about 500. Why would they , apart from connections to an airport that won't be built for nearly a decade. I'll tell you why--TO SPUR GROWTH AND DEVELOPMENT.

Now, I'm not always in favor of development, especially when historic preservation is an issue, but sensible devolpment (meaning built-to-last and environmentally-friendly) is what we need to get us out of this recession. This project would create much-needed jobs in two of the worse-off of these United States--It was recently reported that California's unemployment is at 10.1%, and Nevada continues to have one of the highest foreclosure rates in the nation. And infrastructure investmest spurs that kind of the devolpment--look at what's been done on Del Mar Blvd and the Paseo Colorado in Pasadena thanks to the Gold Line, and look at what's happening in the Arts District lofts by the Gold Line extension. The same thing could happen in Primm, in Anaheim, or even in Barstow.

Oh, and one more thing:

RIP LA Times California section

Analyzing Obama's State of the Union and Budget

Two important events took place this week: President Obama proposed his budget and he delivered his first message to Congress. A Los Angeles Times article noted that Obama's budget "included broad goals and few line items", and the same could pretty much be said for his speech. The three issues he focused on were energy, health care and education. On the face of it, none of those issues are infrastructure. In fact, there was less about infrastructure in Obama's speech than in the speech of Louisiana governor Kenneth Parcell, er, Bobby Jindal. Jindal criticized Obama and Congress' massive appropriation for infrastructure, highlighting the Anaheim-to-Las Vegas high speed rail project (More on that in a future post). Infrastructure made its main entrance in Obama's speech subtly in the energy and education, where Obama highlighted his green energy plans and singled out a crumbling school in Dillon, SC.

Full Text of Obama's Address to Congress

Looking at Obama's budget, the first thing Republicans, including David Brooks, cry foul about is that its percentage of GDP inches us closer to Europe. (To that, I counter that we NEED massive gov't spending in ALL AREAS. This morning's LA Times had an interesting schematic showing the differences in funding between Obama's budget and the last Bush budget. Unfortunately, I couldn't find it on the 'Net. I will note, however, the most important difference to funding--an increase in the outlay to the Department of Transportation by more than $60B, with much of that increase coming in the stimulus package.

This Week on the Blog Front

This blog is a compilation of several interesting articles I read in the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times, and the Huffington Post.

One article in today's Los Angeles Times compares the public works projects built by the WPA and other FDR New Deal agencies to Obama's infrastructure projects, and notes that the projects built THIS:

Grand Coulee Dam in WA

and THIS:

La Guardia Airport, Triborough Bridge

and even THIS:

Whittier High School Auditorium

It goes on to note that Obama's plan creates very few of these monumental projects, with the possible exception of high-speed rail. I would note that high-speed rail is a very important exception (more on the high-speed rail debate later), would disagree with the Times that some of our infrastructure projects are not , and would hope that sooner or later, Obama builds the new infrastructure

Either way, Obama's stimulus/infrastructure package was the main subject of the Governors' Meeting over the weekend, according to a recent New York Times article. Most governors, Democratic and Republican, support Obama on the stimulus package, the most noteworthy Republican crossing lines being our own Arnold Schwarzenegger, who had to take the stimulus money just to balance the budget (For that, the California "I'm-Too-Conservative to-Care-About-the-Public-Good" Republican Party is giving him a vote of no confidence).

The Republican governors who oppose the stimulus package the most, and have hinted they might refuse some or all of the money include Mark Sanford, Bobby Jindal, and Sarah Palin (Where have I heard those names before? Oh, yeah...they're all running for Prez in 2012). According to the Huffington Post, Obama is now taking shots at state governments who oppose him. You can watch the video at the Huffington Post link.

And finally, a recent ABC News poll analyzed Obama's first month. Here are some of their key findings:

*People think Obama was trying to compromise with Republicans by a
3:1 margin, but think that Republicans weren't trying to compromise with Obama, 59-34

*Support for the stimulus plan is 64% overall, but only one in three among Republicans

*Obama holds a 68% approval rating, and an identical 68% of Americans say Obama has brought "Change to Washington"

*The % of Americans who think the country is on the right track has doubled since the election, but is only at 31%

*People think that the stimulus will help their local economy much more than the economy as a whole

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