Amtrak

So in part to examine the passenger rail system in the states, part to look at the ways cities reveal themselves to rail, and part because it was cheap I took an overnight train from Omaha to Denver. Plagued by budget shortages and right of way issues, Amtrak has really taken a back seat in our country to the air network. Nonetheless with President Obama's initial funding of 13 high speed rail projects it signals the sign of a transition between transportation priorities.

The issue that always will need to be addressed in these projects is how you make it more attractive than a car, how you work to connect the rail to other city networks, and ultimately how you attract a population oriented to the car to reorient to travel by train. Europeans almost intrinsically do this because they drive small cars that aren't long distance worthy.

Anyway I want to talk more about the experience and some conclusions that I made. So the interesting thing about Amtrak is the fact that it was created to take over passenger rail from many freight railroads throughout the US who had wanted to remove passenger service for quite a while. Commercial Aviation and the highway system pretty much put the nail in the coffin. So what remains is a system that has been pared down to bare minimum, and in doing that has become inefficient. So in order to take the train from Omaha to Denver that requires taking the California Zephyr, which operates between Chicago and San Francisco. It operates once a day, meaning that wherever it is in its 52 hour trip when it comes to you is where you pick it up. In my case this meant getting on at 11:05 PM, or at least that was what is originally planned. The thing about the Zephyr, and most Amtrak Trains for that matter, is the fact that because they operate on freight lines they are subject to the right of ways of freight trains. So the schedule is up in the air and therefore the train is notoriously late.

My train was delayed an hour getting into Omaha, and didn't leave until 12:35 AM, an hour and a half late, and arrived nearly 2 hours late. The train itself is ok. The seats are big and adjustable, the legroom is phenomenal, and each car has 4-6 bathrooms, making it fairly comfortable for this sort of trip. The train is also double-decked, providing a lot of usable space that most European trains don't (this is more likely due to speed than anything else, at a certain speed the body roll of the trains wouldn't be safe and would be tipping prone). The train is actually fairly comfortable, not really the nicest for sleeping as I found out, but I seemed to manage. Some of the things that it really lacks are modern amenities, such as power outlets, but nonetheless it seems to be fairly nice for a train. The main problem is the time it takes. It was supposed to take 9 hours to go from Omaha to Denver, a distance of around 540 Miles. The problem is that with all the stops and the delays and slowdowns the truth of the matter is that its faster to drive, and flying is infinitely quicker.

The other thing about Amtrak is how quirky it is. Its not that much less expensive than flying, so the people that it attracts are the ones where the factor of time cost is 0 or hate flying. There were quite a few Elderly People, which I imagine don't like flying. The main quirky-ness of it is the system. Amtrak abandoned Union Stations in favor of small cinder block outposts, which fast forward 30 or 40 years are dreary, run down, and just generally not the nicest place to be. Every Automated electronic ticket machine I've seen has malfunctioned, and isn't being used. The way it worked in Omaha was the night conductor that was getting on the train gave us a safety speech and then came around checking tickets and assigning us to cars. I cant really explain why I thought this was so weird but it was. I guess possibly because it was making things that were implicit extremely explicit. All this stuff about holding onto hand rails and headrests when walking seems like common knowledge. Its just plain intuition. I never got briefed on how to cross between MTA cars or hold on, it was kind of a natural instinct. The other thing that is kinda funny is how explicit some things are, as well as how rail enthusiast oriented it is. The fact that we were going through a BNSF yard was announced. The conductor also came on to talk about what tracks we were on and why we were delayed. The many announcements during the morning were oriented primarily to the dining car. Announcing when peoples tables were ready to prevent a log jam. Its this kind of organized linearity that is critical, but also humorous in its explicit nature.

The other real inadequacy of the whole experience was the fact that it took Amtrak 45 Minutes to get checked luggage to us. And thats for the one train that comes into the station each day. The dis-economy of scale for a station handling two trains a day is astounding.

