UW Madison Students Promoting Rail in Wisconsin

Found this article on the Wisconsin Radio Network. It's good to see students taking a proactive approach to encouraging rail in Wisconsin. The student group is called "WISPRIG Advance Public Transit", whose facebook page can be found here. WISPRIG stands for WISconsin Public Research Interest Group. Also, it is nice to see students advocating for rail since they are a significant portion of train ridership. Hopefully the federal government with send some of the $8 billion marked for rail to the Midwest to help fund this rail link, I haven't heard an exact date on this, but from what I hear it could be announced as early as late summer.

Go Student Rail Groups! The more talk the better.

Blueprint America: Road to the Future

On May 20th, PBS aired a documentary on the transportation infrastructure in the US. It highlighted the cities of Denver, Portland, and New York City. I was very impressed with the video, which can be found here. The documentary focused more on the mind set of transportation and less on the technical aspects. One of the questions of the documentary was, how do you combat sprawl? (Although I would have liked to see more on while sprawl is bad for us). In Denver, the city decided to build a highway or "belt-way" around the city. This helped lead Denver to be, at one point, the third most congested city in America with many days deemed too polluted to be outside. Portland chose a different route. Instead of building an expressway through town, they decided to put the money towards transit including light rail and biking. Now Portland is one of the most attractive places to live in the U.S.

All in all, I highly recommend watching it.

Couple notes:
-Oregon Iron Works is building the first street car in America in over many decades
-I believe Denver is slowing turning itself around with investments in light rail

NPR on Trains

On the recommendation of my mom, I listened to a segment from NPR Wisconsin on the future of trains in America. The first half of the segment is a talk with Phillip Longman, Schwartz Senior Fellow, New America Foundation. Author, “The Next Progressive Era: A Blueprint for Broad Prosperity.” He talked about putting more freight on trains and how there are issues in Chicago (watch the video below from PBS on the issues in Chicago). The second half of the segment was a talk with Simon Montague, Director of Corporate Communications, Eurostar high-speed passenger train in the UK and Europe. He discusses how high speed rail in Europe is competing well with the planes and roads.

A link to the talk is here, and I suggest watching this picture slide show of HSR from Flickr while listening to the talk.

Why should you care about infastructure?

As I have mentioned before, PBS is doing a brilliant series called "Blueprint America" which looks at the different aspects (esp. cost and needs) of the infrastructure of America. A nice video explaining what they are doing can be found here.

On May 20th at 9pm (central time), PBS will air a documentary called "Road to the Future." If it is anything like the previous segments for blueprint America, it will be a good, informative show. From the preview it looks like it will emphasize on the effects of urban sprawl and how we can handle it.

Exams are over

Sorry for the break, but I just finished my third year at Boston University. Now I'll be able to update this blog more often. But first, I have a engine static test for the BU rocket team to deal with. So, I'll talk to you all after that.