Mayor Bloomberg, far left, with members of Congress at yesterday's press conference. Photo: Epoch Times

Bloomberg, Sen. Robert Menendez (D-NJ), and Rep. Carolyn McCarthy (D-NY) were joined by the Democratic mayors of Philadelphia, Jersey City, and Trenton, along with NYPD Commissioner Ray Kelly, at a Penn Station press conference intended to spotlight Republican senators' successful bid -- with the help of 27 Dems -- to deny Amtrak any U.S. DOT funds next year unless the train network accepts firearms in baggage.

Local reporters found Bloomberg unabashedly critical of the Senate's move:

“If anyone in Congress thinks the threat of terrorist attacks on trains have gone away, they are mistaken,” the mayor said. Bloomberg said that the Amtrak security was already pretty lax, and if the new bill passes, there wouldn’t be anything keeping someone from carrying multiple assault weapons in their baggage.

“And the American people will blame the Senate if a terrorist attack does occur,” he said. “It has nothing to do with the second amendment and the right to bear arms, but everything to do with keeping passengers safe.”

Nor is yesterday's press conference the first gauntlet thrown over the Amtrak amendment, which would force the train network to significantly strengthen its security screening process without providing any federal aid to help with such a move.

On Thursday a gun-rights group in Washington state accused Sen. Patty Murray (D-WA) of showing "bigotry" against gun owners by voting against the amendment -- a charge aimed at pressuring Democrats into keeping the provision in the final version of the 2010 U.S. DOT spending bill.

The final word may not come until next month at the earliest, when negotiators from the Senate and House, which did not take up the guns-on-Amtrak question, will unveil the merged version of their two chambers' transportation bills.

A college-age Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN), with her father. Photo: Klobuchar for Senate

Coburn's amendment fell short by a vote of 39-59, with three other Democrats, Sens. Russ Feingold (WI), Evan Bayh (IN), and Claire McCaskill (MO), also aligning with the majority of Republicans in favor of the opt-out.

Feingold, Bayh, and McCaskill are fiscal hawks who frequently vote to limit the scope of government spending, making their votes less surprising than Klobuchar and Webb's -- if just as disheartening for clean transportation advocacy groups.

Klobuchar in particular hails from a state where bicycling is a popular element of local culture. She has spoken often of her personal appreciation of biking, hiking, and other outdoor activities, and welcomed a 14-year-old climate activist to Washington after the young girl's 1,500-mile bike ride.

Klobuchar's office has not yet responded to an inquiry about her vote on Coburn's two amendments to the Senate spending bill that funds U.S. DOT for next year. The second Coburn amendment that fell short today was a modified version of his earlier proposal to restrict all "transportation enhancements."

Even when limited to only block funding for transportation museums, however, the second Coburn plan was defeated on a 41-57 vote.

One GOP amendment that did make it into the DOT spending bill was Sen. Roger Wicker's (R-MS) proposal to allow Amtrak riders to carry guns and ammunition locked in their checked baggage. Twenty-seven Democrats joined all 41 Republicans to approve the proposal.

Will all 11 high-speed rail plans end up getting a piece of the action? (Photo: WSJ)

Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell (D), the co-chairman of Building America's Future and an unabashed high-speed rail evangelist, urged senators to shrug off their post-bailout reluctance to approve large spending projects. The White House's $13 billion commitment, Rendell argued, is only a down payment on a workable system.

Building high-speed rail along the California coast, he added, is estimated to cost as much as $40 billion. A northwestern network is projected to cost $25 billion. Similar long-term funding problems, as it happens, are also haunting lawmakers who aim to overhaul federal transportation policy.

Rendell suggested that a national infrastructure bank, independent of the government, should be tapped to direct money to high-speed rail proposals without political concerns influencing the process. "The public wants that," he said. "The public doesn’t want transportation dollars authorized through [the existing] system."

That outcome is highly unlikely, however, given that the federal DOT already has released its guidelines for an internal ranking of regional rail plans. And Federal Railroad Administrator Joseph Szabo was on hand to defend the administration's methods.

"Our vision matches, frankly, what they've done in Europe," Szabo told senators. Meanwhile, Rendell kept imploring the lawmakers to reconsider the Obama administration's 110-mph ballpark for defining what constitutes "high-speed".

With high-speed trains topping 200 mph in China and 160 in France, the governor said, "we're absolutely consigning ourselves to second-class citizenship" by setting the benchmark at 110 mph.

Tom Skancke, a member of the transportation revenue panel that last year called for a major gas-tax hike to fund system-wide reform, echoed Rendell's concerns with a call to publicly promote broad reform:

I don't think the nation as a whole has a plan for high-speed rail. ... The way we get there is, we have to sell the American public, particularly on rail, as we get people out of their horse and buggy. It is a cultural shift. We have to convince the American people that high-speed rail is going to be predictable, going to be on time, going to be affordable. ... We know what the alignment should look like. I just believe we need to step up and do it.

