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by Mountain Lion on 09 May 2015 - 12:05
by GSDtravels on 09 May 2015 - 13:05
by Mountain Lion on 09 May 2015 - 16:05
“Anti-white racism is rampant in Black Studies programs which are generally indoctrination programs in left wing politics,” Mr. Horowitz said, Fox reported.
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2015/may/9/saida-grundy-boston-university-professor-white-mal/
by Mountain Lion on 13 May 2015 - 22:05
I see the moron in the White House trying to make political hay by mentioning that the Republicans are trying to cut funding to Amtrak in the upcoming budget. Of course as usual he opens his big pathetic mouth before the facts are in.
I'm sure not cutting future funds to Amtrak would have stopped a train going a 107 in 50 MPH zone from crashing...
by Red Sable on 14 May 2015 - 10:05
The phrase “for the good of the planet” can be used as an excuse to micromanage virtually every aspect of our lives. This new sustainable development agenda is literally a framework for managing the entire globe.
Under this Pope, the Vatican has become much more political than it was before, and sustainable development has become the Vatican’s number one political issue.
Hmmmm
by vk4gsd on 14 May 2015 - 11:05
Quote
The bodies had not yet been fully recovered from the Amtrak derailment in Philadelphia before Capitol Hill erupted hours later into its usual partisan clash over how much money to spend on the long-struggling national rail service.
As investigators picked through the rubble on Wednesday morning, Democratic lawmakers in Washington angrily demanded an increase in Amtrak funding, calling Tuesday night’s accident a result of congressional failure to support the rail system. Republicans refused, defeating the request in a morning committee hearing and accusing Democrats of using a tragedy for political reasons.
“It was beneath you,” Representative Mike Simpson, Republican of Idaho, snapped at a Democratic colleague after the funding increase was defeated in a 30-to-21 vote.
The scene in the hearing room was a replay of the swirling politics that have threatened to consume Amtrak in the four decades since it was nationalized by the United States government. Like the rest of the country’s crumbling public infrastructure, its aging rail beds and decades-old trains are sagging under increased use, especially in the Northeast, where nearly three-quarters of all travel takes place on the trains, not on planes.
the system, called positive train control, is the end of 2015, but Congress is considering extending the deadline to 2020 at the urging of freight and passenger rail systems that say the costs could rise to $10 billion.
Senator Richard Blumenthal, Democrat of Connecticut, said in a statement on Wednesday that delaying the technology “only leads to preventable and predictable tragedy.”
Investigators said they were examining the speed of the derailed Amtrak train, which they said was going 106 miles an hour on a stretch of track where the speed limit was half that. But they said no firm conclusion had been reached on what caused the derailment.
Edward G. Rendell, the Democratic former governor of Pennsylvania, lashed out at Republican lawmakers on Wednesday for refusing to increase Amtrak funding. He said the requested increase of $251 million over the Republican budget of $1.14 billion could significantly improve safety by upgrading tracks and installing positive train control systems in the busiest part of the system.
Washington. The callousness and disregard was shockingly contemporaneous.”
Representative Steve Israel, Democrat of New York, also criticized his Republican colleagues, saying they should have used the aftermath of the Amtrak accident “as an opportunity to do the right thing, instead of sticking to their ideology.”
The Northeast Corridor is the nation’s busiest rail corridor and accounts for more than a third of Amtrak’s ridership. It is also the most profitable part of its national network. But some bridges, like the Portal Bridge near New York, for instance, are more than a century old and in desperate need of replacement. Trains come to a crawl when they travel through Baltimore’s 100-year-old tunnel. Some parts of the tracks still have wooden ties.
Meanwhile, the Acela — Amtrak’s high-speed train that runs between Washington and Boston — can reach its top speed only in a handful of places. On a 30-mile stretch near Cranston, R.I., for example, the Acela speeds up to 150 m.p.h. About five minutes later, it needs to slow down.
going to take to wake up Congress that this stuff has to be invested in? It is aging, it is not properly maintained.”
Amtrak has its passionate supporters, including Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., who often joins many lawmakers who race to Union Station for a quick trip home. But the rail system also has many detractors, who say its annual losses are a drain on the public treasury. Many argue that privatization of the rail lines would improve service, cut costs and create innovation that could rival the gleaming train systems in Japan, China and across Europe.
Representative John L. Mica, Republican of Florida, is pushing a plan to privatize the improvement of Amtrak’s system in the Northeast region. He said that the rail system needed money for improvements, but that lawmakers did not trust Amtrak to spend it well.
“What they own is poorly maintained and outdated infrastructure,” Mr. Mica said. But he added, “They don’t have the trust of Congress to get substantial money because they’ve not spent the money well that they’ve gotten.”
“When you give them money, they squander it,” he said.
In the meantime, however, Amtrak’s funding is failing to catch up to its ridership, which peaked at 32 million last year, up nearly 50 percent since 2000. In 2014, its latest fiscal year, Amtrak lost $1 billion with revenue of $3.2 billion.
“Amtrak has really suffered from congressional schizophrenia over funding levels,” said Ray LaHood, the Republican former member of Congress who served as President Obama’s first secretary of transportation.
