Your daily source of fresh takes on news affecting America's passengers. See also the weekly NARP Hotline.
December 5, 2013
Written By Logan McLeod Cincinnati once again has been stopped in its tracks trying to improve the lives of community members and business developers by a misguided and selfish political agenda. This is at least the second time a Cincinnati Mayor deliberately shut down a project that didn’t quite align with his plans for the city. I call them “his plans” because the decision was not based o...
December 4, 2013
Written By Abe Zumwalt While the fascinating and complex technology behind driverless cars becomes more and more of a reality, there are worrisome externalities and lessons from the past that will need to be confronted. “The Google car is an old-fashioned sort of science fiction: this year’s model of last century’s make” proclaims a recent opus in the November 25th edition of The New Yo...
December 3, 2013
Written By Malcolm Kenton Last August, I was one of 23 very fortunate individuals who each raised $5,000 through online crowd funding to participate in the inaugural journey of the Millennial Trains Project. This was the first in what should become a series of such journeys, occurring every six months or so, that use a transcontinental train ride as a vehicle to inspire creativity, entrepreneursh...
December 3, 2013
Written By Sean Jeans Gail The story about Sunday’s tragic Metro-North accident got more puzzling yesterday. NTSB Member Earl Weener, in an interview with Wolf Blitzer, said this: “We do know that two minutes before the curve, the train was going at 60 miles per hour and had accelerated then, up to 82, prior to entering the curve.” From the NTSB briefing, the throttle was engaged “givi...
November 26, 2013
Written By Ross Capon Amtrak figured in a rather positive way in a November 21 Washington Post editorial, “Where the money is: As Congress faces yet another spending deadline, it continues to ignore the true debt problem.” The Post was ridiculing suggestions about what would constitute meaningful budget savings. Here’s the key passage: The Congressional Budget Office’s latest report on d...