Cheap Oscars 2021

[Marcel Birgelen]

Veering a little off topic; sorry in advance.

Nobody cared about the Oscars anyway, so we could as well chat about the weather.

LA was a train town: the construction of Union Station in 1937-39 was an attempt to bring order to the chaos of a myriad of local, regional, and long-haul railroad arteries serving the city. Then came the Eisenhower administration and the interstate freeway system in the 1950s, the demise of Pacific Electric, and the resulting car culture of Southern California, which persists to today. There has been an effort to revive rail transportation in the last two decades, and for cargo, it has been very successful. The container trains snaking their way through San Timoteo Canyon, half a mile from my home, have gotten longer and longer over the last few years. For passenger transportation, much less so.

The entire U.S. used to be a train nation, until someone decided to copy the Germans and build a whole bunch of roads all across the nation, back in the 1950s until the late 70s. While the Interstate Highway System probably was more a necessity than anything else, it's interesting how we humans tend to veer to the extremes. I can't imagine a city like New York, Paris, Amsterdam, London or Tokyo without their public transit systems, but I've almost never used it in L.A. or in the Bay Area, which both seem to have been built with just the car in mind. What I also don't understand is the complete lack of fast trains (like TGV and Shinkansen fast) between major cities on the East and West-Coast or even across the continent itself.

Still, I think it will be important for the western nations to kick off of their car-addiction a little bit. It will be interesting to see what happens with the urban sprawl in some of the western nations in years to come. With an aging population and families only getting smaller, sustaining the dream of the single-family home for everyone in some suburban neighborhood, where everything including your daily groceries involves a car, will be a though cookie in the future. Especially once the once shiny new roads and infrastructure starts to crumble, but less and less souls are left to pay for it...

That came to an end when my car was stolen from the parking garage at San Bernardino. The time and money fallout from that deterred me from using the train again.

I can somehow relate to that. About 20 years ago (time flies...) I had my car broken into twice within 3 or 4 months, while parked at the public car park at the station I used to commute. While I liked commuting by train compared to taking the car, this experience took me back to the streets. Nowadays, there is a parking garage with CCTV, so maybe it's safe again to park your car there, but what once used to be free, now considerably adds to your commuting bill, as parking your car there isn't cheap...

[Frank Cox]

Stories like this are among the many reasons why I'm glad that I've never lived anywhere but in a small town. Around here if someone's car got broken into it would be big news (and the culprit would probably be rounded up in fairly short order).

It's not crime-free here, unfortunately, but if you report your bicycle stolen it will actually get investigated and you might even get it back. You won't get that kind of service in a big city.

[Mike Blakesley]

I once told a big city friend about how I could walk from my theater to my other job, my bank, the post office, my insurance agency, my accountant, the grocery store, and a good bar all within a two-minute walking distance. She told me she had more people living in her apartment building than we have here in town.

[Leo Enticknap]

What I also don't understand is the complete lack of fast trains (like TGV and Shinkansen fast) between major cities on the East and West-Coast or even across the continent itself.

I believe that there is a fast (by American standards, i.e. 100mph-ish) passenger train along the east coast between Boston and DC, but the real answer to your question is timing, and the fact that civil aviation became established in the USA between the1950s and '70s on a much bigger scale than it ever did in nations of comparable size and population. That is possibly because the world's largest and most commercially successful civil aircraft manufacturers at that time (Boeing, Douglas, and Lockheed) were all American, and growing the domestic market was how they established themselves. My understanding is that the track and other infrastructure for TGV-speed passenger rails is expensive enough that it's just about viable (with significant government subsidy) for journeys of a few hundred miles, but not when you get significantly into four figures (of miles). At that point, the economies of scale tip in favor of flying. Furthermore, the nation's railroad system is now geared to hauling vast quantities of cargo, relatively slowly. Re-establishing significant long distance passenger capacity, and especially at TGV speeds, would basically mean starting from scratch. And as the infamous California high-speed rail project has demonstrated, we haven't proven to be very good at that! Frankly, Hyperloop looks like it stands a better chance at this rate.

[Marcel Birgelen]

In the end, all transport infrastructure requires some kind of subsidy. Most roads are built from public money and most airlines would barely be able to hold on, without government money and I'm not just talking about the special times we're in right now. Yet, you can't easily quantify the benefit for the economy for such mega projects. What has been the net. benefit of the Interstate Highway System over the years? It's almost impossible to quantify, only that it's massive.

I'd say the beauty of most high-speed rail systems is that they still work like you expect trains to work. As in, you make sure you're at the platform about 10 minutes before the train is scheduled to leave and then you just hop on. As soon as it becomes the same multi-stage security theater as flying with equal processing times, then it will rapidly loose all kinds of appeal, at least for me. I really love systems like the TGV and Shinkansen, but I hate the German ICE, which is High-Speed done mostly bad.

If you want to do it right, you need to build dedicated tracks for high-speed rail, that's what both Japan and France did and also what China is doing right from the get-go. Using your existing lines for local commuter traffic and bulk-cargo is also pretty spot on, but you can't have your high-speed trains waiting for some commuter or freight trains. That's what countries like Germany, Italy and especially the U.K. learned the hard way.

As for the U.S., I guess that for coast-to-coast passenger travel, it makes sense to do this mostly by air. It's a considerable distance and you've got some pesky mountains in between, which will be very expensive to cross with any high-speed line. Still, I'm pretty convinced that a TGV or Shinkansen-style high-speed service along the coasts should be more than viable.

As for the hyperloop... Last time I looked at what Virgin was doing, I saw a maglev train in a vacuum tube. We already know from earlier projects that never happened in Germany, Japan and China that maglev is almost impossible expensive to build. Now, let's wrap that whole thing in a vacuum tube and suddenly it becomes a feasible thing to build? I guess that when such a project gets built, it will be some vanity project in the Middle East, I doubt that anybody really sensible will ever buy into it... But then again, people also keep building monorails to nowhere...

Stories like this are among the many reasons why I'm glad that I've never lived anywhere but in a small town. Around here if someone's car got broken into it would be big news (and the culprit would probably be rounded up in fairly short order).

It's not crime-free here, unfortunately, but if you report your bicycle stolen it will actually get investigated and you might even get it back. You won't get that kind of service in a big city.

It was somewhere in the mid-90s I last tried to report a stolen bicycle around here. They then told me, flat in my face, that they don't register stolen bicycles anymore. I told them that I needed the police report for my insurance, then they VERY reluctantly complied... The moral of the story is: Don't bike around with a fancy new bike in the Netherlands. This wasn't even in a "big town", the city got the city status somewhere around the middle ages and nobody cared to take it away.

I once told a big city friend about how I could walk from my theater to my other job, my bank, the post office, my insurance agency, my accountant, the grocery store, and a good bar all within a two-minute walking distance. She told me she had more people living in her apartment building than we have here in town.

The stupid thing is, there isn't really a reason why this couldn't work the same way in any odd city either. Cities used to be designed to do stuff by walking there, it wasn't until everybody suddenly needed to have a car that city planners started to design everything in such a way that you need a car to get it done.