High speed passenger rail

 I think I can convince you that there is a great alternative to high speed rail.  I've been plugging away trying to get the idea out there for years, but the entrenched money is in the status quo, so it falls on deaf ears.  Here is my pitch. 

High speed passenger rail is an outdated concept.  Few people understand how labor intensive and insecure rail transport was and is. I can cite case after case of disgruntled rail employees and union sympathizers in the 1800s and early 1900s who wrecked trains and rail routes. In the sky, there is no easy access to a flying plane, and the average terrorist has to at least buy a ticket on his way to his heaven. On the ground, every inch of track is a potential weak point to terrorist threat.

Further, make no mistake, the claims of the high-speed rail folks are NOT aimed towards helping the average commuter. If you examine the various plans, they promote high speed transport along tourist corridors.   The promoters have all the skills of lampreys homing in on their big fish, the over-funded government agencies and more gullible greenies, so that they can suck the money out of them.  That is the real driving force of the high speed rail movement.  Please don't fall for the hype of the promoters.

Passenger rail failed in the U.S.  There were a number of factors involved in the demise, but the biggest was the effect of better roads and rubber tires.  A lot of folks don't know that during the heyday of passenger rail, in many areas of the U.S. the roads were closed for the winter and spring mud seasons, and other passable roads were expensive turnpikes.

In the 1800s, people were literally hostage to the railroad timetables. If an area had two trains a day, a trip to the nearest city could often be a two or three day trip. That was a bad idea back then, and is totally impractical today.

During those Halcyon days of rail travel, many competing railroads actually scheduled trains to AVOID good interconnections. In one case in Essex Junction Vermont, an engineer was seen actively backing his train away from the station because he had mistakenly arrived in time for people to make connections with the competing line.  I have cites if needed.

When good concrete was rediscovered in England, and Macadam figured out how to use a little bit of asphaltum to create a tarred road, the surface roads got a technological boost that made them a superior to the railroads for transporting people and goods. 

Why did cities look at paved roads, rubber tires and autos with such favor? Automobiles and bicycles didn't coat towns with cinders like steam trains. Cleaning horse doo was costly, leaving it on the streets was not possible, since it was a health hazard, and the metal tires and horseshoes ground gravel and pebbles and paving stones into dust, which went everywhere.  From 1900 to 1910, there was a revolution in transportation that was every bit a game changer as much as the introduction of the personal computer in the 1980s and subsequent interconnected communication of those computers.  Both passenger rail and street sweepers became rarities, just as the typewriter and adding machines fell to the computer.

The railroad company executives were not stupid.  A lot of folks who love rail don't know that when air travel was first commercialized, rail companies bought and owned passenger planes and were themselves moving their passengers to planes whenever practical. However, the government stepped in and declared it unfair competition, so any integrated rail/air system was squashed in the bud.

In short, railroads couldn't effectively compete for passengers against the superior systems of paved roads and airplanes, especially after WWII and the improved planes and beginnings of the interstate highway system.  Given the changing technologies, most of the rail operators realized that their niche market and money was in freight anyway. 

Those were the real days of the "great" railroading in the U.S. that people romanticize, primarily based on fantasy and reports from the few crack (and very expensive) trains like the 20th Century Limited.  

It is true that rail passenger service worked in England, even while it was failing here.  That is because, let's face it, England is densely populated and only about twice the size of Texas, with much of the population concentrated in the south of England.  A compliant population, historically narrow roads unsuited for automobiles, and bad flying weather made railroads the preferred mode of transport there for many years. 

Returning to the present day, another problem with rail, especially new rail lines, is that they form a barrier in both a physical and legal sense. Such barriers are not well tolerated by communities anymore, making any new construction for a comprehensive system expensive and problematic.

LA Times article on one high speed rail proposal
This is what high speed rail looks like:

Note the overhead wiring and required poles.  Note the swath of protected embankment and trackage and imagine the cost of acquiring the property and disruption of any existing buildings and infrastructure along the right-of-way.  Even "light" rail requires moving tons of equipment, whether one passenger is aboard or one hundred.  Federal regulations developed over the years require strong frames to keep accidents from "telescoping" cars from the major impact forces involved in a wreck.


