Spend a Dime, Get Back Twenty Cents! Is it Madoff?

Imagine the joy for a small business owner who could lay down a pipeline where the open tap would gush forth money instead of water. Another Cherner flight of fancy? No, it’s a rail trail. There are few better ways to deliver eager, well-heeled shoppers right to your front door. Let’s look briefly at a few brick and mortar examples.

Arnold's restaurant is just off the Cape Cod Rail Trail in Eastham, MA (a fact which is prominently mentioned on their landing page). Sit yourself down in the corner of the parking lot, where you can see folks who come in from the trail, and compare that with the number who drive up in their Denalis. We have no scientific survey evidence, but our best guess is that you’d find twenty to thirty percent enter from the trail. Again, no concrete evidence, but we’d be willing to wager that the bicycle customers are hungrier than the Durango drive-ups, and have more desire (and less guilt) when it comes to mass consumption of fried food…

Care for another example? Have a quick peek at The Bikeway Source in Bedford, MA, “so named because it is at the head of the Minuteman Bikeway” as mentioned on their web page. Here’s a thriving sports shop even though it's set well away from the center of town, nestled among factories and warehouses. Their location at the start of the Minuteman has assured that the store is well known to pretty much anyone in the Boston metropolitan area who’s ever ridden this heavily used trail. That is one whopping customer base, and as more people become interested low cost, high quality recreation it is sure to get even bigger.

Sadly, there is the expense to consider. Rail trail construction averages a million dollars per mile, or so they say. How can we justify such extravagant spending in these Troubled Times? Expense often needs to be viewed in perspective. Here in Boston, we’ve just completed The Big Dig, at a cost of one million dollars per foot. Said to be the most expensive public works project in the history of humankind, this bold undertaking has provided Hub residents with the opportunity to experience greater traffic density, breath a higher concentration of carbon monoxide, and get crushed by pieces of falling ceiling. Now does a million per mile sound cheap by comparison? Need more convincing? Then consider the savings on health care.

A quick Internet search for the cost of cardiac care suggests that the average heart attack hospitalization runs about thirty thousand dollars, a figure which sounds suspiciously low even to these untrained ears and probably doesn’t include follow up visits and medication. But let’s say it’s accurate. Then for the sake of argument we’ll allow that five hundred heart attacks are prevented because more folks are getting out and exercised. Bingo, you’ve just bought your community five miles of rail trail! Get some more folks out there, prevent a thousand coronaries and you’ve bought ten miles—and the payback happens every year, regularly plugging well needed dollars back into our healthcare system.

I could go on, but you get the point. Given the return, how could we not spend a few dollars to expand our system of rail trails, especially in these Troubled Times? And that’s my rant for today…

Economic stimulus

Those of you who know me well and even some who don't know that I like to heat with wood.

Not so long ago, during the housing boom, wood could be found readily alongside the road especially here in the Metro-west area of Boston, where developers seemed determined to cover every last acre of semi-buildable land with a dwelling. They’d clear cut a lot and leave the trees piled up curbside. So it would have appeared that the wood was free, and should be used with abandon. We tried this one winter, running the stove hot and fast to get the quickest and most intense heat it could possibly make, sometimes even leaving the door slightly ajar for a bit of blast furnace effect. Mid February, we ran out. With nowhere to turn, in the thick of the cold, there was no choice for us but to buy some wood. I picked up the Pennysaver and dialed some folks who said that they delivered seasoned cordwood. The “cord” arrived in back of a Toyota pick up truck. We haggled a bit over the price, and then I loaded it off and stacked it up. Next morning, the first armful went into the stove. Nothing happened. I put in more kindling, and heard only a loud hiss…

Of course, the wood wasn’t at all free to start off with. Considerable time was spent on cutting, hauling and stacking it,

time which could have been spent on more productive pursuits. Perhaps all of us are a bit guilty of burning wood which seemed free while we were setting it ablaze. Huge credit cards limits, easy to obtain home equity lines, securities made of mysteriously bundled mortgage loans-- how could any of those fail us when the value of our homes and all other indicators seemed to be headed constantly upwards?

But now failed us they have, and we’re forced to buy a bit of wood elsewhere, in the form of more debt, and debt ultimately must be accepted on someone else’s terms. Not a good situation for a nation to find itself in, so we must choose a wise way to burn this next load of wood to make it last long and provide a slow, steady heat. Since this may be our last chance to fire things up, it would behoove us to take just a few moments and do it right.

The way to avoid a fizzle when you’re looking for a fire is to plan ahead for how much fuel you’ll need, and this means knowing the rate at which it will burn. Then again, it helps to have wood that’s high in heat content, as not all wood is created equal. We have only so much fuel to throw on the economic hearth. Give it to Detroit, the folks who brought us an SUV for every driveway? In the short term it might save some thousands of jobs, but they’ll burn through that money mighty fast, and then what? An ad campaign to make us buy more Suburbans? I think not. Let’s do something which will give us a long, slow burn, with high dollar output on all sides. And while we’re at it, why not aim for an economic stimulus which will reduce our output of greenhouse gases rather than augment it?

Ninety years ago, right here in the US of A, we had inter and intra-urban mass transit which would have done any European country proud. Now they have it, and we don’t. Let’s rebuild our transportation systems to be on par with those in Italy or France. Jobs will be created to manufacture light rail cars, to lay track, to string wires and manufacture all the infrastructure required for rapid transit. And speaking of transit, let’s power the whole system with renewable fuel sources. Of course, the technology to do this exists only on the drawing board, so we’ll need more labor to turn it into bricks and mortar or wire and rails as the case may be…

Are there other projects we could undertake which would achieve the same end? There are myriad, but if you leave a soap box in the middle of the town square, any fool is liable to step up there and start to rant. That’s my rant for today.