PEOPLE DIE WHEN GOVERNMENT MESSES UP.

Object to more government action, though, and somebody will carp, "You must want people to die."

Sometimes, no matter what action governments take, people die.  Consider Strong Towns contributor Patricia Tice asking, "What if There Had Been No Interstates?"  Based on a small sample, New Hampshire with its contrarian traditions and understanding the ways federal matching funds ensnare politicians, things look pretty good.

The first 16-mile segment got built quickly, but that was a coastline connector that reinforced existing transportation patterns. As they started pushing in toward the center of the state, progress slowed dramatically. By the time they got past Manchester and headed toward Concord, sections got built as local concerns were addressed, but it was slow-walked. The Franconia Notch project dragged out well into the 1980s. Ultimately, they stretched the implementation across nearly 50 years for a bare-bones system.

Well, this is North of Boston, where "You can't get there from here" is a tradition.

DOES ANYBODY KNOW WHAT TIME IT IS?

Fittingly, a troupe that debuted as Chicago Transit Authority (the eponymous agency brought legal action to get that name changed) asked that question.  For years, the South Shore Line, properly the Chicago South Shore and South Bend, issued all-year-around printed timetables, advising that all published times shown were those in effect in Chicago.  When both Indiana and Illinois were on Standard Time, the South Bend passenger had to mentally add an hour; for that part of the year when Illinois and the Indiana Region observed Central Daylight Time, the South Bend passenger might not have had to make any changes, as Indiana was far enough west in the Eastern Time Zone for those counties on Eastern Standard Time to stay on Eastern Standard Time.  Those changes might not have inconvenienced too many passengers on the east end of the railroad, as, well into the 1960s, the railroad offered a memory pattern schedule with hourly South Bend Limiteds, with Gary Expresses on the half hour.  Conditional and positive stops for the morning Limiteds sufficed to serve any passengers from LaLumiere or Hudson Lake or New Carlisle for Bendix or downtown South Bend.  These days, the conditional stops are gone, although with all trains pulling out of Michigan City to form South Bend departures, there are morning departures for any local passengers so inclined.

Conditions were more complicated on the North Shore Line, the much-lamented and more than a little bit missed Chicago North Shore and Milwaukee.  Yes, the railroad operated entirely in the Central Time Zone.  After the War, though, Illinois observed Daylight Saving Time whilst Wisconsin did not.  So much for agricultural interests favoring Daylight Saving Time.  The cock crows at sunup, irrespective of what's on the clock, and farm kids know about morning chores before they head off to school.  Thus, when Wisconsin did adopt Daylight Saving Time, that ended on the final Sunday in September, whilst Illinois stayed with it until the final Sunday in October.

CLOSING DOWN AHEAD OF THE RAIN.

In 1957, the Chicago Aurora and Elgin Railroad abruptly suspended all service just past noon on 3 July.  Passengers at Desplaines Avenue were more than a little bit cranky when the train they were hoping to board all of a sudden was moved past the platform without boarding, and nobody offered any substitute transportation.  Things got more interesting as offices closed for the holiday.

These days, the Illinois Railway Museum offer visitors a chance to experience living history, as we documented for 2016 and 2017.  Everybody is in on the plot and there's no unpleasantness when the trains set down at the Seemann Road platform.

Last week Friday, the show was ready to go on, but the weather gods had their own say.  For safety reasons, no electric cars operate during thunderstorms, and to protect the vintage cars, the wood interurbans, which the cash-strapped interurban continued to operate right up to the end, do not run in the rain.

At about 11.30, it looked like business as usual at Wheaton, where steel cars from Elgin and Aurora combined to make up a mid-day Chicago Express.

A few Chicago and North Western Bi-Level Commuter Streamliners were operating in those days, although the control cab cars and push-pull operation came later.  The smoke is rising off Shay 5, which was pulling a short coach train.  The threatening skies are to the northwest.

A TRUMPY AMTRAK?

Pajamas Media contributor Ashley McCulley offers "Make Amtrak Great Again."  Her central thesis is sensible national politics.

If Amtrak is the national rail operator of the United States, then it should serve the United States. Not just the Northeast Corridor. Not just the West Coast. For too long, the national agency has been serving only a handful of our population: people who live and work in major coastal cities and rely on rail for daily commuting — you and I both know the dominating voting demographic there. Having lived in Southern California, I can tell you that Amtrak is the best way to get between San Diego and Los Angeles unless you enjoy wasting away in traffic. When we lived in Fredericksburg, Va., Amtrak was a fantastic option for stress-free trips to D.C., Philadelphia, and New York City. All of that said, relegating Amtrak to mere commuting purposes is a disservice to the rail and the taxpayers who fund it.

