Oil Sands Truth: Shut Down the Tar Sands

High-speed rail may help Midwest with energy crunch (Illinois)

High-speed rail may help Midwest with energy crunch
by Chris Gray
Oct 09, 2008

World oil supplies are depleting and gas prices are volatile. The federal highway program — fueled by gas taxes — is running out of money.

Air travel, also tied to fuel costs, is becoming less affordable.

The cities of the Midwest are getting farther apart, practically speaking, if not literally.

Rick Harnish, the executive director of the Chicago-based Midwest High Speed Rail Association, believes there is a way out.

“Having high-speed rail in some form in the Midwest is absolutely essential to our economy functioning properly,” Harnish said. “We’ve got to figure out how to massively reduce our consumption of fuel, and one key part of it is electrifying the railroads.”

Anthony Perl, a professor of urban studies at Simon Frasier University in Vancouver, B.C., said the problem with oil supply and consumption is becoming particularly urgent.

“The Beverly Hillbillies oil period is really coming to an end if it already hasn’t,” said Perl, who was invited to speak before the Midwest High Speed Rail Association last weekend at DePaul University's Loop campus. “The oil that has to be harvested in oil sands in Alberta is not the Beverly Hillbillies oil.”

He said the world may still have a large supply of oil, but whereas traditional oil could be sucked out like with a straw, most of the remaining oil, like oil sands in Canada, have a different composition and must be squeezed out more like from a sponge.

And the more the oil is squeezed, the harder and costlier it is to get it out.

“We’ve done a good job of making our transportation dependent on oil,” Perl said. “Oil drives 98.5 percent of transporation in the U.S.A.”

That oil fuels automobiles as well as jets as well as diesel trucks and trains.

“Every option for replacing the world’s second half of oil on a one-to-one basis has high costs and complications,” said Perl, but there may be no choice. “When you’re in a hole and you need to get out, you need to stop digging. We’re building highway infrastructure that will be obsolete the day that it is opened.”

Perl recommended a transporation revolution, with a greater use of electric motors replacing the internal combustion engine. He also said governments would be wise to make greater use of rail and water and less use of road and air. There should be greater use of collectively managed transport (mass transit) and less use of personally managed transport (like the private automobile.)

“The revolution ahead will be one of the things that turn America toward a sustainable future,” Perl said.

To Perl, an obvious direction is rail. Not only is hydrogen technology for cars not yet readily available, but the process is such that 75 percent of the energy is lost. If electricity is produced from a central source, and then strung out on a grid, only 10 percent is lost, he said.

“We are going to need leaders who can distinguish between 90 percent efficiency and 25 percent efficiency,” Perl said.

Europe is in its fourth or fifth generation of high-speed electrified rail technology, which the United States could borrow and adapt.

Harnish said that in any other country Chicago would be acting as a hub of a high-speed rail network, with so many cities nearby, from Cleveland to Cincinnati to St. Louis to Minneapolis.

“There’s a lot of talk, there’s lots of supporters, but not enough people who have made this their No. 1 or No. 2 priority,” Harnish said. “Not a lot of progress, and that is what we are trying to change.”

The group has made some progress. Rail frequency in Illinois has doubled over the past three years. Instead of three round trips to St. Louis from Chicago via Springfield, there are five. Ridership is up 15 percent over last year, on the Illinois routes, and revenues, especially on the route to St. Louis are also up.

The High Speed Rail Association supported the Regional Transportation Authority’s sales tax hike, and it is lobbying Metra to start accepting credit cards so that all transit providers in the RTA could use one unified transit card.

This month, Congress released $9 billion to Amtrak to help make the way for trains traveling 110 miles per hour in the Midwest. With European trains capable of 220 miles per hour, there’s still a long way to go, but 110 would be better than Amtrak’s current 79 miles per hour.

Many rail lines across the Midwest once had four sets of tracks, but now have been reduced to two or only one, causing congestion with freigh trains and causing delays. New tracks would need to be laid, Harnish said.

He sees as a good first model what was done in California. In 1990, that state had basically the same service that Illinois has today. But voters approved a comprehensive 10-cent gas tax that funded transit and bike paths as well as highways.

The state is able to support six trains on one route, 12 on another and as many as 16 on a third.

“If you do that, Union Station becomes as busy as Midway Airport,” Harnish said.

http://news.medill.northwestern.edu/chicago/news.aspx?id=100499

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