Robert Whitcomb: Private-sector passenger rail?

Since the disappearance of private-sector passenger rail  service decades ago, intrepid entrepreneurs have tried to bring it back. None have succeeded.

However, in some densely populated places, passenger rail has even thrived in the public sector, at least as measured by passenger volume. This mostly means Amtrak in the Northeast Corridor and several major cities’ long-established commuter-rail networks. But  new  commuter rail is  also catching on in some unlikely places, including such Sunbelt cities as Dallas and Phoenix, which now have popular light-rail systems.

Now, with an aging population, the proliferation of digital devices that many people would prefer to stare at rather than at the road and the increasing unpleasantness of traveling on America’s decaying highway infrastructure amidst texting and angry drivers, private passenger rail looks more capitalistically attractive.

Consider All Aboard Florida, a company that plans to offer extensive rail service starting in 2017. It will connect Miami and Orlando in just under three hours, with stops in Fort Lauderdale and West Palm Beach.

Its advertising copy eloquently describes commuter rail’s allure in populous areas: “{Y}ou can turn your stressful daily {car} commute into a productive or peaceful time by choosing to take the train instead of driving your car. By becoming a train commuter, you’ll also help the economy and environment while you’re at it.’’

Southern New England, like much of Florida, is densely populated, with some unused or underused rail rights of way. So our entrepreneurs occasionally propose private passenger rail for routes not served by Amtrak or such regional mass-transit organizations as Metro North and the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority.

Consider the Worcester-Providence route, on which a new company called the Boston Surface Railroad Co. wants to start operating commuter rail service in 2017 on the (now freight-only) Providence and Worcester Railroad’s tracks. Most of the commuters going to work would be traveling from the Worcester area, via Woonsocket, where there would be a stop, to Greater Providence. While Providence itself has fewer people  -- about 178,000 -- than Worcester (about 183,000), the two-state Providence metro area -- about 1.6 million -- is much bigger than the latter’s metro  area’s about 813,000.

The density is there for rail service. That the region has an older population than the national average and frequent bad winter weather also give the idea a lift.

But the old rail line needs to be upgraded if the trips are to be made fast enough to lure many travelers. The company hopes to offer a one-way time of about 70 minutes on a route that you can drive in about 45 minutes in moderate traffic and clement weather.  That could be a killer.

What this project and similar ones need is new welded track, rebuilt rail beds (with help of public money?) and some entirely new routes to make service competitive with car-driving times. We need more passenger and duel-purpose passenger-freight rail lines, not more highways. But getting them will be tough in a country that so blithely tolerates crumbling transportation infrastructure and has a deeply  entrenched libertarian commuting  habit of a single person driving long distances to work. Unless gasoline tops $5 a gallon and stays there for at least a year, it’s hard to see millions of Americans deciding that they’ll quit their cars to take the train.

Still, I applaud the project’s CEO, Vincent Bono, and hope that thousands of commuters will give his railroad a try. While the trip  would be long, think of how much uninterrupted Web surfing (free Wi-Fi!), reading and snoozing you could get on these trains, with their reclining seats.

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An Aug. 10 USA Today story was headlined “Smaller cities emerge among top picks for biz meetings.’’  Depressingly, Providence was not on the list of the top 50 places for “meetings and events’’ in 2015, say evaluations by Cvent.  But many far less interesting and attractive places were.

The reasons probably include Rhode Island’s under-funded and balkanized self-promotion and the long delay (now  finally being addressed) in building a longer runway at T.F.  Green Airport.

Robert Whitcomb (rwhitcomb51@gmail.com),  a Providence-based editor,  writer and consultant,  oversees newenglanddiary.com and is a partner in Cambridge Management Group, (cmg625.com), a healthcare consultancy, and a fellow at the Pell Center. He used to be the editorial-page editor of The Providence Journal and the finance editor of the International Herald Tribune, among other jobs.

Robert Whitcomb: Land of the all-too free

  The U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling authorizing gay marriage across America has  helped to cement homosexual citizens’ sense of civic acceptance. However, in part because homosexuality usually involves behavior as well as orientation, they’ll continue to suffer some angry bias that will be impossible to prevent. There are limits to social engineering and even of litigation, however noble the intentions.

Meanwhile, the erosion of traditional, heterosexual marriage continues. That has helped lead to poverty, child abuse, addiction and other social pathologies as an increasing number of families are led by overwhelmed, low-income unwed mothers, and all too often fathers don’t help support the children they’ve helped create. Indeed, many fathers just disappear.

Thus, we have increasing social dysfunction, exacerbated by the continuing loss of jobs to globalization and technology. Still, some social legislation, such as the Affordable Care Act, may alleviate the effects, especially poverty, of traditional marriage’s decay.

None of this is to say that marriage is a panacea for anything or that no-fault divorce doesn’t have merits. Whatever, it’s good to know that all American gay adults can now experience, if they really want to, the joys, anxieties, sorrows, fun and boredom of marriage and the privilege of paying divorce lawyers to help them terminate their unions. (Since a much higher percentage of married gay couples will presumably be childless than of married straight couples, most of their divorces will usually be fairly easy. But who will look after them when they’re old?)

But I suspect that, as with many heterosexuals, many gay couples will assiduously avoid the duties of marriage. Why get tangled in the red tape of marriage – the smallest unit of government? Isn’t this “The Land of the Free’’?

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Northerners should know that to many Southerners the Confederate battle flag is a symbol not of slavery per se but of regional pride, including in the friendliness, courtesy and sense of community more common in the South than in much of America.

That isn’t to say that the centrality of slavery in “The Lost Cause’’ doesn’t evoke enthusiasm among many of the region’s racists, who hate the melanin-rich President Obama. And I agree with the general sense of Ulysses S. Grant’s opinion that the Confederacy was “the worst cause for which a people ever fought, and one for which there was the least excuse.”