Regardless it was an interesting experience. At some point I want to mine the planned map to try to understand the speeds and distances that the plan calls for.

I will also show the images that I took of the progression into the city. As expected, the experience of going into the city is freight and industry centric vs a showcase of the city.

Thoughts on Omaha Day 2

So Today I ventured into suburbanization with a rental car. I found the State Highway 6 Corridor (or Dodge St) an interesting progression in the form factor of the street and the repetition of standard products (drawing to come explaining this). I then returned through the I-80 industrial corridor, which is the fairly standard mix of sheet metal industrial buildings and fast food chains. The key thing about this corridor is that it is easy interfaced to the highway, to expedite the trucking process.

Despite journeying far out west, I was drawn back to the city center and the North Downtown Area. Its very clear that the core of Vibrancy is straight west. I also visited the Ak-Sar-Ben Redevelopment (or Nebraska spelled backwards), it was originally a coliseum and horse racing track and is now parceled out and a large amount of town homes have been built. The retail portion is starting, and the office buildings are just starting. The Midtown Redevelopment that I went to (pictured below) is really interesting. It puts a lot of density where very little existed, but still relies wholeheartedly on the car. Thats the point of  Omaha though, a concentration on the automobile and the farmland. As I drove farther west the more Trucks and SUVs I was surrounded by, and the bigger the roads became, which is typically American.

Based on these generalizations and the lack of public transport it is clear that there is no plan to change, no plan to push forward. The simple reality is that the car will be king. The midtown redevelopment adds density and program to the area, but also massive parking support in the form of parking garages. It's an interesting development that there is this kind of primacy in the face of a city that was founded on the train.

That brings me to the real conclusion of my time in Omaha, and that is that the city is continuing to reclaim rail yards. It shows the evident transition of rail transport and organization to areas outside of towns and cities. Switching yards still occur in cities, but for the most part organization takes place outside of civilization here. This is evidenced by the fact that there is a massive rail yard in western Nebraska, which serves as the organizing body of the rail system.

This creates unique undeveloped parcels within cities. Here in Omaha the whole riverfront was once a series of rail yards, and through acquisition and gifting it has steadily moved back into the cities hands. Certain parcels work better for redevelopment than others. An example of this is that the rail yard that is now the newly claimed North Downtown area works as a parcel because adjacent businesses had moved out and otherwise folded to allow a takeover. Whereas the parcel between the two Union Stations doesn't work as a redevelop-able site because it is still a train thoroughfare, and the Train runs in a curved path through the area. This means instead that there is simply unused land.

The other observation I was able to make while on the ground is how much topography plays a role in things here. This part of Nebraska is hilly and due to that the riverfront isn't so accessible. The only real 'window' to the water is from ConAgra's campus to the airfield. To the south is hilly and to the north is the airfield and then an industrial area that houses a power plant.

I also ventured south to where the stockyards were, which is now the site of a community college. This would be ideal for all parties except for the reality of the infrastructure that supported the stockyards is still a functioning rail yard. This goes back to the point I've made in my earlier research that right of ways have to be respected and therefore not all adjacencies are ideal.

There will be drawings to follow, with all this running around its difficult to settle down and get work done, but it will have to happen of course. Tonight I'm off to Denver via Overnight Train.... So far said to be running 12-15 minutes late. Full Report on that will follow tomorrow morning.

Baum Iron Company

Former Furnishings Building in the Old Market Area

First Day Recap Part 2

One of the interesting things about Omaha is the amount of private investment in public projects. Because of Berkshire Hathaway and the time frame, there are a lot of charitable people who were first investors with Warren Buffet and now are getting old, and choosing to give some of their earnings to the city of Omaha. This creates a strong private base on which these projects are funded. Virtually every project in the city has had a combination of public ad private investment.

