Transportation 2: Electric Boogaloo

This image infuriates me every time I look at it. It was created using Google Earth and Windows Vista's Snipping Tool (very handy).

The red line is NJ Transit's rail operations in New Jersey. To the north is the Northeast Corridor line, operating from Trenton to New York City. To the south is the Atlantic City line, operating from Philadelphia's 30th Street Station to Atlantic City. The squiggly line connecting them is the RiverLINE, a diesel-powered light rail service operating from Trenton to Camden along the Delaware River and operating along existing and operational freight rail lines. The portion of red line off to the right is the North Jersey Coast Line, provided here for reference as to NJ Transit's service footprint in NJ, ending in Bay Head and heading north to connect with the Northeast Corridor tracks just before Elizabeth and providing service into New York City.

The green line is the existing rail service between Camden and Trenton operating in Pennsylvania. This is controlled by Amtrak and leased to SEPTA (South-Eastern Pennsylvania Transit Authority, for those not in "Teh Know") and NJ Transit for commuter rail operations. North of 30th Street Station, Amtrak operates the Northeast Regional (local), Acela (express), and on weekends, ACES (Atlantic City Express Service, stopping only at NYC, Newark and Atlantic City), while SEPTA operates the R7 and R3 services connecting daily commuters with Trenton and West Trenton, respectively (don't be fooled - the two cities are miles apart). To the south of 30th Street Station, the green line is simply the Atlantic City line. Amtrak used to operate daily service to Atlantic City but discontinued this when it was apparent that no one was actually using it on a daily basis (the ACES service is funded exclusively by the casinos in AC, operated with NJ Transit and Amtrak equipment, and tickets are exclusively distributed by Amtrak).

The yellow lines are simply geographic borders that I couldn't turn off in Google Earth, and the light blueish lines are county borders in NJ.

Now let's see... what could all those black lines all over the place be? Take a second and look at all of them.

Those are the rail lines crawling throughout South Jersey. Some are used as freight rail, some are abandoned, some have the last trains that used them still sitting there derelict, housing vagrants, all manner of wildlife, causing damage to surrounding environs and posing health and safety risks for area children, who are extremely likely to curiously play on or around these monoliths to times past, when rail service was privately operated and sprawled everywhere but now sit neglected.

Google searches for abandoned trains in New Jersey or perusing any Weird NJ magazine or related website often turns up pictures of these things. It's disgusting - anyone who claims to value transit in NJ at all should be appalled that the state has thus far ignored these lines and let the possibility for expansion simply die.

Here is another shot from Google Earth, this time showing simply the transit options SEPTA, with all its problems, has provided, compared to the transit options NJ Transit has provided to South Jersey residents. Pretty stark picture, eh? All of those rail lines, everything NJ Transit has done, has thus far centered on New York or Newark, and has ignored South Jersey and left it to rot. It's not that the freight companies aren't willing to work with them - far from it, they're very happy to work with commuter rail systems, as evidenced by the RiverLINE, which must shut down service at 10 PM and start up at 5 AM because it shares rails with CSX, a freight railroad. The expansion of the Newark Light Rail from Branch Brook Park Station to Grove Street Station in Bloomfield is owned by Norfolk Southern (as are the tracks which make up the other future expansion on the table, found at http://expandncs.blogspot.com). And again, portions of the expansion plan for the Hudson-Bergen Light Rail are currently freight rail lines in use - and I could go on and on with examples of how freight and passenger rail can share lines without any trouble, and still we have wasted rails all over South Jersey.

So really, the question now becomes: what excuse have you, NJ Transit, to not provide service?

I Gave Up Facebook, Not The Internet, So Here's What I Think About Our Situation

In a previous post, I discussed what I thought could be done to try and keep the budget from going too far.  Among the things I pointed out at the time were the similarities between computing resources and budget resources; namely, that over time, things creep in which we don't necessarily need and which invariably bog down and grind to a halt our other resources.  With computers, this results in a fairly bad user experience, which requires a lot of time and effort to fix, and if fixed improperly leaves open the door to more and more problems.  With our government, national budget and national resources the situation is practically the same.  We have had almost fifty years of socialist programs that have led almost two generations to believe that they are owed an upbringing by their government, we have had a budget which is overstuffed with programs that have such wonderful intentions but such horrendously destructive results, and billions of gallons of oil, millions of acres of useable woodland, and hundreds of thousands of brilliant minds and capable manpower squandered on such laughable prospects as global warming/climate change when they could be building more and better nuclear/coal/antimatter (wheeeee that would be awesome!) power plants all over our nation.  

