Advocates make the primary claim that EV adoption will reduce stress on the climate system. Yet the value of greenhouse gas emissions reductions by way of EV switching is far lower than the existing tax credit implies. Electric vehicles draw power from the grid, so that their emissions simply occur at the generation site, rather than the tailpipe. Most U.S. power comes from natural gas and coal, so an electric vehicle still emits about one-third of what a conventional vehicle would.
That is only one of the immediate consequences. There are more immediate, and beyond, consequences.
The counterargument is that people can charge their cars at home. But that is a luxury those of us living in apartments and townhouses do not have, which highlights the regressiveness of [electric car]E subsidies. [Those] are products for suburban homeowners that call for yet more suburbanization. The Americans who benefit most from EV subsidies are those who are most attached to suburbs, the Boomers. Fifty-four percent of new EV purchases are made by people born before Lyndon Johnson was sworn in as president.
>More critically, [electric cars] will do nothing to return American streets to human beings. Thousands of Americans are killed each year while walking by drivers crashing vehicles into them. To the human body, whether the projectile hurtling towards it is powered by gasoline or by battery is of no consequence—but at least death by EV comes quietly.
Helpfully confirming the capture of climate policy by car culture, General Motors has now humorously announced it is “all in” on [electric cars]. This should come as no surprise. The Detroit giant senses a shift in the political winds and smells a new sales market. GM’s [electric] push doesn’t signal the end of an era so much as it signals the beginning of a new stanza in the epic of the car.
At the margin, you could fit the electrics with that Jetson deedling sound (per the Blogfather) but you're still engaging in regressive transfers in the name of the environment. And neglecting the consequences of recycling all those batteries?
Freddie DeBoer, academician of the left, has had enough of performative identity politics.
The insistence that all things have political valence, no matter how ridiculous; that every last aspect of your life is a potential site of political struggle; and that these struggles are of vast importance even though they have no material impact on the world - these things combine to make social justice politics totalizing and yet unserious, inescapable and thus mundane, unremarkable. Paradoxically the intense emotionalism of this school of politics, the insistence that feeling a particular way amounts to doing something, must inevitably leave its proponents unable to make basic distinctions of priority and practice, unwilling to distinguish between what makes them feel intensely and what could make the largest impact in real-world terms. This is not a popular sentiment, to say the least, but it is true: oppression is not emotional, oppression is material.
And where oppression is immaterial, reality has little regard for your feelings, dear reader, but I digress. Mr DeBoer makes a number of points. Here's a key quote. "In a very basic sense this means that social justice politics lack the typical correction systems of other ideologies. When criticism becomes forbidden it is impossible to recognize and address serious internal problems. This meta-problem permeates everything that follows." Hie thee hence, read and understand.
The Stanford women's basketball team won their bubble tournament. It's tough to be a good team in the era of Pat Summitt and Geno Auriemma.
Chiney and Nneka Ogwumike had their chances at championships for Stanford that fell short before the sisters celebrated one together in San Antonio when the Cardinal finally won again.
Kate Starbird, Nicole Powell, Candice Wiggins and countless others were also part of talented Stanford teams that didn’t end their seasons by cutting down the nets.
“It’s heartbreaking to go through that,” recalled Tara VanDerveer, who completed her 35th year coaching Stanford by capturing the program’s first NCAA championship since 1992.
Let the record show that Northern Illinois hosted a first-round game in that tournament. As a lower seed. (The Northern Illinois rant will be for another day.) Stanford has been in the final four ten times since them. As far as I know, nobody got after the coach for underachieving in the tournament. "The 67-year-old VanDerveer is the all-time winningest women’s coach and she’s not ready to say whether she is pondering retirement — not yet, anyway." Make of that what you will.
The Baylor men's team won their bubble tournament. Make of a Baptist college outplaying a previously undefeated Jesuit college what you will. Today's theme is patience.
The game ended in fitting fashion as the Bears stole a pass and dribbled the clock out, bringing a championship to Waco, Texas. It’s a huge feat for the school which has had multiple scandals over the years, including the men’s basketball program, but all that changed with the hiring of Head Coach Scott Drew who took over in 2003. He had visions of what the team could accomplish.
“We came to win games at the NCAA tournament,” Drew said in his introductory press conference in 2003. “We came with a chance to win a National Championship at Baylor University and that’s my goal here.”
Despite being given a program that has gone through many adversities, it’s great to see Drew so confident to fulfill on a promise he made nearly 20 years ago.