Mr. LaHood said much of the blame rested with lawmakers who came to Washington from states where Amtrak does not run. “They think Amtrak is just the easy place to cut,” he said, adding that he had little optimism that anything would change without pressure from voters during election time.
“All Americans should be concerned that there is no vision,” Mr. LaHood said. “There is no plan. There is no courage for taking up what needs to be done in terms of fully funding infrastructure. We are limping along.”
Since the passage of the Rail Passenger Service Act of 1970, the National Railroad Passenger Corporation, as Amtrak is officially called, is the only provider of national passenger rail service in the country.
Successive Amtrak chief executives — there have been six since 2002 — contend with a dual mandate: to provide a public service while also trying to make money, which has proved an impossible task, Ms. Kanter said. Her latest book, “Move: Putting America’s Infrastructure Back in the Lead,” addresses the importance of investing in transportation infrastructure.
“We have to do something big instead of just repairing. We need to repair, of course, but we have to reinvent, too, because the whole model is broken,” she said. “We don’t want to be stuck with the same crummy, shabby system after we fix Philadelphia. We have to do something more, and better.”
by vk4gsd on 14 May 2015 - 11:05
RS, who needs stinkin sustainability when the human population is increasing like a plague, things will just work out perfectly by themselves right.
and what do you care, the world should have ended by now according to you....over and over.
the end is nigh.....
by Mountain Lion on 14 May 2015 - 12:05
by GSD Admin on 14 May 2015 - 14:05
How sad someone posts drevel when lives have been lost. This system would save lives. And is already mandated to be in effect by the end of the year but railroads have dragged their feet and hired lobbiest to lobby their pals in congress to extend the deadline.
No matter what caused Amtrak Northeast Regional Train 188 to derail as it rounded a bend in Philadelphia, it looks like technology could have prevented the crash, a top transportation official said Wednesday.
A system known as positive train control likely would have stopped the train -- which had been hurtling around the curve at more than 100 mph -- from derailing, National Transportation Safety Board Member Robert Sumwalt told reporters.
"Based on what we know right now," he said, "we feel that had such a system been installed in this section of track, this accident would not have occurred."
Here are some answers to key questions about the technology, which transportation safety advocates have been pushing for years:
How does positive train control work?
It's a system that combines GPS, wireless radio and computers to monitor trains and stop them from colliding, derailing or speeding.
If a train isn't being operated in accordance with signals, speed limits or other rules, the system will slow or stop the train.
What are the benefits of the system?
Positive train control was designed to prevent the human errors behind roughly 40% of train accidents, rail safety experts say.
Imagine what would happen, the NTSB said in a fact sheet this year, if an engineer suffering from a cold didn't notice a red signal and failed to stop the train.
"With PTC, the train stops anyway," the NTSB says. "Without PTC, real world results have been tragic. ... Without it, everybody on a train is one human error away from an accident."
Why wasn't it installed on this stretch of track?
"That's going to be a key question. We want to find out," Sumwalt told CNN's "The Situation Room." "Why was it in other areas ... on Amtrak's Northeast corridor, but why was it not here?"
A system that can stop accidents sounds like a no-brainer. But there's a catch: It's expensive.
That's one reason the railroad industry has opposed it in the past. And that's likely one reason why even though it has been installed in most of the Northeast corridor for Amtrak, it hadn't yet been installed on the part of the track where the train derailed Tuesday, said Peter Goelz, a former managing director of the NTSB.
"It costs billions," Goelz said. But that doesn't mean it isn't worth the price, he said. "We cannot stop. The government needs to help."
Goelz also offered another possible reason the system wasn't in place.
"It could be because this is an intersection of a number of different rail lines, at this intersection they did not have it in place even though it was a relatively sharp turn," he said.
Are there plans to use positive train control more in the United States?
In response to a head-on collision that killed 25 people near Los Angeles in 2005, Congress in 2008 ordered the nation's railroads to adopt positive train control by December 2015.
But it's looking increasingly unlikely that the deadline will be met. And some lawmakers have proposed extending it to as late as 2020.
Amtrak said in a newsletter this year that it had plans to implement positive train control on 1,200 more miles of track, including the remainder of its Northeast corridor.
At this point, most freight railroads say they won't be able to make the December 2015 deadline, Sumwalt told CNN. But it's something the safety board is still pushing for, especially in light of this week's derailment.
"We feel that it needs to be implemented," he said, "because it will prevent the very type of an accident that we're talking about here."
by Hundmutter on 14 May 2015 - 15:05
Transport infrastructure is a world wide problem; with increasing population,
aging equipment & facilities, and more & more pressure on transport systems to
go further, go faster, carry greater loads (often in spite of the discomfort to the people
who form those loads !), just about every country is seeing difficulties with its
rail networks. Certainly its very true of the UK too; we share the same arguments
about the need to repair or renew, to chuck more money in the direction of the
railways, who is responsible for paying that money, how they make enough profit
out of the poor sods travelling on an ever more over priced but under-funded system,
yadayadayada.
Certainly don't think religion or prophesy have the answers.
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