If you think the current highway situation is becoming intolerable, I agree with you. However, for passenger transportation, there are less expensive and better options than rail or even trolleys and busses.

The whole skyway concept was more or less abandoned when the various elevated railways went out of favor, due to noise, blocking of light from city streets, and materials cost. There is a whole new generation of technologies that make skyways technically FAR superior to rail for passengers, if only the high-speed-rail government teat-suckers can be pushed out of the way so that attention can be focused on these newer ideas.

 

 

What am I talking about?  First, go to www.Shweeb.com and watch the video to see what one private company has been able to do with an elevated trackway and pedal power.  Pretty neat stuff, and it looks like it might be fun, but it is obviously not for those in wheelchairs or a major transportation system.

 

Next, take a serious look at the skytran idea about 1/6th of the way down the page here:
http://www.news-world.us/pics/2010/04/14/urban-transportation-by-monorail/
(Don't get caught up in the maglev hooie and hype.  Cost per mile of Maglev makes it a non-starter except in unique situations.)


Notice particularly how the Skytran system does NOT create a barrier or hazard to pedestrians and animals, is safe from most tampering, is not affected by snow or rain, can be made to be extremely quiet (enclosed wheels and propulsion, compared to the wheel noise of both roads and railroads) and, with modification, has some inherent flexibility.  The changes I propose have been missing from ALL new transportation proposals...

1. allow people to own their own passenger capsules, and have them semi-permanently attach to company owned standardized tractive units. That eliminates the whole "Gross! Who used this car and what diseases did they have?" routine, as well as allowing customization of cargo and passenger carrying capabilities.

Retaining standardized tractive units owned by the guideway system operators allows for guideway instrumentation that would not allow defective units to even enter the guideway, removing 99.9% of delays from disabled vehicles or accidents.  Anyone can put a clunker on a public road.   On a guideway as I propose, high speed travel is SAFE and consistently high speed.

2. allow the capsules to contain batteries and have 12" wheels on the bottom, so that the capsules can be driven from the home to the overhead, attach to the overhead guideway then disengage at the destination for parking and short distance slow speed ground trips. That one change of design would make many people abandon their cars in favor of such a systematic approach to transportation.


As one example of how the modified personal pod might look for a commuter system examine the vehicle here: clever green vehicle 


Now imagine this basic design, with a small skyhook to attach to the overhead monorail.



Again, the pod itself would be owned by the individual, along with the drive system for the ground.  The skyhook and electrical motor and components would be owned by the skyway company and leased to the pod owners, so that all repair and maintenence would be within the complete control of the skyway company.


 For people who could not afford a pod, basic rental units would be available, dispatched by an automated system.
 
On a rainy day, it is a lot more civilized to get into a vehicle at home in a garage, sit down, then get to the destination in the same chair, and walk out into a covered parking area. Driving, walking or biking to a train station, dealing with any baggage, having to stand and wait, then walk from the train car to a taxi or bike stand or rental place is both  inefficient and a hassle, especially for people with disabilities.

In contrast, the overhead guideway system avoids your having to guide the car for most of a journey, eliminates any drunk driver crossing into your guideway and crashing into you, eliminates slowpoke drivers, and gives a nice view as a bonus.

To repeat, I love rail. I think it is even better than sliced bread for most freight operations. However, use of it for passengers is hopelessly outdated, and the tribulations endured by rail passengers border on embarrassing. Resurrecting passenger rail lines for an encore performance is an idea that is wasteful, silly, and doomed to failure.  Even a cursory glance at the balance sheets of past passenger rail operations will show that it simply does not work in the U.S..

Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand, Philosophy

The movie version of the novel Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand is scheduled to be released April 15th of 2011.  With it, there will likely be another surge of people en-tranced by Rand's philosophy, which she called "Objectivism," and eager to read more of her works.

Back in the late 1960s and early 1970s I was young and impressionable, and I was "into" Objectivism.  Then, as now, there were ample reasons to hope that the really creative minds would not support the continuation of the flaws of the country and government.  I have since had over forty years to reflect upon Rand, her work, and beliefs.  You will find numerous people ready to comment on the author, with the extreme right heaping praises upon her, the extreme left vilifying her.  I went from writing a college term paper in support of her to being horrified that my critical thinking had not seen the major flaws in her viewpoints.

