Part of the Socialist-Fascist Nightmare Stimulus Package that, if some are believed, funds Stalinesque death camps was also funding for high speed railways. I imagine part of the incentive for this was Joe Biden (seen right on his commute back in the 1980s) being Vice President. Despite his myriad other policy flaws, he's the biggest friend trains have in government right now, and that's a good thing.
Trains are great. They offer the advantages of the automobile highway and few disadvantages. The auto highway is inefficient for commuting with the frequency of one-driver cars, those cars pollute quite a lot, and they become even more inefficient and polluting when there's an hour long traffic jam keeping a good thousand cars sitting in place.
High speed railways are much more efficient, don't get stuck in traffic jams, and are very, very fast. Trains in Europe and Japan average out to around 150 mph. This makes the commute a lot faster than a major artery at rush hour, even if you have to walk a little ways (which might be seen as an advantage soon enough).
So when I heard the stimulus had trains in it, I was very excited.
No high speed train from Portland down to San Francisco like I want, but I can live with that. Railways do cost more to build and maintain than freeways, so I didn't expect something analogous to the Interstate Highway System.
But still - why not? A high speed railway up and down the west seems like a natural goal. I can say from living in that weird deadzone between Eugene and San Francisco that the economies here would greatly benefit from a high speed line, particularly tourism-fueled Ashland.
Ever since the Interstate cars and airplanes have been the main way of getting people around. They're far from optimal - airplanes are hugely inefficient and polluting and the car and interstate have destroyed the city.
That's the thesis of the chapter of Alex Marshall's How Cities Work that I'm reading right now, and it rings very true. Cities are defined by transportation because they are economic engines. Commerce breeds jobs which allows people to make a living and build a good city. That's why the Dakotas now have less people than they did in the 1900s while New York just keeps growing.
Through history cities were constantly pushing outwards out of necessity, desperately trying to reconcile economics with physical reality and keep people from building on top of each other. They were limited by the natural geography and the form of transportation - boats, feet and horses for several thousand years. As canals and railways took hold, cities reshaped themselves to accommodate and take advantage of them, but the same pressure towards centralization remained while the new technology allowed people to expand out further.
Cars and their highways are not centralizing systems. Attempts to reorganize cities to accommodate them as was done with railways and canals is fatal. They reversed the polarity and caused the growth to explode out.
Highway off-ramps now serve a similar purpose to railway stations, but their units of distance are measured in miles rather than city blocks. A large number of cars needs a lot of parking lot space. The urban form we know is a result of centralizing forms of transit, exurb-clusters like Las Vegas and Atlanta are the offspring of cars.
Much of our culture is traced to the historic perception of America as the limitless frontier. We still have a lot of empty land - the aforementioned Dakotas, Montana, Alaska, Wyoming, and so on. But that's irrelevant to a city - without constraints on space cities won't form. This is why urban growth boundaries are important.
This perception, I think, is why trains haven't been more popular. It's the same attitude that causes people to flip their shit when higher mileage standards are proposed. Europe and Japan have an excellent high speed rail system and people see that as a necessary sacrifice (not an added benefit of) having less space. Cars in the UK get up to 62 mpg. Here an unfortunate many people here believe a 40 mpg CAFE standard infringes on their "right to drive gas hogs" (that anyone would think that's a desirable right and say it thinking it doesn't sound stupid shows our car culture at its worst). FOX News was recently in hysterics over the false dilemma that lighter cars (I should note that I think Smartcars look stupid - really, we can't just make fuel efficient motorcycles?) are horrible deathtraps. They apparently view the streets as automotive battlegrounds where Hummers smash through VW Bugs during their blood-soaked commute. Ford F-150s with oversize wheels crushing Honda Civics. Mormon Assault Vehicles ramming bicyclists out of their way as they heave the family to a community picnic.
I think I lost the point of this post when I was drifting off into suburban Car Wars. I guess I'll just end it by restating that high speed rail between SF and Portland would be awesome.
And I hate Greyhound buses.
About a week ago I attended a lecture on campus by PZ Myers. As is par for the course here, retirees outnumbered students at least ten to one (despite admission being free for students and $10/person otherwise). Lack of seating aside I really enjoyed it.
It was about intelligent design and why it's not, as people like the Discovery Institute claim, at all on par with evolutionary science. Part of his point was how different things that are designed and things that have evolved by natural selection are.
To illustrate this he brought up evolved satellite antennae. An evolutionary algorithm was used to create and simulate a variety of designs, the most fit one was selected, and them descendant forms of that antennae produced and selected from and so on. The resulting antennae look very weird but work very well - actually far better than the ones NASA engineers designed. They also have a lot of extraneous and awkward parts, the detritus of adaptations. This is why natural selection can produce things like us humans, who have phenomenally advanced brains but precariously located testes.
It took me until this morning, when I was sitting in math and sketching streetcar stations, to connect this to last term's Urban Geography class and realize you could do the same thing with a city.
There's plenty of data to be had on traffic patterns from around the world. From that you can develop a model to simulate the behavior of pedestrians, motorists, bicyclists and rickshaws. Develop a whole range of permutations of city layouts (with all their varieties of intersection types, speed zones, and and select for whatever criteria is desired - least number of accidents, least congestion, most pedestrian-friendly - and go on from there.
I'd be most interested to see how the evolved forms differ from our own. I doubt they'd look like the twisted mazes of Las Vegas suburbs, but it's also unlikely they'd be a nice gridiron like Manhattan.
I'm very glad I came down to Ashland and took that class. Crossing the hell-intersection of Siskiyou and Indiana is far worse th
an crossing 82nd 
Street. Part of this is just the drivers. 82nd Street has its fair share of idiots in low riders with oversized spoilers, but Siskiyou has all of them plus hicks in Ford F-150s with oversized tires who - as I learned last Sunday - will gleefully feign running you down for laughs. This plus the retirees. Half the driving population is made up of people 18-22 and 65-80. Of course the main problem is that Siskiyou is fed directly into by Highway 99, and no one can drive below 45. Anyone who was around me during spring break probably heard me bitch about the Ashland government's response to a pedestrian death at that crosswalk: put in more crosswalks.
Urban planning always tickled my interest, maybe in part because I grew up playing with SimCity 2000 and others like it. The anthology on cities I did for my senior English project also did a lot to put my mind on it. Dealing with that intersection and taking that class, though, have actually made me consider it more seriously as a field of study.
Hopefully all this doesn't bleed into the D&D campaign I plan to run over the summer. I don't want to bore my players with diagrams explaining the absolute genius behind Dwarven intermodal separation of transit.