The challenge is in the how best serve the United States.  There has never been a coherent business model for covering the national network.  The Northeast Corridor get their rolling gated community in the form of Acela trains with premium and business class seating, as well as Northeast Regional trains offering business and coach class seating, and no honoring of the commuter train tickets operated by regional authorities.  The regional operators in North Carolina, Chicagoland, and California have to come up with state money to offer train service that is reasonably comfortable and dependable.

DIVIDE THE RISKS AND MULTIPLY THE TRANSACTION COSTS.

Institutions that make possible the separation of risks in order that each be priced separately, for instance the risk of a cargo being lost at sea separated from the risk that the cargo doesn't command a remunerative price when it arrives, have long contributed to a broader prosperity.  "We thus take for granted the slicing and dicing of risks to ships, even if there no longer is a Lloyd's coffeehouse with a bell that rings to announce a sinking, and we understand foreign-exchange hedges against loss in the value of the cargo on delivery."

SIXTY YEARS TO GET FROM SKOKIE TO HARMSWOODS.

Perhaps the only thing longer than a forever war or a negotiation with Iranians is the procedural wrangling over restoring a few miles of rapid transit track through the Skokie Valley.

Please indulge me my sarcasm.  "Yellow Line extension in Skokie could take ‘decades’ but CTA is studying it."  It's more accurate to say that the studying has already been going on for close onto seventy years.  What today's flatlanders understand as the "Yellow Line" is the first segment of North America's first high speed electrified railroad, which continued to Deerpath and onward on existing tracks to Milwaukee.  And yes, I've taunted Chicago officialdom for studying a relatively short restoration of service at a pace that would please neither Charles Yerkes nor Samuel Insull.

When the North Shore filed for abandonment in 1958, Chicago Transit Authority (public ownership came in 1945) considered purchase of the high speed line as far as Waukegan. North Shore's own ridership studies had a plurality of the commuters boarding at Dempster Street with relatively light loads north of Briergate. As the Transit Authority has a large maintenance facility along the North Shore just west of the drainage canal in Evanston, it was relatively inexpensive to buy only the North Shore property from west of that facility to Dempster. But no sooner was the North Shore gone than some people wanted it back.

Getting even the next section, to somewhere near the Old Orchard mall, which somehow still exists as a mall, has been newsworthy for years. "Sometime in the late 1980s a friend, in making conversation, asked if I was aware the Transit Authority wanted to extend the Skokie Swift to Old Orchard. My reaction: it used to go to Milwaukee. Surprised reaction. No surprise."  At the time, there were a few more people still living who had ridden the North Shore Line.

TRANSPORTATION MIRACLES REQUIRE PREPARATION.

Reason contributors, including Liz Wolfe, have a troubling blind spot where road socialism is concerned.  "New Jersey Transit is preparing backup ferries to help with demand as fans try to make it to the World Cup. I kind of love how they assume public transit will buckle under the pressure."

Not-a-tall.  I heard one senior law enforcement official describe the World Cup as "multiple Super Bowls" in multiple cities in three countries over six months.  Let's bear in mind that the National Football League unaccountably scheduled a Super Bowl for the Meadowlands, and more people than New Jersey Transit anticipated rode the trains.  Lesson learned.

It is not, however, the World Cup, or the Super Bowl, or New Jersey Transit that concerns me.  Rather, it is a centennial.  "In 1926, the North Shore Line built a much larger temporary station, and borrowed rolling stock from the Chicago Rapid Transit Company, for a one-day International Eucharistic Congress at Mundelein.  A rainstorm provoked an early departure for many pilgrims, and the railroad handled it."

In less than ten score years, Chicago went from "mission" territory to birthplace of a Pope.  Strictly speaking, the aforementioned XXVIII International Eucharistic Congress took place in Chicago and at St. Mary of the Lake seminary, then east of a village called Area (pronounced a-REE-a) and subsequently renamed for George Cardinal Mundelein, who made no small plans.  Neither did the seminary, now known as the University of St. Mary of the Lake, not to be confused with the California university that keeps turning up in intercollegiate sports tournaments.  Nor did Samuel Insull, whose country farm was near the seminary.  For that matter, the cardinal offered the Vatican the use of St. Mary of the Lake as emergency quarters during the War.  The Pope might not have had any divisions, but he was no coward.

