By Barbara Kessler
Green Right Now

You’ve heard the saying, “it’s easy being green.” Maybe sometimes. But not always, and not if you’re the Dallas Area Rapid Transit (DART) agency, which finds itself tangling with a green dilemma.

DART, which serves Dallas and 11 other cities in the region, has been planning to replace its aging bus fleet with 537 shiny new buses. It’s a great opportunity to go green with the entire fleet.

But after taking bids this fall and updating the research, the agency members are locked in debate over what type of buses are “cleaner” and which ones make the most sense environmentally and economically. The answer is not readily apparent. Like potential car buyers on the threshold of a dealership showroom, the bus-buying members of DART find themselves puzzling over the new technologies and old perceptions.

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The planned California High Speed Rail system, which voters endorsed with a yes vote on initial funding in November, would offer travel times competitive with air travel and less than half what comparable trips would take by car.

The concept drawings here, provided by the CHSR Authority and graphic animators Newlands & Company, Inc., illustrate how the system would work and be meshed with existing infrastructure.

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By Catherine Girardeau
Green Right Now

Despite the derailing economy, California voters got on board for reviving train service in their state November 4th by passing state proposition 1A — a $10 million bond to begin construction of a fully electric rail system running 220-mph trains between San Francisco’s Transbay Terminal and Union Station in Los Angeles.

The bond is a vote of confidence from the public and a down payment on the $40 billion-plus project that plans to run high-speed trains from Sacramento to San Diego. The plan’s boosters say it will create jobs, relieve air and highway congestion, and help the state meet its legislative mandate to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to 30 percent below 1990 levels by 2020 and 80 percent below 1990 levels by 2050.

While detractors like the San Diego Union-Tribune’s editorial board said California’s budget woes make spending billions of dollars on a massive transportation project not only ill-advised, but “potentially the biggest boondoggle in California history”, proponents called the victory a landmark for high-speed rail nationwide.

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By Catherine Colbert

When David Kilbourne picked up his 8-year-old son from Lake Travis Elementary in spring 2007, he noticed smoke billowing from idling buses parked in queue behind the school. The exhaust fumes his son was breathing each day as he waited to be picked up, he says, were contributing to his son’s migraine headaches. “My son is the quarterback for his youth football team,” said Kilbourne. “Because there’s only one quarterback, when he gets these headaches, it affects the team.”

Kilbourne remembers noticing the bus exhaust during the school’s bus safety week. “They were talking about how buses are safe when it comes to traffic accidents,” he said, “but there’s more to a bus’s safety than traffic accidents, like having air that’s safe to breathe.”

The coincidence spurred Kilbourne to take action. Not only did he write several letters to his local newspaper, but Kilbourne approached the head of his district’s transportation department to discuss air quality in and around its buses. After he spoke to Rick Walterscheid, the transportation director at the Lake Travis Independent School District, the school system put a no-idling policy into effect.

Walterscheid didn’t stop there, either. Later that year the 79th Texas Legislature adopted House Bill 3469, which established and authorized the formation of the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ) to administer a statewide clean school bus program.

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By Barbara Kessler
It’s refreshing in these days of gas and environmental calamities, not to mention lending and budget crises, to hear about something that’s chugging along in a positive direction.
That’s the story of Amtrak, or nearly so, at this junction. Ridership on the American passenger rail service is up a healthy 14 percent compared to [...]

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By Bill Marvel
Once upon a time in American cities, if you didn’t have a car you could still go almost anywhere. A network of steel rails and trolley wires laced together downtowns and neighborhoods, and ran far out into the countryside to connect with suburbs.

Photo by Geoffrey Marvel
DART trains pull into downtown Plano.
Electric interurbans [...]

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By John DeFore
Entrepreneur/showman Richard Branson refuses to accept the notion that air travel will always be a guilty pleasure or necessary evil for globe trotting environmentalists.
On Sunday, Branson’s Virgin Atlantic airline was the first to fly a commercial aircraft using biofuel as part of its fuel mix. It wasn’t a commercial flight, mind you [...]

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