Six months ago sixty-one percent of Peninsula, California, residents voted to support a statewide measure to pledge $9.95 billion for a high-speed rail system. It would ultimately provide high-speed rail travel between Los Angeles and San Francisco making the trip in two hours and 40 minutes. The proposed project is estimated to carry some 94 million passengers by the year 2030.

Part of the green movement is the idea of using massive wind and solar farms located in areas outside of large cities. These farms are estimated, depending on who you talk to, to provide up to 40 percent of needed electrical power in the short term.

The problem is that these efforts to make our cities and society more environmentally responsible are facing some serious roadblocks. It isn’t anything to do with the technology as in many cases we already have the abilities to pull off such projects. The biggest roadblock, once the initial flush of ‘doing the right thing’ has worn off is that old bugaboo – Not In My Backyard, otherwise known as NIMBY.

This is one of the biggest problems facing wind and solar farms. While the actual farms are in outlying areas where they are able to collect all that renewable energy without bothering most people the problem comes in trying to get that energy to its destination point – the cities. To do this means putting up transmission lines and nobody wants these monstrosities anywhere near their homes, which at some point they will have to.

Now we come to the high-speed rail project in California and find that this NIMBY attitude is starting to show its head as people start worrying about the effect the rail system will have on their property values. The people involved try and cover up much of the rhetoric with phrases like “ … no socio-geographic distinction to being on one side of the tracks.” and where the residents were given enough information before the vote.

But when push comes to shove the underlying principal behind NIMBY is an economic one as pointed out by Martin Engel in an San Francisco Examiner post by Will Reisman

“Our home values will absolutely plummet with the prospect of 200 trains a day going by outside,” he said.

The reality is that going ‘green’ isn’t going to be cheap. What is in question though is if a better environmental future is something we really have the stomach to reach for even if it means having to be in your backyard. As it stands right now we mouth the words about how important it is to go green but when it comes down to it costing us personally that all changes. It’s okay to be green as long as it is someone else’s backyard that they need to use but the moment it is your backyard, or wallet, going green suddenly needs more consultation and expensive reviews.

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Even though current oil prices have returned to levels not seen in some time with gas prices lower than they have been for almost a year (at least in my neck of the woods) there is still a strong interest in high speed rail travel. Well, at least everywhere but the United States and Canada. Japan currently leads the pack of nations that are building out their rail systems with new high speed and in some cases environmentally friendly trains.

By the end of the year Japan hopes to have the design of the world’s fasted train done and it promises to reach speeds of 350 km/h (217 mph) which is 50 km/h faster than their current bullet train. Over in France they have a new AVG train which they say will cover 1,000 km (600 miles) in just 3 hours. As well due to a special engine configuration they claim the train will use 20% less fuel. Of course this is up against the other major English / European train – the Eurostar which already runs between London and mainland Europe.

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The Eurostar’s main claim to fame other than being a fast bullet style train is its environmental impact which the company running the trains claim is 90% lower in greenhouse emissions than what an equivalent airplane ride would be. Of course green isn’t something new for some trains as the PVTRAIN in Italy has been trying our solar panels on trains since 2005. While the power generated isn’t so much for the actual train it has reduced the power consumption of things like air conditioning thereby lightening the load on the engines and using less fuel.

Not to be out done by their European brethren Sweden has initiated the  Gröna Tåget (Green Train) research program which they say has set a new Swedish train speed record of 295 km/h (183 mph) while using 20 to 30% less fuel. Now while much of the attention for rail improvement has been in the passenger train arena China has been looking at the locomotives that power their freight trains. In that regard they have begun rolling our engines that are lighter, delibver 40% more power and use 3 – 5% less fuel.

So this begs the question. At what point will both the US and Canada get up to speed and realize that one way to reduce infrastructure costs and lighten the load on the environment means taking a serious look at rail as an alternative. Granted the distances are greater than you will find in Europe and Japan where high speed rail is predominant but that doesn’t mean that there are situations where it would work out very well.

[hat tip to Treehugger]

Related posts:

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