Along the same lines of this mixed investment structure was the ConAgra corporate Campus .One of the most formative decisions was the city condemning and destroying parts of the industrial fabric to allow Conagra to build their campus and a public park. The precedent was there for the rehabilitation and reprogramming of industrial structures, but the city and the corporation wanted to start from scratch. The fight over this went all the way to the supreme court, but eventually the corporation got their way and so the corporate campus is built today. My issue with this was it destroyed the street grid making the first street on the grid start at 10th street. I've talked alot about form structure, and this seems to be a prime example of the difficulty sites have. The park is nice but it creates its own lake as the amenity rather than using the river as the amenity.

I'm in the process of computerizing a drawing about this, but one of the things I found interesting was the riverfront on the other side of I-480. There, the pollution was so bad that the ground was simply capped with a plastic membrane and built on top of. What this means is that the area has to be treeless. What sits on the river right here is a so called "destination restaurant", with parking to support it. The problem is the flood wall. and the terrace that was built. (I should preface my judgement with the fact that Omaha is engaging their waterfront, so its doing something). The problem with the way this was built is it provides too much space between the water and the restaurant, creating a dead zone. That means unless there is some event happening, the waterfront is doomed to feel empty and unoccupied. Rather, the event spaces should be pushed to other areas and the building should be pushed towards the water, or the terrace pulled back farther.

Anyway here are some panoramas I took Yesterday.

View of the Lake at ConAgra's Corporate Campus

First impressions of omaha

As Omaha is very humid, I've been taking breaks from the heat and so I
will try to write some first impressions of Omaha.

First off Omaha seems to be a very vibrant city. They are building and
expanding even when most other cities are stagnant. Of special note is
the fact that they are building a new stadium here for the college
world series, which I learned has a $40 million dollar impact on the
economy every year, despite the fact that it only takes place for less
than two weeks.

One of the other things that is so interesting about this city is the
fact that they have been able to attract high profile corporations to
reinvest into downtown, evidenced by Union Pacific's headquarters and
the newly ground-broken TD office park in the near north downtown,
which was stimulated by a few factors. One of which is the land that
they reclaimed from rail yards and manufacturing which was able to
effectively double the size of downtown. This is attractive to
corporations because the airport is due north of downtown, so building
in north downtown (or No-Do as they call it) is equivalent to some
Chicago corporations which build in areas proximate to the airport.

Another major point of value to the city is the fact that due to the
air force base being located in the south of the city, and the large
amount of defense contracts that were executed here, there is a
massive fiber optic network here which is now available for public use
(the command center closed in 92). This mans that corporations that
are extremely data heavy have many choices about where to locate and
aren't limited as much by network access. This has perpetuated itself
into becoming the "1-800" capital of the US.

I have alot more to talk about regarding Omaha's corporate and city
structure but will wait until I get in front of a computer.

Airline Industry

This Blog isn't supposed to be a purely linear thought process but rather a series of observations and interpretations. Along those lines I continue to be fascinated by the airline industry, and in particular new and emerging airlines. Last night I took Frontier/Midwest, Airlines that are now merging and seeking to merge their corporate culture. Frontier's differentiating moves were to standardize their fleet with the French made Airbus A-319/320 Series planes, and offer direct TV inflight for a nominal fee. Midwest Airlines took on this kind of executive class airline with leather seats and warm cookies. How these airlines move to merge in this difficult economic state will be worth watching. For now, it will be the double sided napkin.

On Location

The interesting part of my travels last night was the fact that there was such a stark contrast between every part of my trip. From the hectic and close-quartered Laguardia to the calm and serenity of the Airport in Milwaukee. From the spacious Airbus Jet to the close quartered regional jet, from a cramped NYC apartment to a spacious hotel room next to green pasture, this trip represents a series of comparisons and juxtapositions between cities, and will continue as the trip progresses.

Frantic Laguardia on a Tuesday Night

Calm Milwaukee, Airy, Light, and Peaceful