In the months before the attack on Pearl Harbor, someone traveling from Nashville to Atlanta likely would have taken the train. One option, the Dixie Flagler, ran from Chicago through the Southeast to Miami. The 289-mile trip would have taken 6 hours and 10 minutes. Nowadays, there are no passenger trains from Nashville to Atlanta. But by 2035, Amtrak hopes to relaunch that service. It will take, by Amtrak’s own estimate, six hours and 34 minutes, or 24 minutes longer than it did 81 years ago.

Hayden Clarkin, a transit planner who tweets under the handle @the_transit_guy, shared this finding on Twitter on July 14. As of this writing, it has been retweeted more than 2,500 times. 

Politicians love to talk about American exceptionalism—that America is the greatest country in the world—as well as the growing need to be increasingly competitive with other economic powers, most especially China. But no topic humbles both concepts quite as much as trains, where America is neither great nor competitive. 

The degree to which the U.S. lags compared to high-speed passenger rail networks in Europe, China, Japan, and even Morocco is well-documented. What’s less well-documented is how the U.S. struggles to compete with a different type of foreign country: the United States about 80 years ago. 

“The richest country in the world has to do better,” Clarkin said in his tweet.

Inspired by Clarkin’s tweet and an ensuing email exchange, Motherboard compared the anticipated travel times of Amtrak’s 2021 Corridor Vision plan, set to go into effect in 2035, with historical timetables for the same routes posted on American-Rails.com, a rail enthusiast website. Most timetables were either from 1941 or 1952. While there are nuances, for the most part Clarkin wasn’t cherrypicking an outlier case. There are several routes where trains were faster in the 1940s and 1950s than Amtrak hopes to achieve in 2035. 

Among the routes:

• San Diego to Los Angeles took 2 hours 45 minutes on the San Diegan in 1952 making normal stops. An express train ran once a day in each direction in just 2 hours 15 minutes. Today, the Amtrak train makes the same trip in 2 hours and 55 minutes. For some reason, Amtrak expects this trip to take 10 minutes longer in 2035, for a total travel time of 3 hours 5 minutes.
• Amtrak wants to launch a Houston to Dallas service in 2035 in 4 hours 30 minutes. In 1952, the same trip could be made in five minutes less on the Sunbeam.
• Chicago to Milwaukee was once a major passenger route taking just 82 minutes in style with reclining lounge seats, a parlor car, and various levels of meal service. Today, the trip takes 90 minutes. In 2035, an Amtrak expects it to take the same amount of time it does now.
• Milwaukee to St. Paul is another route that doesn’t hold up so well to its 1952 counterpart, taking more than a half hour longer between the two Midwestern cities.
• Atlanta used to be a major rail hub and Amtrak wants to revive that tradition. It also wants a train to Chattanooga taking more than three hours. In 1941, it took two hours and 58 minutes.

When presented with these findings, Amtrak spokesperson Jason Abrams said there are two main reasons for the slower travel times. First, Amtrak trains often have to make more stops than their pre-Amtrak counterparts. (Abrams didn’t go into detail why, but as a quasi-government corporation, Amtrak sometimes makes more stops along a route to please Congressional representatives who need to authorize its funding, unlike the private railroads that existed before Amtrak’s formation in the early 1970s.) As an example of the added stops Amtrak now makes, Abrams pointed out the 1959 New York Central’s New York-Chicago route took 16 hours and made eight stops, whereas Amtrak’s Lake Shore Limited along the same route takes 19 hours 10 minutes making 18 stops, including a lengthy pause in Albany where train cars coming from Boston are linked up. 

The second reason has to do with track priority. Passenger trains generally travel on the same tracks as freight trains. When the passenger and freight trains were owned by the same company, they typically prioritized passengers. Now, in the Amtrak era, freight rail companies no longer operate passenger train service but still own, operate, and maintain the tracks, which Amtrak uses. Although the law requires them to prioritize Amtrak trains, in practice they rarely do, resulting in an escalating beef between the freight companies and Amtrak. 

“Amtrak’s host railroads often do not prioritize Amtrak trains over their freight trains, even though that is required by law,” Abrams said. “As a result, Amtrak has to build additional time into schedules.” (Seasoned Amtrak travelers will know even these schedules rarely bear a resemblance to reality as trains can be held up for hours waiting for freight rail to pass. So even Amtrak’s schedules typically understate how much slower train travel has in practice become.)