Amtrak CEO Joseph Boardman also sought to bring Rendell and Skancke's ambitions down to earth.

Citing the Acela train's moderate progress in taking over market share in the northeast corridor, Boardman said the U.S. is "not a train-riding culture" -- an eyebrow-raising admission from the chief of the nation's largest passenger rail service. "With high-speed rail, speed is not the issue," he said. "Convenience and trip times are."

Boardman also did his part to guard Amtrak's turf, suggesting that high-speed rail planners "build a culture of riding the train" by ensuring that the projects receiving funding are easily connectable to the network he runs. "People want to be seamless," he said.

As for the senators in attendance, most put in palpable plugs for their own home-state proposals. Texan Kay Bailey Hutchison, the commerce committee's senior GOPer, was abuzz with the possibilities of the Texas "T-Bone." Sen. Mark Udall (D-NM) spoke of a western corridor linking Albuquerque and Texas.

But with Rendell warning that his fellow governors are equally convinced of the merits of their own local rail plans, the task of separating the wheat from the chaff was rarely discussed.

The presence of the city's mayor, John Robert Smith, at that announcement -- and the likelihood that Meridian, a city of 40,000 people, will be a stop on a regional high-speed train -- is the product of years of effort. Smith, who has been serving as mayor since 1993 and will be leaving office this year, has been working since the beginning of his tenure to capitalize on Meridian's history as a railroad town and its role as the commercial center for some 350,000 people living in Mississippi and Alabama. USDOT Secretary Ray LaHood's recent trip to look at high-speed rail in Europe underscores the Obama administration's conviction, which Smith shares, that trains can radically change the economic prospects of small cities for the better.

Smith has long been an active booster of passenger rail at the national as well as the local level, serving on the board of Amtrak from 1997 to 2002. He worked to secure funding for a complete redesign and reconstruction of the city's railroad station as a multimodal transportation center (Greyhound buses also use it as a terminal). The new station was completed in 1997 and has lifted the fortunes of the neighborhood around it. In February, Smith delivered the keynote address at the launch of Transportation for America's platform.

Back in March, I found myself pulling into Meridian on the Amtrak Crescent. I visited with Smith in his office and we talked about what the railroad has meant to his city's past and what it could mean to Meridian's future. Then he took me for a walking tour of the downtown.

As you'll see from the slide show above, Meridian is an interesting model for of what passenger rail could mean to other small cities around the country.

NONMOTORIZED TRANSPORTATION ACCESS AND STORAGE. -- Grants under this chapter may be used to provide access to rolling stock for nonmotorized transportation, including bicycles, and recreational equipment, and to provide storage capacity in trains for such transportation, equipment, and other luggage, to ensure passenger safety.

Queens Congressman Anthony Weiner got the language into the bill after prompting from Transportation Alternatives. President Bush has not yet signed it into law, but according to the Times, the White House has signaled that he will.

"In the past, Amtrak has claimed that because the funding bill did not explicitly say that the money may be spent on bikes that they couldn't make trains bike-accessible," says T.A.'s Noah Budnick. "Now it should be clear to the most bureaucratic bureaucrat: Federal money for Amtrak can be spent on bike-accessibility."

The bill does not mandate bike-accessibility, so riders will have to contact Amtrak to put it on its agenda. I know I'd like to bring a bike on board the next time I visit my grandmother in DC. A SmartBike location right at Union Station would also do the trick.

Photo of Caltrain bike car near Palo Alto: richardmasoner/Flickr

Johnson said an Obama-Biden victory wouldn't necessarily translate into an avalanche of federal funds for Amtrak. He noted that Al Gore was a big booster of passenger rail when he was in Congress "and yet some of the biggest cuts in service came during the Clinton-Gore administration." 

In 2000, President Bill Clinton proposed a $989 million funding package for Amtrak. According to the Post, the FY 2008 Amtrak allocation was around $1.3 billion.

Photo: relvax/Flickr

Like Joe Biden, Barack Obama also mentioned Amtrak in his acceptance speech to the Democratic National Convention, but only in reference to his running mate's preferred mode of transportation.

There were many, many things to be excited about yesterday, but any livable streets advocate anticipating a call to rebuild and expand our nation's transit infrastructure, or for more investment in clean transportation and sustainable urban development, had to be a little disappointed. In fact, as the New York Observer notes, Obama barely mentioned infrastructure at all, and only then to promise "new roads." And as for energy policy:

As President, I will tap our natural gas reserves, invest in clean coal technology, and find ways to safely harness nuclear power. I'll help our auto companies re-tool, so that the fuel-efficient cars of the future are built right here in America. I'll make it easier for the American people to afford these new cars. And I'll invest 150 billion dollars over the next decade in affordable, renewable sources of energy -- wind power and solar power and the next generation of biofuels; an investment that will lead to new industries and five million new jobs that pay well and can't ever be outsourced.

