A Bit More Detail

China is contemplating on building a high-speed railway that will link Beijing to Vancouver, a 13,000 kilometre route that will cross Siberia and reach Alaska through a 200 kilometres long tunnel under Bering Strait – the narrow point between the two continents.

It was reported on state-run television and the Beijing Times newspaper earlier this month. According to another report by the English language version of China Daily, “The project will be funded and constructed by China. The details of this project are yet to be finalized.”

From Vancouver, the line will branch on to continue to Eastern Canada before reaching its final destination on the American East Coast.

The line would be 3,000 kilometres longer than the epic Trans-Siberia railroad with trains traveling from end to end at an average of 350 km/h, completing a one-way trip in about 37 hours.

One estimate pegs the cost of building such a line at $2 trillion with the main engineering challenge revolving around the technology needed to construct the Bering Strait undersea tunnel – a length four times that of the Chunnel between the United Kingdom and France and an area known for its seismic activity. The economics behind constructing and maintaining such expensive infrastructure is also in question.

The ‘China-Siberia-Canada-America Line’ is among four international high-speed railway projects being contemplated by the Central People’s Government of China. The Beijing Times also lists three other lines that will connect China to London (through Paris, Berlin, Warsaw, Kiev and Moscow), Central Asian nations, and Southeast Asia.

At a press conference this afternoon RCMP officials announced that two men have been arrested and face charges in conjunction with an attack they were allegedly planning against a particular VIA rail route (though the RCMP would not confirm which one). Chiheb Esseghaier (30, Montreal) and Raed Jaser (35, Toronto) face multiple charges for “activities related to terrorism”—including “conspiring to carry out an attack against, and conspiring to murder persons unknown for the benefit of, at the direction of, or in association with a terrorist group”—and will appear at Old City Hall for a bail hearing tomorrow.

RCMP Assistant Commissioner James Malizia emphasized that there was no imminent threat to the public, and that the significance of today’s arrest lies in the support the suspects received “from Al Qaeda elements located in Iran.”

The investigation, dubbed Project SMOOTH, began in August 2012 and was led by the RCMP. Multiple other agencies participated in the investigation, including the FBI, the Toronto Police Service, York and Peel region services, and the OPP. Officials today declined to comment on whether further arrests were expected, or on the details of the planned attack, as their investigation is ongoing. They did say that the support Al Qaeda provided “was in the form of direction and guidance” (rather than material support like the provision of money).

Chiheb Esseghaier, the younger of two men charged in the al Qaeda train plot, is a Tunisian-born PhD student at a Université du Québec nanotechnology lab who was threatened with expulsion for his disruptive behaviour and strict religious views that alienated his colleagues.

One colleague at Institut National de la Recherche Scientifique (INRS) in Varennes, Que., described Mr. Esseghaier, 30, as “a brainwashed person, basically,” who tore down posters he did not approve of, and pestered the administration to install a prayer room.

“He had very strict religious behaviour that made many people frustrated,” said the colleague, who asked that his name be withheld. “He had problems with the administration.”

His co-accused, Raed Jaser, 35, is a Palestinian with citizenship in the United Arab Emirates, who has permanent resident status in Canada. Search warrants were being executed Monday at his home in a Toronto suburb, where neighbours said they have seen a group of young men in traditional Muslim garb weightlifting.

‘‘If I was outside, or getting into my car, he wouldn’t even say hello. He was a very reserved guy. They kept entirely to themselves,’’ said Sanjay Chaudhary, 47, who lives next door.

The two accused — Chiheb Esseghaier, 30, of Montreal and Raed Jaser, 35, of Toronto — face charges that the RCMP say include conspiring to carry out an attack against, and conspiring to murder persons unknown for the benefit of, at the direction of, or in association with a terrorist group.

Tomorrow, the men are due to appear in a Toronto court for a bail hearing.

The RCMP gave few details about the accused, though they indicated that neither man was a Canadian citizen.

During the Monday afternoon press conference, the RCMP said that while they believed the accused had "the intent and capacity" to carry out attacks, the public did not face any imminent risks in advance of the men’s arrest.

When asked what search warrants had revealed to police, Chief Supt. Jennifer Strachan said that information was not available because the searches were still ongoing.

Hours later, RCMP officers could be seen in an eastern Toronto neighbourhood, near Victoria Park Avenue and Finch Avenue East, where two homes were taped off and a large RCMP truck was parked nearby.