The Baylor women's team have not been bad over those past twenty years, either. Building a men's program slowly, though, well, that's rare.
Then, Wisconsin athletics director and football coach Barry Alvarez announced his retirement. "Wisconsin has enjoyed remarkable success during Alvarez’s tenure, winning a combined 16 team national titles and 74 conference regular-season or tournament crowns since he took over. In 2017-18, he earned Under Armour Athletic Director of the Year honors." He and his staff arrived in Madison relatively late in the recruiting season, and yet put together a recruiting class that provided senior leadership for a Rose Bowl win at the start of 1994, back when there was no January playoff.
I saved the best patience part for last. One of the tasks the new coach gave his staff was to get acquainted with the various deans on campus. Unfortunately, none of the news sources I searched through provided a transcript, so the best I can do is link to the university's video feed of Mr Alvarez's remarks. (Why, oh, why, with information technology, is so much stuff only sequential access now? I don't have time to sit through videos and stream podcasts.)
Somewhere in the early remarks, he tells a story about how one of the deans, if I recall correctly, subsequent chancellor John Wiley, was not at all interested in meeting with an assistant football coach for lunch, but that assistant persisted, and the resulting relationship turned out well for athletics, and perhaps for the university's visibility. Recall, though, that "Wisconsin football coach" was up there with "Amtrak timetable coordinator" in the list of high status occupations throughout the 1970s and 1980s.
Bas-Ket, Sure Shot Hockey, electric football and let’s not forget that little backboard you hung on your bedroom door so you could play a raucous game of one-on-one Nerf hoops with your little brother or your best friend until your mom or dad told you to knock it off and wash your hands because dinner is in five minutes and we’re having pork chops and mashed potatoes and peas so hurry it up.
Some of those old-school games from the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s rocked — but some sucked. They were terrible. We just told ourselves they were great.
Those archaic foods, such as pork chops, were likely a treat back in the day. Bas-Ket featured spring-loaded flippers, and used a ping-pong ball, and I don't remember whether it was more fun to pull the levers back so as to accurately make the shots, or to see how far the ping-pong ball would go. Sure-Shot Hockey could refer to any number of games. All I can recall is that they were all too rich for our blood, never mind how well the version I recall was set up with Toronto playing Montreal, and how intriguing the countdown device that would drop the puck for a center ice face-off was. Those vibrating table football games of the era, though, well, slot cars offered more play value, and the patience of setting things up is better reserved for model railroading, or learning to cut wood properly.
The metal field, which was scaled in the dimensions of a real football field, was a thing of beauty. The little players with their detailed uniforms were awesome. Each guy was mounted on a green plastic base with prongs, and you could bend and twist the prongs so a lineman would hold his ground or a running back would go to the left; at least that was the idea. Quarterbacks and kickers had movable parts so you could throw passes or attempt field goals; at least that was the idea. The ball itself back in the day was a tiny oval made of felt.
Before each play, you’d line up your 11 players and your opponent would line up their 11 players — and then you’d flick the “ON” switch and the field would begin to vibrate with a mighty roar, and 22 little football men would go this way and that, over here and over there, until one of the defensive guys made contact with the ball carrier, and you’d turn off the switch — and then you’d have to painstakingly line up all those players AGAIN. Did anyone ever finish a game of electric football? I think our limit was about six plays, including one errant pass with the felt football, before we’d break out the Hot Wheels.
Looks like garden railroad trackage and stock, and they used spare cotton swabs to help tune the glasses. Who knew there was a Guinness record for tuned glass railroads. Enjoy, and name those tunes!
Stephen Kruiser refuses to apologize for The American Founding. "The modern woke consensus is that we’re all supposed to be in a collective self-loathing guilt trip because the United States of America didn’t burst forth from the revolutionary womb having gotten it all right from the get-go." Emergence is like that. It also involves cultural appropriation, which he also won't apologize for.
In principle, academic tenure exists as a safeguard for people to play with ideas. "In other words, if you want academics to engage in quality thinking, they have to be allowed to think out loud without fear of being fired if they say something that makes someone angry." On the other hand, it might be a poisoned chalice for the protection of cowardly careerists. "Ask yourself whether academic freedom and tenure are for Lernfreiheit, or for craven cowardice." Used to be, the group-thinkers didn't want to be tainted with free market notions. These days, that seem like a minor fear: now the risk is coming off as a segregationist or something. The hammer fell on Elisa Parrett, recently tenured in English at the Lake Washington Institute of Technology, for the crime of ... talking back in a struggle session.
