Billions for Better Rail Service

  • High speed trains may be sprouting up across the country in light of the recent initiative. (Photo courtesy of Black Leon)

The U.S. government is spending billions of dollars to improve the nation’s railroads and passenger train service. But those billions will be just the beginning of the cost of updating rail service. Lester Graham reports:

Transcript

The U.S. government is spending billions of dollars to improve the nation’s railroads and passenger train service. But those billions will be just the beginning of the cost of updating rail service. Lester Graham reports:

New investments in higher-speed rail are making passenger rail supporters almost giddy. Eight billion dollars from the Recovery Act is seed money for new high-speed routes in California and Florida and improvements for existing routes in other regions.

At a recent National Press Club panel discussion, Amtrak’s Joseph McHugh said Amtrak is not getting any of that money… but it’ll improve the freight railroads on which Amtrak operates its trains.

McHugh: And that means higher speeds, reduced trip time, additional frequencies, improved facilities, and a higher level of reliability for our services all around the country.

Beyond that first eight-billion dollars, the Department of Transportation’s so-called TIGER grants mean a few billion dollars more for further upgrades railroads and depots that tie into commuter rail, light rail and other mass transit.

Supporters of rail are expecting big things from the investments.

But others see spending billions upon billions of dollars on passenger rail as wasted money. They don’t see the utopia of transportation in better, faster trains. Many online comments from readers of stories on higher-speed rail indicate they don’t want the government to subsidize rail projects. They see it as stealing from necessary highway and bridge improvements. Others are more political, saying the government is trying to imitate the high-speed rail of Europe when –they feel– Americans are more independent and prefer cars.

So the debate sometimes devolves into — car versus train. Or individuality versus socialism.

Susan Zielinksi heads up the Universtiy of Michigan’s SMART transit project. She says that’s the wrong way to view it.

Zielinski:I think we get ourselves stuck in the polarization and this isn’t about getting rid of cars.

She says better passenger rail and tying it in to better mass transit gives more people more choices. She notes not everyone has access to a reliable car.

Environmentalists add… the train is just more environmentally friendly. Howard Lerner is with the Environmental Law and Policy Center.

Lerner: On a per-passenger-mile basis, rail is about three times as efficient as travel by car in terms of fuel efficiency, six times as efficient as travel by air. So, there are pretty substantial pollution reduction benefits, both in terms of greenhouse gasses and other pollutants when it comes to traveling by rail.

But the investment of billions of dollars during the Obama administration is generally considered just the down payment on the cost of bringing U.S. passenger rail service into the 21st century. Just a couple of years ago the Bush administration tried to zero-out the Amtrak budget. A future president might do the same.

Susan Zielinksi at the University of Michigan believes the improvements in rail service we’ll see in just the next several years will prove this investment is worth it.

Zielinski: Congress is not going to be able to go backwards on this. This is going to usher in a whole new set of industry opportunities, of economic development in communities, of new opportunities for jobs.

But even people who like the idea of improved passenger rail service say if this doesn’t result in the trains arriving on time… doesn’t fix the problem of having no transportation once they arrive at the depot… doesn’t spiff up the drab Amtrak train cars… and keep train ticket prices reasonable… it’ll be hard not to keep piling into the car or cramming themselves into an airline seat.

For The Environment Report, I’m Lester Graham.

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Contrails and Warming

  • Researchers say preliminary results suggest contrails can warm the atmosphere - maybe above and beyond airplane's carbon emissions. (Photo courtesy of NOAA)

It’s the tail end of the holiday
air travel season, and, if you’re
flying, you might not be thinking
about your impact on climate
change. But Shawn Allee reports, some scientists are:

Transcript

It’s the tail end of the holiday
air travel season, and, if you’re
flying, you might not be thinking
about your impact on climate
change. But Shawn Allee reports, some scientists are:

Mark Jacobson studies atmospheric science at Stanford University.

He’s just finished research on airplane emissions, including contrails. Those’re the streaming vapor clouds you see coming out of high-flying airplanes.

Jacobson wants to see if contrails contribute to global warming.

“And we’re trying to find out what’s the relative contribution of aircraft to that warming.”

Jacobson says preliminary results suggest contrails can warm the atmosphere – maybe above and beyond airplane’s carbon emissions.