One of the few places Amtrak does not have to contend with freight rail is along the Northeast Corridor from Washington, D.C. to Boston via New York. Either Amtrak or regional commuter rail systems own those tracks. And it is one of the few routes with noticeable time improvements since the Eisenhower Era and the only stretch with anything approaching high speed rail service, saving riders some 45 minutes between New York and Washington when compared to Olden Times. And New York to Boston on Acela—until recently the only stretch of track in the U.S. with true “high-speed rail''—is 21 minutes faster than the fastest train in 1952. 

Yes, our trains here in the Northeast are looking mighty fine these days, so long as you compare them to the ones our grandparents rode. Mighty fine indeed. Unfortunately, the rest of the country doesn‘t hold up so well. One day, our children may ride on trains almost, but not quite, as fast as their great-grandparents did. 

The UK has recorded its highest ever temperature of 40.2 degrees Celsius (or 104.36 Fahrenheit) according to provisional results – and it’s only going to get hotter.

The record-breaking temperature was provisionally recorded at London’s Heathrow Airport at 12:50PM. If confirmed, it would be the highest ever temperature recorded in the UK, beating the existing record of 38.7 degrees Celsius from July 2019. It is also the first time ever that a temperature in excess of 40 degrees Celsius has been recorded in the UK.

It’s unlikely to remain the record temperature for long though – with conditions set to get hotter throughout the day. “Temperatures are likely to rise further through today,” said the Met Office, the UK’s national weather service.

This week the Met Office issued its first-ever “red warning” for extreme heat across much of England, with temperatures forecast to exceed 40 degrees Celsius for the first time, while Network Rail issued a “do not travel warning.”

The warnings come as wildfires rage in other parts of Western Europe due to the extreme heat, including in France, Spain and Portugal.

While it’s difficult to tie individual weather patterns to the climate crisis, scientists say extreme weather events such as these heatwaves are increasing in frequency and intensity due to global warming.

“Climate change has already influenced the likelihood of temperature extremes in the UK,” said Dr Nikos Christidis, Climate attribution scientist at the Met Office.

“The chances of seeing 40°C days in the UK could be as much as 10 times more likely in the current climate than under a natural climate unaffected by human influence.”

Here are some words you won’t find in the text of the 725-page Inflation Reduction Act of 2022, the climate compromise between Senator Joe Manchin and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, a bill described by Ed Markey, one of the Senate’s most reliable climate allies, as “the most significant investment in environmental justice and climate action in American history”: Public transportation. Bicycles. Electric bicycles. The word “walk” or derivatives appear once in a $1.9 billion appropriation to improve walkability or otherwise mitigate pollution impacts from new highways or other power infrastructure. If history is any guide, very little will actually go to improving walkability; almost all will go towards noise barriers and pollution monitoring systems. Rails, as in trains, are mentioned five times, only to explicitly make them ineligible for funding.

This is just a bill, and most bills never become law. But, by nature of the agreement between Manchin and Schumer, along with Markey’s sign-off, the bill is the closest this administration has come to achieving something resembling a climate law. It includes a number of provisions which will obviously help reduce emissions—electric vehicle tax credits, incentives for companies to build solar panels, wind turbines, and batteries in the U.S., to name a few—and also many that are concerning. The words “offsets” and “carbon capture,” in particular, are in there too often for comfort given how little evidence there is to support the efficacy of these ideas.

The bill’s proponents claim it will reduce carbon emissions by 40 percent by 2030. It might. But 40 percent by 2030 is merely a weigh station on the way to 100 percent reduction by 2040 (or 2050, or ever, but preferably yesterday). The goal has to be to achieve the 40 percent reduction with a clear pathway to then get from 40 percent to 100 percent. Unfortunately, from a transportation perspective—and transportation is the biggest sector for carbon emissions in the country—this bill, in conjunction with the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, will make it harder to get from 40 percent to 100 percent by cementing wasteful, inefficient car culture for decades to come.

Although Manchin’s press release stated the bill is about “truly all of the above” rather than any political agenda, from a transportation perspective, it is about only one thing: Cars. This thread by Politico transportation reporter Alex Daugherty is a helpful rundown of the transportation provisions. It is about subsidizing people’s purchases of electric cars and it is about subsidizing the manufacturing of electric cars and the precious metals required to build batteries. 