Am I an expert on Rand?  I am much more of an expert than most of those who claim to be experts, but the reality is that no single person could ever be at the meta-level required to become a completely objective outside expert on her and her works.  What I present here are some of my observations and views, in the hopes that you will quickly gain a perspective that it took years for me to develop.  I have a selfish purpose in this as well, because numbers of people make uneducated reference to Rand. My having a single place to guide them for the basics will save me many hours of writing.

There are three topics that must intertwine in this post - the book Atlas Shrugged, Rand's life and life experience, and her thoughts and "philosophy."  I quite literally could go on for longer than Atlas Shrugged itself in dissecting the three topics, but will instead cover only a few major points and provide references for further reading.

Rand was born Alisa Rosenbaum in 1905 in Russia, daughter of a Jewish pharmacist.  The Russian revolution occurred in 1917 when she was twelve, old enough to experience and remember it viscerally, but not old enough or worldly enough to truly comprehend all of the factors and implications of the event.  In reading her works, the impression can form that she escaped Russia to the United States soon after the start of the revolution.  In fact, she and her family returned to St. Petersburg where she enrolled at Petrograd State University.  While there, she studied history and read the works of a few philosophers.  She graduated in 1924, obtained a visa to visit relatives in the U.S. in 1925, and never returned.  Her parents and sisters remained in the Soviet Union until their deaths.

Once in the U.S., Rand, without family, was drawn to the movie industry even more than she had been in the Soviet Union.  She became, at one point, costume department head for RKO.  She married Frank O'Conner in 1929 and became a U.S. citizen in 1931.  Rand immediately set to writing anti-communist stories, plays, and screenplays, but anti-communism was not yet popular with the public.

Breaking from the time line for a moment, the sources for many of the underlying themes of Rand's life and thought now become apparent.  

Her Jewish heritage and the influence of the atheistic communists led her to have no love for the organized Christian religion of the Eastern Orthodox Church, and with her parents not being active in Judaism, she felt free to declare herself an atheist at around the time of the revolution.  Her later studies in a communist supported university would reinforce such views and provide her ample examples of the excesses of organized religion.

The cultural shift that destroyed her life as a bourgeois young lady of means and comfort engendered no love in her for communism, and the subsequent refusal of the Soviets to allow the emigration of her parents and sisters undoubtedly fed that hate.

Study at Petrograd influenced her writing style towards the Russian classics, and her budding interest in film and writing began with her writing a booklet on a Russian film star, thus beginning to channel her energies.

We next come to a strong speculation on my part. In 1933 Queen Christina, directed by Rouben Mamoulian, starring Swedish-born actress Greta Garbo, hit the big screen.  Although I can find no overt links between Rand, the film, or the authors of the story, Salka Viertel and Margaret Levino, the film marks a change point in Rand's life.  The Night of January 16th was published the next year, followed by We The Living in 1936.  I suspect that Rand stole some of her persona from Garbo's portrayal of Queen Christiana. The romantic nature of her later works is probably partly based on the film.

Rand, as a character and personality, now begins to truly emerge.  There is no question about her being a product of her time and experiences.  Her writing - Russian influence.  Her lack of religion - Soviet and Jewish influence.  Her philosophical leanings - strong negative Soviet influence.  Her romances - Garbo and early film influences.  Her increasingly strong voice - again, influences stemming perhaps from absorbing Queen Christiana's character into her own, especially so without familial feedback and resistance to her changes.

In any valid attempt to understand Rand, the strengths of these influences cannot be underestimated.  Her range of thinking was as crippled by her life experiences as certainly as a woman raped by Cossacks.  Instead of growing beyond her early experience, she ruminated and regurgitated, attempting to attack in turn those who had hurt her, and glorifying those who had delivered her from her personal hell.

The writings of anyone who has been through such strong experiences are bound to be emotional and strong.  Rand's writings were even more so because of her training in pedagogy at Petrograd, and ability to include her study of Aristotle and other philosophers, to lend weight and credence to her views.

