Tag: hammond

Commuter Parking on the Rails

  • The South Shore Commuter Rail Line runs between South Bend, Indiana and Chicago. The line's reaching its 100th birthday, and as it does, its ridership is near a 50-year high. It serves many sizable towns, such as Hammond and Gary, but commuters from smaller towns, suburbs and even rural areas drive to, and sometimes cram, the rail lines' stations. (Photo by Shawn Allee)

More and more people who live in
suburbs have been climbing onto commuter
trains over the past few years. They’ve
got every reason to: they’re fighting high
gas prices, traffic congestion, or even big
road construction projects. But oddly enough,
cars remain a problem even when people choose
commuter rail. Shawn Allee found
that out first hand when he checked out one
system:

Transcript

More and more people who live in
suburbs have been climbing onto commuter
trains over the past few years. They’ve
got every reason to: they’re fighting high
gas prices, traffic congestion, or even big
road construction projects. But oddly enough,
cars remain a problem even when people choose
commuter rail. Shawn Allee found
that out first hand when he checked out one
system:

I’ve just got into a parking lot in a commuter rail station in Northwest
Indiana. This rail line runs from towns like Gary and Hammond Indiana to
Chicago, where there are a lot of jobs.

Anyway, officials with the rail line tell me parking happens to be one of the
biggest complaints. I’m here to check it out, and I gotta tell you I’ve been
driving past hundreds of parked cars, and I haven’t been able to see an
open spot yet.

Okay, finally found one.

(sound of door slamming)

Shawn Allee: “Getting a parking spot in this station took a lot longer than I
expected. This commuter here, Celia Ramirez, says she has the same
problem. What’s it usually like?”

Celia Ramirez: “It’s a dread, because I don’t know where to park.
Sometimes I park where I’m not supposed to park, on the residential
streets.”

Allee: “And then you’re taking your chances.”

Ramirez: “Yes, of getting a ticket.”

Allee: “In fact there are signs all around us right now that pretty much
warn you not to do that.”

Ramirez: “And I break that rule.”

Well, you can guess spillover parking around the rail station in Hammond ticks off
the neighbors.

To make matters worse, a lot of the commuters, they don’t even in live in Hammond.
They’re from towns or suburbs even farther out.

In fact, the local government and The Northern Indiana Commuter Transportation
District don’t always agree on how to solve the problem.

John Parsons is the rail line’s marketing director.

John Parsons: “We have over 700 spaces in Hammond. Unfortunately, we
need more. But the residents in the area are reluctant to expand parking.”

Shawn Allee: “How difficult is it to convince towns to do that, especially if
they feel that they’re creating parking for people outside of their area?”

Parsons: “It’s a difficult problem. For one thing, we’re a tax-exempt
organization and what we’re doing is acquiring residential property that
currently pays taxes and that property’s no longer on the tax rolls.”

Now, this particular rail line had a growth spurt a few years ago. It’s lightened up,
but parking’s still an issue.

So, just imagine pressure other rail lines have, especially ones that saw double-digit
growth over the past year.

The situation’s familiar to transportation experts.

Joe Schwieterman teaches at DePaul University.

He says, when it comes to parking, suburban commuter rail is often behind the ball.

“The ridership is surging on our transit system, and parking spots, you
know, it’s a five a five-year process. If we start now, we have new spots you
know, in 2013. Clearly that’s not fast enough to tap into that new market.”

So, is there a way out of the parking – commuter rail conundrum?

Schwieterman says one idea is to add bus service that branches out from stations.

But not all towns can afford it, or they don’t have enough riders to justify buses.

So, Schwieterman says some commuter rail lines are stuck.

They advertise that they’re a cheap, convenient alternative to driving. And when gas
prices rise, people take that advice.

“It’s a bad idea to encourage floods of people to take public transit if you’re
not ready to accommodate them. You lose them for life, frankly, if it’s a bad
experience.”

Still, Schwieterman says you can look at the parking problem two ways.

Sure, you can shake your head because suburban stations’ parking lots fill up.

But, at least for now, those drivers aren’t clogging roads and spewing even more
pollution on their way to work.

For The Environment Report, I’m Shawn Allee.

