Some months ago I got a cold call from a fellow named Daniel Miller. Originally a resident of Macomb, Illinois, home of Western Illinois University, he now lives in Indiana, but he retains a keen interest in seeing his home town made ready for peak oil.
Daniel introduced Larry and I to a few of his contacts and we’ve hit it off with the guys from the Illinois Institute of Rural Affairs. I’ve been invited to provide a policy piece on renewable ammonia, and what should I find as my example of what to write but a very nice piece (PDF warning) on Interurban Rail.
This is one of the things I was reading as I roamed the coffee shops and restaurants of Champaign yesterday, and it’s a worthy seventeen pages for anyone interested in rural mass transit.
First of all, you need to know that G.M. and the oil companies screwed us bigtime. The Great American Streetcar Scandal is going to haunt us for a long, long time to come. We’re going to wish the routes these Pacific Electric streetcars used to run were still in operation – I don’t think we have a choice but to rebuild them.
A full size map is available.
The Los Angeles area rail being taken out was bad, but in the early 1900s you could leave Long Island and make it to Milwaukee via nothing but streetcar rides with the exception of two twenty mile gaps in the system. We’ll cry for what we’ve lost once the true effect of peak oil is understood.
A full size map is available.
Less well documented is the fact that long before we had highways rural areas were stitched together with rail. I’ve made detailed maps of the four county region where I grew up and the correlation between rail and municipality well being is stark.
Dead towns, which I define as places that are today nothing more than empty fields or a cluster of a few abandoned buildings, number sixteen. Another metric of town death? I’ve never met anyone claiming to be from any of these places. The dying ones have lost one of the school, the grocery store, or the post office. When the school goes that’s a death blow - no family with children will move there and the town withers. The lack of a grocery store weighs heavily on the older residents of the town. The post office is collateral damage after one of the other two fail. Notice the negative correlation between rail and town death.
Healthy towns on this map number twenty one. Almost all have a full school system or a slice of a consolidated system. They have a post office, a grocery store, a gas station, and they have an industry. There are some anomalies here due to those lakes in the upper left – that’s a monster tourist area by Iowa standards. Fostoria, Milford, and Lake Park owe their continued well being in large part to proximity to this. The rail lines running through Lake Park are a ghost, in fact they’re the old route for the Ghost Train, illegally taken up and sold to Chinese buyers some years ago.
More interesting to me are Mallard (200?) and Superior (75?). Each is a dead village walking, except that each has rail access which has lead to heavy industry being built, grain storage in Mallard’s case, and grain storage with an attendant ethanol plant in Superior.
So, a national historic perspective and a current view of things in my home in northwest Iowa being given, lets talk about the problems we can solve with interurban rail. The opening to Connecting the Spots: Interurban Railways is stark. Like I said above, we had it ... once.
"The growth of electric suburban and electric interurban railways has been wonderful, as since the year 1902 there has been constructed, and placed in operation, over twenty thousand miles of track. The development has been especially active in the states of New York, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, and California, as in these states more than thirteen thousand miles, out of a total of about twenty thousand miles, have been constructed. (Fisher 1914)"
The meat of the policy brief is this – the whole of a functional transit system is much greater than it’s parts in terms of geographic connectivity, and once you’ve got connectivity you need synchronicity. Transit systems need to have something called a "clock headway" – trains and buses need to arrive at five minutes before the hour and department promptly at the top of the hour. Travelers don’t have to think too much about managing interconnections, they just have to know the pickup time at their starting point and their final destination. When this is done the topology is described as a "pulsed hub".
This seems very sensible to me given my experiences on the Edge Of The Transit Desert last weekend. The bus system in Champaign is done right, with a central hub and routes running every half hour any direction you’d care to go. The Amtrak that was twenty minutes late and the averaged 21 miles per hour over a fourteen mile run? I’m glad it’s there, but I’m not so impressed.
I’m not so sure about the hub concept for the Iowa Great Lakes counties. I’d say a better method would be a ring connecting the four county seats, but there are a lot of issues – that corridor from Milford north runs right through the must visit tourist area, but it’s congested with auto traffic and it’s the highest value property in the state. It’ll be interesting to see if there is an interurban rail push there some day.
Milford is in the center at the bottom and the white line running north is U.S. 71. It terminates in the city of Spirit Lake and a slightly large view would show Spirit Lake itself, some 6,000 acres of water just north of this view. The acre of the lakes show here is perhaps 4,500 acres.
The policy brief itself was only four pages, but there was a wonderful twelve page index that covered the Bay Area Rapid Transit system, the pulsed hub layout perfected by the Swiss, and there was a taxonomy of rail classes that clearly defined three classes of high speed rail as well as conventional and commuter rail. The brief is red meat for the rail enthusiast – I’m curious to hear from those who actually follow the link and read it.