He says his upcoming paper will likely stir a lot of debate next year, since flying’s becoming more common and there hasn’t been much research on its impact yet.

For The Environment Report, I’m Shawn Allee.

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Teen Pedals Across Canada for Climate Change

  • 17 year-old Malkolm Boothroyd rode a bicycle for 3 months across Canada. Here he is giving a speech at the end of his trip on Parliament Hill. (Photo by Karen Kelly)

All over North America, people
are becoming more concerned
about the dangers posed by
climate change. Karen Kelly
spoke to a teenager who comes
from the far north of Canada,
one of the areas of the continent
that’s already feeling the effects:

Transcript

All over North America, people
are becoming more concerned
about the dangers posed by
climate change. Karen Kelly
spoke to a teenager who comes
from the far north of Canada,
one of the areas of the continent
that’s already feeling the effects:

Malkolm Boothroyd is 17. He lives in Whitehorse in the Yukon, a province at the northern tip of Canada.

It’s a wild mountainous place, with huge caribou herds, moose, bear, and foxes. It’s also a place where climate change is already evident.

The winters are shorter. The permafrost and sea ice are melting. And for young people like Boothroyd, it’s a source of worry.

“Climate change is impacting wildlife patterns, tundra ponds are vanishing. We are one of first places that will feel the severe impacts of climate change. Growing up in the Yukon, you’re maybe more aware of that.”

Boothroyd says already the native Inuit tribes are having a harder time living off the land. And he felt frustrated by what he sees as the Canadian government’s lack of action.

The government has not kept international commitments it made to reduce the gases that cause climate change. So he decided to head to the capital city of Ottawa to lodge his complaint.

Ottawa is 3,700 miles away from the Yukon.

(sound of gears)

Boothroyd hopped on his bicycle.

“I think there are days when you question your sanity, when you’re sitting out in the rain with black flies all around your head and with a soaking wet tent and wondering, ‘why am I doing this?’ But I don’t think there was any time I wanted to go back or anything like that. I just wanted to see the project through and make sure we were here on Parliament Hill to give our message to the government.”

It took him just under three months to ride from the northwestern tip of Canada near Alaska to Ottawa, which is just north of New York State.

His mom rode with him for the first 1,200 miles.

Then he joined up with other young riders, arriving for a rally on Parliament Hill in late September.

“I’m 17-years-old, and that means I’m too young to vote. But I believe I should have a say in decisions that are made on this Hill because when Parliament makes decisions about climate and energy, its people my age – people who are too young to vote – who will live in the world determined by what decisions made.”

(applause)

About a dozen members of Parliament and maybe 50 cyclists showed up for the rally. Boothroyd talked to hundreds more as he rode across the country.

He says he wasn’t just doing it for a good cause, he was doing it to protect his home.

“You’re very protective over wherever you grew up, and the place you know very well and love, so if you see a threat to that, you want to do everything you can.”

Now, Boothroyd is a regular twelfth grader again.
But unlike most, he’ll be keeping a close eye on the climate change talks taking place in Copenhagen in December.

He’s hoping his effort convinced the Canadian government to do more.

For The Environment Report, I’m Karen Kelly.

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How the West Was Warned

  • Wen Baldwin, a volunteer with the National Park service, pulls a non-stick teflon frying pan out of Lake Mead, the reservoir of Hoover Dam. Quagga mussels smothered the pan in a matter of weeks. (Photo by Shawn Allee)

A tiny aquatic pest called the
quagga mussel is invading lakes
and streams across the country.
It’s even clogging up pipes in
some big-city water systems, dams,
and power plants. When environmental
disaster strikes, sometimes people
scratch their heads and ask: how
could this happen? Shawn Allee reports, in the case of
one quagga mussel invasion, people
got plenty of warning:

Transcript

A tiny aquatic pest called the
quagga mussel is invading lakes
and streams across the country.
It’s even clogging up pipes in
some big-city water systems, dams,
and power plants. When environmental
disaster strikes, sometimes people
scratch their heads and ask: how
could this happen? Shawn Allee reports, in the case of
one quagga mussel invasion, people
got plenty of warning:

n 2007, biologists declared that quagga mussels had infested infested Lake Mead just outside
Las Vegas.