SHOWING THEM WHAT THEY WANTED TO SEE?

On Tuesday, we noted the quiet movement of tankers out of the Arabian Gulf along the Omani side of the Strait of Hormuz and with the shepherding of the United States Navy.  That story was coming out a week ago.  "The Strait of Hormuz is more open than previously thought as the U.S. shoots down Iranian drones threatening ships and provides ‘naval overwatch’."

Apparently the Navy setting its blockade line at the Iranian - Pakistani border was thought through.  That the Iranians were not seeing many ships moving, and that their enablers in the palace guard media were scoffing at how ineffective Project Freedom was made the likes of CNN and MSwhatever part of an information operation.

The operation consisted of Very Large Crude Carriers, we'd call them "supertankers," exiting through Hormuz without their Automatic Identification System, the maritime equivalent of an aircraft transponder shut off. Once in the Gulf of Oman, these vessels rendezvoused with other tankers and were emptied via ship-to-ship transfers. The empty tankers then headed back into the Persian Gulf to pick up a new load of oil from the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Qatar, or Iraq. This kept the number of ships in the Persian Gulf stable and provided no hint of Washington running its own "dark fleet" of oil smugglers. Wash, rinse, repeat.

It also explains the U.S. Navy's aggressiveness in the Gulf of Oman in turning around inbound ships bound for Iran. Yes, it served to support the blockade, but it also prevented an Iran-bound ship from stumbling upon a transfer operation and blowing the whistle when they made port.

The blockade runners were covered by a $40 billion war insurance pool furnished by the Development Finance Corporation. Oddly enough, this was another Trump administration initiative that was derided as a failure.

It looks like President Trump's announcement was made because the whole operation was about to become public.

It wasn't so much that the United States was not in a hurry to reopen the strait as it was that keeping the Iranians from profiting by their blockade might have better been accomplished by having only a few ships risk the passage while transloading out of Iranian sight.  "Assuming the accuracy of Trump's statement, it means Iran doesn't control the Strait of Hormuz and can't prevent other Gulf countries from exporting oil. This means the only people Iran is blockading are itself."

Whether that was the cargo that broke the mullahs' economy and that's why they might be signing an agreement remains to be seen.  Here comes the weekend, prepare to be whipsawed.

A LAMENT FOR ROAD SOCIALISM.

Strong Towns contributor Ryan Puzycki rebuts claims that Austin's unbuilt light rail line is evidence transit is useless.

For more than a century, American policy has systematically favored the automobile. It is not entirely unreasonable, given the long history of state-funded roadways and municipal control of city streets, that roads are seen as an unquestioned function of government. Many transit systems, by contrast, were originally private, always regulated, increasingly constrained, and eventually absorbed as they were “outcompeted” by government roads. The collapse of private transit, and its subsequent strangulation, is considered a natural outcome — as if this was not engineered by policy.

That highways are considered politically neutral is itself ideology masquerading as common sense. Transit is treated as “socialism on wheels” while highways are the American way: a big-government, government-funded, deficit-financed free-for-all. Yet these highway socialists still argue that transit should “compete in the marketplace.”

But there is no marketplace for transportation. Transit competes with highways in the same way that the Washington Generals compete with the Harlem Globetrotters: the Globetrotters always win.

Never mind for the moment the way the rent-seeking of railway promoters in the nineteenth century gave the Good Roads movement (which started with bicyclists!) an opportunity to seek their own rents.  We're now at the stage of road socialism where the highway builders run out of other peoples' money.

Interstate highway projects are eligible for up to 90% federal funding, meaning a state may contribute as little as ten cents on the dollar, with the rest drawn from a trust fund kept alive by general revenue transfers that every American taxpayer finances. So Governor Abbott’s claim that Texas is building transportation “without local tax increases” is narrowly true: Texas is building highways through nationalized inflationary deficit-spending, seizing private property unilaterally, and handing cities the bill for the damage. The professed fiscal conservatives who lecture Austin and other cities about responsible spending perpetuate the largest federally subsidized transportation entitlement in American history and call it freedom.

This is not a free market in transportation. This is not fiscal conservatism. It’s central planning for cars, paid for by everyone, yet accountable to no one.

