NSFW! Spanish cyclists always find a cool way to protest for safe biking infrastructure

June 30, 2013 at 9:45 am

Spotted this image in the “In Focus” photo series by The Atlantic, covering protests from around the world.  Might be a bit too much for the American sensibilities but the Spaniards are not bothered by all the skin on display.  Apparently, more than a hundred cyclists gathered in the Spanish capital as they took part in the city’s 10th Naked Bike Ride aimed at highlighting the dependency on oil and road safety issues for cyclists.  Here is one of them riding naked in a public fountain in front of the Royal Palace as others bathe in Madrid, on June 15, 2013. More pics (NSFW, obviousy) from the protest can be seen here.

Image Courtesy: AP Photo/Andres Kudacki – Naked Cyclist Protesting for better & safe biking infrastructure in Madrid, Spain

Image courtesy: AP Photo/Andres Kudacki via The Atlantic

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Have you been “Ave-d”? Guardian gushes about the sleek Spanish rail service! Americans left wondering if their Government will ever “get it”?

August 8, 2009 at 5:16 pm

(Source: The Guardian, UK)

Ana Portet has had an unusual commute to work. At 7.30am she popped down to Sants railway station in Barcelona. Three hours later she was in a meeting with colleagues from her brewery firm, 315 miles away in Madrid.

“I’ll be back in Barcelona by half past five,” she said as her early afternoon bullet train flew back along the new high-speed tracks at up to 210mph. “It’s so quick, sometimes you are there before you have even noticed.”

Portet is one of hundreds of thousands of travellers who have migrated from the world’s busiest air shuttle, linking Madrid and Barcelona, to what is now Spain’s most popular train, the high-speed AVE.

The AVE, an intercom announcement has just told us, will leave us in the centre of Barcelona in two hours and 32 minutes. With Madrid’s AVE station a short walk from the Prado museum, the journey is from one city centre to another. What is more, the high-speed train does this in punctual, hassle-free and elegant style.

High-speed trains pulled by aerodynamic engines with noses shaped like a duck-billed platypus are grounding aircraft across Spain. The year-old Barcelona-Madrid line has already taken 46% of the traffic – stealing most of it from fuel-guzzling, carbon-emitting aircraft. As the high-speed rail network spreads a web of tracks across Spain over the next decade, it threatens to relegate domestic air travel to a distant second place.

A high-speed network is not designed overnight. Spain’s AVE story started in the 1980s, when the socialist prime minister Felipe González commissioned a line between Madrid and his home city of Seville. The project was overshadowed by corruption scandals and greeted with a certain amount of scorn. Why was sleepy Seville getting the line and not busy Barcelona? Some saw it as an expensive white elephant and a monument to González’s ego.

The line, however, was a spectacular success. Remote Seville was suddenly two and a half hours from Madrid. Spaniards, used to shabby, lumbering trains that crawled across the countryside following unpredictable timetables, discovered their trains could be stylish and run on time.

Previously the choice on the Madrid-Seville run was between a hot, tiring six-hour coach journey or an aircraft. Seventeen years later, only one traveller out of 10 takes the plane to Seville. The rest go by a train that is 99% punctual. The Seville line proved that high-speed trains could be part of the answer, albeit an expensive part, to some of Spain’s most enduring problems.

By 2020 Spain will have Europe’s largest high-speed network, its 6,000 miles of track outgunning even France’s TGV system. By then 90% of the population will be within 30 miles of a station. New lines have already been opened to Segovia, Valladolid and Malaga in the last 18 months. New links will eventually connect France and Portugal.

The high-speed train network also helps Spain control carbon emissions, with passengers on the Madrid-Barcelona line cutting their own emissions by 83% on the trip.

Click here to read the entire article.