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Cleaning Up Coal-Fired Power Plants

  • Tom Micheletti (right), and Excelsior Energy Vice President of Environmental Affairs, Bob Evans (left). They are locating where the proposed power plant will be built near the town of Taconite, Minnesota. (Photo by Bob Kelleher)

Acid rain, mercury pollution, and huge amounts of the heat-trapping gas carbon-dioxide are the down sides of burning coal in electric power plants. And yet, some energy experts are saying America should be using more coal. They say new coal technology can produce electricity with few of the pollution problems of traditional coal power plants. Bob Kelleher reports:

Transcript

Acid rain, mercury pollution, and huge amounts of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide are the down sides of burning coal in electric power plants. And yet, some energy experts are saying America should be using more coal. They say new coal technology can produce electricity with few of the pollution problems of traditional coal power plants. Bob Kelleher reports:


Coal has a well deserved bad reputation. Typical coal burning power plants release mercury, sulfur, nitrogen oxides, and lots of carbon dioxide. Those releases mean toxins in the air, soot, acid rain, and many believe global warming. But Tom Micheletti says there’s a way to use coal with very little pollution.


Using heat, steam, pressure, and oxygen, coal can be broken down to a relatively clean gas, and a handful of other chemical products. The gas is burned, to turn generators and produce electricity. The technology is called Integrated Gasification Combined Cycle. Micheletti says, the technology isn’t new, but applying it this way is.


“All we’re doing is marrying the gasification technology, with a technology that’s been well established, the combined cycle gas technology – power plant technology. And all we’re doing is simply putting those two technologies together.”


Micheletti is Co-President of Excelsior Energy, a company formed to build the nation’s first large scale coal gasification electric power plant in northeast Minnesota. At 600 megawatts, it would dwarf demonstration plants now online in Indiana and Florida.


Some experts say coal gasification is not only promising, it’s more practical than nuclear power, natural gas, solar or wind. Daniel Schrag is a climatologist and head of the Harvard University Center for the Environment.


“We have a lot of coal in the US. We’re very fortunate that way. The problem is that coal produces more carbon dioxide per unit energy than any other fossil fuel. And so, when we burn coal and make electricity, it’s really bad for the climate system.”


Schrag says there’s more carbon dioxide around us now than humans have ever experienced. Carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas. Most scientists believe it blankets the earth, forcing temperatures higher.


Schrag says, when used to generate electricity, coal gasification has big advantages over conventional power plants, because it can capture CO2.


“You get more energy for the amount of coal you put in, and that’s good for carbon emissions. The other thing is that it seems to be cheaper in an IGCC plant, or a gasification plant, to capture the carbon dioxide after one extracts the energy from the coal, and then makes it much easier to capture it and inject it into a geological reservoir.”


The key, Schrag says, is a process called sequestration. You capture, and then sequester it, or lock that carbon dioxide away, where it won’t escape into the atmosphere. It’s already being done.


This is the Dakota Gasification Company, just outside Beulah, North Dakota. Here they turn coal into a burnable gas and almost a dozen other products. They also produce plenty of carbon dioxide, but the CO2 is not vented into the air; it’s trapped and compressed. That’s the noise.


The CO2 is piped more than 200 miles into Canada where it’s pumped into oil wells, forcing the last oil out and leaving the CO2 underground. Near oceans it can be pumped under deep ocean sediments, where it stays put.


And that’s all very good, but others say even good power plants might be a bad idea.


Ross Hammond is with the Minnesota based organization Fresh Energy. Hammond says gasification’s proponents are overlooking conservation and the opportunities for clean energy.


“When we’ve exhausted all the clean options including biomass and photovoltaics, and wind and the other options, then we need to look at coal.”


But Harvard’s Daniel Schrag says it’s not as simple as pushing money toward pollution free energy.


“And the answer is complicated. The answer is perhaps not. It may be that coal is so cheap that even the extra cost of capturing the carbon and storing it underground may still make it cheaper than the alternatives, than wind and solar.”


Schrag says we’ll need it all – nuclear, hydro, wind and biomass. But to satisfy the nation’s hunger for energy, he says we’ll need coal – best used in coal gasification.


For the Environment Report I’m Bob Kelleher.

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