I don't need an advanced degree, or anything more than simple math, to tell me that more people taking more pieces of the pie leaves less pie for me.  Mmm pie.  The significant problem, the core of it, is control.  People want to control their own destinies, but other people want to control other people's destinies.  What?  Individuals have the will and the ability to do what they want, when they want it, and would love nothing more than to do it without other individuals having a say in how they do it.  Think about it for just a second.  As a kid, there's nothing more irritating than having your parents order you to go with them to look at houses when really you wanted to spend the weekend riding your bike all over the damned neighborhood.  Yes, we all know it's better to go look at houses, because your parents love and care for you, and want you to tell them what you think of that nice white house two towns over because even though it's a benevolent dictatorship, you'll have to live under that roof too and if you can see something that they might miss, they want to know about it.  Plus, it's better for them to find the crap you'll complain about now (like the place with the one shower for eight or nine people or the place with the basement that reminds you of that ghost story you read last week, the one that made you almost crap yourself, or the place with the one room that looked like it belonged to that liver-eating guy from the X-Files first season) rather than dive into the purchase and have to deal with a bad attitude and misbehavior later on.  Yes it's better for you, but being a kid, you just want to use your free time towards your own ends, like riding through that cemetary and pissing off the caretaker with the black van just because you could, or just relaxing with some mind-blowing 8-bit/16-bit video games.  

The point is, even though you'd be doing what's best for you by going with your folks, you want to go do what you think is the best use of your time.  Now substitute "government" for "your folks," "your money" for "your time," and toss in edicts that have the force of law, and you've got a better idea of what's going on.  

----

A note about Nadya Suleman.  

Because you know I had to say something about this.  

I don't usually condone the use of IVF because very frequently the eggs and sperm are pared down to one egg and one sperm, and the remainders are, for those who can't afford storage, destroyed.  Doesn't sound too bad except that those are potential human beings - destroyed = killed.  

That being said, for the few who are ready to accept however many children come into the world as a result of either IVF or natural conception, I gladly and happily endorse, encourage and embrace their actions.  To accept such a bountiful and wonderful gift from God despite the hardships one may face takes a courage and a resolve few have ever matched.  Nadya absolutely deserves praise and encouragement for these actions.  

Would I have gone the same route as her, and taken all of this on outside the bonds of marriage, and fitfully declared to the world that I would, that I could, do this alone?  Absolutely not.  There is not a chance in hell that I would've even dared to try something like this on my own.  That's one of the reasons for marriage - to provide support in every form, to mitigate the impact of the crap God chooses to throw at us and to help us come out of it better.  Doing something like IVF while wildly proclaiming self-reliance and independence reeks of either stupidity or severe mental issues.  

All of that taken into consideration, the media has taken this whole situation WAAAAAAY too far.  When you have Entertainment Tonight going on about the 911 calls she's made (none of which have resulted in child services or any other authority showing up at her door), you know things are out of control.  People need to leave this woman alone and let her find her own way out of this situation - rather than coming up with more ways to smear her for having multiple kids.  Really, all she needed was a tsk tsk from her parents - not months of hounding by every media outlet and left-wing anti-life butch-to-the-extreme feminist nutjobs haranguing her for all of her faults.  

Temperence, people.  

-----

I gave up Facebook for Lent, as I'm sure you saw from the title.  

I left the notifications RSS feed in my Google Reader, so every time you tag me I see it - I just don't respond.  Why did I do this?  Isn't that cheating?  

Nah.  It's really really easy to ignore Facebook when I don't have it open all the time and when I've disconnected it from all of my other online presences.  It's harder to stay off of it when the notifications are there, taunting me and telling me that someone superpoked me (and only me).  I'm doing this for the challenge, not so I can avoid being stalked or something.  

-----

I've created a second blog, one solely focused on the Newark Light Rail expansion you're all sick of hearing about.  

http://expandncs.blogspot.com

That site will cover all updates and such, along with the Facebook group (which I don't have the link for and won't put up here because it'd require me to log into Facebook), and it also has a link to the Google Docs version of the proposal.  

----

That's all for now.  =)