But years before that, park staff and volunteers like Wen Baldwin told folks how to avoid the
problem.

Baldwin says some people helped – most people told him to just drop it.

“Oh, it won’t happen to us. That’s the American theory – fire, cancer, whatever. Oh, it
won’t happen to me.”

But it did happen, and here’s how it went down.

Baldwin went to this conference out East where biologists explained how quaggas clog pipes at
water treatment centers and power plants.

“There was a presentation about them and I realized, hey, they could get in here and they
could cost me money, you money, everybody money. They could raise havoc as they have in
the Great Lakes.”

Baldwin got worried.

Quagga mussles hitchhike on boats, and Lake Mead is a boating hot spot.

Baldwin warned people – wash down your boat before you put it in the lake!

“I put on a lot of programs trying to get people on board. Just didn’t work that well.”

Now, quagga mussels are making a mess of Lake Mead – and Web Baldwin can show how.

Baldwin tests how well quagga stick to different material.

We’re on this dock one morning, and he pulls a rope out of the water.

The rope’s covered with shells that look like fingernail-sized clams.

Allee: “I reckon you have to be pretty careful with your hands, there.”

Baldwin: “Boy, they’ll cut you to ribbons. I go home looking like my hands went through a
meat grinder.”

At the end of the rope – he’s tied a skillet.

Baldwin: “They’ll stick to teflon.”

Allee: “They’ll stick to teflon. Your eggs won’t stick to teflon all that well, but quagga
mussels will.”

Baldwin: “They will. And anywhere they attach the glue they use will hasten the
deterioration of the surface they attach to.”

A quagga-coated teflon pan is a shocker – but what does a quagga invasion mean?

Well, for one, if you dock your boat at Lake Mead – you’ve gotta scrape it all the time.

Swimmers wear shoes to protect their feet from quagga-coated rocks.

And quagga are getting costly.

Zegers: “We’ve been monitoring water quality in the lake pretty extensively.”

Roefer: “These are the six locations we collect samples at.”

I’m with Ron Zegers and Peggy Roefer. They’re with the Southern Nevada Water System. It
provides water to Las Vegas and other cities.

They walk me through slides divers took near water intake pipes – deep in Lake Mead.

Roefer: “And this is where our intake is, on Saddle Island. This is actually the inside of the
rock structure you can see the quaggas on the inside of that. Quagga mussels were
approximately two inches thick.”

Zegers and Roefer say they’re trying plenty of things to keep quagga out of the water supply.

The first is the old stand-by: chlorine.

But too much chlorine can make people sick.

Zegers: “More of those disenfection byproducts form, which puts us closer to our
regulatory compliance issues, so we also have to be concerned about that also.”

Roefer: “You know we’re watching the alternative control strategies, the bio-bullets and
pseudo-flourence and those kinds of things.”

Allee: “Sounds like an arms race.”

Roefer: “Yeah, who can get there first. The annual for this is one to four million dollars.”

Allee: “One to four million dollars. You know, you could clean a lot of water if you didn’t
have to deal with these critters.”

Zegers: “That’s correct. Now it’s just an anticipated expenditure that certainly wasn’t
budgeted for when they first appeared, and now it’s just gonna be a way of life.”

And it could become a a way of life for more lakes if we don’t stop quaggas from spreading
around.

For The Environment Report, I’m Shawn Allee.

Related Links

Phantom Traffic Jams

  • A phantom traffic jam is when everyone slows down or stops, but starts to go again inexplicably (Photo source: Crazytales at Wikimedia Commons)

According the the last report from
the Texas Transportation Institute,
traffic congestion in the US causes
more than four-billion lost hours stuck
in traffic and nearly three-billion
gallons of wasted fuel. Lester Graham
reports mathmeticians have found – on
paper – one type of traffic jam looks
something like a bomb going off:

Transcript

According the the last report from
the Texas Transportation Institute,
traffic congestion in the US causes
more than four-billion lost hours stuck
in traffic and nearly three-billion
gallons of wasted fuel. Lester Graham
reports mathmeticians have found – on
paper – one type of traffic jam looks
something like a bomb going off:

Phantom traffic jams are frustrating. You know the kind – traffic slows downs or completely stops, and when you finally get to the end, there’s no wreck, no closed lane – nothing.