Until the real debt ceiling crashes in, which might be sooner than you think.  Interstate highways and junk bonds, bought for a dime on the dollar.

PROGRESS OF A CENTURY.

North America's first stretch of electrified high speed railroad opened in June of 1926.  In the winter of 1960, rail enthusiasts were gathering for final rides.

Unattributed photograph, probably a Kodachrome, retrieved from The Trolley Dodger.

The North Shore Line built this section of railroad in order to offer service between Milwaukee and Chicago that wasn't jousting with automobiles on street trackage and subject to franchise restrictions requiring limited trains to stop on the streets of Wilmette.

SOCIALISM FOR CARS AND PLANES.

Not so much, though, for Florida's Brightline, which has borrowed heavily to build its concept fast passenger railroad between Orlando and Miami.

Brightline took on far more than just labor and rolling-stock costs.

It bought right of way in one of America’s most expensive real estate markets; built nearly 170 miles of new track alongside an active railway corridor; constructed stations in downtown Miami, Fort Lauderdale, West Palm Beach, and Orlando; installed modern signaling and grade crossing safety systems; and navigated several years of environmental review, litigation, and regulatory approvals.

The upfront capital costs, running into the billions, were financed through private loans at commercial interest rates. That debt, which is now strangling the company, results from a system rigged against trains.

When you fly, you use infrastructure built and maintained by the government (at various levels), including airport terminals, runways, and air-traffic control systems. When you drive, you’re using a highway system that cost more than half a trillion public dollars to build—plus tens of billions, annually, to maintain. And to be clear: The federal government covers roughly half of those costs from general tax revenues—not gas taxes.

With Brightline, there is no equivalent public backstop. The company built the tracks, paid for the land, financed the stations, and carries the full capital cost of its infrastructure—borrowed at market rates—on its balance sheet.

It's not that the air traffic control system or the Interstate Highways are any model of Public Excellence, and the hoops Amtrak or the Commuter Rail authorities have to jump through to add service are that much more favorable.

Unfortunately, the essay, a policy brief from the High Speed Rail Alliance, looks to the wrong place for relief.  "Tell Congress: It’s time to reconnect the country with high-speed and regional rail!"

No.  Tell Congress to privatize the airports and air traffic control system, end the "essential air service" subsidies and all the other rents to general aviation enthusiasts and the owners of executive jets, and privatize and allow tolling on the interstate highways and the remaining Universal System highways.

SPEED, FREQUENCY, PROXIMITY.

Florida's Brightline have a "death train" tag they probably don't deserve.

Federal agencies have investigated the Brightline incidents and produced no firm conclusions about why they have happened so often. The company, sometimes called “Frightline” on the local news, has not been found responsible for any of the deaths. How could it be responsible for people driving around lowered gates or walking into the clearly delineated path of a train? Yet there must be some explanation for the unusual number of fatalities.

Local newspapers likewise raise the alarm.

Since [fall 2017], the death toll has climbed at an extraordinary rate. Brightline trains have killed 182 people, significantly more than publicly known, an investigation by the Miami Herald and WLRN, South Florida’s NPR member station, has found. Reporters spent a year combing federal rail data, local medical examiner records and police incident reports to count the dead. Brightline officials did not dispute the finding.

The reporting team found that Brightline has failed to urgently address the train’s dangers, blamed victims for the high death rate, and, as fatalities climbed, turned to the public to pay for safety upgrades. Even then, critical life-saving measures, including fencing along the tracks and suicide-crisis signs, haven’t been installed due to years-long delays in the release of federal funds.

Local governments and regulators have added to the problem. Deaths have spiked in parts of South Florida where train horns were intentionally silenced after cities and counties demanded “quiet zones” so as not to bother people living near the tracks. But federal regulators have allowed the train-horn bans to stay in place, and cities have resisted closing treacherous railroad crossings.

Brightline is the nation’s most dangerous passenger train, reporters found, killing someone every 13 days of service, on average. In addition to those deaths, 99 people have been injured. In at least 101 cases, the train crashed into vehicles, but no one was hurt.

The most recent Federal Railroad Administration trespassing casualties, for 2025, report 153 deaths in California, 85 in Texas, 65 in Florida, and 47 in Illinois.  Brightline attract attention as in the past ten years, what was a freight-only railroad has become the route of numerous passenger trains running at up to 79 miles per hour through thickly-settled areas.