In any case, America is now more than ever a land of tolerance. Indeed, for all the rhetoric about bigotry here, by world standards America is a very welcoming place for virtually all minorities, rivaled only by a few northwestern European nations (that we militarily protect). Many Americans would be surprised to learn how lucky they are in this regard. Vicious bigotry reigns on much of the planet.

Dictatorships and discrimination are on the march, and America and the West in general must be ready for a renewal of what John F. Kennedy called the “long twilight battle’’ of the First Cold War. Computers may be the biggest weapons on this war; just ask the Chinese, who are winning it so far and who aren’t about to permit gay marriage.

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“You go to my head

With a smile that makes my temperature rise Like a summer with a thousand Julys’’

-- From “You Go to My Head’’ (1938), music by J. Fred Coots,  lyrics by Haven Gillespie

July Fourth marks the start of high summer, which goes so fast in New England.

Perhaps oddly, considering that he was a World War II combat veteran, my father loved loud fireworks. In those days (the ‘50s) it was nearly impossible to buy them in New England so he’d purchase boxes of them at stores in the Carolinas and fill much of a station wagon with them, often with a lit cigarette in his mouth.

The blasts would happen every few minutes on the Fourth – mostly large firecrackers, such as M-80s, but we also fired a small cannon. The finale was around sunset at a beach, where whatever was left was exploded. This violated town laws, but few local ordinances were enforced on the Fourth.

Robert Whitcomb (rwhitcomb51@gmail.com) is a Providence-based writer and editor and the overseer of New England Diary. He's also a partner at Cambridge Management Group (cmg625.com), a healthcare-sector consultancy, and a Fellow of the Pell Center.

Our weather narcissism

  By ROBERT WHITCOMB

Inevitably, some politicians and entertainers (e.g., Rush Limbaugh) are having great fun with the cold and snowy winter in the East and Midwest, saying that this shows that “global warming” is a fraud.

But they are extrapolating from immediate experience and anecdote, not science. I suspect that most of these people know better, but, hey, they’re in show biz.

Actually, January, for instance, which the news media lamented for its cold, snow and ice, has been rather severe in the eastern U.S. because of a huge dip in the jet stream that has brought cold (though not unprecedented cold) to the Upper Midwest and the Northeast while out West, including Alaska, it’s generally been very warm and dry for this time of year. Northeasterners and Midwesterners have endured temperatures 10, 15 or more degrees below normal; Alaska and California have been 10-15 degrees above. And the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reports that January was, on a global basis, the fourth-warmest on record.

That the Northeast is so densely populated and that much of the national news media are based in New York and Washington mean that the idea that this winter is particularly bad has particularly strong currency. It recalls E.B. White’s funny 1954 essay “In the Eye of Edna,” in which he noted that the nation lost interest in Hurricane Edna after it moved beyond Boston’s radio and TV stations to wallop White’s comparatively remote Mid-Coast region of Maine.

Then there are such relatively new weather-news outlets as the Weather Channel and Accuweather. These commercial outlets will die if they fail to constantly dramatize such old weather phenomena as “The Polar Vortex” — a low-pressure area in upper latitudes that now is presented almost as a new and lethal threat to civilization. Weather events that would have seemed par for the course of a season a half century ago are now characterized as world-historical events.

Changes in the route of the jet stream from time to time bring cold air deep into the eastern part of the United States while the other side of the country becomes much warmer than usual as the jet stream brings in mild, Pacific air from the southwest. The jet stream’s position, of course, can vary widely but it can sometimes get stuck, meaning warm, “open” winters for us some years and cold ones in others. The general trend, though, is for milder winters. The trouble is that we confuse events in our areas that are part of weather’s natural variability with global climate change.

The confusion of one’s particular circumstances with the wider reality reminds me of the heartening rise in recent years of “evidence-based medicine” as opposed to the more traditional “expert-based medicine.” I am simplifying, but evidence-based medicine relies much less on individual physicians’ experience, values and judgment and much more on cold, hard data derived from rigorous collection and analysis of information from broad populations. As with medicine, so with climate, follow the data.

Anyway, New Englanders have suffered through another week of below-normal weather and are heartily sick of it. That the population is aging and that old people, in particular, find winters wearisome may reinforce the winter fatigue of younger people, too.

In some winters, snow drops and crocuses would be popping out of south-facing slopes about now. It looks as if we’ll have to wait a while for them this year. Still, a gradual change in the mix of morning bird song and that there’s bare ground around the base of trees where there was snow a week or two ago reminds us that the sun is getting stronger by the day: Some birds are coming north again and there’s more solar energy for the trees to absorb. And on one of our recent, and for this winter, rare mild days, I found the worms wiggling enthusiastically in our compost bin, whose contents seem to have been frozen solid a couple of days before. Worms: A reminder of the cycles of death and life.

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The Feb. 23 New York Times business section story “Loss Leader on the Half Shell: A national binge on oysters is transforming an industry (and restaurants’ economics)” was heartening for a coastal New Englander. It implied that our estuary-rich region could benefit a lot from much expanded shellfish aquaculture. Unlike, say, casinos, which are a net subtraction from a region’s economy, or local businesses that recycle money that’s already here, aquaculture, because it has exportable physical products and brings people here from far away to buy them in our eateries as local specialties, increases our region’s wealth.

And the business, with its demands for clean water, prods us to keep our coastal environment cleaner.

Robert Whitcomb (rwhitcomb51@gmail.com), a former  Providence Journal editorial-page editor,   is a Providence-based writer and editor and the overseer of www.newenglanddiary.com.  He  is also a director of Cambridge Management Group (cmg625.com).