Mathematicians at MIT say these phantom jams are a lot like detonation waves produced by explosions.

Morris Flynn is the lead author of the report published in the online edition of Physical Review E.

“You have a single person who taps on their brakes. The driver behind them will over-react, hit their brakes just a little bit harder than the person in front. And this disturbance is just cascaded all the way back so that eventually you get this very rapid deceleration.”

And, phantom traffic jam.

Solutions: more lanes on the highway, and automated signs that warn drivers about slowed traffic ahead.

Or, get more people on mass transit.

For The Environment Report, I’m Lester Graham.

Related Links

Coral Conservation in the Caribbean

  • The island of Bonaire is somewhat of an anomaly in the Caribbean due to its remarkably preserved coral reefs (Photo by Ann Dornfeld)

Scientists say nearly half of the coral reefs in the US are in bad shape.
Many are dead. The situation is similar in much of the world. But not
everywhere, as Ann Dornfeld found on the Caribbean island of Bonaire:

Transcript

Scientists say nearly half of the coral reefs in the US are in bad shape.
Many are dead. The situation is similar in much of the world. But not
everywhere, as Ann Dornfeld found on the Caribbean island of Bonaire:

(sound of waves on shore)

Jerry Ligon was working as the on-board naturalist on a small Caribbean
cruise ship when he first saw Bonaire.

“And I saw how clear the water was. And I’d been able to compare, during
my stint on the cruise ship, other islands in the Caribbean, and I realized
how special Bonaire was. So that was at the end of my contract, so I
decided to stay here. And I’ve been here for 15 years!”

It’s wasn’t just the clarity of Bonaire’s water that made Ligon stick around. It
was the remarkably healthy coral reefs that lay beneath the waves.

“I can even talk to divers who come to Bonaire and they say, ‘What
fantastic diving!’ and they remember, ‘This is how the way it was in Cayman
Islands 25 years ago!'”

Ligon says the Cayman Islands might have even had more impressive
reefs than Bonaire’s back in the day. But coral throughout the US and
Caribbean has been in sharp decline for decades.

So how do Bonaire’s reefs remain intact?

Ramón de León is the manager of the Bonaire National Marine Park. He
says the island has an advantage in that it has no industries to pollute the
water.

The island is mostly undeveloped, which means relatively little farm and
lawn fertilizer run-off that can create marine algae blooms. And cool
upwellings in the region help balance the rising ocean temperatures. Warm
oceans can cause coral bleaching, which often kills the coral animal.

But de León says Bonaire really owes its healthy reefs to its history of
conservation laws. They date back to an era when such policies were rare.

“Bonaire start to protect sea turtles and turtle nests in 1961, back when
everybody was promoting sea turtle soups and nailing shells in the walls.”

By the end of the 1970s, Bonaire had banned spear fishing and made it
illegal to damage coral. For years, divers have been required to pay a
sizeable fee and take an orientation course before they’re allowed to dive
on the island. That helps them avoid touching the coral, which can kill it.

De León says the island still allows too much fishing. So several years ago,
he told the island’s fishermen they needed to choose a no-take zone to let
the reefs recover.

“I refuse to decide myself. I give the fishermen some prerequisites that they
have to have to close, and they chose which area. Is not my number-one
option, but is their number-one option. So I have to respect that.”

De León says because the fishermen chose the no-take zone, something
important happened. Compliance is high.

For all of Bonaire’s success in coral conservation, there are still some
problems. De León says its reefs suffer from leaky septic tanks and boat
pollution. And there are few of the large predator fish that used to maintain
population balance on the reefs.

But the island is a haven for researchers like Mark Patterson. He designs
underwater robots at Virginia Institute of Marine Sciences.

Last year he led a NOAA expedition to use robots to map Bonaire’s reefs.
He says the island’s reefs are valuable as a baseline by which other reefs
can be judged.

“If you’re an up-and-coming marine scientist and you go to a lot of the coral
reefs on the planet now, you might think that all coral reefs have always
look like this. And they haven’t! So the fact that we’ve got some pristine
reefs left is very important, and we’ve got to work very hard to protect them
because it shows us how the ecosystem should look and used to look
around the planet before things started to go downhill.”

