Image courtesy CN.
So, fuel taxes are hurting the trucking industry. Airlines are either going bankrupt or gouging us for the peanuts. Taxis are squeezed. How can we hope to move around with the price of oil so high? What are the carbon taxers (Gordon Campbell and Stephane Dion) thinking?
But one transportation industry is thriving in this era of high fuel prices. Care to guess who? See here. It looks like the lowly railroad is making a comeback.
Despite skyrocketing oil prices, freight railroads are thriving. They are taking advantage of their greater fuel efficiency to haul more goods across the country. And they’ve mounted an aggressive marketing campaign to take even more.
There are already industries out there which are well suited to dealing with high fuel prices. In many cases, these industries have been those we’ve been hoping would succeed, to build a more fuel efficient, environmentally friendly world. We’ve been hoping to get more people out of their cars and into public transportation, getting cargo out of trucks and onto railroads. And now the market economy is finally forcing us to do what we’ve been meaning to do.
Dare I hope that we’ll see a revival of passenger trains if this keeps up?
In other news, Union Pacific opens a public observation tower overlooking the world’s largest classification railyard, in North Platte, Nebraska. People have already turned out in droves.
Environmental Plagiarism
You know, when I create titles for my books, one thing I do is type in the title into Google to see if it has been taken. I’ve had some near misses. Rosemary and Time was mostly free until the gourmet detective series Rosemary and Thyme started up. Fathom Five is a Shakespeare quote, so you knew it was going to be heavily mined. Nobody’s taken up The Young City and The Night Girl shares part of a title of an obscure fairy tale written at the end of the 19th century. All of these cases, I’ve been pleased that my titles have been distinctive enough to stand a bit apart.
So, I have to say that somebody or somebodies within the Liberal Party were very, very stupid not to have done just a little research to find out whether or not the proposed name for their carbon tax policy, the Green Shift, wasn’t being used by another company who might be a bit miffed by the violation of their trademark.
C’mon guys, this sort of rank amateurism is precisely the sort of thing you want to avoid when you want the media to, you know, actually talk about your policies. And how hard can it be, really, to do this? You guys have a youth wing. Computers and the Internet are not totally alien to you. Couldn’t anybody have plugged the term into Google and found what came up? Didn’t anybody do that in their spare time?
And to the Conservative Party supporters who are positively crowing about this stupid mistake, they should wipe that smile off their faces. Back in March 2007 they ran into the exact same problem (and received a lighter touch from the blogosphere and mainstream media, interestingly enough), meaning that the party you support couldn’t find its backside with both hands either. I’ve talked before about the dearth of leadership between the two main parties hoping to lead us for the next four years. Now it’s looking like there’s a dearth of intelligence as well.
Google. It’s an easy thing to use, guys. Look it up, and start looking things up.
June 26, 2008 7:26 AM
You see your aunt Bette on CKCO news at 6 last night commenting on taxi fares? Hope someone in government or opposition thinks to add upgrading the rail service between Windsor and Quebec City to high speed as part of their green package! Your aunt Marg said that they’ve got the Toronto Montreal run down to just 4 hours! Now upgrade the rest of it.
June 26, 2008 9:22 AM
Serious question: do we need high speed rail south of London and north of Montreal?
June 26, 2008 9:30 AM
Good question.
Frankly, a TGV for Canada only really makes sense between Toronto-Kingston-Ottawa-Montreal. That string of pearls has the population, and the flights, and if you can get things down to three hours downtown-to-downtown travel, the investment would be very competitive with the planes. Indeed, one could even speculate on using Blue 22 to extend the TGV to Pearson, creating a Pearson to Dorval (Trudeau) train, which could free up runway space at both airports for longer flights.
I think the Quebec-Windsor corridor TGV gets speculated on a lot because that’s VIA’s busiest corridor, but Quebec to Montreal doesn’t have the traffic that Toronto to Montreal gets, and you’ll notice that we’re diverting to Ottawa to roll in that city’s traffic into the numbers. London to Toronto has a similar disadvantage.
The only reason I could see us consider extending the TGV to Windsor would be if we worked on extending it further, to Detroit.
June 26, 2008 9:40 AM
Well, that and Edmonton-Calgary, of course.
June 26, 2008 10:06 AM
Anybody ever suggest a TGV between Detroit London Buffalo with the U.S. funding the major portion? Then a TGV extension to London would make sense wouldn’t it?
June 26, 2008 11:27 AM
Passenger trains are still pretty useful if you are going relatively short distances. I go to London a few times a year to visit Mom and I like taking the VIA trains down there. Sure, it takes about a half hour longer than driving, but it’s relatively hassle-free travel. If you wanted to fly, it would be a complete waste of time to go out to Pearson.
I don’t think I would take the train to Vancouver or anywhere long-haul because they just can’t compete in terms of speed and scheduling. But for relatively short trips, trains are much more relaxing than driving. Or flying, for that matter. Spending an hour to get to Pearson, plus having to show up an hour early, for a 15-20 minute flight, is out of the question.
June 26, 2008 2:04 PM
Agreed. Those trips are for tourists, who need to travel on cruise ships on rails to make the journey worthwhile.
Mind you, on July 4, we’re travelling to Des Moines, Iowa. We were hemming and hawing how to do this. Planes? Too expensive. Car? Too cramped. But the remnants of the old International remain, departing Port Huron at 5:15 a.m. and arriving in Osceola, Iowa at 8:09 p.m with a three hour layover in Chicago. Total cost for five: $500, including taxes and fees. And for just $120 more, we get the use of two bedrooms from Chicago west.
We still have the question of how to get to Port Huron, but the train is likely to turn an arduous journey into a fun excursion.
June 26, 2008 5:58 PM
There’s one fairly large problem, and that is that over the last three decades railroads have abandoned dozens of railway lines totaling thousands of kilometres.
Just in Ontario, there are no train tracks to the northwest of a line from Collingwood to Orangeville to Guelph to Stratford to Goderich.
But still, we should get passenger trains running on all remaining lines (Toronto-Stratford-Goderich would be great). And we’ve got to get the Yanks onboard for the cross-border trains. The heavy security checks post 9/11 are what killed off the Toronto-Chicago trains