Are biofuels, more roads, and easier paths to car ownership really the "change" this country, or the planet, needs? Not even Al Gore or the "We" campaign, with its ubiquitous ads, mentioned altering development or driving habits.

So as Americans celebrate a long weekend of cheaper gas, we leave you with this: How do we do it? How do we seize the "Obama moment," as this call to action by OurFuture.org terms it, to make clean transportation, livable streets, smart growth and the kinds of issues that we care about a part of the national discussion on climate change and energy policy?

Until Tuesday ... 

Photo: Barack Obama/Flickr

You know, John McCain is my friend. And I know you hear that phrase used all the time in politics. I mean it. John McCain is my friend.

We've traveled the world together. It's a friendship that goes beyond politics. And the personal courage and heroism demonstrated by John still amazes me.

But I profoundly disagree with the direction John wants to take this country, from Afghanistan to Iraq, from Amtrak to veterans.

Meanwhile, earlier in the week, a panel of Democratic pols and economists seemed to agree that new investment in American infrastructure -- including freight and commuter rail -- is sorely needed, but came up short on the subject of funding. Roll Call reports:

They all expressed the need for a private-public partnership, but the question of where to raise federal funding caused anxiety among the elected officials.

One key issue was that the current system for infrastructure funding, implemented in the Federal Aid Highway Act of 1956, relies on gas taxes for revenue. Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.) called any attempt by Congress to raise the gas tax “dead on arrival.”

But Gov. Ed Rendell (D-Pa.) said that with or without the gas tax something had to be done to bridge the funding gap, noting that the $1.6 trillion cited by the ASCE report would only cover maintenance, not new projects.

“When I became governor I had to raise $2.4 billion in taxes,” Rendell said. “When re-election came around — people aren’t stupid — one incumbent lost and she voted against the tax increase.

“This is the time we have to challenge the American people. Folks, you get what you pay for.”

Photo: Associated Press via CNN 

Biden commutes to work each day on Amtrak and has been a strong supporter of the beleaguered rail service. He is an original co-sponsor of the Amtrak Reauthorization Bill (National Defense Rail Act), S.104, introduced on January 7, 2003. Introducing an earlier version of the bill with Sen. Fritz Hollings (D-SC) on March 6, 2002, Biden stated, "For 30 years, I have witnessed Congress dangling a carrot in front of Amtrak's eyes, funding it just enough for it to limp along. And I'll tell you, this has to stop.  Now is the time to commit politically and financially to a strong, safe, and efficient passenger rail system." Biden has been particularly concerned with rail passenger security, and has, in the words of communications director Norm Kurz "worked furiously" to secure funding for Amtrak to upgrade its tunnels, hire more cops and bomb-sniffing dogs, build more fences, and add lighting to terminals.

Amtrak president George Warrington presented Biden with a "Champion of the Rails" award in June 2001 and the American Passenger Rail Coalition (APRC), a national association of railroad equipment suppliers and rail businesses, presented him its "Rail Leadership Award" in March 2002.

As Matthew Yglesias (and MissLaura) points out, Biden's son serves on the Amtrak board. (R. Hunter Biden is the only Democrat among current Amtrak board members. He was appointed by fellow Yalie George W. Bush to fill a seat vacated by Michael Dukakis.)

So well known, or well publicized, is Biden's affiliation with Amtrak that it's already become a point of ridicule for Beltway media types. Undeterred, before heading to this week's Democratic National Convention in Denver, Biden made an appearance at the Wilmington station, which he has passed through each day for the last 35 years, to greet workers and passengers.

Photo of Joe and Jill Biden at Wilmington Amtrak station via Delaware News Journal 

"I was with Governor [Tom] Ridge yesterday, and we visited a General Electric plant in Erie that makes -- guess what? -- locomotives. That's not viewed as, quote, high tech, is it? But you'd be amazed at the product, of the thousands of workers that are working there and building a locomotive that over half of their business is through exports, because they build the best locomotives in the world in Erie, Pennsylvania."

As Sean notes, high tech and well-made as Erie-produced trains may be, a more significant factor in the plant's export ratio could be that "because of decades of terrible transportation policy, there's not much of a market for locomotives in this country." And who do the folks in Erie, PA have to thank for that? Why, Senator John McCain, for one -- who, as perhaps the most outspoken opponent of domestic rail in Washington, has done everything in his power to cripple the very industry those "thousands of workers" depend on for the well-being of themselves and their families.