For The Environment Report, I’m Ann Dornfeld.

Related Links

A Rush on Face Masks for Swine Flu

  • Pharmacies have seen a rush on surgical masks, like this one, in response to the swine flu (Photo courtesy of the National Institutes of Health)

Some pharmacies are running out of face masks because people are buying them to try to protect themselves from swine flu. Lester Graham has more on that:

Transcript

Some pharmacies are running out of face masks because people are buying them to try to protect themselves from swine flu. Lester Graham has more on that:

One infectious disease specialist told us if we get to the point of an epidemic, anything that covers your mouth would probably be helpful.

But, people are not waiting until it’s a full-fledged epidemic before getting face masks.

One pharmacy we visited usually sells three different kinds of masks. It was sold out.

Those who can’t find masks at the local pharmacy are sometimes directed to hardware stores.

Lowe’s Public Relations indicated it has seen an increase in popularity of dust and respirator masks, but the home improvement chain declined to give specific numbers.

Health officials say if you’re going to use a dust mask, buy one rated “N-95.” It filters out 95% of particles.

But, some health officials say, it’s better for those who are sick to wear them than it is for you to wear one for protection from the swine flu.

For The Environment Report, I’m Lester Graham.

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All Aboard for Amtrak?

  • The Akron multi-modal transportation center. It was built by the train tracks, but before it was completed, Amtrak pulled out of Akron. Now the only mode of transportation is the bus. (Photo by Julie Grant)

People who like the idea of passenger trains have been waiting for decades for the
federal government to get on board. Now, some think Congress might be ready to
get funding on track for Amtrak. Julie Grant reports:

Transcript

People who like the idea of passenger trains have been waiting for decades for the
federal government to get on board. Now, some think Congress might be ready to
get funding on track for Amtrak. Julie Grant reports:

A few years ago, I took the train from Akron, Ohio to visit my sister in Washington,
D.C. She still teases me about it. What would have taken less than 2 hours by
plane or 6 hours by car took 14 hours by train.

We got side-tracked a lot, waiting for freight trains to go by.

(sound of a train)

That passenger route I took has since been canceled. The trains that come through
now are only for freight.

Moving freight was the real reason most railroad companies started laying down
tracks in the 1800s.

Passenger trains were just a way of getting name recognition and brand loyalty with
the fat cats that owned the factories that needed to move freight. They were treated
well on the passenger trains, and everybody benefited from that great service.

By the 1920s, the government started investing a lot of money in highways.
The age of the auto moved ahead. Passenger trains became quaint.

Companies running trains started going bankrupt. By 1970, Congress voted to
create a national passenger rail line – Amtrak.

Ross Capon is president of the National Association of Rail Passengers. He was
already a leader in the passenger rail movement when the gas crisis in 1979 hit. He
thought gasoline shortages and high prices were going to give Amtrak the jump it
needed.

“When we had prominent cartoonists ridiculing the Carter administration for
discontinuing Amtrak trains, at the same time as gasoline was unavailable to many
people, I thought we were going to be in clover from then on. I was wrong.”

But when gas prices spiked last year, so did Amtrak ridership. Capon thinks, maybe
this time passenger rail will come into its own. Even though gas prices have
dropped, lots of people still want to ride the rails.

I’m visiting the brand new multi-modal transportation center in Akron. But so far, the
only mode of transportation is the bus.

Kirt Conrad is director of planning for the Metro Regional Transit Authority. He says
the center was built along the train tracks. But before it was even finished, Amtrak
pulled out of Akron.

Now if you want to go somewhere, you’ve got to take the bus. But over the past
year, Conrad says, the buses can barely keep up with all the new demand.

It’s like this in many cities across the country. People want to ride the rails – but
there’s no train.

In cities like Dallas and Phoenix, Conrad says trains have been successful.

“The ridership projections are surpassing what they had forecast. So i think the
experience is, you do build it and nationally they have come.”

Many states have been working with Amtrak to improve tracks. And, in some places,
trains go as fast as 120 miles an hour. Passenger rail supporters say for shorter
trips, say a couple of hundred miles or so, trains make a lot more sense than going
to the airport.

But analysts say if passenger rail is going to get on track it needs government
investment.