[Security expert Seth] Jones argues that "Iran is likely holding al-Qaeda leaders on its territory first as an act of defence. So long as Tehran has several leaders under its control, the group will likely refrain from attacking Iran," which is a Shia Muslim country, while al-Qaeda is Sunni Islamist group which has often targeted Shias.

On the other hand, should the U.S. or Israel attack Iran, "Tehran could employ al-Qaeda in a response," Jones has said.

If the Iranian government should be convinced that al-Qaeda in Iran was secretly involved in supporting a plot in Canada, Jones expects Tehran will detain or expel some of the individuals responsible. "I cannot imagine the Iranian government would be happy with al-Qaeda plotting from its soil," he told CBC News.

The influential electronic music artists Kraftwerk, saw their 1977 concept album Trans-Europe Express as a symbol of a unified Europe, a “sonic poem” enabling a moving away from the troubled legacy of the war, and particularly, of Nazi Germany. The spectre of the Reich and their militaristic high speed road construction was often linked to the band’s fourth studio album Autobahn, although the band saw it, in part, as a “European rejoinder to American ‘keep on trucking’” songs. The French journalist and friend to the band, Paul Alessandrini, had apparently suggested the idea of the train as a thematic base (See the wikipedia entry): “With the kind of music you do, which is kind of like an electronic blues, railway stations and trains are very important in your universe, you should do a song about the Trans-Europe Express”. Described as embodying “a new sense of European identity”, the album was destined to become a seminal work of the band, not just in fusing a qausi-utopian political idea with their sonic aura, at once popular, idiosyncratic and profoundly influential, but also in ‘reclaiming the train’, which chugs across “borders that had been fought over”. In response to Kraftwerk’s espousal of European integration, band member Karl Batos says here,

We were much more interested in it at that time than being Germans because we had been confronted by this German identity so much in the States, with everyone greeting us with the 'heil Hitler' salutes. They were just making fun and jokes and not being very serious but we'd had enough of this idea.

The chugging beat, “ripe with unlikely hooks, and hypnotic, minimalist arrangements” is in ways an ideological amplification of the idea of Autobahn, referencing the transport networks of Germany, and seeking in its “propulsive proto electro groove…a high speed velocity transit away from the horrors of Nazism and World War II”. There was, however, as Pascal Bussy writes in Kraftwerk: Man, Machine, Music (1993), a formidable nationalism underlying their somewhat nebulous politics. Kraftwerk believed, as Hütter is quoted saying to the American journalist Lester Bangs in 1975, that they were unlike other contemporary German bands which tended to be Anglo-American; they wanted instead to be known as German since the “the German mentality, which is more advanced, will always be part of our behaviour”.

Drawing quite a bit of inspiration from pioneering avant-garde artists such as Karl Heinz Stockhausen, the Italian composer Russolo & the Fluxus Group (which included La Monte Young, Jon Hassel & Tony Conrad), it was actually the Frenchman Pierre Schaeffer that they were directly indebted to, in some manner, with regard to their electronic transport music. As Karl Batos reveals in the aforementioned interview, they were ‘following his path’, since it was the Schaeffer’s Musique Concrète piece using only train sounds that they were referencing.

Musique Concrète was a Schaeffer’s way of ‘turning his back on music’. It was a method of empirically gathering environmental sounds and creating sonic envelopes using these sources. In doing so it was in “an opposition with the way musical work usually goes”, Schaeffer believed, and the process of collecting sounds, ‘concrete sounds’, whatever their origin be, was “to abstract the musical values they were potentially containing”. It was a way of ‘freeing’ composition from its formalist shackles and reformulating the process of composition, ‘a new mental framework’, which saw the shaping of music as a more ‘plastic’ process. In a 1986 interview (read here), the broadcast engineer who worked for the radio station ORTF, says that having successfully driven out the German invasion in the years after the war, music was still ‘under an occupying power’ – Austrian, 12 tone music of the Vienna School. It was this that he wished to reject and seek instead, “…salvation, liberation if possible”. He along with Pierre Henry, in contrast to purely electronic music, developed pioneering modes and techniques of electroacoustic improvisation, wherein naturally occurring and other environmental sounds, ‘any and all sounds’, were recorded and then manipulated to create musical compositions.

The final Northlander train departed Cochrane Friday morning — and many people are taking the opportunity for one last ride.

More than a century of rail history is not fading away without acknowledgement as the passenger service was cancelled with the provincial government’s decision to get out of the rail business. The last round trip train travelled from Toronto to Cochrane Thursday and was expected to return Friday morning.