But hey, if McCain is elected president and finally succeeds in putting Amtrak out of business, maybe all those GE employees could get jobs building the Car of the Future.

Jerrold Nadler is the only member the New York City delegation to sign on as a co-sponsor so far. It needs 218 co-sponsors to get floor time in the House, but only 41 are on board. (See who's a co-sponsor.)

Judging by the response to a recent post about the bill on Daily Kos, progressive-minded voters are more than willing to get behind investment in rail. Streetsbloggers can join Kossacks in urging support for the bill by contacting your representatives. The NARP website has some handy talking points to help get started.

Democratic front runner Barack Obama just released a campaign "Fact Sheet" entitled, "Strengthening America's Transportation Infrastructure" (download it). While Hillary Clinton has put forward some outstanding and heavily transit-oriented plans of her own, Obama appears to be the first major party presidential candidate to outline a national transportation platform that explicitly seeks to "create policies that incentivize greater bicycle and pedestrian usage of sidewalks and roads" (if anyone knows differently, let us know in the comments section). Whatever the case, it's a significant step up from the 2004 campaign featuring George W. Bush's mountain bike fitness regimen and John Kerry, spandex-clad on an $8,000 Serotta.

Before you get too excited, it's worth noting that Obama's paper looks like it was a bit rushed. Is Amtrak really "the only form of reliable transportation" in "many parts of the country?" What parts of the country would that be? The plan is also missing language from Obama's energy plan concerning the equalization of subsidies for motorized and non-motorized commuting.

Nitpicking aside, we do get a good view of what a President Obama would aim to do for more Livable Streets. In addition to encouraging biking and walking, he wants to:

• "Provide states and local governments with the resources they need to address sprawl and create more livable communities."
  
• "Double the federal Jobs Access and Reverse Commute (JARC) program to ensure that additional federal public transportation dollars flow to the highest-need communities and that urban planning initiatives take this aspect of transportation policy into account." Presumably this includes better transit for inner-cities.
• Provide long-term federal support for Amtrak and "increase the availability of rail transportation options for residents of rural communities."
  
• Support the development of high-speed freight and passenger rail.

Now that we have transportation plans from both Obama and Clinton; John McCain, where you at?

Photo: alison.jane/Flickr

Despite fierce and prevalent Amtrak hating, and although I have yet to hear any presidential candidate discuss it, nationally syndicated columnist Neal Peirce suggests that "the stars are finally coming into alignment" for improvements of America's passenger rail system. He writes:

America's train advocates are mildly optimistic. And for some good reasons. Amtrak is reporting impressive ridership gains. Oil is pushing $100 a barrel, throwing a long shadow over affordability of travel on already congested highways. Airport delays hit an all-time high last summer. Global climate concerns are mounting.

Rail freight demands, meanwhile, are rising fast, suggesting joint improvements with passenger rail. Worries are rising about mobility gaps hindering the ability of America's "megaregions" -- the Northeast, Great Lakes, California and others - to match the performance of competitive regions worldwide.

Also positive for Amtrak: signs of a much friendlier reception in Congress. Add to that an array of states anxious to expand rail service, especially if they can get a federal "match" comparable to the 80 percent-20 percent federal-to-state match for highways.

For years, polls have shown Americans strongly in favor of Amtrak subsidies that would build a viable national rail system. But only slowly have legislators -- federal and state -- shown an openness to system expansion. And the Bush administration has been hostile; it's even tried to zero-fund Amtrak.

So here's the irony: Amtrak is able to report it carried 25.8 million passengers in the last fiscal year -- up 1.5 million from the year before. Ticket revenue rose 11 percent. Trains on the Northeast Corridor and other popular corridors are increasingly sold out.

And no one knows, notes Rick Harnish of the Midwest High Speed Rail Association, how expansive demand for Amtrak service would be if many more routes were opened, offering at least three or four trains daily for reasonable frequency. His bet is that millions of Americans would opt for the more convenient system, especially as oil soars in cost: "For 50 years we assumed we could do everything by car. It's now painfully clear that's not true."

Because I wrote a couple of books about the design of cities (and the shortcomings of suburbia), a lot of blather comes my way about what towns around the nation are planning for the future -- and, off course, I hear plenty on the subject in my own town, Saratoga Springs, New York, which is a classic "main street" type town. I also happen to travel a lot and actually see what's going on far from home. Almost everything I see and hear is inconsistent with what I think reality has in store for us.

Most American towns, including my own, are obsessed to the point of mania with the issue of parking and more generally the management of cars, and much of their spending is directed to those ends. Municipal leaders (and the public they serve) have no idea what kind of problems the nation faces with oil. Because life in the USA has worked a particular way all their lives, they assume that it will continue to operate that way. Not only will they be disappointed as happy motoring spirals into history, but they will create a lot mischief in the meantime in planning things based on faulty assumptions.