Parrett went on to complain about the segregated setting of the training and what she saw as the generally closed-minded nature of the nation's post-Floyd discourse. "Democracy thrives on conversations, but what we are seeing happening right now in the United States is not a conversation," she read. "It is a coup. Everyday Americans of all colors, creeds, backgrounds, and beliefs are being held hostage. Zealots are telling us, 'You're either with us or against us, and if you're against us, you're an evil bigot.' They are telling us, 'You're either part of the solution, or you're part of the problem.' They are telling us that all people may be classified into two sides: us or them, Democrat or Republican, liberal or conservative, people of color or white, righteous or bigoted, oppressed or privileged. I don't accept such false dichotomies, and I don't accept the ad hominem implications that come with it. Too often, words like 'privileged,' 'defensive,' and 'fragile' are just ways to dismiss what another person has to say. Too often, words like 'racist' are just a way to intimidate someone into silence." Parrett argued that people should work together to solve "real problems like wealth disparity, poverty, job insecurity, unemployment, the high cost of living, or the fracturing of the nuclear family, whatever form that family takes," but are waylaid by those who claim the "real problems" are "racism, sexism, transphobia…[and] hateful words."
Predictably, the careerists are manifesting themselves. "The group seemed unhappy Parrett had injected such a skeptical and defiant note into the proceedings—a fair amount of cross-talk and accusation ensued—though she says a number of other colleagues thanked her (mostly privately) for speaking up." After an inquiry of Kafkaesque dimensions, the professor's docket includes a letter of reprimand. The institute itself, just one more hothouse.
In parts of academia and media, it appears to be increasingly common for left-leaning people to make inflated claims of harm when they are exposed within their community to opinions that might rate as blandly center-right or even center-left in a broader context. In other words, the victims of these inquisitions are often accused of having perpetrated a level of harm that would strike a reasonable observer as a profound exaggeration of what occurred.
Parrett's case is drenched in harm claims. According to the LWTech administration, hundreds of her colleagues were rendered so distraught by her words they couldn't even do their jobs. She also needed to be punished, according to [vice president for instruction Suzanne] Ames, for the harm she could commit against a hypothetical student from a marginalized background.
In progressive communities threatened by illiberalism, this hysterical style of accusation is now commonplace.
The accusations also serve to shield people from precisely the sorts of ideas they'd most benefit from being able to engage in an intelligent manner. Our universities, from Brown to Lake Washington, are being run by terminally stupid people.
Particular candidates or parties will offer a platform full of a variety of policy proposals. Individual voters might like some of those proposals but also dislike some of them. Some voters might dislike nearly all of a candidate’s positions. Whichever candidate wins, or whichever party wins a majority, everyone will be subject to their attempts to put their preferred policies in place, regardless of whether we liked those policies or not.
Imagine going to the grocery store and rather than picking out the individual items you wish to buy, each store offered a pre-selected bundle of groceries that were available for purchase. Kroger might offer a different bundle than Whole Foods or Aldi, but each store offers only one bundle and you have to buy everything that’s in it. If we push this analogy to its limit, imagine further that you are required to eat everything that’s in the bundle. Similarly, we could imagine restaurants working in this sort of way.
You can easily see the problems. First, the stores would cater to the median shopper and diner, in a pretty good replica of the median voter theorem. Minority tastes would be largely shut out. Second, very few people would be anywhere close to fully happy with their bundle of groceries or their meal. And if you’re required to eat what you buy, some folks are going to be very unhappy about their meals.
The median eater phenomenon is the best case scenario. Imagine a polarized polity, divided about evenly between strong olive eaters and strong olive avoiders, with control of the bundle being alternated every few years.
The collective choice processes of politics, by definition, don’t allow for the possibility of the tolerance of others’ preferences that is the foundation of the marketplace. This is why so many political battles, especially recently, seem so high-stakes. It’s a winner-take-all game, so those who perceive themselves in the minority have every reason to fight hard, if not cheat.
The more goods and services that are provided through political allocation, the more we will deal with this sort of problem.
I thought the purpose of existential philosophy was to make people feel unsafe. Silly me.
A petition has been launched against Western Washington University Department of Theatre’s decision to showcase the existentialist play “No Exit” this fall.
The petition argues the script is problematic because it gender stereotypes women and lesbians and puts a man in a quasi-leadership role, which perpetuates patriarchy.