Former Ontario Northland Rail workers like Lorne Fleece — who started with the railway in 1949 — hopped on board to reminisce.

“I would say I have over 20,000 miles in train travel,” he said.

[. . .]

Two MPPs also boarded the final northbound train from Toronto to Cochrane — not for medical reasons, but to protest the train's cancellation. Timiskaming-Cochrane MPP John Vanthof was joined at Union Station by Timmins-James Bay MPP Gilles Bisson.

“I’m still stunned at the short sightedness of this decision,” said Vanthof.

“The Liberal government is shuttering the ONTC to save a few dollars, while they waste millions of dollars buying seats in the GTA. Once again, northerners are being left out in the cold. The fact that they won’t even maintain service through the Thanksgiving weekend just speaks to their total indifference to the North.”

When the brakes are applied for the final time on the Northlander, it will mark the end of more than 100 years of passenger rail history on the route.

The province has committed to keeping the Polar Bear Express running, however, and says it plans to enhance bus service.

• Dan Hirschman at A (Budding) Sociologist's Commonplace Book distinguishes between the economic measurements GDP and GDP.


• James Bow mourns the death, via cutbacks and falling passengers, of Ontario's Northlands railway.


• Centauri Dreams considers the question, inspired by evidence that Alpha Centauri is significantly older than Sol, and speculation that habitable planets are likely to be considerably older than Earth, of where the aliens are.


• Daniel Drezner is somewhat surprised that he is optimistic about the spread of liberal-democratic ideals worldwide, at least relative to others in a recent issue of The National Interest.


• Geocurrents' Asya Pereltsvaig considers the similar Russian-based contact pidgins in Siberia and along Russia's Arctic coast as the product not of contact with a single language area but rather as consequence of a mindset of how to talk to non-Russians.


• Marginal Revolution notes a New York Times article noting the culture shock experienced by trained professionals migrating to Germany from southern Europe.


• Registan notes that the International Labour Organization's demand to inspect Uzbekistan's cotton plantations to verify that forced and child labour is not used there, likely to be rejected because (among other things) Uzbekistan does use forced and child labour, is likely to lead to worsened relations with the United States.
  
• I'm late on this one, but Slap Upside the Head notes the retraction of the only credible study on ex-gays by the paper's author.


• Towleroad notes the hysterical anger of Islamic clerics and the usual in Iran at the rumour--not the reality--of a gay pride parade in neighbouring Azerbaijan.

Ten years ago, everyone thought the wait was over. There was a game-changing plan to re-establish downtown Buffalo as the transit center of Western New York. A part of the empty Aud and the area around it would have been transformed into a regional transportation hub, bringing together passenger rail, light rail, and buses. Local politicians even secured money and drew up detailed plans for the building’s repurposing. The Buffalo News quoted then-mayor Anthony Masiello as saying: “This sends a very strong signal we’re no longer talking about concepts…We’re going to start delivering on what we’re talking about for the Buffalo Inner Harbor.”

It never materialized, the Aud was demolished, and the entire idea of such a downtown project vanished with the building. Buffalo was left with a hole in the ground and its meager Amtrak station hidden under the I-190.

Now, Buffalo faces what some suggest may be a new key to energizing the region: high-speed rail.

Groups involved in the planning, including CSX and the New York State Department of Transportation, have discussed faster trains, higher trip frequency, and more reliable service. All this would be within the Empire State Corridor, a two-track line that stretches from Niagara Falls to New York City, with emphasis on the stretch between Albany and the Falls.

Planning is still in early stages, says Hal Morse, executive director of the Greater Buffalo-Niagara Regional Transportation Council. A corridor-wide environmental impact statement on the effects and feasibility of high-speed rail, he says, is expected in the summer of 2012. Localized studies will follow, and after those, construction.

[. . .]

In the beginning, higher-speed trains would still share tracks with regular passenger and freight trains. The finished product, Morse says, would be a third track to be used exclusively for high-speed trains. A small part of that third track has already been built outside Rochester.

“When you’re bringing the external transportation to the region—for example the high-speed rail project—one of the things that we do is try and coordinate how will we achieve the vision for this region,” Morse says. “We’re also working closely with the Canadians. We’ve been building this mega-region concept that incorporates the greater Toronto area and Upstate New York. And when you combine that population base it’s really significant and substantially growing.”