My own town, for instance, relies heavily on tourism, in particular tourism based on happy motoring. There is not the slightest apprehension among the people here, or our leaders in city hall, that automobile-based tourism may not be happening as soon as five years from now. All our political energy is being expended in fighting about what kind of parking structures we will build (with borrowed money) and where to put them, and how these things might incorporate some secondary uses, such as police offices. We have also been debating plans for the expansion of our modest convention center -- in connection with added parking structures. It seems to me that one of the first things to go as the US economy contracts, along with its energy supply, will be activities like boat shows and optometrist's conventions.

Now this town happens to be on a railroad line that connects New York City to Montreal. Before 1950, it was the main way that people came to this town. These days, we get one train a day in each direction. The trains are invariably late, and not just a little late, but hours late. The track bed is in miserable shape and, of course, Amtrak is a sort of soviet-style management organization. There is no awareness among the public here, or our leaders, that we would benefit from improving the passenger railroad service, and around the state of New York generally there is no conversation about fixing the railroads. (Governor Elliot Spitzer is preoccupied these days with arranging to give driver's licenses to people who are in the country illegally.) We are going to pay a large penalty for these failures of attention....

Susan Donovan boarding Metro-North Train No. 737 on July 11, beginning an 8,000-mile rail journey at Grand Central Terminal.

I always find it a little amazing that a handful of times a day, one can descend into Penn Station -- the place where you go to catch the 6:13 to Babylon or the 7:37 to Upper Montclair -- and from the same platforms catch a train with beds and a dining car that will take you to Chicago, or Miami or Atlanta. In this case, we forsook that little pleasure for the much greater pleasure of departing for a transcontinental honeymoon from the grandeur of Grand Central Terminal, where we ran into a friend getting his shoes shined who took our picture and good-naturedly warned us about what married life was like.

After the departure, we transferred at Croton-Harmon to the Lake Shore Limited to Chicago. This is a train that ought to be used more for business travel than it is. If you can afford to leave New York in the late afternoon, this train gets you into Chicago at a quarter to 10, refreshed, well fed and relaxed, in time for your morning meeting or power lunch. Yes, I suppose it needs a better on-time rating to be used more by business travelers, but it is not uncommon for planes to run late as well. Our train arrived at 10:28, 43 minutes late.

The train's name, evocative of the Lake Erie coastline, is a bit of a misnomer. You travel along the lake at night, so you never really see it (at least I never have and I've taken this train quite a few times to Cleveland). But can see something with majestic views that more than makes up for it. The wide and mighty Hudson, which the train hugs all the way to Albany.

View of ship traffic on the Hudson River from the Lake Shore Limited.

After spending time in Chicago we caught the Empire Builder for a three-day, two-night trip to Seattle. Pulling through Chicagoland's suburbs, I noticed a number of shipping warehouses with spur tracks going into them that were buried and weedy, while trucks in large parking lots had taken over rail-marshalling yards. The freight railroads stock was on the rise for years before Warren Buffet started buying (look up BNI, UNP, CSX or NSC for some examples), and these warehouses indicate that they have plenty of room for continued growth if shippers continue to switch to fuel efficient freight rail. An hour and a half later, we were in Milwaukee, which seemed like a city we would have liked:

Milwaukee waterfront as seen from the Empire Builder.

After Milwaukee we rumbled into Minnesota, stopping at St. Paul and passing the Mississippi what seemed like four or five times. Then it was a long night and day roll through the northern prairie and big sky country of Montana before we got to the Rockies. To answer Ianqui's question from the other day, yes, the trains generally seemed filled to capacity, although people would get on and off at intermediate stops to create an ever-changing dynamic. The Empire Builder was the most crowded, and it would have been impossible to book this one but we lucked out because someone cancelled. Here's the scene at Whitefish, Mont., where we stopped at 10 p.m.

The Empire Builder stops in Whitefish, Mont.

The Empire Builder came to its final stop, Seattle, at 9:42 a.m., 43 minutes ahead of schedule. After our visit there we boarded the Pacific Northwest's version of Acela: the Cascades. It's a sleekly designed train imported from Europe that makes medium-distance runs between Vancouver, B.C., and southern Oregon. This is a train that is trying as much as possible to be an airplane. They have television screens that show your relative position over the land you're traveling, which they sometimes show on a flight, and a looooong safety video that goes into way too much detail for a train. By the end of it, you're waiting for them to say: In the event of a water landing, your seat cushion may be used as a flotation device. But the food car has a counter where you can sit and a hip and modern ambiance.

Amtrak's Cascades arrives in Portland.