Many train tracks are elevated to cross above roadways. Others are sunken down to cross beneath them. But the Brightline’s track intersects flatly, or “at grade,” with the roads on much of its route, including the part that runs through central Miami.

Many states have undertaken grade-crossing-elimination projects over the past half century because they make train routes dramatically safer. On the Amtrak route between Washington, D.C., and New York City, the highest-trafficked stretch of train track in the country, there are no grade crossings. The last one was eliminated in the 1980s.

There are 331 grade crossings along the Brightline route in South Florida.

Florida's geography precludes building a trench for the Florida East Coast, and an elevated line through thickly settled areas is unlikely to appeal to local residents, if infrastructure history is any guide.

SILLY, MEANINGLESS WORDS.

Streetsblog's Kea Wilson has long taken up the cause of getting around by anything other than a motorcar.  Which is fine.  Using the Student Affairs vocabulary polluted by fake psychiatry is not.  She goes there all the same.  "Meet the NIMBY’s Toxic Cousin: the NOMS (Not On My Street)," with the sub-headline, "Are neighborhood 'car supremacists' taking over our community meetings — and what do we do about it?"  That might get the Streetsblog set nodding their heads and stroking their hipster beards.  It does little to change minds, and the point of holding a community meeting might be to ... offer information and persuasion to shape transportation policy.

SAGE ADVICE FOR OUR TIME.

In Brussels Signal, Conrad Black offers a verdict that it might behoove the process-worshippers in the faculty common rooms to read and understand.

China is a challenge but not a rival and America’s ostensible allies are much less formidable than they were in the World Wars or even most of the Cold War. If Europe wishes to be taken seriously by the Americans, it has to act seriously and bring something to the party besides unction, loquacity, patronisation, and the compulsive will to appease America’s enemies.

For that consummation to be achieved, dear reader, it is essential that the coils of the anaconda continue to tighten.

What appears to be the last shot in the locker for the beleaguered and fragmented Iranian regime is the false claim that they control the Strait of Hormuz. The United States Navy could certainly convoy oil tankers through in approximately three 30-tanker convoys per day. They have the ships and aircraft necessary to assure reasonable safety and could put Marines on all ships to repel boarders and respond instantly to shore attacks and to the small craft of the Iranians that have so terrorised unescorted tankers. President Trump has already declined the belated offer of the Europeans, who need this oil, to assist in clearing the Strait. The United States doesn’t really need oil from this source and its lack of alacrity in reducing the price of oil for allies who would not allow the United States use of their own airspace and American bases in their country for the purposes of conducting this war, is understandable.

In his view, the mullahs might posture and puff in the way of men of Asia Minor, but it's likely for show for the benefit of their own subjects, but they won't do anything foolish.

The correlation of military forces now between the United States and Israel on one side and Iran on the other is approximately a thousand to one, and any recourse to aggression against the United States by Iran would be so horrifying a mistake that even the blooded and divided fighting bull government of the Islamic Republic has eschewed it. The departure of the United Arab Emirates from OPEC also indicates that that country will assist in moderating the world oil price while Iran flounders to the end of this operetta of a war in which the principal terrorism-sponsoring country in the world and a relentlessly belligerent source of threats and outrages has been reduced to impotent mendicancy, all at a cost to the United States of eight battlefield fatalities and a non-combat accident in which five other servicemen died.

What has been most remarkable in the response of the West has been this sour grapes recognition that the United States does not need anything from NATO to achieve its international strategic goals.

All of which might be true, and yet now is not the time to go wobbly.

Turn over the fissile material and destroy the machinery of uranium enhancement.  Stop funding proxies throughout Asia Minor.  Compensate the Gulf Arab states for damages to their tourist infrastructure.  Recognize that the Strait of Hormuz is international waters.

PRIZE AND BOOTY.

Maritime law features all sorts of interesting terminology.  The most familiar pairing might be flotsam and jetsam.  At law, how that stuff wound up in the water (loosely, floated off as opposed to jettisoned) determines who has the right to retrieve it.

Now contemplate, with or without a dead-man's chest and a bottle of rum, prize and booty.