Transportgooru Musings:

Something unusual is happening with the mainstream media these days.  There seems to be a renewed interest in pushing the idea of having a high-speed rail network in to the minds of the American public .  We have seen two articles on CNN/Fortune have brought too fore how China is pushing ahead with its investment in building a sophisticated, world class HSR network.  This spurred a good bit of debate on many popular infrastructure & transportation forums such as the Infrastrucrist.  Another one appeared in LA Times, by business writer David Lazarus whose sentiments about the American transportation system was summarized as follows after experiencing the highly systematic & super-sleek Japanese network: “It’s hard to appreciate how truly pitiful our public transportation system is until you spend some time with a system that works.” Many of us know that feeling.  Then he gushes about the consistently reliable, affordable and convenient transit systems in Japan. “I rode just about every form of public transit imaginable — bullet trains, express trains, commuter trains, subways, street cars, monorails and buses.”  Again, our good friends at Infrastructurist followed-up with a nice debate.

Now we have this Guardian article, that gushes about the glorious Spanish high-speed rail network.  I am sure this would stir another round of renewed interest in the minds of us transportation nerds, especially among those who keenly the TransportGooru and Infrastructurist columns on this topic. But do these discussions go beyond the comments section of these portals.  I wonder if the Government is even taking note of these anxiety-laden cries that advocate the need for a comparable HSR.  As the President and his administration staff reiterate his commitment to keep American workforce competitive in every field, pushing huge loads of money for all sorts of industries (Automobile manufacturing, battery research etc.) , everyone in the Government seems to forget that competitiveness should also extend beyond roads and vehicles.  The vast American bureaucracy is slowly pushing ahead with limited funding ($8Billion) and a massive goal (a HSR-network in pockets of nation with targeted connectivity), while other nations like China and Spain are blazing ahead with massive investments in a rail network.  Unless we as a nation get serious about investing in alternative transportation options such as rail, we will continue to remain dependent on our expensive oil addiction.

With the Government pushing new thinking such as transit-oriented development, it is probably not too far in the future before urban living becomes “cool” again and the minor discomforts of not having the plush sub-urban life with white picket fences and acre-wide manicured lawns might fade away.   The Government facilitated the emergence of the sprawl and the suburban lifestyle with its policy and funding push for interstates.  Back in the past were days when railroading was the best alternative for longer distances.  Ford and other American automakers created a new way of life with the commercialization of automobile technology, which has now blossomed into a thriving industry.  Can the Government enable a similar push for building high speed rail networks around the country?

Before we even get there, let’s first ask: Is there a need for it?   Yes, clearly there is a need for it, at least for distances shorter than 400 miles and there is also a desire for it among folks.  But the only thing that is lack is the Governmental backing. The paltry $8B will not be enough but it is definitely a good start.  It is not always a bad thing to emulate successful strategies, irrespective of where it emulates from.  American ingenuity stems from this ability to take ideas irrespective of their origin and tweak to make them suitable for the American landscape.  We did this for years by simply importing foreign talent (from nuclear scientists to PhD students) propelled new ideas and thinking to create a huge economy that was atop the world for decades. Why not do the same for building a rail network?

We have the need, we have the people who can get it done. All we need is the willingness to invest and the determination to get it done. As demonstrated in the past, Americans can accomplish great things (from building the interstate system to the invention of the atomic bomb), when the Government stood firm and pushed ahead to finish these mega-projects.  Some of these projects not only became a rallying point for nation building (during and after WWII) but they also spawned new economies and industries, spurring job growth and economic development in communities.

For argument sakes, for the time being we can remain content that our nation has a sophisticated air transportation network, with even the tiniest of the towns boasting an airport.  In reality, many of our airports are overwhelmed and strained by heavy operational delays and operate with sub-par efficiency, at times also posing a risk to passenger safety.  But at the end of the day, we are still going to be an oil-dependent economy, ply our cars and planes with imported for the near future.  Of course, there is a lot more to it than just saying and writing it on these websites and newspapers.  But that’s where the Government comes in to figure it all out and to make it happen.  That’s what the American tax-payers pay for every year before April 15th – to fund and keep a massive bureaucracy working for the to safeguard the interests of its citizens and not budge for the disgruntled political masses.