After the Cascades took us to Portland, we switched to the West Coast's long-distance train, the Coast Starlight, for two runs: An overnight trip to Oakland, and what was to have been a daytime trip from San Jose to Los Angeles. This train had the worst on-time performance of our trip, but it had the coolest lounge. Actually, it is called the Parlor Car, to distinguish it from the lounge car next door. With wood and glass paneling and plush swivel seats and benches, this lives up to its old-timey sounding name. The parlor car is where we had our second wine-and-cheese tasting. (The first had been on the Empire Builder.) Downstairs, there was even an unused movie theater. Here's a photo of the Coast Starlight rounding a sharp bend as we approached the Bay Area.

The Coast Starlight rounds a bend in northern California.

We pulled into Oakland four hours late and hopped the BART at Lake Merrit to San Francisco. After our time there, rather than go back on the BART again, we we rode the MUNI light rail (it was packed with baseball fans hoping to see Barry Bonds hit his 755th home run) to CalTrain for a ride south along the San Francisco peninsula to San Jose. CalTrain is a double-decker commuter train that has an incomparable feature that encourages intermodal, non-oil-guzzling transportation: The bike car. The bottom level has a large open space where you bring your bike in and tie it to racks on the wall. You sit upstairs. I'll write it again because it is such a pleasure to type: bike car. Only in California.

At San Jose, we caught the second of the two Coast Starlights, and it was running even later. The morning we were to head to Los Angeles, a woman from Amtrak called to say that our train was running 12 hours late. It had gotten stuck behind a freight train in the Cascades mountains and that train had broken down. As she no doubt prepared for me to fly into an apoplectic rage, I just said, "Great! Give us a sleeper!" Actually, we had already been in touch with Julie, Amtrak's ever-chipper automated agent, who told us about the lateness. (When traveling on Amtrak, you have to maintain constant contact with Julie, who always has up-to-date information and has the potential to reduce your wait time dramatically.) I was actually excited because the lateness gave us 12 more hours in San Francisco, time to sleep in, and saved us money because we were able to cancel a hotel room.

A little while after arriving in L.A. we departed on the Sunset Limited (the train that Pete Sessions tried to eliminate while we were on it), for the longest train of our trip -- a 48-hour ride to New Orleans. We took a lot of photographs on that train because there were plenty of sights that illustrate humanity's impact on the environment.

Automobile junkyard outside Los Angeles as seen from the Sunset Limited.

A desert wind farm. It would take a lot of wind farms to replace the oil we import.

Newly minted desert sprawl. It sells better if you have a giant red balloon to attract attention.

If you don't have a giant red balloon, multicolored flags work well too.

Nature strikes back: A flooded automobile junkyard in east Texas.

Texas is so huge it took us 24 hours to cross it. Vast portions of the east side of the state were flooded when we passed, but thankfully this didn't stop the train. We went through Houston and on to New Orleans. People along this route seemed especially friendly. I can't shake the image of a whole crew of workers in some kind of big open warehouse stopping what they were doing and waving at the train. We pulled into New Orleans six hours late, but we didn't care much because we were just excited to be there. After our time in the Big Easy, we rode our last train home: The Crescent. You see a lot of kudzu on that route.

Kudzu vines, as seen from the Crescent.

In Washington, the Crescent picks up an electric engine for the relatively speedy home stretch along the Northeast Corridor.

In Washington, an electric locomotive prepares to pull the Crescent to New York.

As we neared home, we passed into the old Northeast. The densely built-up cities in this part of the country are obsolete -- relics of a past and much different economy that didn't allow people to have the amount of private space and separation that people demand today. Future growth will happen in low-density communities, especially in the sunbelt. At least, that is the message or implication of a long line of pundits. Joel Garreau. Joel Kotkin. David Brooks. Robert Bruegmann.

But if those guys are correct, why the evident difficulty selling those subdivisions we saw? And why are skyscrapers rising in downtown Philadelphia?

Skyscrapers under construction in downtown Philadelphia, as seen from Amtrak's Crescent.

The series will wrap-up tomorrow with a handy summary in chart form.

San Francisco

Fully restored streetcars, cable cars, buses with and without pantographs, submerged and at-grade light rail, a regional subway and two commuter rail lines all make for a dizzying array of often very scenic public transportation. (Although, with a $5 fare, the cable cars seem more like a tourist draw and less like a form of public transit.) But even in a city that like New York derives much of its appeal from having a walkable, pre-automobile environment, we read about how pro-traffic forces are trying to reshape the city to accommodate more cars. There's apparently a big vote coming up in November on whether to continue transit-first policies or build a lot of parking garages (which would seem to counteract the $159 million San Francisco just won for congestion pricing).