Prize law is the body of maritime law and the law of armed conflict that applies to captured neutral or enemy merchant vessels. Prize law applies to civilian merchant vessels, distinct from enemy warships or aircraft, which automatically become booty of war when captured. Prize law only applies during armed conflict, making it distinct from routine maritime interdictions or sanctions enforcement, which can occur outside armed conflict and are not necessarily belligerent acts. Eight specific grounds make a neutral state’s vessel capturable, including breaching a blockade, carrying contraband, and resisting visit and search. Contraband consists of goods destined for an enemy of a belligerent and susceptible to use in armed conflict, a definition that was has not been broadly applied since World War II. According to U.S. policy, a blockading state has the right to stop vessels bound to or from blockaded ports anywhere on the high seas and apply prize law. Although the U.S. has recently interdicted other Iran-linked vessels outside the Strait of Hormuz, the U.S. has invoked maritime interdiction and sanctions enforcement for those interdictions, not for blockade violations.

The law has developed over the years and it isn't as simple as putting Marines on the bridge and steering a course for a friendly port.

Once vessels are captured, they can be escorted to a port under belligerent jurisdiction for inspection and adjudication by a prize court. That court would determine whether the capture was lawful. If so, the court may condemn the vessel and cargo as prize, and award title to the capturing state.

Meanwhile, back at the Strait of Hormuz, a few ships might be moving, but free movement by ships from or for Gulf Arab ports isn't happening.

Maritime activity across the Strait of Hormuz and adjacent corridors is showing early signs of recovery, but under sustained enforcement pressure and continued sanctions-driven disruption.

Transit volumes rebounded on April 25 following several days of suppressed movement, with all crossings conducted under full AIS visibility. At the same time, U.S. enforcement activity expanded beyond the Gulf, highlighted by the interception of a sanctioned LPG tanker in the Arabian Sea.

Iranian export infrastructure continues to operate under strain. Kharg Island shows active loading alongside a growing anchorage queue, indicating throughput pressure rather than a full recovery in export flow.

Across the system, vessel behavior reflects a controlled reopening environment, where movement is resuming, but under active monitoring, enforcement risk, and persistent sanctions pressure.

The article notes increased open and clandestine transit of the strait, without disaggregating Gulf Arab traffic that enjoys freedom of transit once clear of the area from Iranian traffic subject to U. S. enforcement anywhere at sea.

As far as effects on the price of gasoline, Stephen "Vodka Pundit" Green notes,  "Sure, nobody likes paying four bucks for gas, although $5 gas under Joe Biden would be $5.75 in today's dollars. But as Robin Brooks noted this weekend on Substack, 'the current physical shortage of oil was entirely predictable and got priced long ago.'"

We'll take stock of the motor fuel prices another day.

WHAT'S YOUR ALTERNATIVE?

Earth Day always brings out the sort of people who would like to scold us for being prosperous.  Carbon Outfront! by Lloyd Alter identifies those things we most deserve to be spanked for.  "Our planetary boundaries are being breached by cars and cows."  The author confesses to "spitballing."  Read his conclusions though, and ask yourself whether he wants the ongoing energy crunch to continue or not.

I taught my students about planetary boundaries because I realized I was too carbon-brained and wasn’t giving them enough information about many of the other problems we face. But after a week of thinking about them, I realize how interrelated they all are, and they almost all come back to the problems caused by cars and cows, both of which are directly or indirectly products of the fossil fuel economy.

I know it is a simplistic view of things, but we may see it play out in real time if this stupid war continues and the cars have no fuel and the cows have no feed.

Then I suppose we'll all live like it's 1825.

THE MERCANTILIST TEMPTATION.

Those oil tankers that transported the final shipments out of the Arabian Gulf had to go someplace after they delivered their cargoes.  Many of them are heading to United States ports for their next load.

I don't know whether this train, which passed the train watching camera at Sturtevant on Sunday, is a load of ethanol or of Bakken crude.

The You Tube channel soundtrack includes Canadian Pacific radio, and of late train crews have been calling attention to trespassers more frequently of late.  Whether that reflects a security bulletin or the effect of better weather on kiddos looking for new places to take selfies I don't know.

I do know that Our President is hailing all those tankers heading Stateside to pick up, and some of his cheering section in the media are carrying on about "jobs" and "exports" and all the rest.  Which is true, but let us balance that against the higher prices for finished product and the efficiency losses from sending the natural gas crude carriers over longer distances between loads.

As far as the Strait of Hormuz, Windward's most recent briefing notes, "The operating environment is now defined by active enforcement, partial compliance, and continued evasion, with vessel movement shaped by both restriction and adaptation."  There are still some eight hundred ships of all kinds west of the strait, which is a lot of cargo still to move.  The briefing noted that one of the outbound ships flew the Chinese Flag with a Hong Kong port.  Some people are making a lot of noise about that.  The ship has a cargo from one of the Gulf Arab states and its manifest is in order for passage.