Old Jean might have had to say "yes, dear" to Simone, but his plays might have been his way of talking back. Maybe he wasn't as down for Simone playing both ways as he let on. But wait, there's more.
The petition also argues the play is inappropriate at this time because it is set in one room in which the characters cannot escape, thus may be too “mentally taxing for the community to watch. Especially if we are still in quarantine at that time.”
“This play is not challenging, but instead is reinforcing classical notions of womanhood designed by the patriarchy,” the petition states, adding “it is disturbing and unacceptable.”
“No Exit” is a play by French philosopher and existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre. Penned in 1944, it’s about three people trapped in a room, and as they spend more time in it they come to realize that being trapped in eternity with the same three people is hell as opposed to fire and brimstone.
The play’s most famous line — “Hell is other people” — comes toward the end when the male character realizes this.
Good writing is supposed to shine a light (or is it direct a lens?) on aspects of life otherwise unexamined, and calling attention to quarantine conditions in a way that might be manifesting itself at the divorce lawyer's office is one way for that light to shine. Good grief.
They run out of new gags, and out of new recruits. Their tropes grow tiresome, even comical, such as the Woke mainstays of “racism,” “misogyny,” and “white supremacy.” Their promptings reveal themselves as obviously dishonest. The punishments they seek seem increasingly warped and sadistic. The behavior they induce begins to look patently insane. That’s where America stands now.
Social movements that look scary and permanent at the time run their course. Younger readers were not around in the ten years from Steal This Book, to The Official Preppy Handbook, or for the change in Jeff MacNelly cartoons from Jimmy Carter begging Leonid Brezhnev to behave, to Mikhail Gorbachev begging the rest of the world for food. In some ways, the contemporary manifestations of the counterculture are more fragile than their 1960s predecessors, and not just for the vegan diets and androgyny.
The geographic area and population of Illinois are both similar to those in Sweden, and there are similarities of the Chicago and Stockholm metropolitan areas. But Springfield politicians are hazardous to your health. Governor J. B. Pritzker (D-Lake Geneva) continues to micromanage and destroy local businesses.
A service called Worldometers has been keeping track of coronavirus infections and deaths, disaggregated in a number of ways.
Conditions in Illinois are such that a transition to a full reopening is in order. If I have to keep extending this post until Anthony Fauci comes to his senses, or resigns, or until the governor is primaried, or until the ukases are vacated, or until the cows come home, I will.
The Centers for Disease Control are currently reporting over six million Trump shots (in many cases, these are both doses of the Moderna or Pfizer vaccines) administered statewide. The statewide recovery rate is still around 98 percent. The legislature, however, is still doing nothing to rein in the governor's ukases. I'm encouraged that Republicans seeking state office are going to make that a campaign issue.
Public-health officials widely denounced Sweden for refusing to lock down and mandate masks last spring, when its Covid-19 mortality was high. A computer model projected nearly 100,000 Swedish deaths from the virus last year. But that prediction turned out to be ten times too high [see above -- Ed.], and other countries have since caught up with Sweden. While it suffered another outbreak this winter, mainly in regions that were not hit hard in the spring, Sweden’s cumulative death toll per capita from Covid-19 is now slightly below the European Union’s average and about 20 percent lower than America’s.
Free states have largely avoided the labor market carnage associated with the COVID pandemic, while lockdown states have wrought higher unemployment levels — without guaranteeing better pandemic health outcomes.
As famed economist Thomas Sowell said, in complex issues of public policy “there are no solutions, there are only tradeoffs.” There was never an easy answer to the COVID pandemic, but the economic, health, and social outcomes of free states all suggest that they made the right call in rejecting the authoritarian instinct embraced by too many of their neighbors.
Although public health officials aren't necessarily economists, they ought be sensitive to the notion of tradeoffs.
Public-health officials are supposed to consider the overall impact of their policies, not just the immediate effect on one disease. They’re supposed to weigh costs and benefits, promoting policies that save the most total years of life, which means taking special care to protect younger people and not divert vast resources to treatments for those near the end of life. They are not supposed to test unproven and dangerous treatments by conducting experiments on entire populations.
Sweden and Florida followed these principles when they rejected lockdowns and trusted their citizens to take sensible precautions. That trust has been vindicated.