For what it matters, we are blessed with a dedicated team of professionals who are a part of this massive bureacracy and the USDOT employs thousands of people under its railroad-ing arm, the Federal Railroad Administration (FRA).  The agency should be given special powers (agreed that we are not Communist China and it may all have to be worked out within a Democratic framework) to expedite the approval process for the pending HSR proposals.  It should also be taken into account that allied industres such as steel manufacturing be reviatlized with incentives for making steel locally.  This would be a really good way to resuscitate the long-shuttered steel mills of our nation.  Hire a new workforce to build these raillines (as a data nugget, consider what China had been able to do in keeping its workforce busy.  The CRCC now employ 110,000 workers on a single line connecting Beijing and Shanghai.  If you are running short of professional capacity to build and manage all this new work, employ the new grads coming out of our universities (FYI,  the CNN article on Chinese HSR plans offer this data:  Last year China Railway Construction Co., the nation’s largest railroad builder, hired 14,000 new university graduates — civil and electrical engineers mostly — from the class of 2008. This year, says Liang Yi, the vice CEO of the CRCC subsidiary working on the Beijing-to-Shanghai high-speed line, the company may hire up to 20,000 new university grads to cope with the company’s intensifying workload. But with the private sector cutting way back on hiring — and university students desperate for work — taking on that many new engineers and managers hasn’t been too difficult) and put them to work on this project of national importance.   If we managed to somehow put aside all our  political in-fighting and come together to accomplish this in the next 20 years, our future generations may have a better shot at being competitive.  We may even see a renewed interest in our nations private-sector players to invest and operate these new railroads (many foreign and local infrastructure firms are now buying rights to build and operate our nation’s ports and toll-roads).  Who knows! Someday in the future we may have a sophisticated system if we “get it right”).

It takes a special leader , who can stand tall amidst all the challenges and marshall his troops to get the mission accomplished and our President sure has shown glimpses of such qualities.  But as we all know, mere glimpses are not enough.  Unless our leadership shows some serious commitment and interest, the possibilities of an average American riding an Ave-like or Shinkansen-like or a TGV-like system will remain elusive.  Will the real leader stand up and deliver?

US transport boss explores Spain’s high-speed rail system

May 30, 2009 at 11:00 am

(Source: AP, NY Times, The Infrastructurist, The Atlantic)

The U.S. transportation secretary says Spain’s bullet train system is a model to follow as America plans how it will spend its stimulus package. Ray LaHood says the $8 billion allocated for high-speed railways in the United States will improve the country’s infrastructure, spur economic growth and reduce greenhouse gas emissions. As part of his visit to Spain, he took a ride on the AVE from Madrid to Zaragosa and then hung around in a railway control center with the transport minister for a while. On Saturday he met with Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero, the guy who’s has really been the force behind Spain’s recent investment.

When President Obama announced in April his $13 billion plan to propel the United States into the age of high-speed rail, he tipped his hat to the trains that zip between the cities of the Old Continent at up to 217 miles an hour.  Spain opened its first Alta Velocidad Española, or AVE, high-speed train route in 1992, between Madrid and Seville. The network has grown to nearly 2,000 kilometers and stretches from Malaga on the south coast to Barcelona, which is north and east.

Spain, an enthusiastic latecomer to high-speed rail, on Friday will complete a six-day tour of European transit systems that it presented to the American transportation secretary, Ray H. LaHood. Officials say the Spanish experience could hold lessons in what works and what does not.

Supporters say the AVE has begun to transform the country, binding remote and sometimes restive regions to Madrid and leading traditionally homebound Spaniards to move around for work or leisure.

“Spaniards have rediscovered the train,” said Iñaki Barrón de Angoiti, director of high-speed rail at the International Union of Railways in Paris. “The AVE has changed the way people live, the way they do business. Spaniards don’t move around a lot, but the AVE is even changing that.”

Such is the train’s allure that politicians of different stripes have made extravagant promises to lace the country with a sprawling network. Under a plan devised by Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, Spain will have 10,000 kilometers (more than 6,200 miles) of high-speed track by 2020.