Los Angeles

Making fun of Los Angeles car dependency was already a cliche decades ago. We didn't want to fall into that trap. We arrived in L.A. with open minds, hoping that it just might pleasantly surprise us. It did and it didn't.

L.A.'s Amtrak station is spectacular, way better than ours (not that that says anything). High ceilings, wide corridors and open concourses with a warm, inviting feeling and soft armchairs for waiting. (Wikipedia's photo does it justice.) It was also busier than we expected, serving morning commuters when we arrived but still busy in the afternoon. It's Amtrak's fifth busiest station (scroll).

Then we exited the station and found ourselves feeling like second class citizens walking with our luggage along wide, busy boulevards and buildings that were distant from one another. Pedestrians are actually forbidden from crossing the street right in front of the station, so we had to take some kind of circuitous route to get back to the station, crossing extra streets unnecessarily. Because of a little bit of a snafu that I'll describe tomorrow, we spent less time in L.A. than we had planned: just five hours. We spent most of it struggling with a crossword puzzle outside a Starbucks three blocks from Union Station.

New Orleans

New Orleans is recovering from Katrina. We stayed across the street from a monument to General Robert E. Lee in the Central Business District, three blocks from Amtrak. This area, like the French Quarter, was never flooded and the Quarter was bustling as always on the weekend we were there. Most of the many cyclists we saw in New Orleans were riding one-speed coaster bikes, which is a trend we didn't see anywhere else. There was also a fair proportion of trikes used to haul stuff. But the transportation highlight was definitely the streetcars, which have friendly drivers, friendly fellow passengers, and tall, wide windows that allow you to see the great panorama before you. Their grassy right-of-way does its little part at reducing the portion of our country paved with the impervious surfaces like asphalt, which are so harmful to drinking water supplies. The oldest and longest streetcar line in NOLA, along St. Charles Avenue, is now running as a short downtown shuttle until the rest of the line can be put back into service. Because I love them so much: two more photos of New Orleans streetcars below the jump.

A grassy median forms the bed of the New Orleans streetcars' right-of-way in some places.

Canal Street streetcar, at the intersection where Carondelet becomes Bourbon.

In between all that fun Amtrak travel I described yesterday, my wife Susan and I stopped on our honeymoon at six great cities with an eye toward observing their built environments and transportation systems (but mostly just being plain old tourists). Below are photos and brief observations from the first three, in the order we visited.

Chicago 

The railroading capital of the United States is a great, great town, loved by New Yorkers for generations. We love it too, right?

Chicago had a lakefront exhibit of great big globes encouraging people to adopt environmentally friendly but inoffensive habits, like setting one's washing machine to cold or switching to compact florescent light bulbs. But next to the exhibit, when we tried to hail a pedicab to take us downtown, we were told that pedicabs are not allowed in the Loop. Ouch. Our recently imposed pedicab restrictions were bad enough, but this takes it to a whole new level. On the plus side, Chicago has the coolest-sounding train-related terminology that we found: the Metra Electric District.

Seattle

We had hoped not to get into a single automobile on the whole trip, but in Seattle (and only in Seattle), that broke down, mostly because we had a friend in town who owned a car and was putting us up at his place. This city has what seems like hundreds of bus routes, but the one we needed never came, even though two drivers on other routes and other passengers all swore it was running on the Sunday we arrived. After we got off the train we waited and waited for our bus. Then we took a different bus to a more central stop to try our luck there. Then our friend Matt offered to pick us up from the bus stop. We accepted because he said he completely understood our motivating principle, but was downtown anyway and would be burning the same amount of gasoline either way. He drove us again a few more times, including to Lake Union go kayaking, which was worth it.

However we still wanted to explore Seattle on foot, so we walked through downtown, adjacent Belltown, where new condos are going up like mad, and residential Queen Anne Hill. Somewhere in there we noticed the signs all around Seattle encouraging people to ride transit. They have sayings like "Take the monorail, Abigail," and "Take the bus and relax, Max." Slogans aside, Seattle already had what Ted Kheel knows is a better incentive. At least downtown, its buses are free.

Portland

Like Seattle's downtown buses, Portland's downtown light rail does not charge a fare. Our hotel was in the free zone, and we felt a little guilty riding so much for free, so we vowed to spend our extra money in various Portland businesses, like the worker-owned bicycle cooperative where we rented bikes. The bikes were great, as they allowed us to really see the city and its nearby bike trails up close and personal. As I stood watching cyclists pass by on a fully-separated bike lane next to a light rail line and a aerial tram depot, I realized why it is said that Portland has the most diverse multimodal transportation network in the country for a city its size. One of those modes is the automobile, which in places is catered to as much as any suburb. On the way to the rail, we'd pass curb cuts used by cars and SUVs in the drive-thru restaurant and drive-thru Starbucks across from our hotel, engines idling as their occupants awaited their morning venti mocha frap. Portland leads the nation in many ways, but hey, it's not perfect.