That, though, is not the way for public officials with ambitions to be the next Platonic philosopher king to roll. "The goal is always to make fear of something the problem and then empowering the government the solution." That means keeping up the skeer. "A February bar opening in rural Illinois led to at least 46 COVID-19 cases, a school closure affecting 650 children, and the hospitalization of one long-term care facility resident, according to a Monday report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)." Nobody died, and the school closure was on the basis of Illinois ukases. That doesn't matter, though, because there's a Narrative. "Local health department officials first traced a cluster of cases to the bar event, which was mostly attended by 18- to 44-year-old white men. It's unclear how many people attended, but the venue could hold 100 people."
Last week, the governor trailed by 10,125. Note the time series: a margin of terror that used to be growing by hundreds in a week is growing by around a hundred, or less.
The day train linking Wellington and Auckland is back in operation. "You’ll feel smug as you settle into your seat and the train glides out of the city against the flow of commuters heading in to work." The suburban zone looks like what you might get if the Denver and Intermountain had remained in operation into the strip-mall era. Although the train is running on the North Island, there is no such thing as a water level route.
Rivers threading down from their slopes have cut deep channels through the plain, but the smooth journey continues, thanks to more viaducts here. They date back to 1908 and one, marked by an obelisk, was the last link in the completion of the route between Auckland and Wellington. It’s the Hāpuawhenua Viaduct, rebuilt in 1981, that gets everyone jostling for photos. Its elegant 414m curve, on tall concrete pillars rising from the fern-filled bush, is a modern classic.
Trouncing even that, though, is the Raurimu Spiral that comes next. Designed in 1898 to make the steep 139m height difference accessible, the track here winds around on itself with two short tunnels, three hairpin bends and one big horseshoe curve. It’s in equal measure clever, using the topography to avoid the need for bridges, and a testament to engineering skill and, especially, hard work by men with shovels and horses pulling carts. It’s also quite confusing for passengers, able at one point to see their own train heading in the opposite direction on what looks like a separate track. The story goes that a train driver once slammed on his brakes, seeing his own guard’s van light apparently just ahead, and fearing a collision.
The train is primarily for sightseeing, and one rake alternates departures, marking off on Tuesdays.
Mary L. G. Theroux provides the Easter meditation. "Easter is the day of liberation—the day the greatest earthly power has done its best, unleashed its ultimate weapon—and been defeated." As the hymn puts it, "a mighty triumph o'er His foes."
I think "zionism as racism" was a public policy thing before there was a Star Wars cantina. It's the message of his cartoon, not the presentation of the United Nations, that is really prescient.
Think I was being hyperbolic a month ago? "It's almost enough to make one think that the people pushing "inclusive education" have among their priors that their protected-class charges don't have the necessities to write a coherent essay or derive a proper proof."
It is difficult to survey recent developments in "inclusive" education and not be compelled to think as much. Consider intelligence itself. “Stop calling your female colleagues ‘smart,’ or ‘clever,’ or ‘brilliant’” might be a clunky way of saying "don't patronize people," but when it comes bundled with “intelligence is a White man’s mythology” what do you do, dear reader?
The authors of the program state that “The concept of mathematics being purely objective is unequivocally false, and teaching it is even much less so. Upholding the idea that there are always right and wrong answers perpetuate objectivity as well as fear of open conflict.”
The materials also instruct teachers to “Choose problems that have complex, competing, or multiple answers” so that students can come up with “at least two answers” in order to “challenge standardized test questions…”
Don't students deserve some intellectual basis for being able to "challenge standardized test questions," something that I used to do to get graduate students to be more careful in designing their exams? That implies a basis for producing right answers, which is to say a functioning intellect, doesn't it?
The next unnecessary difficulty to go is ... musical notation? "Musical notation should be studied whether it has roots in Babylonia or Brighton." Exactly, and Delta blues and Harlem jazz and Tribagonian calypsos are written down using it.
Encouraging black youth to better themselves by achieving in school, working at legitimate jobs, eschewing substance abuse and sexual experimentation, and forming stable two-parent families is somehow not in their lane; so much easier, more immediately satisfying and rewarding when it comes to regular gigs in national news media, academia, or in the newly popular gravy train of corporate anti-racism training. At the bottom line of this all is the realization that the problems and pathologies afflicting the worse-off urban black communities can really only be fixed by the community itself. Blaming everyone else for those pathologies is a useless and potentially dangerous diversion.
In the past, differentials in educational attainment were put down by some to genetic factors; the outperformance of a particular racial group was explained by making reference to the genetic superiority of one group over another. For reasons to do with inaccuracy as much as unpalatability, this explanation has declined in popularity. But if someone today were to enter a discussion wielding the hammer of genetic traits, we would all be able to see what they were doing: rather than being interesting in discussion, their conclusion had already been decided.