In a backhanded tribute, the train is perceived as such an effective tool of political cohesion that the Basque militant group ETA has effectively declared war on a project that would link the Basque region to Madrid.

As has happened elsewhere, the high-speed train is stealing passengers from the airlines: The 2.5-hour route between Madrid and Seville handles about 89 percent of railway and air traffic between the cities, according to Renfe, the state railway operator. In its first year, the Madrid-Barcelona route lured nearly half the five million passengers who would normally fly between the cities, Renfe said.

Supporters say such statistics bolster the train’s green credentials: The International Union of Railways says a high-speed train can carry eight times as many passengers as an airplane over a given distance, using the same amount of energy and emitting a quarter of the carbon dioxide for each passenger.

Here in Lleida, a town of 125,000 in northeastern Spain surrounded by plains that produce half of the country’s apples and pears, the inauguration of a high-speed route to Madrid in 2003 cut the journey to the capital to two hours from five and a half, and the extension of the line to Barcelona last year halved that trip to one hour.

The reception from the US media for the Secretary’s interest in rail has been surprisingly positive.  Voicing its support for the deployment of a high-speed network, the Atlantic notes that many of the nation’s important metropolitan corridors manage to have unbearably congested highways and airports. In the few places where intercity rail has the capacity and speed to be competitive with alternatives, Amtrak has no problem filling its trains. Rail construction obviously has high upfront capital costs, but they’re likely to prove worth it in the long run, particularly given that trains can run on electric power, which will grow steadily greener and become increasingly attractive in a world of rising oil prices (check).

And of course, airline service has not only become miserable and unreliable as the system has become overburdened and unprofitable, but it’s also pretty dirty, in terms of carbon emissions. The standard approximation has planes emitting as much per mile as cars, but of course planes travel much longer distances and at higher altitudes, where emissions have a more significant effect.

Word is, the president really wants to leave office with a high-speed rail network as part of his legacy. Sounds good to me.

It is natural to think if a country like Spain, whose political system is often gridlocked and often confronted by the militant ETA in the Basque region, canembark and accomplish such an ambitious national project, why can’t the same be accomplished in the United States?  A columnist at the Infrastructrist has rightly captured this thought: The conversation about all this in Spain seems very lucid in contrast to our own,  where the political system is so debilitatingly gridlocked that we can think in the smallest terms. Keep in mind that this a $150 billion project for a country with an economy one-tenth the size of ours. So if we were doing things on the Spanish scale, we’d be devoting more than a trillion dollars to passenger rail. Imagine what that debate would sound like in Congress and on talk radio. Rightly said!

Spain leaps forward with its ambitious high-speed rail network expansion – On track to bypass France and Japan

April 21, 2009 at 1:49 pm

Spain's system of 218-mile-an-hour bullet trains, the AVE[mdash ]meaning 'bird' in Spanish[mdash ]has increased mobility for many residents, though critics say it has come at the expense of less-glamorous forms of transportation.

Agence France-Presse/Getty Images via WSJ

(Source: Wall Street Journal)

Bullet Train Changes Nation — and Fast

CIUDAD REAL, Spain — To sell his vision of a high-speed train network to the American public, President Barack Obama this week cited Spain, a country most people don’t associate with futuristic bullet trains.

Spain’s system of 218-mile-an-hour bullet trains, the AVE — meaning ‘bird’ in Spanish — has increased mobility for many residents, though critics say it has come at the expense of less-glamorous forms of transportation.

Yet the country is on track to bypass France and Japan to have the world’s biggest network of ultrafast trains by the end of next year, figures from the International Union of Railways and the Spanish government show.

The growth of the Alta Velocidad Española, or AVE, high-speed rail network is having a profound effect on life in Spain. Many Spaniards are fiercely attached to their home regions and studies show they are unusually reluctant to live or even travel elsewhere.

But those centuries-old habits are starting to change as Spain stitches its disparate regions together with a €100 billion ($130 billion) system of bullet trains designed to traverse the countryside at up to 218 miles an hour.