And even in Portland, we learned, bike and transit networks are under attack. This newspaper article described the efforts of one Craig Flynn, a local activist and one-time city council candidate who "thinks city transportation funds should go toward relieving congestion on freeways and other main roads, specifically adding lanes or building new freeways." He told the paper: "I feel like honking my horn going over a speed bump to irritate the people who want them there."

In tomorrow's installment, San Francisco, Los Angeles and New Orleans.

My wife and I were married last month in Brooklyn. For our honeymoon, we wanted to see as many great American cities as we could. In 19 days of travel, we visited Chicago, Seattle, Portland (Ore.), San Francisco, Los Angeles and New Orleans (and also stopped briefly in Cleveland, Milwaukee, Minneapolis, Houston, Atlanta, Washington, Baltimore and Philadelphia).

How could two people as obsessed as we are with minimizing our transportation carbon footprints possibly justify taking so many flights for leisure travel? We didn't take any flights. We also didn't rent any cars or even set foot in a single taxi. We learned that thanks to the magic of transit-oriented hotel development (often inadvertent), it is entirely possible to travel this great country from sea to shining sea without any of those carbon-belching modes of travel -- and still have a fantastic time.

Our intercity travel consisted of 33 miles on Metro-North (because we couldn't allow ourselves to depart for such a historic trip from Penn Station), 48 miles on CalTrain, and 7,840 miles on our underfunded national railroad, Amtrak. To travel about in town, we rented bikes in Portland but mostly used an amazing variety of light rail, bus and subway transportation, including trips on Chicago's El, Portland's TriMet light rail, San Francisco's Muni and BART and New Orleans' streetcars. All of which worked perfectly well for our purposes.

Despite the large number of transit providers, it was Amtrak that did the heavy lifting and made our vacation possible. Amtrak employees are painfully aware of the railroad's reputation as habitually late. They desperately wanted to provide an on-time, high quality service, but were demoralized when the trains ran late and frustrated because it was almost always for reasons beyond their control.

We took six Amtrak trains more or less through the entire length of their routes: The Lake Shore Limited, the Empire Builder, the Cascades, the Coast Starlight, the Sunset Limited and the Crescent. All of these trains left their departure stations on time to the minute. It wasn't until we got moving that delays occured, and these were caused by chronic underinvestment in rail infrastructure that has left many lines with just a single track. The lines are owned by freight railroads, which Amtrak pays for the rights use. The freight railroads are in increasingly intense competition with one another for customers, and have a habit of having passenger trains wait at a siding while freight trains roll through. Despite this, the Empire Builder managed to travel 2,206 miles from Chicago to Seattle and still arrive 38 minutes ahead of schedule. If our national government invested in rail improvements just a fraction of the billions of dollars it spends annually on highway maintenance and widening, Amtrak would run on time and more people would ride it.

As gasoline prices have gone up and congestion at airports has increased, Amtrak has had record ridership for multiple years in a row, despite being starved by the Bush administration, which wanted to disband the railroad, and the Republican-led Congress. Many threats remain. On the day we rode rode the Sunset Limited across Texas, a Republican congressman from Texas introduced legislation that would have eliminated the Sunset Limited. (It was defeated with the help of our region's congressional delegation by a vote of 299-130.)

But the trains are still running and we had the time of our lives on this trip. Even if its running late, and even if they've replaced the chefs in the dining car with microwave ovens, there remains something inherently enjoyable and relaxing about riding on a train across vast distances. You have time to yourself to sit and watch the world roll by, completely stress free, and sleeping in a real honest-to-God bed while rolling along through the undulating darkness is just incomparable to anything else experienced in travel. Now with the addition of laptop computers, you can watch a DVD or play tetris to pass the time, but I prefer to leave the screen off and look out the window.

This is the first part of a five-part series on our travels to run this week. Parts two and three will focus on the cities we visited, with brief updates on their struggles for livable streets. Part four will describe in greater detail the trains we rode and the sights we saw. Part five will compare the cities to one another in terms of livable streets, pedestrian-friendly development and intermodal transportation.

The great American poet Robert Hunter has written that he and the other members of the Grateful Dead had the greatest time of their lives aboard a train across Canada that carried themselves, Janice Joplin, The Band and many other musicians. That's high praise from people who spent their lives rocking out. The trip inspired Hunter to write some lines that became the motto for our honeymoon:

No big hurry
What do you say
Might as well travel
The elegant way

UPDATE: Here are the other entries in this series:

• Part 2: Chicago, Seattle, Portland
• Part 3: San Francisco, Los Angeles, New Orleans
• Part 4: The Trains
• Part 5: Wrap-Up