If there is one single point that I would like the reader to take away from the knowledge I have presented so far in this post, it is that Ayn Rand was a ROMANTIC FICTION writer trained in pedagogy and warped in her life views by early experience.

The book: Atlas Shrugged.  Any book is a construction.  Without deeply going into the craft of writing  and spending pages dissecting the book, I'll expose some of the bones of this one.  The plot line in summary:

• Dagney Taggert tries to fix her transcontinental railroad, which services mines as well as passenger traffic.
• Dagney's old lover d'Anconia has copper mines serviced by the RR but he has turned into a playboy.
• Hank Rearden creates a new stronger steel. He gets in trouble with politicians and his wife.  Dagney finds him hot and wants his strong steel rail.
• All the major industrialists go on strike because of the parasitic and repressive laws, sending the country into chaos.
• John Galt tells in a massive speech why he organized the industrialists to go on strike.
• The repressive and parasitic government falls and the industrialists prepare to return to make a better world.

Rand plays with various truisms in the book.  Here are a few of them: 

• Very few people LIKE taxes.  Many people suspect taxes are parasitic and repressive, and that they thwart the growth of companies that create jobs and the wealth of new products.  
• Politicians by definition have to balance the needs of a society and economy.  They often fail to satisfy constituents and industry leaders, making politicians easy targets in a story.  
• Engineers work with physical materials and concepts.  If an engineering concept works, it is good.  If it doesn't, the failure is soon apparent.  By making engineers heroic in the story, Rand reinforces the idea of black and white thinking - a concept is either good or bad, with little space for a gray area.   
• By making politicians seem to work only in a gray area, they are more easily portrayed as evil.  
• The people who bring ideas to the marketplace are seen as heroic.  
• Complex systems, when confronted with the loss of a major component, will fail.  
• Apocalyptic stories have an inherent audience.  Science fiction stories have an inherent audience.  Romance novels have an inherent audience.  
• Anti-communist and anti-socialist novels have an inherent audience.  
• Railroads have a romance attached to them.   
• There is an aspect of Rand's novels that is similar to "Symphonie Fantastique"  The theme just keeps droning on and on until it gets into the subconscious.  Repetition can eventually overwhelm critical reasoning.

The idea of this book plot existing in real life is simply not possible, for any number of reasons.  Perhaps the easiest one to understand is that Rand has stereotyped almost all the characters within classes and assigned them their morality as a group.  ALL major engineers in it are inherently good.  ALL politicians are inherently evil.  ALL women except the lead are flawed, insipid, or worthless.  Writing using such stereotyping allows readers to more easily follow what appears to be a complex plot and empathize with the protagonists.  In truth, such a style of writing is usually consigned to books aimed at juvenile audiences.  Adding pseudo-philosophical aspects to the plot and turning it into a morality play promotes the impression of the novel being a deep work, especially to those who are not used to deep writing or long books.

In the world of Atlas Shrugged, the railroads are led by noble capitalists, and everyone with money and brains (which seem to magically go together in the book) goes on vacation in Colorado in a strike of creative genius, making the world fall apart.  Never mind that creative genius is often a guy in a garage like WOZ, or the fellow who wrote a freeware CPM and sold the rights to it for peanuts to Bill Gates, who then renamed it MS-DOS and added a feature or two and built a reputation and empire on it.  Never mind that Einstein was a geek librarian.  REAL creative people do not "go on strike."  Their creativity is part of their souls and cannot be turned off and on like a light.  Many creative people simply do not care what others do or think and have been ostracized for years from the mainstream of society.
 

Rand does use actual locations and a loose sense of history in Atlas Shrugged.  There is an actual resort on a branch line railroad in Colorado that fits as the location in her novel.  What she conveniently leaves out of her story is that the real-life railroad barons were far from noble.  How many reading this know that the U.S. government GAVE huge tracts of land along the routes of proposed railroads to the rail companies in order to "promote" rail growth and the transcontinental railroad?  How many know that the votes for those give-aways were BOUGHT in Congress?   How many have any knowledge of Jay Gould or the Credit Mobilier?  Reality and romantic fiction are tremendously different animals.  The Wizard of Oz was a story.  Atlas Shrugged is a story. It is not profitable to confuse them with reality.