Conrad says passenger trains need better access to tracks – and better tracks – so
they can move past the slower freight trains.

But Ross Capon at the Rail Passenger Association says Congress is spending
almost all its transportation money on highways and airports.

“The federal government has, to put it crassly, bribed the states for years not to
spend money on rail. Look, we’ll give you 90% dollars on your highway projects,
80% dollars on your airport projects. But if you dare spend money on passenger
trains, youíre on your own buddy.”

But Capon thinks, maybe now, since Amtrak is more popular, Congress might be
ready to increase the amount of federal money it spends on passenger rail service.

Getting rail projects across the nation on the fast track.

For The Environment Report, I’m Julie Grant.

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Eating Right for the Climate

How far your food travels might be less important

than the kind of food you buy. Lester Graham reports on a

new study that looks at the connections between food and

greenhouse gasses:

Transcript

How far your food travels might be less important than the kind of food you buy. Lester Graham reports on a new study that looks at the connections between food and greenhouse gasses:


One of the reasons more people have been buying local food is because it doesn’t travel as far, use more energy and create as much greenhouse gas emissions.


But a study from Carnegie Mellon suggests the kind of food you buy is more important. The study indicates emissions from animals such as methane and nitrous oxides can be as much as twenty times more potent than carbon dioxide from transportation.


Christopher Weber is the lead author of the study.


“Because of smaller amounts of emissions, but more potent emissions of these gasses, it turns out that the CO2 associated with energy to move food around is not as important as these non-energy related greenhouse gasses.”


Weber acknowledges there are more good reasons to buy local food than just greenhouse gas emissions. But cutting down on meat in your diet might reduce greenhouses gasses more.


For the Environment Report, this is Lester Graham.

Related Links

Deep-Fried Road Trip

  • Devin Smith and Matthew Rolen Stucky use waste oil from deep fryers to power their diesel car (Photo by Katie Carey)

For many people, the summer road
trip includes trips to the beach, and of
course, frequent stops to the gas station.
Two college students are driving across the
country in a car that runs on used vegetable
oil. So when most people pull in to the gas
station this summer, they pull up to the
grease traps. They say it’s a way to raise
awareness about alternative fuels, and save
a bit of money. Katie Carey brings us this
audio postcard:

Transcript

For many people, the summer road
trip includes trips to the beach, and of
course, frequent stops to the gas station.
Two college students are driving across the
country in a car that runs on used vegetable
oil. So when most people pull in to the gas
station this summer, they pull up to the
grease traps. They say it’s a way to raise
awareness about alternative fuels, and save
a bit of money. Katie Carey brings us this
audio postcard:

MATT: My name is Matthew Rolen Stucky. I am taking this ’85 Mercedes Benz Diesel
with a grease car kit, putting old vegetable oil that we find from restaurants along the way
and sticking it in and making it go.

DEVIN: Hi, I’m Devin and we’re getting our fuel for the car from mainly restaurants
from the deep fryer. They dispose of the grease and we just take that and filter it a couple
times.

MATT: Well I pre-filter it – it’s basically a water filter. I have a couple mesh filters that
it goes through and then it goes through a second gas tank where it heats up and runs
through the car and then has one more engine filter that it goes through secondary. You
can drive this around everyday nearly in every situation and it doesn’t slow down your
gas mileage you have the same top speeds, the same acceleration, literally you will not be
able to tell the difference, until you realize you’re not buying the gas, and then you are
happy about it.

DEVIN: We have a journal in the car and we have a tally of how many hummers we’ve
seen on the road trip so far and I think the tally is to sixteen, and we kind of do a little
‘ha-ha’ every time we see one. Just because we know how much they are spending on
gas.

MATT: The reactions range from people saying, “Oh yeah, you are putting it in your car,
great, yeah here take it.” To people going “You do what? What does it do in your car?”
And they don’t believe it and they want to go see it sometimes.

DEVIN: Some people this is the first grease car they have ever seen and they just think it
is awesome that someone is out there doing it. It’s not a solution for everyone, again,
there’s not going to be waste vegetable oil for every single person that wants to drive in
the car around the country, so it definitely is not a solution to the fuel crisis. It’s just us
trying to do our part to raise awareness.

Related Links