“We Spaniards didn’t used to move around much,” says José María Menéndez, who heads the civil engineering department at the University of Castilla-La Mancha. “Now I can’t make my students sit still for one second. The AVE has radically changed this generation’s attitude to travel.”

High-Speed Frenzy

Spain opened its first high-speed line, between Madrid and Seville, in 1992. At the time, the decision to run the line to sleepy Seville, host to the World Expo that year, was deeply controversial. Critics said it would be a costly failure for then-Prime Minister Felipe González, and that he built the line just to take him to Seville, his hometown, on the weekends.

 

But the AVE-which means “bird” in Spanish- proved to be a popular and political success. Politicians now fight to secure stations in their districts. Political parties compete to offer ever-more ambitious expansion plans. Under the latest blueprint, nine out of ten Spaniards will live within 31 miles of a high speed rail station by 2020.

By last year, the sprawling network of lines that stretches out from the capital, Madrid, reached Málaga in the south, Valladolid to the north and Barcelona in the country’s northeast. Now, residents of Barcelona can be in Madrid in just over two-and-a-half hours-a journey that takes around six hours by car.

 

The University of Castilla-La Mancha’s campus here has grown sharply in size and importance. “The school is here because of the AVE,” says Mr. Menéndez, the department head. “Without it, it would be impossible to attract the high-level staff we need.”

Around a third of Mr. Menéndez’s students are from a different region of Spain — almost unheard of in a country where students mostly stay close to home.

Click here to read the entire article (Free regn. required)

Washington DC Bike-Sharing Program is Growing Up!

March 23, 2009 at 5:59 pm

(Source: Examiner via Tree Hugger); Logo courtesy:  SmartBikeDc.com

Five-Fold Increase in Number of Bike Stations Time flies! It wasn’t so long ago that theWashington DC bike-sharing pilot project was born, and now it’s growing up: “By summer, the D.C. Department of Transportation will have expanded the current Smartbike system from 10 racks to 50 racks.” Total number of bikes should be about 500. Not quite Paris with its Vélib program (20,000 bicycles!), but a step in the right direction. 

washington dc bike sharing photo

According to the ExaminerWTOP is reporting that DC’s bike-sharing program Smartbike is slated for a significant expansion this summer. The D.C. Department of Transportation (DDOT) expects Smartbike to add about 40 racks, a move that will bring the total number of bikes in the program to about 500. As of January, more than 1,000 people subscribe to the program.
 
Vox Popoli, a Georgetown blog, is thrilled by the newsof the expansion. David Alpert of Greater Greater Washington has some thoughts on how the city might consider expanding the program even more (as well asan interactive Google map where users can suggest locations for future racks). Earlier this month, I posted the transcript from an exchange with Martina Schmidt, the manager of the DC bike-sharing program, during which we discussed vandalism and usage statistics. 
 Click here to read the entire article.

Spain’s pilot EV recharging network starts in Seville

March 18, 2009 at 11:10 am

(Source: Autobloggreen)

Spain’s fourth largest city is getting 75 public electric vehicle recharging stations throughout the city this year. Spain’s ambitious program of introducing EVs, hybrid and plug-in cars (a million units for 2012) is promoting the new network under the Movele program. Seville is getting recharging stations in the most used parking lots in the city, as well as at the airport, city hall offices and other official buildings. The plan includes 500 electric cars, which will be allocated not only to public institutions but for private users as well. It’s expected that each simple recharging post will cost €1,000.  The picture shows a recharging post in Lisbon, Portugal.
Click here to read the entire post. 

The Trains in Spain Go Faster Than the Planes

March 5, 2009 at 6:55 pm

TransportGooru recommends all readers to listen to this interesting coverage on NPR.

(Source:  NPR)

 President Obama’s economic stimulus package includes $8 billion for speeding up train travel. America is far behind other industrial countries in high speed rail. A few years ago, Spain was also behind the curve. But the Spanish network is expanding fast, and the trains are beating planes.

File:Renfe clase 100.JPG