Electric cars are quite obviously a necessary tool in the energy transition, but they are not sufficient. Electric cars may be marketed as “zero emission,” but they are incredibly energy intensive, especially the pickup trucks and SUVs with batteries in some cases large enough to power an apartment for an entire month. And the bill not only subsidizes those trucks and SUVs, but even accommodates their wastefulness into its provisions. Trucks and SUVs can cost up to $80,000 to qualify for the credit—an increased cost to account for the massive batteries that have to make up for the vehicle being so damn inefficient and non-aerodynamic—whereas more efficient cars can only cost up to $55,000. (This is entirely separate from commercial vehicles that have to be bigger and less efficient, which are covered under other provisions.) A $55,000 ceiling for credit eligibility for all personal vehicles would have made perfect sense and may have even discouraged the mass production of big, expensive, inefficient EVs that are hardly any better for the planet than gas cars. Despite Manchin’s claim in his press release that “this legislation ensures that the market will take the lead,” this bill goes out of its way to intervene in the market to encourage inefficient vehicle production. 

One of the most surprising revelations I’ve had covering electric cars and sustainability in the transportation sector is just how few people understand that electricity does not magically appear at their outlets, that it quite often comes from power plants that burn fossil fuels, and that simply using an electrical device has an emissions impact of its own. On one memorable occasion, someone I know who is generally a smart person tried to assert that electric cars and all other electrical devices have zero climate impact because they do not have tailpipes.

Along similar lines, most people don’t understand just how much electricity EVs use, so let me give you an example. Electric car owners today would generally be thrilled to get an efficiency of four miles per kilowatt-hour. Most get less. But if you’re traveling at 65 mph on the highway, that means using 16 kilowatts to travel for one hour. In that same time, a whole-home air conditioner running at full tilt is using something like four kilowatts. So driving on the highway uses, at a bare minimum, as much electricity as running four air conditioners at once. But realistically, most EVs get less than four miles per kwh, and most people drive faster than 65 mph on the highway, so the actual effect is probably more like five or even six air conditioners.

This is why transportation experts are near-unanimous that we not only need to replace gas cars with electric cars as soon as possible, but also allow people the option to make some trips by much more efficient modes like walking, public transportation, or cycling. (There is also ample evidence that traveling by such methods drastically increases mental and physical well-being, a not-insignificant consideration for a country struggling to cope with mental and physical health epidemics.) The number I hear most often is that a quarter to a third of car trips need to be replaced with more sustainable modes, a goal that is a lot more attainable than it sounds because our streets and neighborhoods are designed, like this bill, solely around the car. E-bikes are a powerful tool here because they use a tiny fraction of the electricity cars do but provide effortless, fast trips across dozens of miles. So are smaller EVs like golf carts and “neighborhood electric vehicles,” things that look a lot like small cars but have a top speed of 35 mph and use a fraction of the electricity. (They’re not in the bill text either.) This bill ignores all of this, doubles down on car culture—big car culture at that—and calls it a win.

Much of Manchin’s statement on the bill is dedicated to ensuring “energy independence”—a George W. Bush-era talking point that ignores the actual workings of a global commodity market—and reliability. He doesn’t want us to end up like Europe, dependent on a foreign power for our heat in the winter and cooling in the summer, to make our cars go and our factories run. It sounds like a sensible goal. It also completely ignores that one of the best ways to accomplish this goal is for us to use less electricity and become a more efficient society. Instead, the only time the word “efficient” appears in his statement is about the infrastructure to export fossil fuels for profit.

For those of us who have been writing about, covering, and advocating for a cleaner, more efficient, and sustainable transportation landscape in the U.S., this bill is a bittersweet moment. It is very much a compromise between what needs to be accomplished today and what must be done tomorrow by locking in the very status quo that needs to be changed. With no provisions for the most lasting improvements like encouraging the development of neighborhoods where people don’t need to nearly double their electricity usage to get to work or the store or the park or anything else in life, we’re very much doubling down on the world and the mentality that got us into this existential crisis in the first place. 

Markey is probably right, that this is “the most significant investment in environmental justice and climate action in American history,” and he is also probably right that it needs to pass if we have any hope of achieving any semblance of the country’s emission reduction targets. But, paradoxically, it makes true zero emission goals that much harder. It ensures we are just shifting the excesses and waste, not eliminating them, from the tailpipe to the power plant.