Anyone who reads Atlas Shrugged would do well to then immediately read the historical book Empire Express, Building the First Transcontinental Railroad by David Haward Bain.  That book of over 700 densely written pages is almost overwhelmed by footnotes and bibliography providing factual historical documentation of what the real railroad operators and industrial giants were like.  It isn't a pretty picture.


Atlas Shrugged was published in 1957 and was Rand's last major literary work, although she continued to write "non-fiction" books expounding her philosophic and political points.  Rand's life began to unravel after Atlas Shrugged.  There are reports that she used amphetamines to plow through the intense writing the novel required, and that she suffered depression after it.  During her writing and lectures, she had picked up a couple of side-kicks, Nathaniel and Barbara Branden.  Rand made a cuckold of her husband by having an affair with Nathaniel.  The breakup occurred in 1968, with letters going out to subscribers of The Objectivist newsletter, informing them that Branden no longer represented the Objectivist philosophy and castigating him.  Branden began his own groups and practice, much to the confusion of readers.  In October of 1971, The Objectivist had become thin enough in material that it became the Ayn Rand Letter, Inc.

In the summer previous to this, I decided on a whim to visit the offices of the newsletter in New York City.  Followers of Rand will remember her earlier proud pronouncement of offices in the Empire State Building.  After that buildup, the later address was a little startling.  I present some of my snapshots from June of 1971, taken with permission:

The racks of books in the front reception area

Door to the offices - note the cheap angle reinforcements

Directory of the building - classy, huh?

The reception desk in the tiny front room

 
Rand died in 1982.  Many notables have been influenced by her thought and writing, including Alan Greenspan, Gene Roddenberry, Robert Heinlein, Martin Anderson, and Ron Paul.  Two rather tedious movies have been done about her life: The Passion of Ayn Rand, and Ayn Rand: A Sense of Life, the latter based on the book by Barbara Branden, which may be the best biography of Rand.

Part 3 

The philosophy in summary - Objectivism.

Metaphysics: 

There is only one reality. The principles of it are fixed, and man must live within it.  Other realities are irrelevant.

Epistemology: 

Reason is based on logic. Only pure logic is a valid tool to perceive, identify and integrate material provided by the senses.

Ethics: 

"Every man is an end in himself, not the means to the ends of others."  The pursuit of his own rational self-interest is the highest moral purpose in his life. This statement implies that pursuit of self-interest is without expense (damage) to anyone else.

Politics (which Rand posited as the ethics of a society)  Knowledge, trade, and protection are the functions of a society: 

Knowledge is endemic and to be freely exchanged.

Free market Capitalism is the preferred method of trade.

The sole purpose of government is protection.

I have dissected Objectivism a number of times before, often with variation.  The apparent simplicity of it may first appear to be a strong point, but is in fact one of its failures.  Professionals and professors will undoubtedly find flaws in my work, but to borrow a line from Sam Clemens, "The unexamined life may not be worth living, but the life too closely examined may not be lived at all."  I try to seek a balance and broad view for myself, so if I do that, I don't worry to much about dots and tittles.  The comments below should be sufficient to blow any veracity that Objectivism has as a legitimate and workable philosophy out of the water.

Metaphysics - literally "after physics."  What do we do with the knowledge from physics?  Rand's version is closer to that of Zeno (who posited a fixed reality) than her hero Aristotle ( who broadened it to matter with change and form).  On a meta-scale, the reality of physics in the nano-seconds after the big bang was markedly different than the reality we experience today (so much for the fixed reality idea).  On a micro-scale, the EXPERIENCE of reality occurs only within the mind of the individual, through the filters of the senses, and within the framework of whatever intelligence is present.  The perceived reality is the only functional reality of the individual.  The collective reality of one individual or group of individuals might also be entirely different than others.

To put it in the conceptual framework Rand intended - If a safe drops on you from the fifth floor of a building, your concept of reality will be irrelevant to your squashed body.  Her metaphysical world depends upon Newtonian physics and every action having an equal and opposite reaction.