BLOCKADING HATTERAS INLET IS HARDER.

I allude, of course, to Gideon Welles's Anaconda Plan, which ultimately strangled the rebellion.  It took four years to implement, because getting control of the Mississippi River and the Atlantic and Gulf of Mexico America wasn't easy.  Note how in four years, Vladimir Putin hasn't been able to do something similar with Ukraine.

INFRASTRUCTURE IS THEIR LEAST IMPORTANT PRODUCT.

In Transportation for America, Corrigan Salerno asks, "This Congress is focused on how federal dollars go out the door in the next surface transportation reauthorization, and it looks like states might win big time. But with a track record like theirs, why shouldn’t Congress consider who else might use their money better?"

Nobody?

With the vast majority of funding flowing directly to them, State DOTs are, in effect, in charge of the federal highway program. If they are to claim credit for successes, they need to be held accountable for their failures. While local-led planning and project delivery could get things wrong just as much as state DOTs do today, they may also end up being more accountable to the priorities and nuances of communities, based purely on their proximity. When your city or county misspends money or fails to take care of obvious needs, it’s a lot easier to hold them accountable than a faceless, faraway, typically unelected state transportation agency.

As an indication of just how far away they are from thinking about outcomes, one of AASHTO’s top talking points revolves around how good they are at spending other people’s money quickly.  Obligation rates, meaning simply the speed at which federal dollars are spent by a recipient, do not imply any measurement of success based on outcomes. If anything, the use of obligation rates as a metric should be scrutinized. What are you getting for that spending? Are results improving at unprecedented rates? Or are DOTs just prioritizing funding any investment as fast as possible?

In the manner of anything governmental, one requires a list of acronyms. "DOT" refers to state departments of transportation.  "AASHTO" refers to the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials.  That "and transportation" is a recent addition, as the acronym used to be "AASHO" which offers opportunities for all sorts of mischief.

None of which matters.  County road commissioners and state departments of road building are competing to get federal matching funds, which is to say, the local rent-seekers get to wet their beaks and future generations are on the hook to repair or replace it, which means hoping some future Member of Congress will write that project into some future porkulus.

IF ONLY THERE WAS A QUICKER WAY HOME.

The Green Bay Packers just put up two touchdowns on the Bears.  Oh, sorry, the Major League Baseball season opened in Milwaukee, with the Brewers allowing the White Sox a home run in the first and a home run in the ninth and otherwise battering Pale Hose pitching, 14-2.  And as I type, the Milwaukee traffic reporters are talking about all those people trying to get home.  Oh, did I mention that Interstate 94 is being widened in the vicinity of the Stadium.  Construction delays they'll never get back.  Wait, isn't that a line from "Take Me Out to the Ball Game?"

Now, look closely at this partially-colorized photograph, showing Milwaukee County Stadium, which the county built with the hopes of attracting a Major League Baseball team.

I forget the timing of the construction of Milwaukee County Stadium: it was there a few years before the Braves decamped from Boston, and this event took place before the outfield bleachers were built.  Focus, dear reader, on the embankment in black and white back behind the third-base grandstand and parking lot.  Two electrified tracks last operated by The Milwaukee Rapid Transit and Speedrail Corporation, and the substantial girder and truss bridge carrying trains over the Menominee River and The Milwaukee Road's main line.  And Speedrail had hoped to hang on long enough to be able to cash in on ball game traffic, as well as on passengers headed for the new Milwaukee County Zoo, a-building not far from where the electric cars ran.

That was not to be.

The photographer did not yet know that this photo, taken Labor Day of 1950 in downtown Hales Corners, was of the last run of duplex streetcar 39-40, which was wrecked in a fatal collision on a return working with the special train.

That was the end of Speedrail, although some of the right-of-way was available for streetcar service to the stadium.

That curved retaining wall on the southeast corner of Calvary Cemetery is still there, over seventy years on.  I have noted before that no Milwaukee team has won a World Series since the streetcar to the stadium went out of service.  I'm not sure whether the expansion of the expressway, which runs just to the left of the photo, will encroach on any of the trees or of those electric transmission towers, which are still in place with no streetcars or interurbans to run under them.

But I want to end this post on a cheerful note.  There have been too many gloomy posts of late.