“Who knows how much service would actually increase with high-speed rail,” says Dr. Daniel Hess, associate professor in the School of Architecture and Planning at UB. Hess, like Foster, recognizes high-speed rail’s potential. “It would have to be really terrific service, really priced right, in order to greatly increase the number of people coming to Buffalo by rail.”

He says that if it does materialize, Buffalo can handle the increase in visitors that Morse and the NYSDOT predict. “Can NFTA handle the number of people that would be coming on rail? Right now I think absolutely,” he says.

Hess teaches classes on transportation planning, and has experience in researching travel behavior, or people’s choices about where, when, and how they travel. He, too, warns that any decisions on high-speed rail, at both the city and state level, must be approached cautiously. Often, Hess says, American travelers in Western Europe will experience the region’s efficient high-speed trains and demand that the same system be built back home.

“Where rail works best is at its arrival and departure points you have a lot of activity happening. You travel from the center of London to the center of Paris on high-speed rail, and when you arrive in the center of Paris there’s an enormous density of activity,” Hess says. The closest example of such a system stateside is the Boston-New York City-Washington, DC corridor, which is different in more than one way from the Empire Corridor. “The problem with cities like Buffalo is the central city, the central core, has really lost its bang as the nerve center of the region,” Hess says. “If you were to arrive in downtown Buffalo on the rail, there isn’t necessarily so much there for you.”

What, exactly, do Republicans, conservatives, and libertarians have against trains? Seriously, what? Why did President George W. Bush try to zero out Amtrak funding in 2005? Why is the conservative Republican Study Committee suggesting that we do so now? Why does George Will think "the real reason for progressives' passion for trains is their goal of diminishing Americans' individualism in order to make them more amenable to collectivism"?

[. . .]

Libertarians, of course, have no problem with trains (see, e.g., Atlas Shrugged). They do have a problem with federal spending on transportation, as do many Republicans. Atlas Shrugged was published in 1957; Amtrak took over the rails in 1971. Since then, conservatives will sing the praises of private rail projects but criticize federally funded projects that don't meet the ideal. Rep. John Mica, R-Fla., for example, pushed a high-speed rail initiative through Congress in 2008. By 2010, he was denouncing "the Soviet-style Amtrak operation" that had "trumped true high-speed service" in Florida. In 2011, as the chairman of the House Transportation Committee, he is interested in saving the Orlando-Tampa project by building 21 miles between the airport and Disney World. This is about 21 miles farther than local Republicans want to go.

For more than a decade, Lind and a conservative movement icon, Paul Weyrich, collaborated on papers about why conservatives should support rail. Their 2001 paper, "Twelve Anti-Transit Myths: A Conservative Critique," actually tackled 34 "myths" about rail, including "rail transit is a federal conspiracy" and "trains are noisy." It ended with Lind and Weyrich declaring of their foes: "THESE PEOPLE DON'T KNOW WHAT THEY'RE TALKING ABOUT!" Weyrich died in 2008, effectively cutting the number of conservative rail prophets in half.

"Conservatives used to be in favor of a civilized way of doing things," says Lind. "Board a train and you don't have the TSA groping you. If you think our greatest vulnerability is a dependence on foreign oil, here's a way to get around that can run on coal or electrified rails."

But conservatives hear that spiel every day. They have a response that's part economics and part culture. The economics are simple: Trains cost too much. Randal O'Toole, a Cato Institute fellow who studies transportation and is constantly cited by rail skeptics, likes to compare the total federal subsidies-per-passenger of rail to subsidies-per-passenger on highways. Amtrak got $2.2 billion in pure subsidies in 2010 and carried 28.7 million people, for around 13 cents per passenger, although some researchers estimate the annual cost at closer to 30 cents. Highways got $42 billion in funds in fiscal year 2010, but far more people use them; the estimate puts cost at between 1 cent and 4 cents per driver.

But there is another way to look at the numbers: Amtrak passengers pay more of the cost of their transportation than do drivers on the interstate. About 62 percent of Amtrak's operating expenses, according to the Department of Transportation, comes from fares. According to the Federal Highway Administration, the percentage of highway spending paid for by users—in the form of gas taxes and tolls—is headed below 50 percent.

[. . .]

Leaving aside the apparent contradiction—first rail doesn't make sense because no one would ride it, then it doesn't make sense because too many people would want to ride it—Cox's point is the conservatives' second play in their anti-rail argument: the cultural case against rail. Rail can't work because people don't want to ride it. Liberals want to fund rail because they want to change behavior.