Copenhagen and certain forms of Calvinism explored that, with the general division running along two lines of thought. The first went something like, "Yep, that is right, so if every single action has an equal and opposite reaction, we can take that to a molecular or atomic level and work the fixed relationships back to the beginning of time and forward to the end of time.  In other words, we have no free will and are on a fixed course of length, width, breadth, and time, through this reality.  What Rand believed was determined at the beginning of time, and any talk about it is merely fulfilling another aspect of the fixed path. If you don't believe it, that was predetermined also, and your brain is constructed to make you think you have choices."  So, to summarize,  if Rand WAS right... WHO CARES?  It doesn't make any difference and the "philosophy" has no greater meaning than a bunch of words strung together.

The second division suspects that there are random quantum effects or effects that transcend the limitations of the four common dimensions.  It would only be within such constructs that Rand's "philosophy" would matter, but then, by definition, it would be wrong.  That, my friends, is a logical double-bind.  finis.

Epistemology:  - The study or a theory of the nature and grounds of knowledge especially with reference to its limits and validity.  Rand would limit any integration of "the" correct model of nature to that gained through pure logic.  Even a momentary rumination on this will find the idea simplistic and nonsensical. The only way for this to be true would be to already have complete and pure knowledge.  

For example: Joe is color blind and does not know it.  He drives through a traffic light and gets a ticket.  He argues to the judge that in his reality, the light was NOT red.  The judge says "Doesn't matter.  The ticket stands."  Joe had an unintentional limitation in his ability to completely understand reality.  You say, "Yeah, but we have a much better understanding of reality than that.  That is not a valid example."  Now, the $64 question - as a completely logical Objectivist who considers his view of reality superior to those of the Goy, please detail the full workings of Einstein's special theory of relativity and how that relates to the size of Madonna's bra cups.  Anyone with a COMPLETE understanding of the universe should be easily able to accomplish that.  As I see it... We ALL have limited views of reality and our internal constructs or models of the external reality will be flawed, and those models will be further flawed by the limitations of our mental processes, physical brains, transient chemical reactions, interfering radiation, and a host of other influences.  Bucky Fuller once said; "I seem to be a verb."  Perhaps more accurately he could have stated; "I seem to be a verb with a bunch of modifiers attacking me."

Ethics:
Ethics are a code or set of principles that guide everyday action.  The common error of those attempting to follow Rand's stated ethics (which she obviously didn't follow too well in real life) is to equate them with an Epicurian ethical hedonism.  Pleasure and self-interest are not synonyms.  Getting dead-drunk might produce pleasure, but it is not usually in one's self-interest.  Getting filthy rich might seem to be in a person's self-interest, but if the cost is the relationships that support other needs of the person, it is limited thinking and not self-interest.  We rarely know what is in our ultimate best interest.  If we did, we wouldn't have much of a need for philosophy anyway, would we?

Politics: 
Knowledge: With the insertion of "intellectual property rights" and the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, knowledge is no longer a free agent, to be used for the greater edification of all those in our society, but a commodity to be rented, leased, sold, but only rarely given. 99% of the extreme right wing politicians see no problem with this idea, and since that is the base group of the so-called "Objectivists", the construct has failed.

Trade:  Lassie goes to the faire Capitalism.  That simply does not exist in the U.S. on any scale.  The politics and trade of a flea market may have a certain amount of free market trade.  That does not exist in a managed economy.  What is a managed economy?  If you are asking that, you have no reasonable right to espousing the value of an economic "philosophy" as interpreted by Rand or anyone else.  If you can get insurance or medicare to pay for cocaine and a voodoo doll to cure your cold, you don't live in a managed economy.  If you can spread gasoline and DDT at will on your fields to grow poppies, you don't live in a managed economy.  Every economy is managed to some extent, either by stated law or convention.

Government: See my earlier post on the problems in limiting the control of government, even if you take it to only have the purpose of protection. 

In summation:
Rand was an interesting and flawed person, who allowed us to explore some of the extremes of behavior.  Her work has special merit for those who are working through issues of low self-esteem.  Her personal life was a mess.  She wrote some interesting novels that can bring new topics of conversation to many tables.  She was not a guru, and even back in 1968 stated that her followers were not a movement, but that it was the ideas she had expressed that she wanted to see continue forward.

Any cult of Rand is exactly that, a cult, with all of the flaws of any religious cult.  The truly free and creative thinker has no need for such crutches.