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Rural airlines take flight
Benjamin Spillman, Las Vegas Review-Journal
Service is too costly; passengers are too few
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Airline woes that make flights from hubs such as Las Vegas, Phoenix or Salt Lake City less convenient are making it downright impossible for rural residents to fly from small towns across America.
High fuel costs, lousy airline balance sheets and a shortage of suitable planes have left more towns than ever without scheduled air service this year, despite the government spending more than $100 million annually to subsidize routes to isolated airports.
Residents in locales from Ely to Lewisburg, W.Va., are without service for everything from doctor appointments to business meetings to visits from far-flung relatives.
Delores Manchester, 63, of McGill, says there’s a price to pay for living in remote towns:
“It is a three- and four-hour drive to get anywhere from this community.”
(13 July 2008)
Personal Rapid Transit: preempting the need for oil in urban transport
Bill James, Seeking Alpha
There are investment opportunities in changing our economic lifeblood from oil to ingenuity, preempting the need for oil in urban transport.
Unexpected innovations (positive Black Swans) such as personal computers, the Internet, lasers, penicillin, often require preparation to allow investment.
The objective of this paper is to alert investors so those interested can exploit current opportunities and organize their charter to for direct investments in the Personal Rapid Transit [PRT] industry – the Physical-Internet.
Government management of infrastructure created our oil addiction. Bureaucracies developed plans to maximize consistency (know-how), minimizing the messy process of innovation (know-what). For a century the technologies of Ford, Bell, Edison and the Wright Bothers have been frozen in time (Bell until 1984).
Alternative technologies based on computer networks, such as PRT, have not been allowed because they were not in the plan. The consequence of a century of better know-how but the same know-what has resulted in Peak Oil and Global Warming.
Peak Oil, with rising gas prices, is forcing a change and an investment opportunity that will cause the cost to travel a mile to drop from 56 cents to 4 cents. This savings applies to about 4 billion of the 8 billion miles Americans drive daily. The Physical-Internet will grow in the next 15 years to about 1.4 million miles of packet-switched, ultra-light rail networks. The world market is about 5 times larger.
(2 July 2008)
Color me skepical. -BA
Namibia: Multitudes switch to bicycles
Chrispin Inambao, New Era
More and more workers, possibly feeling the squeeze from a slew of interest rate increases on vehicle repayments and escalation in fuel prices that a week ago sped past N$10 for a unit of diesel, are resorting to alternative means of transportation.
Though figures are hard to come by, Greensport Cymot (Pty) Ltd that sells camping and fishing gear and bicycles says sales of the humble bicycle have gone up in recent months more so for the Challenger and for 18-speed bicycles…
…Unlike a monthly repayment for a new car that could range anything from N$1000 to several thousands plus insurance, a thousand dollars can buy a decent bicycle, which is almost maintenance-free save for the occasional oiling of the hub and chain.
But Africans, unlike Europeans, are more obsessed with status and they tend to shy away from this cheaper mode of transport and would rather drive to work than cycle.
(15 July 2008)
Bike shelters to be built at 4 CTA train stations
Jeremy Gorner, Chicago Tribune
Ground is scheduled to be broken in mid-August for indoor bicycle shelters at four CTA train stations, city officials said.
Amid high gasoline prices that are encouraging more people to use public transportation, the shelters will be built at stations in neighborhoods most frequented by cyclists, according to the Chicago Department of Transportation. These are the Midway Airport station on the Orange Line, the Sox-35th Street station on the Red Line and the Jefferson Park and Damen Avenue stations on the Blue Line.
“We want to provide a seamless transition from riding a bicycle to taking public transit,” said CDOT spokesman Brian Steele, who said the city received a $916,000 grant from Congestion, Mitigation and Air Quality, a federal program geared toward providing the public with alternative means of travel to automobiles.
(14 July 2008)