Instead of "genetic traits," the one-size-fits-all argument these days is "institutional racism," as if somehow the very tools of writing words or music or equations aren't for everybody.
In Evanston, Illinois, Ndona Muboyayi is running for the school board precisely to protect her children from that sort of intellect-crushing idiocy. "I want my children to know about slavery and Jim Crow. But I want it to be balanced out with the rest of the truth. They’re not taught about Black people who accomplished things in spite of white supremacy; or about the Black people today who got ahead, built things, achieved things; and those who had opportunities that their ancestors fought for." Read the entire interview, I'll give her the final word. "Showing up on time has nothing to do with being white. It’s something that you’re taught or not taught. My [Congolese] father taught me at a very early age to keep my word. If you say that you’re going to be somewhere at some time, be there. What system of white supremacy was he influenced by?"
That's long been a Cold Spring Shops theme. Cato's Chris Edwards applies similar thinking to the infrastructure parts of Our President*'s latest wish list. "It moves entirely in the wrong direction by increasing subsidies and centralizing power. A better approach would be to end federal subsidies and decentralize infrastructure ownership and decisionmaking." Make people aware of just how much they're relying on other people's money to keep their roads passable and watch the fireworks. But it's an idea that might just catch on, after Our Political Masters have tried everything else.
Biden would subsidize Amtrak $80 billion. Instead, passenger rail should be privatized and de‐unionized to reduce costs and increase flexibility to run the system efficiently based on consumer needs, not political directives.
Biden would subsidize highways $115 billion, public schools $100 billion, urban transit $85 billion, water systems $66 billion, and airports $25 billion. There is no need for federal subsidies for these state and local assets. The states should fund their infrastructure with taxes and user charges. Indeed, many state and local assets—such as airports, seaports, and water systems—should be privatized and subsidies ended. Some highways and transit systems should also be privatized.
That preceding post turned out to be long, and a balky internet connection made its production even longer. Now put yourself in the shoes of the train dispatcher, as five sections of the Ringling Barnum train move The Greatest Show on Earth through Iowa.
On the other hand, the yardmasters welcomed the distraction, as on any model railroad, the distance between towns is so short that the yards quickly become overwhelmed, and with all the road operators stretching out their motive power on the circus extras, the yardmasters were able to get caught up, even taking some time to record the passage of the trains.
It's been an interesting week for people making observations in the service of longer arguments. Here are the passages that caught my attention. Follow the links for the elaborations.
The City of Milwaukee is ready to implement a new street light fee.
Approved as part of the city’s 2021 budget, the Department of Public Works says it will be part of the municipal services bill people will receive starting next quarter.
The charge is $1 per linear foot for a property’s street frontage, or the shorter street side for a corner property.
The average household should owe around $10 per quarter.
Time to update the Community Chest card?
I leave it to people more versed in the minutiae of municipal finance to determine whether this street light charge is a user fee or a new assessment on a property tax. I wonder, though, what balance the taxing authorities might strike between taxing road access, which is what the Monopoly assessment, or a similar sort of quarterly frontage charge to property owners is, and taxing road use, which is what excise taxes on tires and gasoline (and there has to be a way of metering battery use) do, if incompletely, and what those miles-travelled taxes also intend to do.
That's right, the map is aspirational, and also taking such a long view that if nothing changes, nobody notices.
Along with [Amtrak head Bill] Flynn’s statement, the company released a “Amtrak Connects US” fact sheet and map, available here, that shows existing routes, including those with “enhanced service,” and suggests where new routes might be added as part of what Amtrak calls “Our 2035 Vision.”
The map is similar to one the company made available to advocacy organizations as it sought to garner support from states which might be interested in sponsoring short-distance corridors.
The outline claims there would be “up to 160 more communities served; multiple daily trips in 15 more states; up to 30+ potential new routes; and up to 20+ existing routes with more trips.” Details are not provided because all those proposed additions would require a buy-in by states, or groups of states, to make a long-term commitment to fund operations.
Amtrak, and the political figures pushing for an expanded Passenger Rail network, ought not be calling attention to any ultra-fast, French or German style, dedicated services on special rails.
Something more like this, which is to say, a restoration of a state of good repair, might be the place to start.
That Hiawatha is passing through Camp McCoy, near the crossing of the old Chicago and North Western at Camp Douglas, and once upon a time, the connection for Madison was to a train at Portage rather than the bus at Columbus.
